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Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: Preemptive Strike - How a Rarely Used Law May Prevent Violence at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Aug. 13 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on Aug. 12, 2026, by public safety policy fellow David Zimmer:
* * *
Preemptive strike: How a rarely used law may prevent violence at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair
Officials in Ramsey County teamed up with the Minnesota Attorney General's Office late last week in a unique effort to secure the 2026 Minnesota State Fair. The effort makes use of a seldom used state statute - the "Minnesota civil gang nuisance law" ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Aug. 13 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on Aug. 12, 2026, by public safety policy fellow David Zimmer: * * * Preemptive strike: How a rarely used law may prevent violence at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair Officials in Ramsey County teamed up with the Minnesota Attorney General's Office late last week in a unique effort to secure the 2026 Minnesota State Fair. The effort makes use of a seldom used state statute - the "Minnesota civil gang nuisance law"- that would allow officials to sue gang members and prevent them from associating, intimidating, annoying, provoking, or threatening others in and around the state fair grounds between August 27th and September 8th, 2026.
Some may scoff at this and suggest it's ridiculous to think a civil lawsuit could prevent gang violence, but there is real value in this effort. If the injunction is issued, law enforcement would have the legal authority to proactively detain gang members listed in the suit who violate certain conditions - such as associating with one another at the fair. Absent the injunction, law enforcement is forced to respond after a crime has been committed and after the fair's family friendly atmosphere has been damaged.
This is no small endeavor, and Minnesotans should be pleased by the effort that our law enforcement officials have put into this.
* Ramsey County Sheriff's Deputy Ben Seidl, a gang expert, assembled a 17-page affidavit laying out the historical violence between the Ville and Muddy Somali gangs, including specific assaults during previous state fairs and more recent shootings associated with high school and college graduation ceremonies. Furthermore, the affidavit exposed multiple social media posts involving these gang members advertising their intent to continue this violence while at the state fair in 2026.
* The Minnesota State Fair Chief of Police, Ron Knafla, assembled a 4-page affidavit supporting the need for the injunction.
* Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison authorized the drafting of a joint 7-page complaint supporting the injunction against a total of ten gang members.
* A corresponding 18-page draft order granting temporary injunction was also assembled and submitted to the court.
* The individual gang members have been served with copies of the complaint and await the outcome of an August 13th hearing before Ramsey County District Court Chief Judge Sara Grewing. If Judge Grewing issues the proposed temporary injunction the gang members will be prohibited from associating with one another in or around the fairgrounds for the entirety of the 2026 state fair. Any violation would result in their arrest - prior to any crime or violence occurring.
Ramsey County Attorney Choi has some experience with this legal maneuver. His office supported the original bill in the 2007 Legislature and then used it successfully in both 2009 and 2015 to proactively curb violence that was occurring between Hispanic gang members as part of Cinco de Mayo celebrations in St. Paul.
While the lawsuit against the 10 Ville and Muddy gang members isn't a guarantee against violence occurring at this year's state fair, the likelihood of violence will be greatly reduced if the injunctions are issued. And the message sent to would be offenders is critical to maintaining deterrence.
The law enforcement officials who have ushered this forward should be commended. We are fortunate to have imaginative and engaged law enforcement officers who pride themselves on keeping one step ahead of offenders. It's a must.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/preemptive-strike-how-a-rarely-used-law-may-prevent-violence-at-the-2026-minnesota-state-fair/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Preemptive strike: How a rarely used law may prevent violence at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair
Officials in Ramsey County teamed up with the Minnesota Attorney General's Office late last week in a unique effort to secure the 2026 Minnesota State Fair. The effort makes use of a seldom used state statute - the "Minnesota civil gang nuisance law" ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Aug. 13 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on Aug. 12, 2026, by public safety policy fellow David Zimmer: * * * Preemptive strike: How a rarely used law may prevent violence at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair Officials in Ramsey County teamed up with the Minnesota Attorney General's Office late last week in a unique effort to secure the 2026 Minnesota State Fair. The effort makes use of a seldom used state statute - the "Minnesota civil gang nuisance law"- that would allow officials to sue gang members and prevent them from associating, intimidating, annoying, provoking, or threatening others in and around the state fair grounds between August 27th and September 8th, 2026.
Some may scoff at this and suggest it's ridiculous to think a civil lawsuit could prevent gang violence, but there is real value in this effort. If the injunction is issued, law enforcement would have the legal authority to proactively detain gang members listed in the suit who violate certain conditions - such as associating with one another at the fair. Absent the injunction, law enforcement is forced to respond after a crime has been committed and after the fair's family friendly atmosphere has been damaged.
This is no small endeavor, and Minnesotans should be pleased by the effort that our law enforcement officials have put into this.
* Ramsey County Sheriff's Deputy Ben Seidl, a gang expert, assembled a 17-page affidavit laying out the historical violence between the Ville and Muddy Somali gangs, including specific assaults during previous state fairs and more recent shootings associated with high school and college graduation ceremonies. Furthermore, the affidavit exposed multiple social media posts involving these gang members advertising their intent to continue this violence while at the state fair in 2026.
* The Minnesota State Fair Chief of Police, Ron Knafla, assembled a 4-page affidavit supporting the need for the injunction.
* Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison authorized the drafting of a joint 7-page complaint supporting the injunction against a total of ten gang members.
* A corresponding 18-page draft order granting temporary injunction was also assembled and submitted to the court.
* The individual gang members have been served with copies of the complaint and await the outcome of an August 13th hearing before Ramsey County District Court Chief Judge Sara Grewing. If Judge Grewing issues the proposed temporary injunction the gang members will be prohibited from associating with one another in or around the fairgrounds for the entirety of the 2026 state fair. Any violation would result in their arrest - prior to any crime or violence occurring.
Ramsey County Attorney Choi has some experience with this legal maneuver. His office supported the original bill in the 2007 Legislature and then used it successfully in both 2009 and 2015 to proactively curb violence that was occurring between Hispanic gang members as part of Cinco de Mayo celebrations in St. Paul.
While the lawsuit against the 10 Ville and Muddy gang members isn't a guarantee against violence occurring at this year's state fair, the likelihood of violence will be greatly reduced if the injunctions are issued. And the message sent to would be offenders is critical to maintaining deterrence.
The law enforcement officials who have ushered this forward should be commended. We are fortunate to have imaginative and engaged law enforcement officers who pride themselves on keeping one step ahead of offenders. It's a must.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/preemptive-strike-how-a-rarely-used-law-may-prevent-violence-at-the-2026-minnesota-state-fair/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: Another Day, Another Scheme Where the State Government Wastes Hundreds of Thousands of Your Hard-earned Dollars
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Aug. 13 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by economist John Phelan:
* * *
Another day, another scheme where the state government wastes hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned dollars
It never stops.
Minnesota's state government has lost billions of dollars of taxpayers' money in recent years to fraud; let us call this Category 1. Then there is all the taxpayers' money which is spent as intended, but those intentions are wasteful, ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Aug. 13 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by economist John Phelan: * * * Another day, another scheme where the state government wastes hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned dollars It never stops. Minnesota's state government has lost billions of dollars of taxpayers' money in recent years to fraud; let us call this Category 1. Then there is all the taxpayers' money which is spent as intended, but those intentions are wasteful,the egregious examples receiving our not-coveted Golden Turkey award; let us call this Category 2. Then there is taxpayers' money which is just lost through rank incompetence; let us call this Category 3.
KSTP reports on a scheme which started as Category 2 and moved into Category 3.
Category 2
In 2023, representatives of FlexForge appeared at the state Capitol asking for $10 million to create more than 160 jobs manufacturing electric car part at its facility in Brooklyn Park. "What we envision is bringing a clean energy hub to Minnesota," said Jevne Micheau-Cunningham, CEO of FlexForge.
But, KSTP reports, "records obtained by 5 INVESTIGATES show FlexForge LLC was not registered with the Minnesota Secretary of State when it made its funding request and described itself as an established business with about 10 employees."
Many businesses have to go to the bank for financing, some to friends, others to equity markets. Still others, often those with "green" somewhere in the prospectus, go to politicians to get money from you. And these were the halcyon fiscal days of 2023, when the DFL had a trifecta and a surplus of $18.5 billion to spend, so FlexForge got $1.5 million, courtesy of you, the hard-working Minnesota taxpayer.
Category 3
Alas, KSTP reports:
"The funding came with reporting requirements. State law required FlexForge to submit information detailing how the money was spent and how many jobs had been created by last December."
"The company missed that deadline.
"Yet records show the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, or DEED, continued sending payments to FlexForge, including more than $300,000 after the reporting deadline had passed.
"...
"Two days after 5 INVESTIGATES contacted DEED about the missed filing, the state received the overdue report - roughly seven months late.
"The filing primarily describes the company as one that is still in a design phase. It also appears to provide conflicting information about job creation, listing figures that range from one to six jobs.
"FlexForge's late report says state funding supported approximately 30,000 hours of engineering work used to design multiple products.
"In text messages to 5 INVESTIGATES, a company representative urged the station not to pursue the story, writing that "FlexForge-type entrepreneurs should be and are applauded and celebrated. This is important to the healthy future of Minnesota and America."
"When asked for clarity on jobs created, the representative pointed to a table in the report showing a headcount of six in 2025, and four by year's end."
That works out at about $250,000 of taxpayers' money per job "created." Perhaps this is why the company didn't try to raise the money with debt or equity?
KSTP informs us that:
"DEED acknowledged shortcomings in its oversight after being contacted by 5 INVESTIGATES."
"In an email, the agency said it "should have ensured that FlexForge had submitted its report to the Legislature prior to sending payment.""
Whoops!
DEED is the department that administers Minnesota's paid family and medical leave (PFML) program.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/another-day-another-scheme-where-the-state-government-wastes-hundreds-of-thousands-of-your-hard-earned-dollars/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Another day, another scheme where the state government wastes hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned dollars
It never stops.
Minnesota's state government has lost billions of dollars of taxpayers' money in recent years to fraud; let us call this Category 1. Then there is all the taxpayers' money which is spent as intended, but those intentions are wasteful, ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Aug. 13 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by economist John Phelan: * * * Another day, another scheme where the state government wastes hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned dollars It never stops. Minnesota's state government has lost billions of dollars of taxpayers' money in recent years to fraud; let us call this Category 1. Then there is all the taxpayers' money which is spent as intended, but those intentions are wasteful,the egregious examples receiving our not-coveted Golden Turkey award; let us call this Category 2. Then there is taxpayers' money which is just lost through rank incompetence; let us call this Category 3.
KSTP reports on a scheme which started as Category 2 and moved into Category 3.
Category 2
In 2023, representatives of FlexForge appeared at the state Capitol asking for $10 million to create more than 160 jobs manufacturing electric car part at its facility in Brooklyn Park. "What we envision is bringing a clean energy hub to Minnesota," said Jevne Micheau-Cunningham, CEO of FlexForge.
But, KSTP reports, "records obtained by 5 INVESTIGATES show FlexForge LLC was not registered with the Minnesota Secretary of State when it made its funding request and described itself as an established business with about 10 employees."
Many businesses have to go to the bank for financing, some to friends, others to equity markets. Still others, often those with "green" somewhere in the prospectus, go to politicians to get money from you. And these were the halcyon fiscal days of 2023, when the DFL had a trifecta and a surplus of $18.5 billion to spend, so FlexForge got $1.5 million, courtesy of you, the hard-working Minnesota taxpayer.
Category 3
Alas, KSTP reports:
"The funding came with reporting requirements. State law required FlexForge to submit information detailing how the money was spent and how many jobs had been created by last December."
"The company missed that deadline.
"Yet records show the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, or DEED, continued sending payments to FlexForge, including more than $300,000 after the reporting deadline had passed.
"...
"Two days after 5 INVESTIGATES contacted DEED about the missed filing, the state received the overdue report - roughly seven months late.
"The filing primarily describes the company as one that is still in a design phase. It also appears to provide conflicting information about job creation, listing figures that range from one to six jobs.
"FlexForge's late report says state funding supported approximately 30,000 hours of engineering work used to design multiple products.
"In text messages to 5 INVESTIGATES, a company representative urged the station not to pursue the story, writing that "FlexForge-type entrepreneurs should be and are applauded and celebrated. This is important to the healthy future of Minnesota and America."
"When asked for clarity on jobs created, the representative pointed to a table in the report showing a headcount of six in 2025, and four by year's end."
That works out at about $250,000 of taxpayers' money per job "created." Perhaps this is why the company didn't try to raise the money with debt or equity?
KSTP informs us that:
"DEED acknowledged shortcomings in its oversight after being contacted by 5 INVESTIGATES."
"In an email, the agency said it "should have ensured that FlexForge had submitted its report to the Legislature prior to sending payment.""
Whoops!
DEED is the department that administers Minnesota's paid family and medical leave (PFML) program.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/another-day-another-scheme-where-the-state-government-wastes-hundreds-of-thousands-of-your-hard-earned-dollars/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Rand Issues Commentary: Readiness and Resilience - National Effort We Can't Delay
SANTA MONICA, California, Aug. 12 -- Rand issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by Lucia Retter, co-director of the Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition, and research leader Judith Huismans:
* * *
Readiness and Resilience: The National Effort We Can't Delay
Nations across Europe face a growing and diversifying array of threats within their borders and beyond. Readiness to meet these threats is improving, but unevenly. While some European nations are taking increasingly prudent steps to counter hostile state-sponsored threats, others risk delaying their responses to the detriment ... Show Full Article SANTA MONICA, California, Aug. 12 -- Rand issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by Lucia Retter, co-director of the Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition, and research leader Judith Huismans: * * * Readiness and Resilience: The National Effort We Can't Delay Nations across Europe face a growing and diversifying array of threats within their borders and beyond. Readiness to meet these threats is improving, but unevenly. While some European nations are taking increasingly prudent steps to counter hostile state-sponsored threats, others risk delaying their responses to the detrimentof their readiness to withstand crises.
Europe is already confronted on its own soil, with hybridised and non-linear Russian threats directly affecting national security, economic activity and critical infrastructure. The number of Russian state-sponsored acts of sabotage across Europe continued to increase in 2025 after almost tripling in 2024 compared to preceding years. In 2024, 34 Russian attacks in Europe were documented, many of which were connected to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
For instance, several companies supplying arms to Ukraine--including BAE Systems, Rheinmetall, the German Diehl Group and EMCO--have been targeted in recent years. The largest proportion of attacks however, over a quarter, were directed at the transport sector. As before, these attacks have targeted perceived weaknesses in European societal structures, industry, infrastructure and government and military premises.
Such attacks do not only incur physical damage. They are also intended to test European cooperation, its readiness to meet emergent crises, and to expose flaws in the resilience of its democratic and societal structures.
It is increasingly apparent that European nations must be prepared to meet these diverse challenges with an appropriately comprehensive and holistic response. National preparedness must be founded on a whole-of-society approach to meet, contain and deny new threats. Research highlights the multi-faceted nature of resilience, spanning cyber security, supply chain and societal cohesion. It also examines specific case studies of good practice across the Nordics, Ukraine as well as historical examples of wartime economies.
The private sector has a critical role to play in this response, which must involve industry in a broader sense, including energy providers, food retailers, transport industry and their respective supply chains. Private companies and industries possess not only physical and digital infrastructure and production facilities needed for mobilising the economy in times of crisis; they also employ a workforce whose skills can support preparedness and readiness. Governments that proactively engage with the private sector around national preparedness help businesses plan better (PDF) for personnel, purchases and overall resilience.
Close collaboration between the government, military and the private sector has been evident in Ukraine. Since the onset of the war, both the public and private sectors in Ukraine have been engaged in repairing (PDF) telecommunications and critical infrastructure networks. Ukrainian companies have benefited from a rapid government relocation scheme launched in March 2022, which supported 745 enterprises in moving operations to western Ukraine.
Governments can also engage with industry representatives to identify critical sectors and professions and determine how their operations can be sustained during crisis or war. France's recent efforts to establish an industrial reserve--essentially a pool of former defence industry staff available for mobilisation in the event of national crisis--is an attempt to do just that. It offers an example of how nations might maintain a standing register of key occupations essential to wartime production, minimising disruption and delay in the event of a major crisis.
Although real increases in defence spending matter, it is the frameworks in place governing the deployment of such spending, rather than the sheer size of the budget, that will make or break a nation's response to crisis.
European spending on defence continues to rise year-on-year, but without comprehensive frameworks to address the increasingly diverse nature of threats, its overall impact will continue to be undermined. This gap is not uniform across the continent. In Central Europe, the Nordics, and the Baltics, preparedness is far more embedded in national consciousness than in Western Europe, and crisis response frameworks are correspondingly more advanced. Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany are not only acutely aware of the risks of hostile state interference and hybrid threats, but are actively strengthening resilience across society, government and industry. Their frameworks for national response extend beyond purely military scenarios; cross-border coordination efforts focus on countering and adapting to novel physical threats, and also pre-emptive resilience-building against hybrid pressures--such as irregular migration--which have been effectively weaponised by Russia and Belarus in the past.
A Europe capable of deterring, denying and defeating existential threats is within reach. However, achieving such resilience will require difficult conversations on security and preparedness across European NATO, as a whole. Effective preparedness will mean having frameworks in place ensuring that the right people can be put in the right place when needed. This requires building cooperation and coordination between government, industry and society, establishing mechanisms that not only mandate but also incentivise, encourage and where needed, compensate, civilian participation in preparedness.
All of this must be underpinned by clear communication and engagement with the public. Regulatory frameworks and financial incentives should promote and encourage engagement from all levels of society, from individuals and communities to businesses and public institutions. The Nordic concept of "Total Defence" serves as a blueprint for Western European leaders to translate into their own context. National preparedness must start from the ground up--and be supported by a collective ethos instilled by its leaders from across government, industry, the military and broader society.
* * *
Lucia Retter is Co-Director of the RAND Europe Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition. Judith Huismans is a Research Leader at RAND Europe's Netherlands office.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2026/08/readiness-and-resilience-the-national-effort-we-cant.html
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Readiness and Resilience: The National Effort We Can't Delay
Nations across Europe face a growing and diversifying array of threats within their borders and beyond. Readiness to meet these threats is improving, but unevenly. While some European nations are taking increasingly prudent steps to counter hostile state-sponsored threats, others risk delaying their responses to the detriment ... Show Full Article SANTA MONICA, California, Aug. 12 -- Rand issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by Lucia Retter, co-director of the Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition, and research leader Judith Huismans: * * * Readiness and Resilience: The National Effort We Can't Delay Nations across Europe face a growing and diversifying array of threats within their borders and beyond. Readiness to meet these threats is improving, but unevenly. While some European nations are taking increasingly prudent steps to counter hostile state-sponsored threats, others risk delaying their responses to the detrimentof their readiness to withstand crises.
Europe is already confronted on its own soil, with hybridised and non-linear Russian threats directly affecting national security, economic activity and critical infrastructure. The number of Russian state-sponsored acts of sabotage across Europe continued to increase in 2025 after almost tripling in 2024 compared to preceding years. In 2024, 34 Russian attacks in Europe were documented, many of which were connected to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
For instance, several companies supplying arms to Ukraine--including BAE Systems, Rheinmetall, the German Diehl Group and EMCO--have been targeted in recent years. The largest proportion of attacks however, over a quarter, were directed at the transport sector. As before, these attacks have targeted perceived weaknesses in European societal structures, industry, infrastructure and government and military premises.
Such attacks do not only incur physical damage. They are also intended to test European cooperation, its readiness to meet emergent crises, and to expose flaws in the resilience of its democratic and societal structures.
It is increasingly apparent that European nations must be prepared to meet these diverse challenges with an appropriately comprehensive and holistic response. National preparedness must be founded on a whole-of-society approach to meet, contain and deny new threats. Research highlights the multi-faceted nature of resilience, spanning cyber security, supply chain and societal cohesion. It also examines specific case studies of good practice across the Nordics, Ukraine as well as historical examples of wartime economies.
The private sector has a critical role to play in this response, which must involve industry in a broader sense, including energy providers, food retailers, transport industry and their respective supply chains. Private companies and industries possess not only physical and digital infrastructure and production facilities needed for mobilising the economy in times of crisis; they also employ a workforce whose skills can support preparedness and readiness. Governments that proactively engage with the private sector around national preparedness help businesses plan better (PDF) for personnel, purchases and overall resilience.
Close collaboration between the government, military and the private sector has been evident in Ukraine. Since the onset of the war, both the public and private sectors in Ukraine have been engaged in repairing (PDF) telecommunications and critical infrastructure networks. Ukrainian companies have benefited from a rapid government relocation scheme launched in March 2022, which supported 745 enterprises in moving operations to western Ukraine.
Governments can also engage with industry representatives to identify critical sectors and professions and determine how their operations can be sustained during crisis or war. France's recent efforts to establish an industrial reserve--essentially a pool of former defence industry staff available for mobilisation in the event of national crisis--is an attempt to do just that. It offers an example of how nations might maintain a standing register of key occupations essential to wartime production, minimising disruption and delay in the event of a major crisis.
Although real increases in defence spending matter, it is the frameworks in place governing the deployment of such spending, rather than the sheer size of the budget, that will make or break a nation's response to crisis.
European spending on defence continues to rise year-on-year, but without comprehensive frameworks to address the increasingly diverse nature of threats, its overall impact will continue to be undermined. This gap is not uniform across the continent. In Central Europe, the Nordics, and the Baltics, preparedness is far more embedded in national consciousness than in Western Europe, and crisis response frameworks are correspondingly more advanced. Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany are not only acutely aware of the risks of hostile state interference and hybrid threats, but are actively strengthening resilience across society, government and industry. Their frameworks for national response extend beyond purely military scenarios; cross-border coordination efforts focus on countering and adapting to novel physical threats, and also pre-emptive resilience-building against hybrid pressures--such as irregular migration--which have been effectively weaponised by Russia and Belarus in the past.
A Europe capable of deterring, denying and defeating existential threats is within reach. However, achieving such resilience will require difficult conversations on security and preparedness across European NATO, as a whole. Effective preparedness will mean having frameworks in place ensuring that the right people can be put in the right place when needed. This requires building cooperation and coordination between government, industry and society, establishing mechanisms that not only mandate but also incentivise, encourage and where needed, compensate, civilian participation in preparedness.
All of this must be underpinned by clear communication and engagement with the public. Regulatory frameworks and financial incentives should promote and encourage engagement from all levels of society, from individuals and communities to businesses and public institutions. The Nordic concept of "Total Defence" serves as a blueprint for Western European leaders to translate into their own context. National preparedness must start from the ground up--and be supported by a collective ethos instilled by its leaders from across government, industry, the military and broader society.
* * *
Lucia Retter is Co-Director of the RAND Europe Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition. Judith Huismans is a Research Leader at RAND Europe's Netherlands office.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2026/08/readiness-and-resilience-the-national-effort-we-cant.html
[Category: ThinkTank]
Inflation increases slightly in July, Americans still paying higher prices: CEI analysis
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The Competitive Enterprise Institute posted the following news release:
* * *
Inflation increases slightly in July, Americans still paying higher prices: CEI analysis
*
July's Consumer Price Index (CPI) report shows inflation increased 0.1 percent across all sectors, in line with economists' predictions. With new proposed tariffs on the horizon and continued instability abroad creating concern, attention is again on the Fed's anti-inflation strategy.
CEI Finance and Monetary Policy Analyst Steve Swedberg:
"While the last two months have provided ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The Competitive Enterprise Institute posted the following news release: * * * Inflation increases slightly in July, Americans still paying higher prices: CEI analysis * July's Consumer Price Index (CPI) report shows inflation increased 0.1 percent across all sectors, in line with economists' predictions. With new proposed tariffs on the horizon and continued instability abroad creating concern, attention is again on the Fed's anti-inflation strategy. CEI Finance and Monetary Policy Analyst Steve Swedberg: "While the last two months have providedAmericans with some relief from relentlessly rising household costs, they are still paying the price for years of inflation. Consumer prices rose slightly in July, while the annual inflation rate remained elevated. Since January 2020, prices overall have increased by around 30 percent.
"That history matters. Even if inflation returned to the Federal Reserve's year-to-year goal of 2 percent, the prices Americans face for groceries, housing, utilities, and other necessities will remain far higher than they were before the pandemic.
"Americans feel that pressure in their wallets. Americans' one-year inflation expectations is at 3.6 percent in July. Meanwhile, consumer confidence is 10 percent lower than it was last year.
"The affordability problem extends beyond the latest monthly inflation number. Families are dealing with a much higher cost of living than they faced six years ago, and continued price increases only add to that burden. Americans need more than inflation to slow down. They need policies that restore purchasing power and give people the ability to afford the very things that make life worth living."
CEI Senior Economist Ryan Young:
"There is good news and bad news from this week's CPI report. The good news is that the core inflation rate, which excludes volatile food and energy, is not far off target. The bad news is that tariffs and the Iran stalemate will continue to cause uncertainty and raise prices.
"There are things the Federal Reserve can control, and things it cannot control. The things it can control seem to be mostly under control.
"But if the late Sen. Lindsey Graham's Russia tariffs bill becomes law, Congress will hand President Trump the ability to enact up to 100 percent tariffs against major trading partners such as Europe, China, and India. This would cause even sharper price increases.
"Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has indicated that the Fed is focused on the inflation-fighting side of its dual mandate to keep both inflation and unemployment low. With the labor market still in decent shape, it should be able to continue concentrating on inflation at its next interest rate meeting. Some stability on tariffs and Iran would make that job easier."
***
Original text here: https://cei.org/news_releases/inflation-increases-slightly-in-july-americans-still-paying-higher-prices-cei-analysis/
* * *
Inflation increases slightly in July, Americans still paying higher prices: CEI analysis
*
July's Consumer Price Index (CPI) report shows inflation increased 0.1 percent across all sectors, in line with economists' predictions. With new proposed tariffs on the horizon and continued instability abroad creating concern, attention is again on the Fed's anti-inflation strategy.
CEI Finance and Monetary Policy Analyst Steve Swedberg:
"While the last two months have provided ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The Competitive Enterprise Institute posted the following news release: * * * Inflation increases slightly in July, Americans still paying higher prices: CEI analysis * July's Consumer Price Index (CPI) report shows inflation increased 0.1 percent across all sectors, in line with economists' predictions. With new proposed tariffs on the horizon and continued instability abroad creating concern, attention is again on the Fed's anti-inflation strategy. CEI Finance and Monetary Policy Analyst Steve Swedberg: "While the last two months have providedAmericans with some relief from relentlessly rising household costs, they are still paying the price for years of inflation. Consumer prices rose slightly in July, while the annual inflation rate remained elevated. Since January 2020, prices overall have increased by around 30 percent.
"That history matters. Even if inflation returned to the Federal Reserve's year-to-year goal of 2 percent, the prices Americans face for groceries, housing, utilities, and other necessities will remain far higher than they were before the pandemic.
"Americans feel that pressure in their wallets. Americans' one-year inflation expectations is at 3.6 percent in July. Meanwhile, consumer confidence is 10 percent lower than it was last year.
"The affordability problem extends beyond the latest monthly inflation number. Families are dealing with a much higher cost of living than they faced six years ago, and continued price increases only add to that burden. Americans need more than inflation to slow down. They need policies that restore purchasing power and give people the ability to afford the very things that make life worth living."
CEI Senior Economist Ryan Young:
"There is good news and bad news from this week's CPI report. The good news is that the core inflation rate, which excludes volatile food and energy, is not far off target. The bad news is that tariffs and the Iran stalemate will continue to cause uncertainty and raise prices.
"There are things the Federal Reserve can control, and things it cannot control. The things it can control seem to be mostly under control.
"But if the late Sen. Lindsey Graham's Russia tariffs bill becomes law, Congress will hand President Trump the ability to enact up to 100 percent tariffs against major trading partners such as Europe, China, and India. This would cause even sharper price increases.
"Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has indicated that the Fed is focused on the inflation-fighting side of its dual mandate to keep both inflation and unemployment low. With the labor market still in decent shape, it should be able to continue concentrating on inflation at its next interest rate meeting. Some stability on tariffs and Iran would make that job easier."
***
Original text here: https://cei.org/news_releases/inflation-increases-slightly-in-july-americans-still-paying-higher-prices-cei-analysis/
Center for American Progress: Trump's Intimidation Tactics Won't Deter the Truth, CAP's Neera Tanden Says
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following statement on Aug. 11, 2026:
* * *
Trump's Intimidation Tactics Won't Deter the Truth, CAP's Neera Tanden Says
Last night, President Donald Trump used Truth Social to threaten a lawsuit against the Center for American Progress and a staffer, all because a CAP report showed his administration's costly deployments of the National Guard had no measurable impact on reducing violent crime. In response, CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden issued the following statement:
The Center for American Progress stands firmly behind ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following statement on Aug. 11, 2026: * * * Trump's Intimidation Tactics Won't Deter the Truth, CAP's Neera Tanden Says Last night, President Donald Trump used Truth Social to threaten a lawsuit against the Center for American Progress and a staffer, all because a CAP report showed his administration's costly deployments of the National Guard had no measurable impact on reducing violent crime. In response, CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden issued the following statement: The Center for American Progress stands firmly behindits research and its staff. When politicians can't defend their failed policies with facts, they resort to intimidation.
Trump is lashing out and threatening bogus lawsuits because he wants to silence independent research, waste taxpayer money on his failed agenda, and distract from the reality that his policies are hurting the American people. Core to our mission is telling the truth with evidence and data, and that mission is crucial during the Trump administration.
We're going to keep delivering the data, exposing the president's failed leadership, and fighting on behalf of the American people. We will not be intimidated, and we will not back down.
For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Sam Hananel at shananel@americanprogress.org.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/statement-trumps-intimidation-tactics-wont-deter-the-truth-caps-neera-tanden-says/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Trump's Intimidation Tactics Won't Deter the Truth, CAP's Neera Tanden Says
Last night, President Donald Trump used Truth Social to threaten a lawsuit against the Center for American Progress and a staffer, all because a CAP report showed his administration's costly deployments of the National Guard had no measurable impact on reducing violent crime. In response, CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden issued the following statement:
The Center for American Progress stands firmly behind ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following statement on Aug. 11, 2026: * * * Trump's Intimidation Tactics Won't Deter the Truth, CAP's Neera Tanden Says Last night, President Donald Trump used Truth Social to threaten a lawsuit against the Center for American Progress and a staffer, all because a CAP report showed his administration's costly deployments of the National Guard had no measurable impact on reducing violent crime. In response, CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden issued the following statement: The Center for American Progress stands firmly behindits research and its staff. When politicians can't defend their failed policies with facts, they resort to intimidation.
Trump is lashing out and threatening bogus lawsuits because he wants to silence independent research, waste taxpayer money on his failed agenda, and distract from the reality that his policies are hurting the American people. Core to our mission is telling the truth with evidence and data, and that mission is crucial during the Trump administration.
We're going to keep delivering the data, exposing the president's failed leadership, and fighting on behalf of the American people. We will not be intimidated, and we will not back down.
For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Sam Hananel at shananel@americanprogress.org.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/statement-trumps-intimidation-tactics-wont-deter-the-truth-caps-neera-tanden-says/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Capital Research Center Issues Commentary: Courier's News Machine Turns Against Data Centers
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by investigative researcher Parker Thayer:
* * *
Courier's news machine turns against data centers
Courier Newsroom is a nationwide political operation designed to look like independent local news outlets. Since April 2026, Courier's shadowy network has been waging a coordinated offensive against the construction of AI data centers, publishing more than 200 negative articles, videos, and news blasts on a topic its newsrooms hardly discussed last summer. This has all the hallmarks of a left-wing ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by investigative researcher Parker Thayer: * * * Courier's news machine turns against data centers Courier Newsroom is a nationwide political operation designed to look like independent local news outlets. Since April 2026, Courier's shadowy network has been waging a coordinated offensive against the construction of AI data centers, publishing more than 200 negative articles, videos, and news blasts on a topic its newsrooms hardly discussed last summer. This has all the hallmarks of a left-wingastro-turfing operation.
-
Readers encountering The 'Gander in Michigan, UpNorthNews in Wisconsin, and the Copper Courier in Arizona might think these news outlets providing skeptical coverage of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are refreshing examples of homespun, objective journalism. But their folksy branding hides a secret. All of them are fronts for a DC-based, left-leaning political advocacy firm named Courier Newsroom.
Founded by Democratic strategist Tara McGowan, Courier was initially incubated inside a left-of-center nonprofit named ACRONYM. Courier has since become a for-profit firm running news outlets in at least 20 states. The Courier affiliates are still regurgitating talking points from left-of-center advocacy groups, but now with a profit motive. One target audience lately is Americans with worries about data centers being built in their communities.
Frustrated with recent policy setbacks and eager for a path back to popularity, several left-wing anti-energy climate groups have begun to stoke these concerns about data centers into flames of hysteria. Some far-left environmental activists have even gone as far as helping to create activist groups claiming to be conservative that organized nationwide protests against datacenters.
The Courier network seems to have taken up this cause. Since 2025, Courier outlets in sixteen states have published at least 242 media products (such as articles, videos, and newsletters) attacking or otherwise unfavorably mentioning artificial intelligence and AI data centers using the guise of an ordinary local paper.
The graph below (fittingly, made with the help of AI) charts the dates of the Courier coverage against data centers and reveals a clear trend. Last summer, Courier affiliates were hardly covering the issue. Then, following a brief upward blip in December, Courier's all-out blitz against data centers began around April 2026 and lasted well into June and early July, when this data was collected.
Courier's coverage trend regarding this issue over the last year, including the spring/summer spike, closely (to say nothing of suspiciously) matched Google search trends data showing overall relative interest in terms such as "data center," "AI data center," and "data center news":
A benign explanation for this close correlation is that Courier affiliates were just responding to spikes in public concern. Maybe that's true, but there's a less innocent explanation.
Nominally, Courier may call itself a "newsroom," but in the fine print they admit they're all about the politics. Courier has repeatedly bragged that they know the secret to manufacturing public concern over hot-button political issues.
In 2022, for example, Courier and Data for Progress conducted a sophisticated study showing Courier's artificially boosted coverage of abortion in Michigan swayed four percent of readers on the issue. In 2021, Courier's case study in Virginia showed that exposure to paid advertising of policy-related articles was highly cost effective at increasing voter turnout. In 2023, the Courier newsletter boasted that their studies showed "our newsletter subscribers, folks who saw local reporting on the midterm elections and candidates running for office in their states and communities within our newsletters showed a five percentage point swing in their likelihood to support candidates who shared their values," and that "individuals who had been subscribers to our newsletters for longer than 8 months were the most likely to change their minds."
Courier is clearly comfortable with using orchestrated coverage blitzes to shift public opinion. So, it's reasonable to suspect their sudden interest in AI data centers is not merely an organic example of just covering the news as it happens. If Courier's boasting is to be believed, this could be an example of them creating stories as much as covering them. That might also explain the advertisements that Courier outlets have purchased promoting their anti-data center coverage in states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona.
One script, many stories
In covering the data centers, Courier's allegedly local news outlets have conspicuously leaned on the same handful of talking points and experts, producing a narrative that is repeated from state to state. The stories all claim shady tech companies are invading communities, draining water, driving up electric bills, and receiving lavish tax subsidies. The stories encourage common sense citizens to join with far-left environmental activist groups to oppose and prohibit new data center construction.
The locations change, the story does not.
Take these three articles, for example, written by two separate authors for three different Courier affiliates:
-Fairfax County mom fights for clean air as VA data centers expand
-This Wisconsin mom fought back against proposed data center construction in her neighborhood--and won.
-PA data center surge sparks local fears over pollution, power costs, and weak oversight
All three articles begin by introducing a sympathetic mom in the respective state who, one day, became scared that data centers would pollute the air and overwhelm the local power grid. Then, each of the moms jumped into action, creating local activist groups to oppose the construction of a data center and support creation of legal impediments such as a data center moratorium.
It just so happens that all three of these moms, from three different states, are described as members of a group called the Moms Clean Air Force. Three different stories were written about three different moms fighting against data centers in three different states, and all of them happened to be members of the same group? What a remarkable coincidence!
Or not.
The Moms Clean Air Force, like Courier, is also not what it seems to be. According to tax filings the group is a front for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), one of America's largest, anti-energy, left-wing activist groups, with a $300 million annual budget.
In 2021, the Environmental Defense Fund received a $1.2 million grant (see Page 11), earmarked for the Moms Clean Air Force project. The donor was the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, the private foundation of British investor Jeremy Grantham. As a prominent (and obviously very wealthy) hedge fund manager, Grantham has repeatedly claimed AI is creating a bubble in the stock market that will soon pop.
If the rich professional investor is warning that AI data centers are a bad investment, then it isn't a stretch to guess that his portfolio is positioned to benefit if he's correct. Sending some of his loot to nonprofits supporting data center moratoriums could be very profitable for him.
Whether Courier is doing so on purpose or not, the language across the Courier articles is helping Grantham's cause. Data centers aren't merely being built, but instead always "creep" into communities. States are never just seeing an increase in data centers, they're being "overrun." The facilities are "water-guzzling," "energy-hungry," or even "vampires" and their owners are "billionaire Tech Bros" profiting from "corporate welfare." Government officials operate "behind closed doors," while residents are "shut out" or "gaslighted."
The repetition is not limited to rhetoric. The same set of policy fixes appears in articles posted in multiple states: special utility tariffs, repeal of supposed tax exemptions, water-use disclosure, zoning restrictions, environmental reviews, community-benefit agreements, and local or statewide moratoriums. Data center moratoriums seem to be a Courier favorite, with the policies being discussed favorably in publications from Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, Nevada, New York, Nebraska, and New Mexico.
It's a repeat of the policies that environmental activists have used to undermine non-AI American industries for decades.
Journalism equals organizing
Sometimes Courier stops pretending to be news at all and instead overtly campaigns against data centers and encourages readers to help stop them.
UpNorthNews published "3 ways Wisconsinites can get involved as data centers try to creep into their communities." Courier Texas told readers exactly "what you can do" about the state's data-center boom. Weekly "Guide[s] to Taking Action" advertise the times and dates of "Protests against data centers" across Michigan. Nearly all Courier outlets advertised at least one "data center town hall" sometime in the last year.
Courier also ties the data center issue to elections and partisan politics. Its outlets have profiled numerous Democratic candidates simply for calling for moratoriums, tax changes, or stronger regulation on data centers. Courier Texas posted a video of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico outlining his data-center policies. In Wisconsin, gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong was profiled glowingly for endorsing a state moratorium. Courier Georgia profiled three Democratic gubernatorial candidates and asked each of them to explain their views on data centers as part of an article on rural policy priorities.
The implied message is that Democrats bashing data centers will be rewarded with precious and favorable media exposure.
Courier's campaign also draws from a large network of environmental and progressive organizations. Recurring sources include the aforementioned Moms Clean Air Force (the EDF front), but also Food & Water Watch, Good Jobs First, various Sierra Club chapters, and numerous state-level environmental activist groups. The groups supply nearly all the reports, statistics, and quotes Courier uses to become their communications department.
Who pays for this?
Data centers consume a lot of electricity, require water for cooling, and the possibility of AI replacing human jobs has become a terrifying prospect for some. But every technology comes with tradeoffs--costs and benefits--and it's often not difficult to exaggerate or even fabricate the costs.
Many of the groups mentioned above (in particular, the Environmental Defense Fund and Sierra Club) are fanatically anti-energy NGOs that have spent decades demonizing and opposing nuclear energy, even though it is widely regarded as the strongest combination of safe, clean and reliable energy humans have ever exploited. Courier's stoked-up data center hysteria may be similarly detached from reality, yet just as politically useful.
It's clear who is benefitting from this coverage. Might some of the beneficiaries be paying for it?
Because Courier Newsroom is a for-profit company, and because the tax disclosures of their nonprofit clients are generally published on a two-year delay, it is not possible to get a complete look at Courier's current finances. But a glimpse at the recent past does give clues as to who has--for whatever reason--been putting money in Courier's pocket.
The largest known recent client is Future Forward USA Action, the "dark money" affiliate of Joe Biden's, and later Kamala Harris's, presidential campaign, which granted Courier $13.5 million in 2024. Courier was also paid $2.5 million by ActBlue, the fundraising engine of the Democratic Party, in December 2025.
Additionally, Courier received $260,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and $100,000 from the Windward Fund in 2024. Both are core pieces of the $1-billion-per-year activism network controlled by the left-wing management firm formerly known as Arabella Advisors.
It isn't hard to imagine that one of these groups, or some similarly placed left-leaning activists friendly to Democrats, deducing that the data center issue is an expeditious way to fracture the Republican coalition, bolster their own base, and perhaps revive the floundering climate change coalition. Courier's own bragging shows that helping with such behavior is literally part of their business model.
And they're a profit-seeking enterprise.
Courier's data center coverage appears to be as artificial as the artificial intelligence coming out of the data centers. What might be real is the money they're receiving to produce it.
* * *
Parker Thayer is an Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. A native of Michigan, he recently graduated from Hillsdale College.
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/couriers-news-machine-turns-against-data-centers/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Courier's news machine turns against data centers
Courier Newsroom is a nationwide political operation designed to look like independent local news outlets. Since April 2026, Courier's shadowy network has been waging a coordinated offensive against the construction of AI data centers, publishing more than 200 negative articles, videos, and news blasts on a topic its newsrooms hardly discussed last summer. This has all the hallmarks of a left-wing ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by investigative researcher Parker Thayer: * * * Courier's news machine turns against data centers Courier Newsroom is a nationwide political operation designed to look like independent local news outlets. Since April 2026, Courier's shadowy network has been waging a coordinated offensive against the construction of AI data centers, publishing more than 200 negative articles, videos, and news blasts on a topic its newsrooms hardly discussed last summer. This has all the hallmarks of a left-wingastro-turfing operation.
-
Readers encountering The 'Gander in Michigan, UpNorthNews in Wisconsin, and the Copper Courier in Arizona might think these news outlets providing skeptical coverage of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are refreshing examples of homespun, objective journalism. But their folksy branding hides a secret. All of them are fronts for a DC-based, left-leaning political advocacy firm named Courier Newsroom.
Founded by Democratic strategist Tara McGowan, Courier was initially incubated inside a left-of-center nonprofit named ACRONYM. Courier has since become a for-profit firm running news outlets in at least 20 states. The Courier affiliates are still regurgitating talking points from left-of-center advocacy groups, but now with a profit motive. One target audience lately is Americans with worries about data centers being built in their communities.
Frustrated with recent policy setbacks and eager for a path back to popularity, several left-wing anti-energy climate groups have begun to stoke these concerns about data centers into flames of hysteria. Some far-left environmental activists have even gone as far as helping to create activist groups claiming to be conservative that organized nationwide protests against datacenters.
The Courier network seems to have taken up this cause. Since 2025, Courier outlets in sixteen states have published at least 242 media products (such as articles, videos, and newsletters) attacking or otherwise unfavorably mentioning artificial intelligence and AI data centers using the guise of an ordinary local paper.
The graph below (fittingly, made with the help of AI) charts the dates of the Courier coverage against data centers and reveals a clear trend. Last summer, Courier affiliates were hardly covering the issue. Then, following a brief upward blip in December, Courier's all-out blitz against data centers began around April 2026 and lasted well into June and early July, when this data was collected.
Courier's coverage trend regarding this issue over the last year, including the spring/summer spike, closely (to say nothing of suspiciously) matched Google search trends data showing overall relative interest in terms such as "data center," "AI data center," and "data center news":
A benign explanation for this close correlation is that Courier affiliates were just responding to spikes in public concern. Maybe that's true, but there's a less innocent explanation.
Nominally, Courier may call itself a "newsroom," but in the fine print they admit they're all about the politics. Courier has repeatedly bragged that they know the secret to manufacturing public concern over hot-button political issues.
In 2022, for example, Courier and Data for Progress conducted a sophisticated study showing Courier's artificially boosted coverage of abortion in Michigan swayed four percent of readers on the issue. In 2021, Courier's case study in Virginia showed that exposure to paid advertising of policy-related articles was highly cost effective at increasing voter turnout. In 2023, the Courier newsletter boasted that their studies showed "our newsletter subscribers, folks who saw local reporting on the midterm elections and candidates running for office in their states and communities within our newsletters showed a five percentage point swing in their likelihood to support candidates who shared their values," and that "individuals who had been subscribers to our newsletters for longer than 8 months were the most likely to change their minds."
Courier is clearly comfortable with using orchestrated coverage blitzes to shift public opinion. So, it's reasonable to suspect their sudden interest in AI data centers is not merely an organic example of just covering the news as it happens. If Courier's boasting is to be believed, this could be an example of them creating stories as much as covering them. That might also explain the advertisements that Courier outlets have purchased promoting their anti-data center coverage in states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona.
One script, many stories
In covering the data centers, Courier's allegedly local news outlets have conspicuously leaned on the same handful of talking points and experts, producing a narrative that is repeated from state to state. The stories all claim shady tech companies are invading communities, draining water, driving up electric bills, and receiving lavish tax subsidies. The stories encourage common sense citizens to join with far-left environmental activist groups to oppose and prohibit new data center construction.
The locations change, the story does not.
Take these three articles, for example, written by two separate authors for three different Courier affiliates:
-Fairfax County mom fights for clean air as VA data centers expand
-This Wisconsin mom fought back against proposed data center construction in her neighborhood--and won.
-PA data center surge sparks local fears over pollution, power costs, and weak oversight
All three articles begin by introducing a sympathetic mom in the respective state who, one day, became scared that data centers would pollute the air and overwhelm the local power grid. Then, each of the moms jumped into action, creating local activist groups to oppose the construction of a data center and support creation of legal impediments such as a data center moratorium.
It just so happens that all three of these moms, from three different states, are described as members of a group called the Moms Clean Air Force. Three different stories were written about three different moms fighting against data centers in three different states, and all of them happened to be members of the same group? What a remarkable coincidence!
Or not.
The Moms Clean Air Force, like Courier, is also not what it seems to be. According to tax filings the group is a front for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), one of America's largest, anti-energy, left-wing activist groups, with a $300 million annual budget.
In 2021, the Environmental Defense Fund received a $1.2 million grant (see Page 11), earmarked for the Moms Clean Air Force project. The donor was the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, the private foundation of British investor Jeremy Grantham. As a prominent (and obviously very wealthy) hedge fund manager, Grantham has repeatedly claimed AI is creating a bubble in the stock market that will soon pop.
If the rich professional investor is warning that AI data centers are a bad investment, then it isn't a stretch to guess that his portfolio is positioned to benefit if he's correct. Sending some of his loot to nonprofits supporting data center moratoriums could be very profitable for him.
Whether Courier is doing so on purpose or not, the language across the Courier articles is helping Grantham's cause. Data centers aren't merely being built, but instead always "creep" into communities. States are never just seeing an increase in data centers, they're being "overrun." The facilities are "water-guzzling," "energy-hungry," or even "vampires" and their owners are "billionaire Tech Bros" profiting from "corporate welfare." Government officials operate "behind closed doors," while residents are "shut out" or "gaslighted."
The repetition is not limited to rhetoric. The same set of policy fixes appears in articles posted in multiple states: special utility tariffs, repeal of supposed tax exemptions, water-use disclosure, zoning restrictions, environmental reviews, community-benefit agreements, and local or statewide moratoriums. Data center moratoriums seem to be a Courier favorite, with the policies being discussed favorably in publications from Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, Nevada, New York, Nebraska, and New Mexico.
It's a repeat of the policies that environmental activists have used to undermine non-AI American industries for decades.
Journalism equals organizing
Sometimes Courier stops pretending to be news at all and instead overtly campaigns against data centers and encourages readers to help stop them.
UpNorthNews published "3 ways Wisconsinites can get involved as data centers try to creep into their communities." Courier Texas told readers exactly "what you can do" about the state's data-center boom. Weekly "Guide[s] to Taking Action" advertise the times and dates of "Protests against data centers" across Michigan. Nearly all Courier outlets advertised at least one "data center town hall" sometime in the last year.
Courier also ties the data center issue to elections and partisan politics. Its outlets have profiled numerous Democratic candidates simply for calling for moratoriums, tax changes, or stronger regulation on data centers. Courier Texas posted a video of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico outlining his data-center policies. In Wisconsin, gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong was profiled glowingly for endorsing a state moratorium. Courier Georgia profiled three Democratic gubernatorial candidates and asked each of them to explain their views on data centers as part of an article on rural policy priorities.
The implied message is that Democrats bashing data centers will be rewarded with precious and favorable media exposure.
Courier's campaign also draws from a large network of environmental and progressive organizations. Recurring sources include the aforementioned Moms Clean Air Force (the EDF front), but also Food & Water Watch, Good Jobs First, various Sierra Club chapters, and numerous state-level environmental activist groups. The groups supply nearly all the reports, statistics, and quotes Courier uses to become their communications department.
Who pays for this?
Data centers consume a lot of electricity, require water for cooling, and the possibility of AI replacing human jobs has become a terrifying prospect for some. But every technology comes with tradeoffs--costs and benefits--and it's often not difficult to exaggerate or even fabricate the costs.
Many of the groups mentioned above (in particular, the Environmental Defense Fund and Sierra Club) are fanatically anti-energy NGOs that have spent decades demonizing and opposing nuclear energy, even though it is widely regarded as the strongest combination of safe, clean and reliable energy humans have ever exploited. Courier's stoked-up data center hysteria may be similarly detached from reality, yet just as politically useful.
It's clear who is benefitting from this coverage. Might some of the beneficiaries be paying for it?
Because Courier Newsroom is a for-profit company, and because the tax disclosures of their nonprofit clients are generally published on a two-year delay, it is not possible to get a complete look at Courier's current finances. But a glimpse at the recent past does give clues as to who has--for whatever reason--been putting money in Courier's pocket.
The largest known recent client is Future Forward USA Action, the "dark money" affiliate of Joe Biden's, and later Kamala Harris's, presidential campaign, which granted Courier $13.5 million in 2024. Courier was also paid $2.5 million by ActBlue, the fundraising engine of the Democratic Party, in December 2025.
Additionally, Courier received $260,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and $100,000 from the Windward Fund in 2024. Both are core pieces of the $1-billion-per-year activism network controlled by the left-wing management firm formerly known as Arabella Advisors.
It isn't hard to imagine that one of these groups, or some similarly placed left-leaning activists friendly to Democrats, deducing that the data center issue is an expeditious way to fracture the Republican coalition, bolster their own base, and perhaps revive the floundering climate change coalition. Courier's own bragging shows that helping with such behavior is literally part of their business model.
And they're a profit-seeking enterprise.
Courier's data center coverage appears to be as artificial as the artificial intelligence coming out of the data centers. What might be real is the money they're receiving to produce it.
* * *
Parker Thayer is an Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. A native of Michigan, he recently graduated from Hillsdale College.
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/couriers-news-machine-turns-against-data-centers/
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: Proving Ground - China's Strategic Ratcheting of the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific's Gray Zone Problem
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by Haroro J. Ingram, senior associate (non-resident) in the Southeast Asia Program:
* * *
Proving Ground: China's Strategic Ratcheting of the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific's Gray Zone Problem
The 10th anniversary of the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award highlighted the ruling's enduring legal significance and the ongoing contest over its implications. A decade on, China has not only refused to comply with the legally binding award, which invalidated Beijing's expansive ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by Haroro J. Ingram, senior associate (non-resident) in the Southeast Asia Program: * * * Proving Ground: China's Strategic Ratcheting of the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific's Gray Zone Problem The 10th anniversary of the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award highlighted the ruling's enduring legal significance and the ongoing contest over its implications. A decade on, China has not only refused to comply with the legally binding award, which invalidated Beijing's expansivehistorical claims and affirmed the Philippines' sovereign rights, but has intensified its campaign of unlawful maritime coercion and occupation in the West Philippine Sea. The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative has tracked record levels of Chinese maritime activities over successive years, with 2026 projected to set new highs. An important feature of China's maritime "gray zone" operations has been its equally aggressive approach to public messaging. This was on stark display last month in Beijing's bristly official response to a joint statement by 14 nations reaffirming the arbitral award while Chinese state media released a crude animated video depicting the Philippines as a monkey. On July 20, 2026, China Coast Guard forces attacked and injured a Filipino sailor in the Second Thomas Shoal, highlighting, once again, Beijing's willingness to mix aggressive information operations with dangerous actions at sea.
Yet, what is happening in the West Philippine Sea is, in many ways, just a microcosm of a broader and multifaceted effort by China to target the entire Philippines archipelago. Philippines government officials have been sounding the alarm for years. As recently retired Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner Jr. warned, "we are experiencing already cyber warfare, information warfare, cognitive warfare, political warfare. The communist China is already conducting United Front works in our country." Given the complexity and diversity of these China-linked activities, Philippine officials have acknowledged that simply grasping their scope is challenging. To bring this threat landscape and its policy implications into clearer focus for policymakers, it is crucial to understand the logic and mechanics of China's campaign.
Beijing's Strategic Ratchet
China's influence and interference activities in the Philippines are deliberately varied, ambiguous, and often deniable. This can make it difficult to decipher an overarching strategic logic or monitor the scale of their effects. Compounding this conceptual and strategic confusion is the absence of an overarching Chinese Communist Party or People's Liberation Army doctrine that lays out the rationale of these activities. There is immense value to be drawn from engaging with primary sources, such as 2025 China's National Security in the New Era, and expert analyses of recurring concepts such as "community of common destiny" and the "three warfares," that have shaped China's military and foreign policy thinking and practice. A pattern emerges when these insights are combined with empirical consideration of the full scope of China-linked operations in the Philippines: three core strategic objectives, pursued through eight interlocking levers, that cumulatively and progressively act as a ratchet constraining the Philippines' strategic options.
The first objective is to establish cognitive advantage by competitively shaping perceptions and decision-making to increase acceptance of and reduce resistance to China's interests in the Philippines. This is pursued through two principal levers:
* Information and Narrative Operations: This lever aims to actively shape the perceptions and understanding of target audiences. Typically involving a combination of official government messaging, state-run media, and Filipino proxies, these activities are used to advance China's interests and undermine critics. Examples include actively shaping local media narratives about Chinese investment projects in the Philippines and orchestrating social media attacks against the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism for its reporting on pro-China influence operations.
* Elite Influence and Capture: China aims to direct the preferences of individuals and groups with sectoral or public influence to either support China's positions or be silenced. This is exercised by leveraging shared interest, coercion, incentives, or opportunism. Several high-profile cases--including United Front operations and affiliated actors seeking to influence local government and police, Beijing-funded Filipino troll campaigns, and efforts to target Chinese-language media--have prompted calls to update the Foreign Agents Act of 1979.
The second objective is to normalize Beijing's interests working through established political, diplomatic, legal, and economic channels.
* Political and Diplomatic Channels: Activities through these channels seek to routinize acceptance of China's behaviour and rhetoric to shape relations and entrench new norms. This is exemplified by the "wolf warrior" diplomacy that has recently been on display by China's embassy in Manila.
* Legal Channels: This work involves the harnessing of domestic and international legal instruments to legitimize and entrench China's claims while delegitimizing alternatives. For example, when the Philippines passed the Philippines Maritime Zones Act and the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act in 2024, China responded by condemning the new legislation and publishing its own territorial baselines.
* Economic Channels: Spanning trade, investment, and development finance, efforts through these channels leverages incentives and dependencies to secure Beijing's interests. Front of mind for many Filipinos are Beijing's largely unfulfilled trade and infrastructure agreements during the Duterte administration.
It is important to acknowledge the role that legitimate statecraft activities play in China's engagements with the Philippines and the potential for positive and mutually beneficial outcomes. The Philippines is going through a transformational period that has seen it transition to upper-middle-income status, heightening the importance of a stable relationship with China. However, normalization across the three channels can also work through constant pressure over time. This leads to Beijing increasingly dictating what is acceptable discourse and behaviour while institutionalizing its preferences in ways that one-sidedly benefit China, to the Philippines' disadvantage.
The third objective is to coerce acquiescence through incrementally escalating actions below the threshold of armed conflict to alter behaviour, reshape norms, and compel compliance. This is pursued through three principal levers:
* Cyber Operations: Actions such as hacking attacks on Philippine government networks are deployed to gain network access, collect intelligence, disable capabilities, and coerce decisionmaking.
* Covert Foreign Interference and Espionage: These activities, such as recent China-linked intelligence operations to recruit Philippine government officials, are conducted to gain access, exert influence, and exploit vulnerabilities through clandestine and deceptive means.
* Military, Paramilitary, and Militia operations: These establish a coercive presence that raises the cost of resistance and, over time, entrenches new baselines of presence, occupation, and militarization that are impossible to reverse without significant escalation. This is exemplified by Chinese naval, coast guard, and maritime militia activities closely monitored by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and SeaLight.
The threat and risk dynamics confronting the Philippines are unlike China's direct strategic competition with the United States or even Japan, where relative capability and posture are the primary points of contestation. China's principal target is the Philippines' decisionmaking environment, which it seeks to shape through a process of competitive conditioning. Beijing looks to position its preferred outcomes as reasonable and inevitable, but if that is insufficient to achieve compliance, it has increasingly raised the cost of resistance through coercive measures. This approach is designed to gradually constrain the Philippines' future choices and tilt outcomes in China's favour. The result is a ratcheting effect as each lever reinforces the other, combining to compound effects that, over time, result in conformity with China's interests. Acquiescence ends up looking like stability, while resistance, let alone reversal, seems the risky, escalatory move.
For the Philippines, these challenges are asymmetric. China is applying its overwhelming weight on a much smaller nation, while the Philippines is not seeking to offensively condition China in return. However, it is a competitive dynamic because the Philippines has waged a multifaceted defensive campaign in response to China's aggressions. The Philippines' pushback has been complicated by ambiguities around actors, intent, and effects as China blends attributable actions and centralized coordination with opportunistic exploitation of deniable and unattributable actions.
The lack of a shared understanding of the problem has perhaps most hamstrung the Philippines' responses. Beijing's blend of legitimate statecraft with coercive and deceptive tactics has too often had the effect of reducing public debate to a Rorschach test for partisan loyalties than a serious policy discussion. This plays to China's advantage. The incremental "slow boil" escalation of China's coercive campaign is easily dismissed in its early stages, a dynamic epitomized by the oft-cited "a bunch of rocks" equivocation about China's maritime operations in Philippine waters. Such dismissals buy Beijing time and space to tighten the ratchet.
Priorities for Breaking the Pressure Cycle
This analysis points to five policy implications for the United States and the Philippines.
1. Coordinate messaging and actions around shared values and red lines. Trust between the United States, the Philippines, and like-minded partners is a target of China's influence and interference activities and needs to be defended as deliberately and methodically as any other strategic or physical asset. This requires a shared understanding of how China's levers operate so that public messaging and concrete action are appropriately calibrated. Ideally, the U.S.-Philippines-Japan trilateral should anchor a wider architecture of like-minded nations that needs sustained activation and coordination.
In practice, this requires states that support the Philippines to act as strategic partners willing to defend shared values and establish clear red lines that are consistently and repeatedly validated through coordinated actions and amplified by disciplined messaging. Say-do gaps are credibility gaps, and only a steady rhythm of coordinated messaging and action will build resilience and trust among partner nations and shift momentum away from Beijing. Coordinating with, complementing where appropriate, and just giving space to Philippines efforts, such as the transparency and mulat campaigns, will be important for amplifying mutually reinforcing effects.
2. Win and hold the semantic high ground. Language is terrain in this contest, shaping all three of China's objectives simultaneously. Borrowed or ambiguous words cede cognitive advantage while aiding normalization and acquiescence. When the Reagan administration pivoted from containment to roll back of Soviet influence, NSDD 75 instructed officials to prevent Moscow from appropriating terms like "peace." It is a valuable lesson for today. Ceding vocabulary cedes ground that argument alone may not recover. It also accelerates the very conditions in the decisionmaking environment that Beijing seeks to foment. Partners should adopt Philippine terms like "West Philippine Sea" over Beijing's preferred nomenclature. "Gray zone" remains analytically useful for describing integration across the eight levers, but its reflexive use in public messaging should be reconsidered. Beijing avoids the term precisely because "gray" implies ambiguity. When China's actions are illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive, they should be clearly described as such.
3. Watch the right indicators and recognize missteps. China will continue to incrementally embed and militarize its presence in Philippine waters. The major challenge for the Philippines and its allies is to not lose sight of China's broader whole-of-archipelago campaign by myopically focusing on China's maritime gray zone activities. Adopting a more holistic view of the competitive terrain also requires Washington to consider that Beijing's most effective instruments have often been legitimate tools of statecraft. China remains one of the Philippines' largest trade partners, and the view from Beijing is that while administrations in Manila come and go, economic leverage is strategically durable.
All this matters because current U.S. advantages could prove more fragile than they may appear from Washington. For instance, bucking the global trend in the Pew Spring 2026 Global Attitudes Survey and regional trends in the State of Southeast Asia: 2026 Survey Report, Filipino public opinion still favours Washington over Beijing. Bilateral ties also remain strong. However, recent U.S. policy decisions detrimental to Philippine interests, particularly alongside the energy shock triggered by the Iran war, risk steadily eroding U.S. favourability. Without sustained engagement, today's favorable strategic position could prove more transient than enduring. Equally, China's unpopularity in Philippine public opinion should not be interpreted as evidence of the failure of its influence efforts. Authoritarian regimes care little for popularity at home, let alone abroad. The entrenchment of Beijing's interests across the Philippines is the only metric that matters. Whether Filipinos like how they got there is largely inconsequential.
4. Build domestic resiliencies across Philippine government, business, and civil society. To be clear, the Filipino people are a major target of China's conditioning campaign--just not to boost Beijing's popularity. Enhancing sustainable resiliencies requires a shared understanding of China's activities in the Philippines, the vulnerabilities it seeks to exploit, and to what effects. As other studies have detailed, Beijing seeks to erode a "trinity of trusts"--social trust, trust in expertise and authorities, and trust in democratic institutions and processes--among Filipinos that over the long term weakens societal, political, and cognitive resiliencies while exacerbating vulnerabilities. Protecting that trinity should be treated as a core resilience objective. This work is urgent because Beijing has real vulnerabilities it can exploit in the Philippines, including corruption scandals across the national government, inconsistent pushback against China's maritime coercion, an escalating Marcos-Duterte feud, and a Bangsamoro peace process under intense strain.
5. Accelerate capacitation efforts before the window to the 2028 election closes. Some of the most cost-effective, high-impact support the United States and other partner nations can provide is the capacity to detect and monitor influence operations, coordinate strategic messaging, develop sustainable indigenous capabilities especially around cybersecurity, and align efforts across partner nations. That work is urgent and the implementation window is closing. The Philippines' 2028 elections bring acute uncertainty about the strategic direction of the next administration. Joint mechanisms with the United States and other partners can serve as a bridge to close gaps via arrangements that build near-term resilience while cultivating capabilities the Philippines will need to sustain independently, regardless of who governs after 2028. The strategic logic is simple: Whatever capacity is not built and institutionalized before that inflection point risks being abandoned or delayed after May 2028.
Beyond the Maritime Gray Zone
China's maritime gray zone operations in the West Philippine Sea are the "tip of the spear" for China's pressure campaign against the Philippines. It is essential that policymakers do not lose sight of the rest of the spear. That much broader, multifaceted, sometimes seemingly benign and at other times surprisingly insidious, spectrum of activities spanning the entire archipelago must also be better understood and appropriately confronted.
The lessons to be learned from the Philippines' experience reach well beyond the territories of this critical U.S. ally. In only the last few weeks, China has fired a ballistic missile into the Pacific, intensified multi-lever pressures on Japan and New Zealand, and pushed its maritime gray zone operations east of Taiwan. The Philippines is a proving ground for methods that China is increasingly applying across the Indo-Pacific. The bipartisan Countering Gray-zone Aggression by the People's Republic of China Act is an important signal that Washington recognizes China's expanding campaign and its cascading strategic effects as a direct threat to U.S. security and interests. Whether the Philippines or China succeeds in this struggle could determine how the Indo-Pacific threat landscape evolves in coming years.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/proving-ground-chinas-strategic-ratcheting-philippines-and-indo-pacifics-gray-zone-problem
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Proving Ground: China's Strategic Ratcheting of the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific's Gray Zone Problem
The 10th anniversary of the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award highlighted the ruling's enduring legal significance and the ongoing contest over its implications. A decade on, China has not only refused to comply with the legally binding award, which invalidated Beijing's expansive ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on Aug. 11, 2026, by Haroro J. Ingram, senior associate (non-resident) in the Southeast Asia Program: * * * Proving Ground: China's Strategic Ratcheting of the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific's Gray Zone Problem The 10th anniversary of the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award highlighted the ruling's enduring legal significance and the ongoing contest over its implications. A decade on, China has not only refused to comply with the legally binding award, which invalidated Beijing's expansivehistorical claims and affirmed the Philippines' sovereign rights, but has intensified its campaign of unlawful maritime coercion and occupation in the West Philippine Sea. The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative has tracked record levels of Chinese maritime activities over successive years, with 2026 projected to set new highs. An important feature of China's maritime "gray zone" operations has been its equally aggressive approach to public messaging. This was on stark display last month in Beijing's bristly official response to a joint statement by 14 nations reaffirming the arbitral award while Chinese state media released a crude animated video depicting the Philippines as a monkey. On July 20, 2026, China Coast Guard forces attacked and injured a Filipino sailor in the Second Thomas Shoal, highlighting, once again, Beijing's willingness to mix aggressive information operations with dangerous actions at sea.
Yet, what is happening in the West Philippine Sea is, in many ways, just a microcosm of a broader and multifaceted effort by China to target the entire Philippines archipelago. Philippines government officials have been sounding the alarm for years. As recently retired Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner Jr. warned, "we are experiencing already cyber warfare, information warfare, cognitive warfare, political warfare. The communist China is already conducting United Front works in our country." Given the complexity and diversity of these China-linked activities, Philippine officials have acknowledged that simply grasping their scope is challenging. To bring this threat landscape and its policy implications into clearer focus for policymakers, it is crucial to understand the logic and mechanics of China's campaign.
Beijing's Strategic Ratchet
China's influence and interference activities in the Philippines are deliberately varied, ambiguous, and often deniable. This can make it difficult to decipher an overarching strategic logic or monitor the scale of their effects. Compounding this conceptual and strategic confusion is the absence of an overarching Chinese Communist Party or People's Liberation Army doctrine that lays out the rationale of these activities. There is immense value to be drawn from engaging with primary sources, such as 2025 China's National Security in the New Era, and expert analyses of recurring concepts such as "community of common destiny" and the "three warfares," that have shaped China's military and foreign policy thinking and practice. A pattern emerges when these insights are combined with empirical consideration of the full scope of China-linked operations in the Philippines: three core strategic objectives, pursued through eight interlocking levers, that cumulatively and progressively act as a ratchet constraining the Philippines' strategic options.
The first objective is to establish cognitive advantage by competitively shaping perceptions and decision-making to increase acceptance of and reduce resistance to China's interests in the Philippines. This is pursued through two principal levers:
* Information and Narrative Operations: This lever aims to actively shape the perceptions and understanding of target audiences. Typically involving a combination of official government messaging, state-run media, and Filipino proxies, these activities are used to advance China's interests and undermine critics. Examples include actively shaping local media narratives about Chinese investment projects in the Philippines and orchestrating social media attacks against the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism for its reporting on pro-China influence operations.
* Elite Influence and Capture: China aims to direct the preferences of individuals and groups with sectoral or public influence to either support China's positions or be silenced. This is exercised by leveraging shared interest, coercion, incentives, or opportunism. Several high-profile cases--including United Front operations and affiliated actors seeking to influence local government and police, Beijing-funded Filipino troll campaigns, and efforts to target Chinese-language media--have prompted calls to update the Foreign Agents Act of 1979.
The second objective is to normalize Beijing's interests working through established political, diplomatic, legal, and economic channels.
* Political and Diplomatic Channels: Activities through these channels seek to routinize acceptance of China's behaviour and rhetoric to shape relations and entrench new norms. This is exemplified by the "wolf warrior" diplomacy that has recently been on display by China's embassy in Manila.
* Legal Channels: This work involves the harnessing of domestic and international legal instruments to legitimize and entrench China's claims while delegitimizing alternatives. For example, when the Philippines passed the Philippines Maritime Zones Act and the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act in 2024, China responded by condemning the new legislation and publishing its own territorial baselines.
* Economic Channels: Spanning trade, investment, and development finance, efforts through these channels leverages incentives and dependencies to secure Beijing's interests. Front of mind for many Filipinos are Beijing's largely unfulfilled trade and infrastructure agreements during the Duterte administration.
It is important to acknowledge the role that legitimate statecraft activities play in China's engagements with the Philippines and the potential for positive and mutually beneficial outcomes. The Philippines is going through a transformational period that has seen it transition to upper-middle-income status, heightening the importance of a stable relationship with China. However, normalization across the three channels can also work through constant pressure over time. This leads to Beijing increasingly dictating what is acceptable discourse and behaviour while institutionalizing its preferences in ways that one-sidedly benefit China, to the Philippines' disadvantage.
The third objective is to coerce acquiescence through incrementally escalating actions below the threshold of armed conflict to alter behaviour, reshape norms, and compel compliance. This is pursued through three principal levers:
* Cyber Operations: Actions such as hacking attacks on Philippine government networks are deployed to gain network access, collect intelligence, disable capabilities, and coerce decisionmaking.
* Covert Foreign Interference and Espionage: These activities, such as recent China-linked intelligence operations to recruit Philippine government officials, are conducted to gain access, exert influence, and exploit vulnerabilities through clandestine and deceptive means.
* Military, Paramilitary, and Militia operations: These establish a coercive presence that raises the cost of resistance and, over time, entrenches new baselines of presence, occupation, and militarization that are impossible to reverse without significant escalation. This is exemplified by Chinese naval, coast guard, and maritime militia activities closely monitored by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and SeaLight.
The threat and risk dynamics confronting the Philippines are unlike China's direct strategic competition with the United States or even Japan, where relative capability and posture are the primary points of contestation. China's principal target is the Philippines' decisionmaking environment, which it seeks to shape through a process of competitive conditioning. Beijing looks to position its preferred outcomes as reasonable and inevitable, but if that is insufficient to achieve compliance, it has increasingly raised the cost of resistance through coercive measures. This approach is designed to gradually constrain the Philippines' future choices and tilt outcomes in China's favour. The result is a ratcheting effect as each lever reinforces the other, combining to compound effects that, over time, result in conformity with China's interests. Acquiescence ends up looking like stability, while resistance, let alone reversal, seems the risky, escalatory move.
For the Philippines, these challenges are asymmetric. China is applying its overwhelming weight on a much smaller nation, while the Philippines is not seeking to offensively condition China in return. However, it is a competitive dynamic because the Philippines has waged a multifaceted defensive campaign in response to China's aggressions. The Philippines' pushback has been complicated by ambiguities around actors, intent, and effects as China blends attributable actions and centralized coordination with opportunistic exploitation of deniable and unattributable actions.
The lack of a shared understanding of the problem has perhaps most hamstrung the Philippines' responses. Beijing's blend of legitimate statecraft with coercive and deceptive tactics has too often had the effect of reducing public debate to a Rorschach test for partisan loyalties than a serious policy discussion. This plays to China's advantage. The incremental "slow boil" escalation of China's coercive campaign is easily dismissed in its early stages, a dynamic epitomized by the oft-cited "a bunch of rocks" equivocation about China's maritime operations in Philippine waters. Such dismissals buy Beijing time and space to tighten the ratchet.
Priorities for Breaking the Pressure Cycle
This analysis points to five policy implications for the United States and the Philippines.
1. Coordinate messaging and actions around shared values and red lines. Trust between the United States, the Philippines, and like-minded partners is a target of China's influence and interference activities and needs to be defended as deliberately and methodically as any other strategic or physical asset. This requires a shared understanding of how China's levers operate so that public messaging and concrete action are appropriately calibrated. Ideally, the U.S.-Philippines-Japan trilateral should anchor a wider architecture of like-minded nations that needs sustained activation and coordination.
In practice, this requires states that support the Philippines to act as strategic partners willing to defend shared values and establish clear red lines that are consistently and repeatedly validated through coordinated actions and amplified by disciplined messaging. Say-do gaps are credibility gaps, and only a steady rhythm of coordinated messaging and action will build resilience and trust among partner nations and shift momentum away from Beijing. Coordinating with, complementing where appropriate, and just giving space to Philippines efforts, such as the transparency and mulat campaigns, will be important for amplifying mutually reinforcing effects.
2. Win and hold the semantic high ground. Language is terrain in this contest, shaping all three of China's objectives simultaneously. Borrowed or ambiguous words cede cognitive advantage while aiding normalization and acquiescence. When the Reagan administration pivoted from containment to roll back of Soviet influence, NSDD 75 instructed officials to prevent Moscow from appropriating terms like "peace." It is a valuable lesson for today. Ceding vocabulary cedes ground that argument alone may not recover. It also accelerates the very conditions in the decisionmaking environment that Beijing seeks to foment. Partners should adopt Philippine terms like "West Philippine Sea" over Beijing's preferred nomenclature. "Gray zone" remains analytically useful for describing integration across the eight levers, but its reflexive use in public messaging should be reconsidered. Beijing avoids the term precisely because "gray" implies ambiguity. When China's actions are illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive, they should be clearly described as such.
3. Watch the right indicators and recognize missteps. China will continue to incrementally embed and militarize its presence in Philippine waters. The major challenge for the Philippines and its allies is to not lose sight of China's broader whole-of-archipelago campaign by myopically focusing on China's maritime gray zone activities. Adopting a more holistic view of the competitive terrain also requires Washington to consider that Beijing's most effective instruments have often been legitimate tools of statecraft. China remains one of the Philippines' largest trade partners, and the view from Beijing is that while administrations in Manila come and go, economic leverage is strategically durable.
All this matters because current U.S. advantages could prove more fragile than they may appear from Washington. For instance, bucking the global trend in the Pew Spring 2026 Global Attitudes Survey and regional trends in the State of Southeast Asia: 2026 Survey Report, Filipino public opinion still favours Washington over Beijing. Bilateral ties also remain strong. However, recent U.S. policy decisions detrimental to Philippine interests, particularly alongside the energy shock triggered by the Iran war, risk steadily eroding U.S. favourability. Without sustained engagement, today's favorable strategic position could prove more transient than enduring. Equally, China's unpopularity in Philippine public opinion should not be interpreted as evidence of the failure of its influence efforts. Authoritarian regimes care little for popularity at home, let alone abroad. The entrenchment of Beijing's interests across the Philippines is the only metric that matters. Whether Filipinos like how they got there is largely inconsequential.
4. Build domestic resiliencies across Philippine government, business, and civil society. To be clear, the Filipino people are a major target of China's conditioning campaign--just not to boost Beijing's popularity. Enhancing sustainable resiliencies requires a shared understanding of China's activities in the Philippines, the vulnerabilities it seeks to exploit, and to what effects. As other studies have detailed, Beijing seeks to erode a "trinity of trusts"--social trust, trust in expertise and authorities, and trust in democratic institutions and processes--among Filipinos that over the long term weakens societal, political, and cognitive resiliencies while exacerbating vulnerabilities. Protecting that trinity should be treated as a core resilience objective. This work is urgent because Beijing has real vulnerabilities it can exploit in the Philippines, including corruption scandals across the national government, inconsistent pushback against China's maritime coercion, an escalating Marcos-Duterte feud, and a Bangsamoro peace process under intense strain.
5. Accelerate capacitation efforts before the window to the 2028 election closes. Some of the most cost-effective, high-impact support the United States and other partner nations can provide is the capacity to detect and monitor influence operations, coordinate strategic messaging, develop sustainable indigenous capabilities especially around cybersecurity, and align efforts across partner nations. That work is urgent and the implementation window is closing. The Philippines' 2028 elections bring acute uncertainty about the strategic direction of the next administration. Joint mechanisms with the United States and other partners can serve as a bridge to close gaps via arrangements that build near-term resilience while cultivating capabilities the Philippines will need to sustain independently, regardless of who governs after 2028. The strategic logic is simple: Whatever capacity is not built and institutionalized before that inflection point risks being abandoned or delayed after May 2028.
Beyond the Maritime Gray Zone
China's maritime gray zone operations in the West Philippine Sea are the "tip of the spear" for China's pressure campaign against the Philippines. It is essential that policymakers do not lose sight of the rest of the spear. That much broader, multifaceted, sometimes seemingly benign and at other times surprisingly insidious, spectrum of activities spanning the entire archipelago must also be better understood and appropriately confronted.
The lessons to be learned from the Philippines' experience reach well beyond the territories of this critical U.S. ally. In only the last few weeks, China has fired a ballistic missile into the Pacific, intensified multi-lever pressures on Japan and New Zealand, and pushed its maritime gray zone operations east of Taiwan. The Philippines is a proving ground for methods that China is increasingly applying across the Indo-Pacific. The bipartisan Countering Gray-zone Aggression by the People's Republic of China Act is an important signal that Washington recognizes China's expanding campaign and its cascading strategic effects as a direct threat to U.S. security and interests. Whether the Philippines or China succeeds in this struggle could determine how the Indo-Pacific threat landscape evolves in coming years.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/proving-ground-chinas-strategic-ratcheting-philippines-and-indo-pacifics-gray-zone-problem
[Category: ThinkTank]