Moderates’ Revenge: Th e Warren Pile-On Begins

Beijing has been undercutting Tibetan monastery education while dramatically increasing enrollment at state-run boarding schools.

China Global Television Network (CGTN) recently released a video report from a Lhasa high school. The reporter, wide-eyed and cheery, speaks about the facilities and curricula with unrestrained exuberance. A young schoolgirl talks of wanting to continue her education outside of Tibet because she thinks she’ll learn more.

The student’s comments were no coincidence. CGTN is the foreign service of the Chinese Communist Party-controlled CCTV network and the closest thing China has to Voice of America. The video suggesting that young Tibetans want to leave their homeland to study in other parts of China fits a narrative Beijing is carefully building as its latest weapon to shape Tibet’s future.

For the first time, her fellow Democratic presidential contenders treated Warren like the front-runner.

Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, writes:

Call me naïve, but going into Tuesday night’s debate, I predicted that very few candidates would choose to mount attacks against Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her bold, progressive policies. Maybe it’s because her favorability numbers are so high. Maybe it’s because, while her policies like the wealth tax and Medicare for All have little chance of becoming law under a Mitch McConnell–led Senate, they are still seen as smart, lofty goals that would help millions of Americans who are hurting in this country.

Boy, was I wrong.

In the face of strict control and internal dissent, the once-influential organization that briefly ruled Egypt is now struggling for survival.

Just days after hundreds of people marched through Cairo and other cities calling for the Egyptian president to step down, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi settled into a chair alongside his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump and addressed the rare explosion of public anger against his rule. “As long as we have political Islam movements that aspire to power, our region will remain in a state of instability,” el-Sissi said on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. “But I want to assure you, especially in Egypt, the public are refusing this kind of political Islam.”

In two sentences, the Egyptian leader summed up the narrative that secured his rise to power and has defined his six years as head of state: The greatest threat to the Arab world’s most populous nation is the Muslim Brotherhood, and he is the man to guarantee stability.

But there was no obvious link to the Brotherhood. Instead, the protests appeared to be a spontaneous outburst of anger over economic grievances and alleged government graft.