Chinese Exile and Ex-Trump Advisor Fill the Skies over Lower Manhattan with Proclamations of a New Nation
Republican political strategist Steve Bannon and fugitive Chinese billionaire Miles Guo on the deck of a yacht in New York Harbor Wednesday evening, as they announce the birth of a new nation, which they intend as a replacement for the People’s Republic of China. This is a screen shot from GNews.org.
Amid a pandemic virus outbreak, emerging economic slump, and civil unrest in response to police violence, Lower Manhattan was buzzed on Wednesday evening by a squadron of eight airplanes towing banners that displayed the flag and proclaimed the birth of a nation almost nobody has heard of: the New Federal State of China. The armada of single-engine prop planes flew up and down the Hudson River twice, before assembling into an aerial cordon that circled above the State of Liberty for almost an hour.
This stunt appears to have been organized by a fugitive expatriate Chinese billionaire, Miles Guo, and his lavishly compensated American political strategist, estranged Donald Trump advisor Steven Bannon.
On Wednesday evening, as the planes looped above them, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo stood together on the deck of a yacht moored near the Statue of Liberty, while camera crews from GNews (a website Mr. Guo controls) memorialized their speeches.
In an event timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1989 massacre that followed the Tiananmen Square protests, Mr. Bannon cited the support of a litany of organizations—the Whistleblower Movement, the Himalaya Supervisory Organization, and the Rule of Law Society—funded by Mr. Guo, before saying, “it is a great honor to work for the freedom of the Chinese people, and to know that today the New Federal State of China is being announced by the Himalaya Society, to confront, combat, and take down the Chinese Communist Party.” Calling China’s ruling party, “a gangster organization,” he added, “they don’t deserve to be able to keep the Chinese people in slavery.”
Mr. Bannon, who alternately looked embarrassed and bored, also repeated a claim disseminated by Mr. Guo’s GNews website, that China “recently unleashed a biological attack on the free countries of the world with the COVID-19 virus,” which has been refuted by multiple researchers and medical experts. He then began reading from a rambling, 26-page manifesto, “A Declaration of the New Federal State of China,” which refers to supporters of the putative new nation as “brothers in arms.”
It is unclear whether the Wednesday evening declaration by Mr. Guo and Mr. Bannon amounts to a violation of the Logan Act, a federal law that makes it a crime for U.S. citizens or residents to conduct their own foreign policy, meddle in relations between the United States and other nations, or try to overthrow foreign governments. Their proclamations could also arguably run afoul of the Neutrality Act, a federal law that prohibits U.S. citizens or residents from taking up arms or plotting against a nation at peace with the United States.
What does seem clear, however, is that their performance will further whet the appetite of the Chinese government to get its hands on Mr. Guo. Beijing is already seeking his extradition from the United States to face dozens of charges, ranging from corruption, bribery, money laundering and fraud to kidnapping and rape. (Mr. Guo maintains that these allegations are politically inspired by his criticism of senior Chinese officials—a falling out that led him to flee China in 2014, and take up residence in New York.) Before his feud with senior Communist Party politicians, Mr. Guo had amassed a billion-dollar fortune from investments in real estate, finance, and healthcare, and was at one point estimated to be the 73rd richest man in China.
In 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. officials were preparing to deport Mr. Guo back to China when President Donald Trump intervened to stop the proceedings, because he had learned that Mr. Guo was a dues-paying member of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Mr. Bannon is reportedly paid $1 million per year for advising Mr. Guo, and additionally presides over the Rule of Law Society, to which Mr. Guo contributed $100 million. He also apparently has the use of Mr. Guo’s private plane, a Bombardier Global Express jet that seats up to 13 people. An investigation by ProPublica found that Mr. Bannon has used the plane to advise and assist Republican congressional candidates in New Mexico and Arizona. This may contravene another U.S. law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, which bans foreign nationals from contributing (either through direct donations of funds, or else through in-kind support in the form of valuable services, such as the use of an airplane) to candidates for federal office.
In the meantime, Mr. Guo insists that, “the Communism regime of China will be obsolete and illegal after the fourth of June, when the echoes from the Tiananmen Square finally reached the Statue of Liberty, where the New Federal State of China comes into being.”
Matthew Fenton
Letter
Re “The Inn Crowd Gets More Crowded,” BroadsheetDAILY, June 1, 2020
To the editor:
Ho Yip IS missed. It was always packed at lunch time. And the sudden change in need for hotel rooms means that space will sit unbuilt for a long time.
When it first closed, it seemed like another loss of an affordable lunch spot in an area where those are getting scarce. Do we really need another high rent place selling $11 cups of organic non-GMO cold-pressed dandelion juice?
Each day, a different encore presentation from the company’s Live in HD series is available for free streaming on the Met website, with each performance available for 23 hours, from 7:30 p.m. EDT until 6:30 p.m. the following day. The schedule will include outstanding complete performances from the past 14 years of cinema transmissions, starring all of opera’s greatest singers.
Join the Museum of American Finance, the Fordham Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis and the CFA Society of New York for a moderated conversation with Paolo Scaroni, former CEO and general manager of Eni Spa Oil and Gas and deputy chairman of Rothschild Group. Noon.
To most people, “3G” and “4G” refers to cell phone data – but to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, these terms are shorthand for something far more meaningful. What does it mean to be a third- or fourth-generation survivor? Is trauma transmitted through epigenetics, or inherited along with family stories and heirlooms? Join Tablet Magazine Deputy Editor Stephanie Butnick, co-host of the leading Jewish podcast “Unorthodox,” for a new MJH Live series exploring these questions and more with a changing roster of guests. In the first series installment, Stephanie will be joined by Alyssa Greengrass Sommer and David Wachs, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who are dedicated to sharing their grandparents’ stories with audiences around New York City. 7pm.
Virtual version of an annual summer Friday night favorite from the Battery Park City Authority—the weekly sunset singing circle at the Hudson Riverfront.
What is award-winning filmmaker Wu Hao’s chosen artifact? A classic movie? No. It’s a thick history tome called To Change China: Western Advisors in China, by the great Yale historian Jonathan Spence. Join us as he explains how the book changed the way he views his country—and the world. Wu Hao is an award-winning filmmaker. His documentary, People’s Republic of Desire, which portrays the surreal world of livestreaming celebrity in China, won the SXSW Grand Jury Prize. All in My Family tells the poignant story of love overcoming prejudice as he introduces his American husband and their two children to his conservative family in China. Noon.
Vincent Toro reads from his new book “Tertulia” (Penguin Random House, 2020) from Fort Lee, NJ. His new collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the “tertulia”) and revises it for the Latinx context in the United States. The collection examines immigration, economics, colonialism and race thru the imagery of music, visual art, and history. Noon.
Virtual performance at home by Crys Matthews, a prolific lyricist, who blends Americana, folk, jazz, blues, bluegrass and funk into a bold, complex performance steeped in traditional melodies and punctuated by honest, original lyrics. From Brookfield Place. 12:30pm.
In celebrating the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Renwen Society presents a lecture on the forces that helped make Met’s Asian art collection one of the finest in the world. Free; advanced registration requested. This event will be conducted in Mandarin, Chinese. 8pm.
June 4: Today in History
Henry Ford in his first car.
781 BC – Oldest Chinese recording of a solar eclipse
1070 – Roquefort cheese created in a cave near Roquefort, France
1133 – Rome-Innocentius II crowns Lotharius III Roman-German emperor
1666 – Battle at Dunkirk: English vs Dutch fleet
1760 – Great Upheaval: New England planters arrive to claim land in Nova Scotia, Canada, taken from the Acadians.
1783 – Montgolfier brothers launch first hot-air balloon (unmanned)
1784 – Madame Elizabeth Thible becomes the first female balloonist.
1789 – US constitution goes into effect
1876 – An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, California, via the First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after having left New York City.
1896 – Henry Ford takes his first Ford through the streets of Detroit
1907 – Automatic washer and dryer introduced
1912 – Massachusetts passes first US minimum wage law
1917 – American men begin registering for the draft
1919 – US marines invade Costa Rica
1929 – George Eastman demonstrates first technicolor movie (Rochester NY)
1940 – British complete miracle of Dunkirk by evacuating 300,000 troops
1940 – German forces enter Paris
1956 – Speech by Khrushchev criticising Stalin made public
1972 – Angela Davis, black activist, acquitted of killing a white guard
1975 – Oldest animal fossils in US discovered in NC
1984 – DNA is successfully cloned from an extinct animal
1986 – Jonathan Pollard, spy for Israel, pleads guilty in US court
Birthdays
1754 – Franz Xaver, Baron Von Zach, Austrian editor and astronomer (d. 1832)
1899 – Hassan Fathy, Egyptian architect (d. 1989)
1909 – William Batten, CEO (NY Stock Exchange 1976-84)
1917 – Robert Merrill, Brooklyn New York, baritone, Metropolitan Opera
1926 – Robert Earl Hughes, became heaviest known human (486 kg)
1939 – Phil Linz, baseball shortstop (NY Yankees)
Deaths
1316 – Louis X, King of France (1314-16), dies at 26
1798 – Giacomo Casanova, Italian adventurer/writer/librarian and womanizer, dies at 73
1921 – Heinrich E Albers-Schoenberg, German x-ray experimenter, dies at 56
Previously Published Downtown News
Judge Not
Downtown Non-Profit Sues to Gain Release of Protestors
A non-profit based in Lower Manhattan is suing the New York Police Department (NYPD) to obtain the release of more than 100 protestors arrested during the recent demonstrations over the death of George Perry Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.
The Legal Aid Society, headquartered at 199 Water Street, filed suit on Tuesday in New York State Supreme Court, on behalf of 108 detainees who were arrested in Manhattan during the first five days of protests.
CB1 Endorses Push to Expand VCF Coverage to Pandemic Illness
Community Board 1 (CB1) has signed on to a campaign that aims to expand the eligibility criteria of the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund (VCF) to include illnesses related to the outbreak of the pandemic coronavirus.
Crashes in Tourism and Business Travel May Signal Trouble for Downtown Hotel Sector
A hotel developer seeking to repeat a 2017 coup may face headwinds that could work against such a reprise. Last December, Hidrock Properties, a Manhattan-based builder of hotels and office properties, completed demolition of two small buildings at 110 and 112 Liberty Street, between Greenwich Street and Trinity Place, which it bought for $38 million in 2018. (Local residents may remember them as the home of the Ho-Yip and Essex World restaurants.)
Three More Lower Manhattan Residents Die from Pandemic, But Local Trend Lines Continue to be Favorable
The death toll among Lower Manhattan residents from the pandemic coronavirus has grown by three additional lost lives, to a total of 67. This represents a 4.6 percent increase from the Broadsheet’s last update, on May 22. Statistics released by the City’s Department of Health (DOH), which quantify mortality and infection metrics, indexed by zip code, continue to show that only two zip codes (among 178 residential districts) throughout the five boroughs have registered no deaths at all from COVID-19 (the disease caused by the pandemic coronavirus), and both are located Downtown: 10280 (southern Battery Park City) and 10006 (the Greenwich South neighborhood).
Click here to view a list of Downtown restaurants compiled by the Downtown Alliance that are open and serving takeout and delivery.
Check Your Screen to Get Screened
State Launches Online Map Showing Local Testing Facilities
Online map specifying the locations of more than 700 facilities throughout New York where testing for exposure to the pandemic coronavirus is available. These testing sites can process up to 40,000 patients per day, and are currently operating well below their capacity.
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