Nevertheless, traders and householders have started signing non-importation pacts. Violators are called out in the papers. It's on now. An alternative marketplace of products would be needed for the colonies to hold out longer than Parliament.
Women across the colonies have started holding marathon spinning sessions to produce homespun yarn and fabric. Clothes are a good start; everyone is cheered by the skill and speed with which the ladies meet this integral task. And the homemade linen dresses make a handsome patriotic fashion statement.
But which other goods could the colonies handle domestically and feel confident boycotting? The “Massachusetts Gazette Extraordinary” notes that:
“We are assured from very good Authority, that there were made at Shirley within the last year no less than forty thousand Watches, which will convince the Cavillers [of the necessity that this] necessary Implement for Men of Business was numbered among the Articles not to be imported, when we can make it so easily ourselves: Nay we may perhaps next Year send Watches to Europe...”
Large-scale business ventures were banned; proofs of concept like the watches were expensive, illegal, and likely suspicious to British officials if detected – but necessary to win over the Cavillers (a pointed name for people who cavil, or raise trivial objections).
Imagine a time when our country wasn’t sure whether it could independently manufacture basic products at scale; and its patriots were met with fear and loathing in asking the question. Actually, it sounds like America today, whenever the concept of China-free supply chains comes up. Our modern-day Cavillers have shown themselves in the form of globalist kowtowers. We just haven’t confronted the question seriously enough yet for the gloves to come off.
Through divine providence and stunning ingenuity, we lifted ourselves out of colonial servitude to become the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world within 10 generations. Just north of 200 years later, this nation – which fought so dearly to free itself from oppression – finds itself sinking perilously into a new quagmire of de facto commercial colonialization – by China, if we continue down the current path.
Having achieved total military and economic supremacy, our 90s-era leaders looked west toward China for yet more trade and increased wealth. Chinese sweatshops were to produce low-cost parts and components from which our companies would profit.
Immediately, the slow-moving Trojan Horse inversion started. The outsourcing of labor to improve corporate bottom lines would end up shuttering whole factories and crippling towns. More factories in China opened, reinforcing the trend.
While we reached out to China to rummage around for cheap stuff, China started reaching into our supply chains (and eventually, cyber networks) to embed itself there. In the pharmaceutical industry. The clothing industry. Even, evidently, the defense industry.
Chinese factories that once constructed clothes for American labels now sell under their own labels such as Shein and Ochirly. Chinese clothing brands have begun to specialize in the uniform of a previously dignified Western era: the skirt suit. Meanwhile, skirt suits are all but extinct within the washed-up American fashion landscape. Once-essential workwear brands such as J Crew and Express have filed Chapter 11. This is not a coincidence.
Rosemary Gibson’s ChinaRx shows us that China is the largest producer of essential pharmaceutical ingredients in the world. Meanwhile, the last American penicillin was produced in 2004. If you’ve eaten Smithfield bacon lately, well, China bought that company to vertically integrate clean, American pig intestines into its blood thinner pharmaceuticals following a tragedy with tainted Chinese heparin ingredients.
The Trojan Horse inversion has reached its last stage, with Chinese companies and nationals purchasing US companies, agricultural land, residential properties, and commercial properties for US expansion of Chinese businesses.
The CCP never wanted our products for its people, and still doesn’t. That’s part of its business model. In 1973, then-National Security Council international economist Robert Hormatz visited China on a trade mission. Mr. Hormatz asked a Chinese official what China might want to buy from us. The official said, “We’re revolutionaries. There is nothing you could sell us that we want.”
Don’t mistake this comment for a context-specific sentiment of the green jacket-wearing, little red book-carrying communist of the past. China seeks to profit from, surpass, and eventually dominate the US. The most efficient way to accomplish that is to create a monopoly around selling America everything it wants, accept nothing America might sell, and reduce America’s ability to manufacture anything independently to ensure the cycle continues.
This bears a striking resemblance to Britain’s goals for its colonies before we were the United States of America. Britain sought to maintain its dominion over its imperial property. For the past 30 years, China has taken advantage of the trade overtures of globalist American politicians to invert its position from new-hire to boss.
By giving over the manufacturing dominance that we had established for ourselves, and by allowing the CCP to create a monopoly within so much critical infrastructure, we have wound up, in a sense, where we started: commercially beholden to another country, and fairly helpless to do anything about it. Sure, Britain price-gouged while China’s products are cheaper – for now. The exploitation phase will come, by whatever form.
With our self-sufficiency ceded to China, and China progressively buying up our land and resources, do we at some point become China’s colony?
Where is the outrage at being closed in from all sides by an adversary? Where are the non-importation pacts? Did we learn nothing from the COVID lockdowns about what a total supply chain breakdown or embargo could look like?
Any muttering about global supply chains, it’s too hard, or China being a good trading partner is to self-identify as a Caviller. If the colonial-era men reindustrialized illegally with the enemy’s army camped out among us, and the women wore homemade linen dresses for 10 years, then we can find a way out of the current dilemma.
Imagine flipping over the tag on a garment or piece of furniture, and seeing the American city where it was manufactured. You could visit the maker, who might even give you a tour. Long into the future, people could look at a chair like this and know its lineage: an American company that became an enduring emblem of the town where its founders settled. And the chair would still be in a living room rather than a trash heap because it was constructed with thoughtful craftsmanship. It was like this once, and can be again.
I have such a chair, made possibly in the 1940s by the Fontaine Bros company in Gardner, MA. Gardner, incidentally, is a stone’s throw from Shirley: where a bunch of watches was proof enough for the intrepid that we could take on the largest power in the world.
“If the True Patriot or anyone else doubts of this, or attempts to assert the contrary to deceive the ignorant, we will in the next Paper, to silence these wretched Cavillers, give an account of the Workmen, and how many Watches each of ‘em makes in a Day.”
