vittorio

This journalist at The Economist pushed hard for Jensen Huang to be purged. It's really funny because I knew Corbin Duncan in real life. We were good mates until he basically sided with a bunch of CCP supporters who bashed me at a pro-Hong Kong rally when I was 20. Honestly a very funny backstory. We were mates to the extent that he personally recruited me to the Australian Labor Party when I was 18. I really looked up to him because he was one of the smartest guys in the young Brisbane politics world and got into Harvard from high school. I really wanted to be his mate so I joined his Labor faction. He brought me along to the classic Fortitude Valley Labor Right stack branch to listen to some boring speech by Jim Chalmers before I was formally inducted to the Party. We got Nandos after the meeting and I remember telling him that I reckoned he would be PM one day. Anyway, we basically stopped being friends after I began protesting against the CCP. I held one pro-Hong Kong rally at my Australian university (University of Queensland) and was violently assaulted by masked CCP supporters. Corbin tried to argue that I was the aggressor, even though Queensland Police ultimately charged a masked thug who assaulted me. The Brisbane Chinese Consul General Xu Jie - also an ''Honorary Professor'' at UQ - put out a statement endorsing the ''self-motivated patriotism'' of the CCP supporters who attacked me on campus. Chinese state media outlets like The Global Times then began to call for my expulsion from university. UQ ultimately spent half a million dollars hiring two of Australia's top four law firms to build a case to expel me. They whipped up a 186 page expulsion document filled with trumped up charges, including the absurd claim that I stole a pen from a campus art shop. UQ even hired a PR firm to defame me to journalists, mocking me as a ''virgin.'' Newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post read the full 186 page expulsion document and concluded that I was being punished for my political opposition to the CCP - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd even put out a statement condemning the expulsion and accusing the university of ''bending the knee to China.'' But Corbin insisted that the university was right to expel me. He insisted that I had ''defamed'' UQ Chancellor Varghese and Vice-Chancellor Høj by loudly pointing out that Høj had received a confidential six figure bonus each year for meeting secret China related performance KPIs. Høj had even received an official award from the Chinese government for promoting Confucius Institutes worldwide. But I had ''defamed'' him by pointing this out. Anyway, I ended up leaving the Labor Party partly due to the abuse I copped from Corbin and his mates in Young Labor Right. He then started calling me a “rat” online and sending rat emojis to me to symbolise the fact that I had allegedly ratted on the Party. He also mocked the fact that I went to an Australian university instead of Harvard like him: ''Hate to dash your post-grad plans but paying for an MPA doesn't really count. Unlike being a UQ undergrad like yourself.'' UQ ultimately suspended me for only six months. They wanted to expel me for life but Senator Marco Rubio and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intervened behind the scenes to voice US government disapproval of attempts to permanently expel me from university. This was the only thing that put a stop to their full scorched earth campaign against a 20 year old student; US government pressure was the one countervailing force able to resist Chinese government pressure on the university. I was happy that I ultimately avoided life expulsion with the help of Rubio, Pompeo and Rudd but I was still spewing. I lost my spot on the UQ Senate and I couldn't get that back. Prior to my suspension, the student body elected me as their representative to the board that ran the university. I automatically lost my elected position the second I was suspended. So I concocted a genius scheme during my six month sojourn/exile from uni to try get back onto the UQ Senate. The student union president automatically got a seat on the UQ Senate, so I got my mate Taylor Wass to legally change his name to Drew Pavlou and run a Drew Pavlou ticket in student union elections on my behalf. If he won he was going to resign the post for me so that I could get back to the UQ Senate. Corbin was outraged at our ingenious plan so he established an anti-Drew Facebook campaign page called ''FRAUD WITH DREW PAVLOU.'' The page accused me of ''anti-Chinese racism'' and ''assaulting Chinese students.'' One of his mates tracked down Pauline Hanson to try get her to ''endorse'' my student ticket and then used that endorsement to call me a Nazi. It was all round psychotic, venomous and insane. Corbin loudly positioned himself against me and he set himself up as a China dove. He retweeted dire warnings that the West wished to encircle and destroy China and reposted open CCP shills like Bob Carr. He claimed that Australia's spy agency ASIO subverted Australia's foreign policy towards China, a common Beijing line. He ultimately got a Schwarzman scholarship to China and studied at Xi Jinping's alma mater Tsinghua University. Next thing I know he's a China expert with The Economist. I tried to reconcile with him a few years later but he ignored me. I see that he's still being a smug smarmy know it all, so I thought I would give this backstory to the world.