‘Murder With a Borrowed Knife’

“Many people fear that a war with China may be coming,” Peter Schweizer writes in his new book Blood Money. “But the war is already here.”

He explains that though no Chinese boots are on the ground and no People’s Liberation Army warplanes are in the skies, this war is killing 200 Americans each day. That’s almost one person every 7 minutes. Every year, the slain add up to more than the American combat deaths in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

This war is raging in every corner of the United States, from Alaska and Hawaii to Maine and Florida. It kills rich and poor, young and old, black and white. It’s often called America’s “fentanyl crisis.” But since the Chinese Communist Party is involved in every step of this stunningly destructive attack on America, it would be more accurate to call it the New Opium War.

No Drug Like Fentanyl

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is about 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. Inside the bloodstream, it produces a rapturous high. This means fentanyl is extremely addictive and astonishingly high-risk, in terms of overdoses. Even tiny trace amounts, such as the few grains at the tip of the knife above, are enough to kill an adult.

“There’s never been another drug like fentanyl before,” said chemical and pharmaceutical expert Josh Bloom. “For street drugs, this absolutely destroys anything else in terms of lethality and danger.”

Jim Crotty, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s former chief of staff, emphasizes that fentanyl is “the most pernicious, the most devastating drug that we have ever seen.”

Making fentanyl is also far easier and cheaper than making heroin, since it’s entirely synthetic and doesn’t require growing poppies or dealing with related agricultural complications. The plant-based opium required to make a kilogram of heroin costs around $6,000. The precursor chemicals needed for a kilogram of fentanyl costs only about $200.

Since this “most pernicious” drug is so inexpensive to make, and since a little goes a long way, traffickers mix it into all kinds of other drugs. Fentanyl is everywhere. And though many of its American victims knowingly rolled the dice with this vicious poison, the majority of those killed by it didn’t know they were taking it.

“Many victims believe that they have purchased an fda-approved drug such as Xanax or Vicodin, when in fact the product is a counterfeit pharmaceutical laced with fentanyl,” Schweizer writes. In other cases, fentanyl “is laced into other illegal drugs, such as marijuana or cocaine, without their knowledge.”

In 2020, 18-year-old Californian Tyler Gordon bought some pills from a local drug dealer that he was told were fda-approved Percocet. After taking one, he overdosed and could not be resuscitated. The toxicology report listed his cause of death as “acute fentanyl toxicity.”

The next year, a 1-year-old North Carolina boy named True Lash ingested some of his mother’s fentanyl—perhaps just a few grains of powder that had accidentally gotten onto his tiny fingers. By the time medical crews arrived, it was too late. True was one of 133 American children under 5 years old that year who died from unintentionally ingesting fentanyl.

In 2022, several U.S. military cadets traveled from West Point to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for some spring break partying. Four of them took what they were told was cocaine. Shortly afterward, all four suffered cardiac arrest. Three others tried to give them cpr, and in the mouth-to-mouth process, were also exposed to trace amounts of fentanyl. All seven would likely have died had first responders not arrived so quickly. That year, 73,654 other people in the U.S. were not so fortunate.

Last year, four New York City children, ranging from 8 months to 2 years old, were hospitalized after inhaling trace amounts of fentanyl that had been hidden under a napping mat at their daycare center. Three were resuscitated with Narcan, a medication used to reverse overdoses from opioids. But 1-year-old Nicholas Dominici did not recover. “I love him, I miss him, I want him back,” his mother told the bbc. “But there is nothing that will give me back my son.”

Over the last decade, such tragic stories have filled the pages of American news publications. And new ones are published every single day, without fail.

It’s no wonder that some U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials have argued that fentanyl should be categorized as a “weapon of mass destruction.” And it’s no wonder that even Mexican cartel members, callous to so much evil and suffering, have a sober fear of fentanyl. They refer to it as el diablo, “the devil.”

It may sound in some ways like just another drug problem, just another symptom of America’s sick society. But the truth is that this particular crisis would be addicting, weakening and killing far, far fewer people if not for an active strategy employed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Schweizer’s book is based on meticulous research from restricted Chinese military journals, leaked private e-mails, Chinese corporate data, leaked records from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security, internal documents from Mexican law enforcement and American criminal court documents. And it all shows that the Chinese Communist Party is involved in basically every step of America’s fentanyl problem.

Enter the Dragon

The U.S. fentanyl crisis does not begin south of the Rio Grande but 7,000 miles east of the American heartland—in Shijiazhuang, China. Companies in Shijiazhuang produce some 40 percent of the synthetic precursor chemicals that illicit U.S. fentanyl is made from. Another 55 percent of those chemicals are manufactured in several other cities across China.

Many of the Chinese companies churning out precursors, such as Xuyang Biotechnology and Skyrun Industrial, are state-owned. They receive grants, tax breaks, subsidies—and orders—from the Chinese Communist Party. And it is important to know that in China, even firms that are not officially “state-owned” still operate at the discretion of the authoritarian government and function as weapons of statecraft.

Occasionally, U.S. officials muster the political clarity and will to sanction a certain Chinese company for manufacturing fentanyl precursors. But since the Chinese Communist Party runs it all from higher up, they can quickly change the company name or shift its operations to a different firm. If the U.S. outlaws a certain precursor chemical, Chinese Communist Party officials order their scientists to tweak the chemical compound ever so slightly. The “brand new chemical” is technically not illegal but is every bit as potent, addictive and destructive to American users, and that’s the point.

Many think that making precursors is where China’s involvement in the U.S. fentanyl crisis ends. It is actually only the beginning.

From Shijiazhuang and other cities, China ships these precursors across the Pacific Ocean to Manzanillo, a major port northwest of Mexico City. The international terminal at this port, like several others in Mexico, is not run by Mexican companies but by a Chinese one called CK Hutchison Holdings. Hutchison also controls the railroad terminals in Manzanillo. Its employees keep a steady flow of trains hauling car after car of precursors up to Culiacán, a small town in northern Mexico.

Around 2,000 Chinese nationals, many of them chemists, have a permanent presence in Culiacán. They work with Mexican cartel members to convert those precursors coming up from Manzanillo into the toxic cocktail called fentanyl.

China’s involvement in this attack doesn’t stop there.

After the fentanyl is successfully synthesized, it needs to be pressed into pill form for easy smuggling, distribution and ingestion. Here again, the Chinese lend the Mexicans a helping hand. Chinese companies smuggle pill presses into both Mexico and the U.S. The Department of Justice has also pointed out that China’s “ambiguous export regulations” enable “traffickers to use vague manifest descriptions to describe pill press machines to avoid scrutiny from U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel.”

Many of the pill presses made by China include the specific metal cast dies that are needed to imprint the pills with counterfeit codes, such as “10/352.” That’s the imprint put on genuine Percocet pills. Eighteen-year-old Tyler Gordon very likely saw that code on the fentanyl pill—presented to him as a Percocet—that ended his life.

Curiously, the facts show that Chinese firms sell these pill presses to cartels for just around $1,000 per unit, basically at cost. If they’re selling these presses at little to no profit, what do the Chinese gain from these transactions? The chilling answer is this: They measure the success of their fentanyl venture not in dollars but in American lives.

At this point in the process, the precursors are cooked into fentanyl, and the fentanyl is pressed into enticing pills. Even here, the Chinese are not finished twisting the knife.

To smuggle the pills across America’s Swiss-cheese border and distribute and sell them, cartel members need means of communication that American lawmen are unable to tap. For this they use WeChat, a messaging app owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent. The Mexicans rely on WeChat because they know that, even though it is vigilantly monitored by Chinese authorities to suppress political dissent, the Chinese turn a deaf ear to chatter about getting fentanyl inside Americans. The cartels also know that the Chinese refuse to share communications with the U.S.

“It is all happening on WeChat,” said retired dea agent Thomas Cindric, who had focused on the fentanyl war. “The Chinese government is clearly aware of it.”

The final step of the process is giving cartel blood money an appearance of legitimacy so it can be spent on weapons, bribes and anything else that will expand their vicious drug empires. And here again, the Chinese eagerly step up. Chinese operatives launder billions of fentanyl dollars for cartels each year. And they do so at rates far lower than cartels got from Colombian launderers back in the cocaine era. “With the Colombians, it had been an 18 percent to 13 percent commission,” said Cindric. “The Chinese are doing it for 1 to 2 percent on average. And the speed at which they do it is unbelievable. The Chinese absorbed the risk. You know it will get paid.”

The alarming truth is that America is being ruthlessly attacked.

China is involved in basically every aspect of the illicit and devastating trade, and it is for the purpose of ruining as many American lives—grief-wracked, wounded or killed—as possible. Schweizer sums it up chillingly: “Fentanyl is being covertly and systematically aimed at the citizens of our country by a major foreign power—the most lethal peacetime attack in human history.”

Why is China working so furiously to poison Americans and destabilize our society? Because the Chinese want to overtake America as the world’s leading nation. And they have a long history of working toward such goals with underhanded and wicked methods.

‘Murder With a Borrowed Knife’

In his book The Art of War, the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu encouraged the use of disruption, deception and subterfuge to defeat enemies. He emphasized the use of indirect tactics, when possible, rather than overt military confrontations. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” is one of his book’s most famous tenets.

This was written more than 2,000 years ago, but it remains foundational to the thinking of modern Chinese leaders and operatives.

In 2003, the Chinese government published its official Three Warfares policy. This was designed to guide the minds of People’s Liberation Army soldiers, sailors and officers at every level. And it includes Sun Tzu’s phrase about “subduing the enemy without fighting” no fewer than 10 times, along with many details about applying it to the modern landscape.

Starting in 2006, every member of China’s People’s Liberation Army has been required to thoroughly study The Art of War as a textbook. This is meant to provide a clear vision for China’s overarching military strategy.

In 2010, Chinese military planners published a manual called Disintegration Warfare, the cover of which quotes that same Sun Tzu tenet, and the pages of which provide still more detail about how China can accomplish it.

China is using fentanyl to subdue the enemy without fighting. Around half of the Americans killed by this dark, underhanded warfare are of military age. “This is the equivalent of removing two or three divisions of Army or Marines off the rolls every year,” said U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham (Ret.). This is chilling, but the truth is the Chinese don’t specifically target military-age individuals. They are thinking ahead to total war and are waging it already through fentanyl’s wide and messy spray of devastation, wrecking families and destroying communities. With each new addict, overdose or grief-crushed survivor, the enemy is a little more subdued, without actually fighting.

The people of China also universally study an ancient set of tactics called the 36 Stratagems. These are methods of deception, misdirection, exploitation for use in war and politics, which complement Sun Tzu’s teachings well. These 36 stratagems permeate modern Chinese culture, with children learning them in their earliest years and re-encountering them over and over in nursery rhymes, books, magazines, music, tv shows and film. Among the most frequently discussed of the 36 translates to “Murder with a borrowed knife.” This means inflicting damage on an enemy by involving a third party, fomenting civil war or finding other insidious means of attack that give the attacker a degree of plausible deniability. And it describes China’s murderous role in America’s fentanyl scourge perfectly.

A Dark New Era

In his March 30, 2018, Key of David program, “The Times of the Gentiles,” Gerald Flurry said: “Surely if we stop and think about this, with China doing all that and making all these deals and paying all that money, what is their goal? What is their ambition? Surely we must see a strong motivation there to take over the world, to conquer the world, and some of the Chinese leaders will even tell you that.”

That episode’s title comes from Luke 21:24, in which Jesus Christ warned that in our modern era, the world would enter into a nightmarish new period: the times of the Gentiles.

The Scriptures make clear that this new epoch would occur when the power of Israelitish nations America and Britain declines, and other countries such as China become globally dominant. We are in that era now, and China is increasingly twisting the knife to further erode U.S. power, including its diabolical fentanyl offensive.

As America increasingly succumbs to its societal rot, numerous crippling addictions and political dysfunction, China will continue to do all it can to hasten its fall and boost Chinese power. Bible prophecy makes clear that these efforts will culminate in China working with other global powers to besiege America.

It is plain that some horrifically dark days lie ahead. But the darkness will not last long.

In His forecast about the “times of the Gentiles,” Christ said, as China and other powers keep weakening America and strengthening themselves, “men’s hearts” will be “failing them for fear” (verse 26). But in the very next verse, He promises that the fear will give way to the best possible event: “And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory” (verse 27). These brutal times of the Gentiles—which the world is now already in—will come to an end with the return of Jesus Christ!