That's a brilliant synopsis. Incredibly frightening too.

... many of these academics are on the same ideological page as the CCP. The key alignment is control of centralized data and a self-surety that they, as elites, know what's best for the common-people.

This surety gives them a self-appointed license to lie about whatever because they've told themselves they're doing it for a higher-purpose - which always, 100% of the time, coincides with what's best for their own financial/power interests.

I see an analogy of this happening in the US.

For me, this is WW3.

It does appear to be so. With more and more countries moving towards extremism, the question is, how do they pull back from that? How do they pull back from moving into either authoritarianism or a failed state?

Has that ever happened in history without war? One could argue that Taiwan does serve as an example of how a country moved peacefully from authoritarianism to a full democracy, but that was during a period of extreme economic growth and external support. We're now in a world economy teetering on collapse with multiple influences pushing it over the edge.