Rebel News Podcast - June 05, 2021


It’s the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. And China is worse than ever.


Episode Stats

Length

32 minutes

Words per Minute

151.23642

Word Count

4,856

Sentence Count

342

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

29


Summary

On this day in 1989, Chinese tanks and soldiers under the direct command of the communist dictatorship attacked thousands of pro-democracy protesters who had gathered in Tiananmen Square. According to the British Embassy, at least 10,000 people were murdered.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, my Rebels. It's June 4th, which is the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
00:00:04.620 I think things are worse in China than they were back then politically.
00:00:08.480 I think things are worse globally in terms of diplomacy and China's place in the world.
00:00:15.020 I'll take you through the evolution of that.
00:00:17.540 You know, China had the Olympics in 2008.
00:00:19.760 You know they're going to have them again next year.
00:00:21.820 I think that's a symbol of where they are.
00:00:23.520 They're on the ascent.
00:00:25.600 I'll take you through it.
00:00:26.400 Before I do that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News+.
00:00:30.620 Just go to rebelnews.com and click subscribe.
00:00:33.620 It's eight bucks a month. You get the video version of this podcast.
00:00:36.780 Plus, similar video podcasts from Sheila Gunn-Reed, David Menzies, and Andrew Chapados.
00:00:42.540 Okay, here's today's show.
00:00:56.400 Tonight, it's the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and China is worse than ever.
00:01:04.380 It's June 4th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
00:01:09.120 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:01:12.620 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
00:01:16.960 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
00:01:26.400 On this day in 1989, Chinese tanks and soldiers under the direct command of the communist dictatorship
00:01:33.740 attacked thousands of pro-democracy students who had gathered in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.
00:01:40.180 Tiananmen means heavenly, peaceful gate, but of course it was just another communist slaughterhouse that day.
00:01:46.620 According to the British Embassy, at least 10,000 people were murdered that day.
00:01:52.120 This man was the symbol that day for many, at least to the West.
00:01:57.660 A brave young man literally standing in front of a column of tanks and staring them down.
00:02:01.900 What an inspiration.
00:02:04.200 Except, of course, it didn't work.
00:02:06.400 Maybe it worked for a moment, we caught on tape, but the thing about passive resistance
00:02:11.020 that Gandhi used to such powerful effect against the British Empire in India
00:02:16.080 is that it only works against an enemy whose values you're appealing to, an enemy that's pretty gentle.
00:02:23.740 So in the case of the British Empire, values like fair play, the rule of law, limited government,
00:02:28.920 civil society, non-partisan, police and the military, and of course the free media to document it all,
00:02:35.800 that's the only way Gandhi could have won.
00:02:37.540 Even Hitler or Stalin would have just shot anyone trying Gandhi's tactics and no one would have even seen it.
00:02:44.960 No media would have covered it.
00:02:46.000 If they did, they'd be shot too.
00:02:48.240 So that young man in Tiananmen Square surely died.
00:02:52.840 It was a brave moment, but just a moment.
00:02:56.740 And after some huffing and puffing, well, the world moved on.
00:03:00.020 After all, China was opening up its economy and there was plenty, well, plenty of people
00:03:05.680 who wanted to make a buck or two billion, including Canada's own Jean Chrétien.
00:03:10.200 He was prime minister from 1993 to 2003.
00:03:14.100 He loved China.
00:03:15.240 He led Team Canada trade missions to China.
00:03:18.260 His family are huge investors in China.
00:03:20.920 His son-in-law is a senior executive of a power corporation, a massive Chinese company.
00:03:26.980 Weeks after he finished being prime minister, he went to work for China in China.
00:03:31.000 I'm talking about Jean Chrétien.
00:03:33.300 That was the way.
00:03:35.080 Just too much money.
00:03:36.840 And by the time the 2008 Olympics rolled around, China was ready to once and for all whitewash itself.
00:03:42.300 I mean, wasn't it proof that it was fully welcome in the family of nations?
00:03:48.040 There were boycotts of the Nazi Olympics in Berlin in 1936.
00:03:52.740 There were boycotts of the Soviet Olympics in Moscow in 1980.
00:03:55.620 But everyone was there for China's debut, weren't they?
00:03:59.640 Qian and what?
00:04:01.900 Well, China learned a thing or two.
00:04:04.400 I mean, ask John Cena, the wrestler and actor who dared to say Taiwan was a country.
00:04:09.840 Oh my God.
00:04:10.720 Listen to this blubbering apology.
00:04:12.580 Hello, China.
00:04:15.020 This is Jiao Xina.
00:04:17.040 I must say now, in Sudduyu Gijin Joe, I have a lot of interviews.
00:04:24.160 A lot, a lot, a lot.
00:04:25.860 So in one interview, I have a mistake.
00:04:31.820 I have a mistake.
00:04:32.820 I have a mistake.
00:04:33.820 I have a mistake.
00:04:34.820 I must say now, it's very, very, very, very important.
00:04:38.820 I love China and China.
00:04:40.820 I have a mistake.
00:04:41.820 It's very important.
00:04:42.820 I love China and China.
00:04:44.820 I have a mistake.
00:04:45.820 I have a mistake.
00:04:46.820 I have a mistake.
00:04:47.820 I must say now, it's very, very, very, very important.
00:04:51.820 You must say now, it's very, very, very, very important.
00:04:56.820 I love China and China.
00:05:01.820 I'm very, very sorry for my mistakes.
00:05:06.820 Sorry.
00:05:07.820 Sorry.
00:05:08.820 I'm very sorry.
00:05:09.820 You must understand.
00:05:12.820 I love China and China.
00:05:18.820 I'm sorry.
00:05:19.820 Bye.
00:05:20.820 That's pure fear.
00:05:23.820 Fear of losing big endorsement deals and big money and big box office hits in China.
00:05:28.820 The biggest NBA basketball stars, they smear America as a racist jail every day.
00:05:34.820 But boy, they bend the knee to China.
00:05:37.820 Even as China sets up concentration camp style compounds for their Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang province.
00:05:45.820 There's no doubt about that.
00:05:47.820 It's not just a rumor or a myth.
00:05:50.820 It's ethnic cleansing of Muslims on a massive scale.
00:05:54.820 But no one cares.
00:05:55.820 The opposite.
00:05:56.820 Disney filmed part of their big movie, Mulan, literally in Xinjiang province, near those concentration camps, work camps.
00:06:06.820 And they actually gave a thank you to the Xinjiang secret police in their movie credits.
00:06:13.820 Nike and Coca-Cola, very woke companies.
00:06:16.820 They actually lobbied against a U.S. bill that would address the Uyghur genocide and crackdown on doing commerce in Xinjiang.
00:06:23.820 Nike and Coca-Cola just love money too much.
00:06:26.820 You didn't believe their ads, did you?
00:06:29.820 That's where we are today.
00:06:31.820 And literally today on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, look at this.
00:06:35.820 In English, from one of China's propaganda websites, this one's called Global Times, published on Twitter, which is banned in China, by the way.
00:06:44.820 Here's a tweet from Global Times.
00:06:47.820 Tiananmen Square embodies Chinese people's confidence in China's politics.
00:06:52.820 The Chinese public's understanding of the June 4th incident has fundamentally changed.
00:06:57.820 We laugh at those posturing commemorative activities orchestrated by outside forces.
00:07:04.820 They're laughing.
00:07:05.820 They just said they're laughing.
00:07:07.820 Now, they've always laughed, but just in private until recently.
00:07:11.820 In public, maybe they were ashamed or at least pretended to be, but now they know they don't have to pretend.
00:07:17.820 If they can get John Cena to blubber like that and Nike, the brand of Black Lives Matter, the brand of Colin Kaepernick,
00:07:25.820 if they can get the take a knee guy to support Xinjiang, to lobby for genocide commerce, why not laugh?
00:07:36.820 In fact, if you click on the link in that tweet, they're positively proud of it.
00:07:42.820 Tiananmen Square embodies Chinese people's confidence, pride.
00:07:48.820 Let me read an excerpt.
00:07:50.820 If the incident 32 years ago, I love that, the incident, they won't even say what it is.
00:07:55.820 If the incident 32 years ago has any positive effect, that is, it has inoculated the Chinese people with a political vaccine,
00:08:03.820 helping us acquire immunity from being seriously misled.
00:08:07.820 China underwent a color revolution, but wasn't brought down by it.
00:08:11.820 The leadership of the Communist Party of China has saved the fate of the nation at a critical juncture.
00:08:18.820 Imagine rubbing it in with that metaphor, the vaccine virus metaphor.
00:08:22.820 They know they can.
00:08:23.820 I mean, who's going to complain?
00:08:25.820 John Cena, LeBron James?
00:08:27.820 Here's the editor of Global Times, that Communist Party mouthpiece that we were just reading from.
00:08:31.820 Reading from, here's what he asked today, he says, the conclusion on June 4th incidents will never be reversed in Chinese history
00:08:39.820 because its political outcome played a role in shaping socialist path with Chinese characteristics, which has led China to success.
00:08:47.820 The longer the time, the more resolutely the incident will be rejected, the incident.
00:08:52.820 So to be clear, they're not ashamed anymore, if they ever were.
00:08:57.820 They're proud of it.
00:09:00.820 In fact, they believe that in time, the incident will be seen, really, as a bunch of terrorists trying to take down China.
00:09:07.820 Because they intend to keep saying that.
00:09:10.820 And I bet they'll get plenty of Westerners to repeat that for them for free.
00:09:15.820 I mean, like Peter Harder, a senior Trudeau appointee, ran Trudeau's transition team, now a Trudeau senator.
00:09:23.820 Let me read this tweet from Steve Chase of The Globe.
00:09:26.820 Senator Peter Harder, an ex-civil servant who later ran the Canada-China Business Council, told senators Thursday,
00:09:33.820 it's self-righteous to pass a motion urging a boycott of the Beijing Olympics over repression of Uyghurs, given Canada's cultural genocide of residential schools.
00:09:45.820 He got it.
00:09:46.820 He literally stood up in Canada's Senate and said, it's self-righteous to criticize China.
00:09:53.820 We are the genociders, not them.
00:09:55.820 He said that.
00:09:56.820 Did China write his speech?
00:09:58.820 In fact, China's pushing forward, pushing on Tiananmen Square.
00:10:04.820 That's a terrorist incident, don't you know?
00:10:07.820 It's a laugh that anyone would support them, don't you know?
00:10:10.820 And they're pushing back on the virus origin story, too. Look at this.
00:10:13.820 Just in, China accuses the US and Japan of running a secret biological warfare development program. Take a look.
00:10:20.820 After coming down the war, the European Union in many years, the European Union軍 in the United States will send the military crew to Japan,
00:10:27.820 The U.S.S.S.S.S.S.S.A.
00:10:57.820 Yeah, they really said that.
00:11:14.540 So who will push back against this, not Senator Harder?
00:11:19.200 Trump's not of the picture now.
00:11:22.740 Joe Biden's son worked for China, did billions of dollars in China.
00:11:26.920 there. So he's compromised. So who's going to push back against China?
00:11:31.780 There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic
00:11:41.260 dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
00:11:46.300 Yeah, no, not him. Stay with us for more.
00:11:56.920 Welcome back. Well, I remember a year ago comparing how China's dictatorship responded
00:12:07.560 to the coronavirus to how the Soviet dictatorship responded to Chernobyl. I had just seen the HBO
00:12:15.060 miniseries called Chernobyl. And by the way, if you haven't seen it, you absolutely must. I resisted.
00:12:22.220 I thought, well, I know the story. I don't want to be bored by a documentary. It was absolutely
00:12:26.900 gripping. It was riveting. And even though I knew how the story ended, to have it recreated and to
00:12:32.220 see how the first instinct of the Communist Party was to deceive and to not lose face,
00:12:38.820 I thought it was a powerful analogy, except for one thing. Chernobyl mainly hurt people in the
00:12:46.520 Soviet Union, in Ukraine itself and Belarus. But in the Soviet Union, its deadly radioactivity did
00:12:54.300 much less harm outside the Soviet Union. I think that's the opposite of China's coronavirus. But
00:13:00.640 a new essay in an online magazine called American Greatness, amgreatness.com, is called,
00:13:08.240 The Chinese Coronavirus is This Generation's Tiananmen Test, as in Tiananmen Square. And I have to agree,
00:13:16.480 that's actually the better analogy than the Chernobyl one. And joining us now via Skype is the author
00:13:24.040 of this essay, our old friend Ben Weingarten, who joins us now via Skype. Ben, very, very thoughtful
00:13:31.560 piece, as always. And it comes on the anniversary. Well, today is the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Of course,
00:13:39.400 you wrote this a little bit earlier, but the points remain. Make your case for how this is analogous to
00:13:49.040 the Tiananmen Square moment in 1989. Yeah, and let me just preface by saying, you know, we're talking
00:13:54.780 today on the anniversary of the apex of the Tiananmen Square massacre, ultimately. And this piece
00:14:02.320 that I wrote is actually from a year ago, but it could just as easily have been published today. I'm sorry
00:14:07.520 to say, unfortunately. And really, what the argument of this piece is that, unlike Chernobyl, to your
00:14:15.900 point, in this case, we're all victims. And it's the same thing relative to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
00:14:22.540 There, it was a distant, far away, brutal purge of dissenters by the Chinese Communist Party. The shot was
00:14:29.880 caught, of course, by purported reformer and liberalizer, Deng Xiaoping. So even under the most
00:14:36.120 moderate so-called communist leader, we saw its true face when it actually had to grapple with
00:14:41.820 college students simply demanding their most basic natural rights. That should have taught us
00:14:48.040 everything we needed to know about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and its willingness to
00:14:53.580 be as brutal and deceptive as every other communist party, if not more so than any other communist party
00:14:59.720 in the history of mankind. And what I said was that we failed the Tiananmen test the first time around,
00:15:07.400 in that Tiananmen did not even serve as a speed bump, really, to China's ambitions to become a dominant
00:15:13.100 economic, military, and technological power. On the contrary, we engaged in this project to integrate,
00:15:21.480 effectively, the Chinese Communist Party into every aspect of the Western world. And it used that to its
00:15:27.480 huge advantage. All of the benefits of engaging with the West accrued to communist China. And yes,
00:15:33.240 we got cheap products and purportedly access to massive open markets to ourselves. It hasn't
00:15:41.160 exactly played out that way. But at the consequence of our national interest, and I would argue our
00:15:45.320 national soul, quite frankly, and you can broaden that to the entire West, not just America, for that
00:15:51.000 matter, as you well know. And so the long-winded point that I'm getting to is that this time around,
00:15:55.880 we were all victims of Chinese Communist Party tyranny, brutality, lies and deception, callousness,
00:16:01.640 not caring about, and in fact, probably in some ways, using to its advantage, the knowledge in
00:16:08.440 the West that they were willing to deal effectively to help foist on the world this pandemic, which has
00:16:15.400 resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths. So our test this time is how do we respond
00:16:22.040 when we are directly impacted by Chinese Communist tyranny? And the Chinese Communist Party has
00:16:27.080 the blood of the West on its hands. It's sapped our treasure. We've sacrificed our liberties as a
00:16:33.480 consequence of it. And so it is of the utmost importance. It might be the most important thing
00:16:38.120 in geopolitics for us to hold the Chinese Communist Party absolutely to account. And the fact that we're
00:16:43.480 talking now over a year since that piece came out, and only now the lab leak theory is even being
00:16:50.760 entertained by the establishment, I think speaks volumes about the failure of our so-called ruling
00:16:56.520 class to pass this Tiananmen test. Yeah, you know, I want to emphasize that you did write this last
00:17:02.040 year, and I'm sorry, I didn't actually quite, I was reading it because it feels like it was written
00:17:07.000 today. But I noticed that you were a very early analyst to get this right. Let me read what I
00:17:13.240 think is the key paragraph in your essay. Again, it's called, The Chinese Coronavirus
00:17:18.040 Is This Generation's Tiananmen Test? And here you spell out what that test is in a paragraph.
00:17:23.160 The test is as follows. With the Chinese Communist Party inflicting incalculable losses in blood and
00:17:29.160 treasure through its unique role in spreading the coronavirus and its related menacing behavior,
00:17:35.080 will we demand reparations or will we let the regime off scot-free, emboldening it and encouraging it
00:17:40.920 to act with impunity and still more reckless abandon in its quest for hegemony going forward?
00:17:46.280 We failed this test in 1989. Well, you know, I was thinking about how the 2008 Olympics in Beijing
00:17:54.440 was their ultimate proof to the world, the outside world, and proof to their own citizens that everything
00:18:01.640 was forgiven from Tiananmen Square. They could say with great justification, look, the entire world
00:18:07.480 is coming here to pay homage to us. They're bending their knee, they're saluting our anthem.
00:18:18.200 This is proof that we were right to crush them 19 years ago because look at the normalization. Well,
00:18:24.840 can you believe it? Beijing is getting the Olympics again next year, the Winter Olympics, and it serves
00:18:31.160 the exact same purpose to tell the world and domestic Chinese citizens, hey, we're the boss. Who else has
00:18:38.120 had two Olympic games in 14 years? Nobody but China. I think it's incredible how it's not even a speed,
00:18:47.480 like Chanaman Square, not even a speed, but at least Chanaman Square, you had some squawking about it
00:18:53.320 in some quarters of the West, as opposed to now, when if you even dispute the origins of the virus and
00:19:00.360 suggest maybe we should ask China a few more questions, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter will silence
00:19:05.240 you. It's incredible. It's happening all over again, Ben. The individuals inside the US government,
00:19:11.800 national security, intelligence, foreign policy establishment will suppress dissenting views with
00:19:17.560 respect to the Chinese coronavirus. The WHO will get rewarded with re-entry by the United States when
00:19:24.280 it's a China-controlled entity that helped participate in the cover-up of the origins and then the spread of
00:19:29.400 the coronavirus as well. It's really an exceptional point that you make, an analogy to draw, and I remember
00:19:35.800 in 2008, there were these triumphalist symbols of Marxism, of the Chinese Communist Party, and I watched
00:19:42.680 it and I'm just disgusted in real time, fuming as I'm watching that as a college student, thinking this
00:19:48.680 is a regime with the blood of tens of millions of people on its hands. And here it is. And how many
00:19:53.400 people in the West even comprehend of the propaganda effort that this is, that we're witnessing?
00:19:59.640 Like you said, fast forward to today and we have John Cena groveling because he dared to have the gall to
00:20:05.240 say that Taiwan was a country. And look at what China's done this time. I mean, move beyond
00:20:11.880 Tiananmen Square now, it of course operates Uyghur gulags. It has swallowed Hong Kong whole. It crushes
00:20:21.000 Christians and Falun Gong and the Tibetans and the Mongolians run down the list. It threatens to subsume
00:20:28.840 Taiwan, which is a living representation of what China could be, were its people to be free of the
00:20:34.680 clutches of the Chinese Communist Party. And then of course it has our blood on its hands and it
00:20:39.640 threatens to expand its sphere of influence everywhere and ultimately be the hegemonic world
00:20:44.040 power. So to your point, they are laughing at the fact that they can literally get away with murder,
00:20:48.920 including the murder of us and be able to then host the Olympic games as if they're a legitimate
00:20:53.640 member of the family of nations. It's absolutely sickening and in good conscience, no representative of
00:21:00.040 any Western country should give the privilege and the honor to the Chinese Communist Party to host those
00:21:06.200 games. You know, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch pointed out that no country controls more United Nations
00:21:14.760 agencies than China. Chinese nationals run four key agencies and of course they installed Tedros,
00:21:23.640 Dr. Tedros, the Ethiopian boss of the World Health Organization. So they effectively control five.
00:21:31.160 During the Cold War, I don't think the Soviet Union ever had that kind of sway over global diplomacy.
00:21:40.440 I mean, I could be wrong on that, but I don't think they ever did. But the thing is, that's the only
00:21:44.920 forum they were relevant. There wasn't an enormous amount of commerce between the Soviet Union
00:21:51.400 and the West. There was some, but it was limited. I think that's one of the reasons why Chernobyl
00:21:58.680 didn't morally destroy the West as much as the coronavirus did, is because the Soviet Union was
00:22:06.680 so cut off economically, scientifically, in terms of media. This really was a problem in their own house.
00:22:14.440 It was one of the reasons the Soviet Union fell because they bore 90%, 99% of the economic burden
00:22:23.400 of fixing it. With coronavirus, China is so ingrained. I mean, you note in your piece that
00:22:31.720 so many supply chains in the West are rooted in China, including about 95% of our medicines, by the way.
00:22:37.720 You can't buy medicine at a pharmacy that's not made in China. I mean, good luck finding, I mean,
00:22:44.920 just basic medicines, complex medicines, it's all made in China. The linkages, it's almost impossible
00:22:53.400 to untangle that mess. Yeah, it's a great point. If you look around whatever room you're in to viewers,
00:22:59.480 can you imagine any product that you have sitting around your office or your living room or the like
00:23:04.920 that doesn't have components made in China in it or raw materials coming from there or the like?
00:23:11.240 It's almost impossible, like you said. And that, I would argue, is the brilliance of the Chinese
00:23:15.240 Communist Party's strategy in contrast with that of the Soviet Union, which is that unlike the Soviet
00:23:21.320 Union, which was intransigent and had to fight against the Western imperialists, China said,
00:23:26.920 no, let's not resist. Let's open ourselves up to the West. Let them capitalize us. Let them shower
00:23:34.040 us with all the benefits of its labors in terms of technology and the financial markets and the trade
00:23:39.480 architecture and all the and entree to all the Western led institutions. And then let's take advantage
00:23:45.560 of all of these benefits to the maximum extent possible. It was a brilliant, brilliant strategy
00:23:52.200 executed to perfection. And as a consequence, we're stuck in a bear hug today, which is that,
00:23:57.480 you know, and it's sort of represented in physical form by these supply chains that lead to these
00:24:01.320 products around us. How do we get ourselves out of this inextricably intertwined relationship? And it
00:24:06.680 would have been significantly easier in 1989, of course, before this massive trade and diplomatic
00:24:13.560 relations and the like took place and manifested itself. Now, unfortunately, we face a far richer,
00:24:20.200 far stronger, far more powerful, far more brazen Chinese Communist Party that is no longer biting
00:24:25.960 its time in the words of Deng. You know, I think sometimes of rivals or enemies or opponents or
00:24:34.840 competitors to the West. I think of Iran and I think of China and both of them have been engaged in
00:24:42.040 diplomacy and military strategy for literally thousands of years, for millennia. And I think that there's a
00:24:51.480 there's a snobbery, there's a self-delusion, there's an ethnocentricity in the West that says
00:24:57.480 we're much more sophisticated than the Persian Empire or the Chinese Empire because we've got,
00:25:04.920 you know, Instagram influencers, we have woke this and vegetarian that and we're just the absolute
00:25:14.200 height of fashion. And I mean, I think of John Kerry, and I think of his obsession with climate change. And
00:25:21.240 I think of how the US military is now, you know, emphasizing its wokeness. And I'm and we think that
00:25:28.920 that signs of sophistication, and that we're going to run circles around Iran or China. I think they're
00:25:36.520 beating us at things that we think we're better at. I think they're more strategic than us. I think
00:25:42.840 they're more skillful diplomacy than us. I think they think more long term than us. I think they're
00:25:47.960 more disciplined than us. I think that they look at a buffoon like Joe Biden and his son, or John Kerry
00:25:55.800 or Anthony Blinken and say, these guys, their arrogance, let them think they're in control.
00:26:03.000 They're not. I don't know. I just think that they're they're absolutely cleaning our clock in the West.
00:26:09.000 Yeah. And the thing that's most depressing about it is that we're doing it to ourselves.
00:26:14.360 If the West mustered all of its energy, talent, creativity for all of the warts on our societies today,
00:26:22.040 I still firmly believe we can triumph over anyone, no matter what adversary. But we are hanging
00:26:27.880 ourselves right now. And then you add to that the fact that to your point, these are these are
00:26:33.080 strategically oriented nations regimes that are much longer term oriented than we are that are
00:26:40.360 willing to deal with substantially more sacrifice than we are, and also that understand us, we better
00:26:45.480 than better than we understand them. So they're able to take advantage of our avarice or self interest,
00:26:51.240 our short term thinking. And then you add on to it, the signs of decay and decadence and lack
00:26:57.400 of moral clarity or really even belief that we ought to survive in any traditional sense as Western
00:27:03.320 civilization that's inherent in this wokeness that we see. And you have a sick Western world right now.
00:27:10.840 And of course, our adversaries are going to take advantage of that. And I think that's one of the
00:27:14.280 reasons they don't even need to really directly attack us or engage in any sort of traditional,
00:27:18.920 conventional warfare at this point, because we're doing it to ourselves. And they can watch and
00:27:23.880 build up and bide their time. And almost organically, they're positioning themselves to be dominant.
00:27:31.080 You know, it's incredible. I mean, I was saying earlier in the show today,
00:27:35.400 they're not even pretending on Tiananmen Square. I mean, the Global Times, one of the English language
00:27:40.200 propaganda arms of the Chinese dictatorship, they literally say they're laughing at criticisms of
00:27:48.280 Tiananmen Square. So I don't even think they would have been that brazen about that in the past.
00:27:52.840 But they don't need to be their best defenders because they've got the John Cena's of Hollywood.
00:27:58.360 They've got the NBA and the LeBron James. They've got so many businessmen willing to go woke
00:28:06.280 to get into that lucrative market, so they think. I just think that they are, I hate to say it,
00:28:13.480 I think they're winning. I think had Donald Trump being reelected, that might not
00:28:17.400 be the case. But I think they're roaring back. To me, the ultimate image of that was New Year's Eve.
00:28:25.720 In Times Square, the iconic apple falling, sorry, you know, the clock, rather the countdown,
00:28:35.640 didn't happen. There was no one on the street other than Bill de Blasio dancing
00:28:40.920 with his wife by themselves, just that cringe image. Whereas in Wuhan, no masks,
00:28:46.200 huge parties, huge fireworks. Wuhan, China had the New York City New Year's celebration,
00:28:54.680 and New York was a ghost town. To me, that's the symbol of where we are. Last word to you, Ben.
00:29:00.600 Yeah, it's a sorry, but very apt image to part ways on. And what I just say is, doesn't it tell you
00:29:08.920 everything you need to know about the Western world, that our ruling class, and this goes beyond the U.S.,
00:29:15.080 but really internationally with respect to most of the West, and China, were all on the same page
00:29:21.160 in terms of wanting to do everything they could to see Donald Trump fall. I think that tells you
00:29:25.880 everything you need to know about ultimately what side our ruling class is on, and the fact that it
00:29:33.240 was Donald Trump that stood as the greatest bulwark against these tyrannical forces.
00:29:38.440 Yeah. We've been talking with Ben Weingarten. His article from last year in The American Greatness
00:29:43.960 is called The China Coronavirus is This Generation's Tiananmen Test. Thanks, Ben. Great to see you.
00:29:50.120 Thanks for having me.
00:29:50.840 All right. Cheers. Stay with us. More happy.
00:30:04.520 Hey, welcome back. Your feedback, Calvin writes,
00:30:07.640 let's fool everyone and elect an independent. Yeah, I just don't think it's going to work that
00:30:13.080 way. You know how premiers and prime ministers are chosen in the parliamentary system. It's whoever gets
00:30:17.640 the most MPs or MLAs to support them, typically the party leader who wins a majority. So it just
00:30:24.120 won't work to have an independent, unless you mean an independentist, someone who wants to separate
00:30:29.880 from Canada. And there's starting to be rumblings like that in Alberta.
00:30:34.440 Ina writes, do the conservatives have a death wish? Doug Ford at least does not behave as badly as Jason
00:30:39.880 Kenny, although he no longer leads us. We're now led by unelected health specialists.
00:30:44.280 I don't know if Doug Ford behaves as badly as Jason Kenny. I suspect that Doug Ford doesn't follow
00:30:51.320 any rules. In fact, we sort of have evidence that he doesn't. It's just that I don't think he's quite
00:30:55.880 as ostentatious. That sky palace is so, it's the greatest lightning rod for wasteful, luxurious living
00:31:04.920 politicians in Alberta, to go to that patio of all places and break the lockdown rules you're enforcing
00:31:12.360 and others at the same time. The layers of arrogance there, there's just so many. I'm sure Doug Ford has
00:31:20.120 a layer or two at any one time, but to do that, men need things on top of each other. And the photo, and
00:31:26.040 then defending it by saying, oh, you know, it was only a $35 bottle of whiskey. It wasn't luxurious.
00:31:33.240 I just don't know. I mean, I don't think they realize the trouble they're in. I think they're
00:31:38.280 going to lose the next election. That's our show for today. That's our week that was. We'll have
00:31:45.240 videos over the weekend, of course. We'll see you on Monday. Until then, on behalf of all of us here
00:31:50.280 of Rebel World Headquarters to you at home. Good night. Keep fighting for freedom.