Rebel News Podcast - Should we sue the communist Chinese government for coronavirus？

00:00:00.000 Hello, my Rebels. Manny Montenegrino said to me yesterday, we should sue China. So I started to

00:00:05.820 look into it. Is it possible to sue a foreign country? And I found some interesting cases,

00:00:12.800 and I've got some ideas about reparations. Let me make my case. Before I get out of the way,

00:00:19.520 let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. That gives you the video version of

00:00:24.840 the show, which I would encourage you to get. It's eight bucks a month, no big deal.

00:00:27.620 It's good TV watching while you're in quarantine. All right, here's today's podcast.

00:00:48.380 Tonight, should we sue the Chinese government? It's March 19th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:00:54.280 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:01:00.140 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:01:04.200 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody

00:01:09.080 right to do so.

00:01:15.400 China is to blame for the coronavirus. I'm not talking about the creation of the virus itself.

00:01:20.680 We don't know exactly how that happened. China's high-security virus research lab

00:01:25.640 just happens to be located in Wuhan. I mean, what are the odds of that? But other than that

00:01:30.920 unusual coincidence, we have no actual evidence that the virus was released from that government lab,

00:01:37.000 let alone that it was some sort of biological weapon. And I'm not even talking about another

00:01:41.940 explanation, that the virus came from people eating exotic animals or even eating animals alive,

00:01:48.000 as is the custom in some parts of China, eating bats, eating bat soup.

00:01:52.960 It's shocking to our Western sensibilities, but more than that, it could have allowed the virus

00:01:58.000 to leap from animals to people. Just as an aside, there's an evolutionary reason why we humans gag

00:02:06.160 at gross things, why we sometimes even throw up when something is gross just at the thought of it.

00:02:13.000 It's our body's natural way after a thousand generations of expelling things that could make

00:02:19.800 us physically sick. That sense of revulsion you feel when you see maggots on a dead animal carcass,

00:02:26.120 for example. That sense of revulsion and the urge to throw up is nature's way of keeping you safe,

00:02:32.680 of stopping you from eating gross things because they're dangerous to you. I think maybe we should

00:02:38.520 re-instill that natural instinct of disgust and revulsion for eating some foods. Just saying.

00:02:45.080 But when I say that China is to blame for the virus, I'm not talking about hypotheticals like

00:02:50.520 the Chinese government's Wuhan virus laboratory, the bizarrely Justin Trudeau approved sending

00:02:56.280 samples of the Ebola virus too. Can you believe that? I'm not talking about bats. Those are both

00:03:02.040 possibilities, not certainties. Like with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. We'll have to wait

00:03:07.880 for the fall of communism in China to learn the truth. By the way, I recommend that Chernobyl series

00:03:13.240 on HBO if you're in quarantine. Great cinema, very historically accurate. But I'm talking about

00:03:19.480 the incontrovertible truth that however the virus was caused in the first place,

00:03:24.600 wherever the virus came from, the first willful, thoughtful, deliberate, strategic decisions by the

00:03:31.480 Chinese dictatorship were to hide the facts, to cover up the problem, and even to arrest and punish

00:03:38.440 the doctors who were talking about the virus in public, who were trying to warn the world. That's

00:03:43.480 incontrovertible. That is indisputable. As you know, the world's best disease fighters, the US

00:03:49.720 Centers for Disease Control, they wanted to go into China right away to help and to learn more. China

00:03:54.440 banned them. China didn't want them to find out the truth. Why? Probably the same reason the Soviets

00:04:00.760 covered up the truth about Chernobyl. They thought it was embarrassing and dictatorships don't like to

00:04:05.080 be embarrassed. No one does, but certainly not in democracies. But in dictatorship especially,

00:04:11.400 the government needs to be seen as infallible, all-knowing, the protector of the people. And in

00:04:15.560 supremacist dictatorships like China, places where the government constantly talks about how they'll

00:04:21.880 dominate the world, how they're superior to the free West, this would be doubly embarrassing. That's

00:04:27.080 my attempt to explain why China covered it up. If the virus did in fact come from the government

00:04:33.160 research lab, that's a whole other level of embarrassment. That could actually cause the

00:04:37.000 downfall of the regime. If this disastrous, murderous virus was actually created by the

00:04:42.120 government of China on purpose, I think that would be it. I think they would be over, I think they would

00:04:46.760 do literally anything to cover that up if it were true. They would literally prefer the death of

00:04:50.680 millions of their own people than to have such a truth come out. That's just a hypothetical for now.

00:04:54.600 But whatever the reason is for the cover-up, we know they did it. The cover-up. They covered it up.

00:05:03.240 Here's the story. In the state-run wire service, Xinhua announcing the arrest of Chinese doctors for

00:05:10.040 spreading rumors. Here it is in English put through Google Translate. The police arrested the doctors for

00:05:15.720 talking about the virus, for trying to spread the word. Those doctors were trying to warn people.

00:05:20.200 They were asking for help. China shut them up. China kept crucial information about the virus,

00:05:24.920 like its DNA sequencing, secret. That delay, according to Western scientists,

00:05:29.640 led the virus spread throughout China and around the world. Had China not silenced its own doctors,

00:05:36.680 95% of the cases would not have happened. The Chinese people would have been warned. Travel from Wuhan to

00:05:42.920 other cities in China could have been limited. China could have stopped its own people from

00:05:45.960 spreading the virus around the world, other countries. And other countries armed with that

00:05:49.720 information could have stopped travel from China months earlier than we did. Trump stopped those

00:05:55.560 flights about six weeks ago. He was ridiculed by the media for it. I mean, the World Health Organization,

00:06:01.000 a UN agency that's controlled by China, they published the lie that the virus is not contagious from

00:06:06.920 person to person. China knew that was a lie, but they published it anyways. Even now, China is lying

00:06:12.600 to evade blame. They're actually saying the virus is an American plot or something. I'm not even

00:06:17.400 kidding. That's why Trump is pushing back by calling it the Chinese virus. He really didn't start doing

00:06:22.440 that until China started blaming America to divert attention. But what do we know for sure? We only know

00:06:29.080 for sure that China's first response was to lie, to arrest the doctors, to hide the truth. Just like the

00:06:34.600 Soviet response in Chernobyl. That Soviet response in Chernobyl cost the lives of many people in the

00:06:41.080 Soviet Union, especially in Ukraine, where Chernobyl is. But ultimately, the costs of that decision were

00:06:46.040 borne by the Soviet Union. The massive human cost, the economic cost. Watch that miniseries on HBO.

00:06:53.080 Read some history about it. I believe Chernobyl, as much as Reagan's arms build up, or the Soviet-Afghan

00:06:57.880 War is what brought down the USSR. But this Chinese virus is different. The bulk of the cost is being borne,

00:07:04.520 by the rest of the world, in terms of human life and prosperity. Chernobyl didn't put a single

00:07:10.200 Canadian or American or Italian in the hospital or in the morgue. Chernobyl didn't shut down businesses

00:07:15.960 across the world, just in the USSR. So as our guest yesterday and former lawyer to Prime Minister

00:07:23.160 Stephen Harper, Manny Montenegrino, suggested, can we sue China? Can you sue a country? Now, I haven't

00:07:31.320 practiced law in years, and I've never practiced international law of that sort. There's a lot of

00:07:35.720 international law, actually. But it depends on treaties. Immigration treaties, trade treaties,

00:07:41.240 tax treaties. But it's countries agreeing to be bound by rules that they believe are in their own

00:07:45.720 interest. And if there is a dispute, the countries agreed in advance to be bound by some sort of

00:07:50.360 international judges, like trade dispute panels. The countries have to agree to accept a loss in those

00:07:56.360 tribunals. Otherwise, what's the point? So sometimes the mighty United States itself would

00:08:00.760 lose a trade dispute and would accept losing because they agreed in advance to the process,

00:08:05.640 and they signed the treaty, and they believe that treaty and the process is fair enough. And if they

00:08:09.560 stop feeling that way, they can get out of the treaty. But my point is international law depends

00:08:13.640 on countries willingly submitting to outside decisions that might go against them, because there's

00:08:18.440 no international police force. There's no way of enforcing a ruling on a country that doesn't accept it.

00:08:23.240 Just the other week, the so-called International Criminal Court announced they were going to

00:08:28.120 investigate the United States for war crimes in Afghanistan. The obvious question is, yeah,

00:08:32.600 you and what army? Because the International Criminal Court isn't a real thing. Here's a colorful map of

00:08:39.560 the countries who have ratified the treaty that sets it up. Green are the countries that have ratified it.

00:08:45.640 About 120 countries have ratified it, but you'll notice not the United States or Russia or China or

00:08:51.880 India or Saudi Arabia, just to name a few countries. So my point is, yeah, good luck with that, guys.

00:08:57.720 And that's my point. How could you even sue a foreign country? There's no global court. China

00:09:02.440 already controls much of the United Nations, like the World Health Organization. China has a veto on

00:09:07.160 the United Nations Security Council. How are you going to sue China? Where? Not in their own courts,

00:09:11.720 of course. China's courts are not independent. They are agents of the Communist Party. Remember,

00:09:16.040 those are the people who themselves participated in the doctor silencing. And then there's the concept,

00:09:21.320 and I think it's generally a good one, of sovereign immunity. Sort of like diplomatic

00:09:26.680 immunity, but applies to whole countries. You can't just sue a country you don't like.

00:09:31.000 We generally accept that we handle other countries through diplomacy or, God forbid, war, not in courtrooms.

00:09:38.840 For some of the reasons I mentioned above, we can put sanctions on other countries. We can even do what

00:09:43.320 Trump is so good at using the bully pulpit, using Twitter to push and cajole and morally punish

00:09:50.840 in a way other countries simply, you know, through his rhetoric. I think Trump does that very well.

00:09:55.400 Don't deny that it works. So back to the big question today. Can we sue China?

00:10:01.160 If they were a company, the answer would obviously be yes. At the very least, they were negligent with

00:10:06.120 this virus. They were not careful enough. They did not live up to their duty of care,

00:10:10.440 as lawyers would say. They were willfully blind to the risks. They had an obligation to take

00:10:14.840 reasonable precautions. They did not. But it's much more than just negligence. It was

00:10:21.240 intentional. When you get into a car accident because of careless driving, because you were

00:10:26.440 playing with the radio or something, you generally didn't take positive steps to crash into someone

00:10:32.840 else. You were just foolish or careless. But China went beyond an accident when it deliberately covered

00:10:39.880 up the virus and deliberately took steps to silence the conscientious doctors of Wuhan who were trying

00:10:44.920 to ring the alarm. There were many good people in Wuhan trying to help, trying to stop the virus,

00:10:49.560 trying to ask questions, to learn more, to help, to warn others. The Chinese government deliberately

00:10:53.480 and actively shut them down. That wasn't an accident or carelessness like most car accidents.

00:10:58.840 Using the car crash analogy, that's not dozing off at the wheel or even driving drunk.

00:11:05.320 That's taking your car and deliberately ramming it into people to shut them up. The arrest of China

00:11:11.080 literally, the government of China literally arrested people who were trying to warn us.

00:11:17.080 What if it were a private company that did that? Either negligently or willfully? Well,

00:11:23.160 we have lots of precedents. One of them, a big one, is the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with the

00:11:31.400 cigarette companies. There had been a lot of individual lawsuits by states and the feds against

00:11:36.120 cigarette companies for years. What did those companies know about the health effects? What

00:11:41.880 did they hide? What was important? What wasn't? What did they cover up? Did they lie? In 1998,

00:11:48.600 Bill Clinton and the US states came to terms. A 25-year, $200 billion settlement. $200 billion.

00:11:56.520 The companies weren't shut down. The payment is over time. Obviously, if it weren't, the companies

00:12:03.640 wouldn't have been able to pay. They'd just have all gone bankrupt. So it's an extended period

00:12:08.920 payment. The payment period, you could call it a massive tax increase, I guess, because that's pretty

00:12:13.480 much what it is. But it was, at least legally, compensation for past conduct about health.

00:12:19.640 There were also agreements about not selling smokes to kids. But look, it's a fact. Since the 1960s,

00:12:25.640 the Surgeon General had warned against smoking. No one alive in America or Canada doesn't know that

00:12:30.680 smoking's bad for you. Everyone knows the risks and everyone chose to smoke anyways. But still,

00:12:35.880 the companies made a huge settlement. $200 billion. That's a fifth of a trillion dollars. Now,

00:12:41.560 smoking is a choice. It's not foisted on you. There are very few public places anymore where

00:12:45.480 you encounter smoke if you don't want to. So it was all voluntarily. Anyone who got sick from

00:12:51.880 smoking pretty much did so consensually. Just like anyone who gets fat from eating cheesecake or gets

00:12:57.240 drunk from drinking liquor. You really weren't tricked or trapped or surprised. You really can't

00:13:02.200 sue the fork makers that you used that fork for the cheesecake or the shot glass that you used to

00:13:08.120 drink the liquor. Unlike the virus, there was no voluntariness there. There was no

00:13:14.280 joint negligence, as a lawyer would say. We're not partially to blame for contracting this virus.

00:13:21.080 They did this to us. They, the Chinese government, by covering it up, by lying,

00:13:24.280 by letting their people travel around the world, by arresting the whistleblowers. And don't get me

00:13:28.040 started if the virus itself was a Chinese creation, but we don't know that. But what we do know is

00:13:33.400 surely enough. But what should we do about it? Before he was president, Donald Trump mused about

00:13:39.080 offsetting Chinese industrial espionage against America's national debt. As you know, America has

00:13:46.440 borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars from China. America owes that money to China. But then China went

00:13:52.280 and stole hundreds of billions of dollars worth of intellectual and industrial secrets from America.

00:13:57.240 Trump's suggestion was, well, let's call it even. Right off the debt. And that's, you know,

00:14:02.920 because you stole stuff from it. That's mainly posturing and rhetorical. But it made a point.

00:14:09.320 OK, but what about now? The shutdown, and we don't know how long this shutdown is going to go on for, has

00:14:14.600 already knocked trillions of dollars out of the stock market. That means anyone who has a retirement plan,

00:14:19.720 a pension plan just got poorer. And we haven't even seen the economic devastation from the layoffs,

00:14:24.360 from restaurants and movie theaters and amusement parks and the travel industry, tourism. I flew

00:14:28.680 from Toronto to Calgary and back the other week. And the plane was just over the weekend, actually,

00:14:33.320 the plane was three quarters empty. Think of all the little companies who support just that one

00:14:39.400 industry, travel. We're absolutely going to be heading into a recession because China lied and covered up the

00:14:44.520 risk. So we can, can we sue for our damages? Well, there have been lawsuits against countries before.

00:14:51.880 Just last month, lawyers here in Canada filed a lawsuit against Iran for shooting down that

00:14:59.080 passenger plane this year. They're suing for 1.5 billion Canadian dollars. Let me quote from the story.

00:15:05.720 The suit names Iran, its supreme leader, the elite revolutionary guards and others as defendants.

00:15:11.240 Iran admitted its missiles down the Ukrainian airliner by mistake on January 8th, killing all 176 people

00:15:18.280 aboard, including 57 Canadians. The lead plaintiff in the case is anonymous, primarily, preliminarily

00:15:25.080 identified as John Doe and described as immediate family to a victim identified as Jack Doe. So you

00:15:32.520 can imagine a lawsuit filed on behalf of anyone who got ill from the virus or the family of someone who died

00:15:38.200 from the virus because of that Chinese virus. And look at this. Jonah Arnold is co-lead counsel with his

00:15:45.400 father, Mark Arnold, who has represented clients in several suits against Iran, including a 2017

00:15:51.000 appeal decision that led to seizure of some Iranian assets in Canada. Okay, so hang on. How did that

00:15:56.840 work? How did those victims of terrorism get a ruling, a judgment, and then actually use it to seize

00:16:03.160 Iranian assets? What about that sovereign immunity we talked about? Well, that's fairly new here.

00:16:09.880 There's a change that was brought in by Stephen Harper that Justin Trudeau has not managed to repeal

00:16:14.680 yet. And we quote, foreign states are not typically within the jurisdiction of Canadian courts. A 2012

00:16:20.520 Canadian law limited that immunity for countries Ottawa lists as foreign state supporters of terrorism,

00:16:26.920 currently Iran and Syria. So that was the wrinkle there. Iran is liable in Canadian courts for terrorist

00:16:34.360 acts because they are a terrorist state. And look at this story here. Sudan says it has signed a deal

00:16:41.320 to settle claims related to the bombing of the USS Cole 20 years ago, a move that could end lawsuits

00:16:46.840 filed by victims and their families, and also improve Sudan's chances of getting off the U.S. list of

00:16:52.040 state-sponsored terrorism. Sudan's transitional government has made it a priority to get off that

00:16:58.280 punitive list since it took charge last spring. So that was 20 years ago, the USS Cole. And Sudan,

00:17:05.240 of course, is a terrorist state. There were some technical problems with the lawsuit. I won't get

00:17:09.480 into them. American courts said the lawsuit had to be served on the Sudanese government in Sudan,

00:17:14.600 not just their embassy in America. But nonetheless, the new government wants to clear it up and get back

00:17:20.760 in America's good books. Another U.S. judge awarded the victims about a third of a billion dollars.

00:17:26.280 They want to pay it and get over it. About a dozen years ago, I don't know if you remember,

00:17:32.200 Muammar Gaddafi paid out $10 million each to the victims of his terrorism, a bombing of a nightclub,

00:17:38.760 bombing of a passenger jet over Lockerbie. Now, I'm not an expert in suing sovereign states. Very

00:17:46.040 unique area of law. You can sue, I guess. You can even win a judgment. The hard part is collecting the

00:17:52.200 money. You could seize assets in Canada or America, but not diplomatic assets, remember. And again,

00:17:59.320 it's one thing to have a piece of paper that says a foreign entity wronged you and owes you millions

00:18:02.600 or billions of dollars or a trillion dollars, but now try to collect. Even Canadian American

00:18:07.640 judges will be very careful not to violate the concept of sovereign immunity because that's our

00:18:11.800 law. And of course, we need to protect our Canadian property around the world, too. We wouldn't

00:18:17.720 want foreign litigants suing our government and collecting against Canadian government assets

00:18:23.080 overseas. So there is a precedent to collect against governments. The Iran case, but mainly if my cursory

00:18:30.120 review of these few cases is accurate, it's only when the government on the other side agrees to finally

00:18:36.280 pay up. Usually, like all of international law, it's like what Stalin said about the pope. When the pope

00:18:43.880 expressed in a political opinion, Stalin said, how many divisions does the pope have? As in military

00:18:49.800 divisions, you and me might say, you and what army? You will not likely collect a judgment against China

00:18:58.200 for inflicting the virus on the world, even though they certainly seem to be negligent or worse,

00:19:02.680 probably criminal, because they're a country, not a company, not an individual. They don't, on the face of

00:19:08.120 it, meet the test of being a terrorist supporting country like Iran and Sudan and Afghanistan was.

00:19:15.080 And when Trump joked about setting off China's stolen intellectual property from American debt,

00:19:19.080 he was speaking dramatically, not literally. But what if, what if an American court issued a trillion

00:19:25.080 dollar judgment against China and that judgment was respected and respectable, but maybe not enforceable?

00:19:32.360 Is it still worth doing? Maybe. Because although enforcing the judgment against a country wouldn't

00:19:41.960 be like we didn't enforce a judgment against a debtor in Canada, you can't, you have a debt,

00:19:47.320 someone owes you money in Canada, you seize his car, you foreclose on his house, you garnish his wages

00:19:51.480 from his employer. While getting a trillion dollars for China couldn't be done forcibly like that,

00:19:57.320 against their will, it could happen like it happened with Muammar Gaddafi of Libya,

00:20:02.440 or how Sudan is looking to make things right. If there was a trillion dollar judgment against China,

00:20:07.640 China could certainly afford to pay it. They have trillions of dollars in foreign currency reserves.

00:20:12.440 In fact, China is probably the only country in the world that could pay for it in cash.

00:20:16.360 And if a handful of tobacco companies could pay a fifth of a trillion dollars on a payment plan,

00:20:21.720 China could be put on a payment plan too for trillions. So how would that work?

00:20:27.560 Well, China wants things from the West that they have simply been given

00:20:31.560 historically, out of naivete or out of goodwill, access to our markets, access to international

00:20:38.120 treaties and courtesies like World Trade Organization, participation in things like the G20

00:20:43.560 summits, a seat on the UN Security Council, participation in the Olympics, participation in many

00:20:48.760 things that are soft, that are voluntary, because they're part of the brotherhood of nations. But

00:20:53.480 their misconduct of these past few months shows they're not acting in good faith.

00:20:58.120 So why should they be given those privileges? Why should they be treated any better than any rogue

00:21:03.400 states? Iran and Sudan are awful places, but when did they ever kill thousands of Americans and

00:21:09.720 Canadians, as is likely going to happen, and cost trillions of dollars as is happening? China is beyond

00:21:14.920 negligent. This goes to intentionality. It's positively criminal what they did. It was willful

00:21:20.440 what they did. They hid the facts. China damaged all of us as individuals, some more than others.

00:21:28.360 China should pay those reparations. Reparations, that's the word. Like Germany paid reparations to

00:21:33.960 Israel after the Holocaust. Like descendants of American slaves seek reparations. And many democratic

00:21:39.400 politicians in America agree, by the way. Why not Chinese reparations? Sue in court, pass a law,

00:21:44.520 and wait to collect. Maybe China needs sanctions on them first. Maybe that'll be bartered away.

00:21:51.480 Maybe China needs to be kicked out of polite society first. Maybe it needs an adjustment.

00:21:55.400 The Soviet Union wasn't invited into the G7 until it became a democracy. And then after

00:22:01.160 Putin became authoritarian, he was kicked out of what was called the G8.

00:22:04.280 Why is China in the G20? Why is China in anything, let alone in our technology, in our media,

00:22:13.960 seeking to build our 5G cell phone systems? Reparations. If America did this grievous harm

00:22:19.960 to any other country in the world, America would pay damages. There are a dozen cases of such reparations

00:22:26.040 for American negligence around the world. It's not even rare. It's rare for China because no one has ever

00:22:31.480 stood up to them before. Maybe it's time now. Stay with us for more on this with Joel Pollack.

00:22:50.920 I mean, look, this is just coming back to where this conversation started after the press conference.

00:22:55.400 I hear what Sanjay is saying about, uh, Tony Fauci giving, you know, a little bit more wiggle room

00:23:00.760 than, than others. But if you look at the big picture, this was remarkable from the president

00:23:06.840 of the United States. This is a nonpartisan. This is, um, an important thing to note, uh, and to

00:23:13.160 applaud from an American standpoint, from an, from a human standpoint. He is, um, being the kind of

00:23:21.000 leader that people need, at least in tone today and yesterday, in tone that people need and want

00:23:27.800 and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty. There you have it, Dana Bash of CNN, her last name

00:23:37.400 Bash. It's almost like Shakespeare would say, what's in a name? She bashes Trump every day, but look at

00:23:44.520 her there. And she went on in that vein for quite some time saying, the president has risen to the

00:23:49.800 occasion and is a uniting Americans and giving people that feeling that he's in charge and doing

00:23:55.640 the right thing. It's almost like it's opposite day to hear that from CNN. Well, joining us now

00:24:01.480 via Skype from his home in the Los Angeles area is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor at large

00:24:06.920 at Breitbart.com. I have to say, first it was Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, then Andrew Cuomo,

00:24:13.480 the governor of New York, two very democratic states, now Dana Bash.

00:24:16.920 These people do not praise Donald Trump easily or lightly, yet all three of them have.

00:24:25.800 Right. And it's not just the praise that any president would get. I think there's a natural

00:24:31.080 tendency to pull together, but Democrats in the media had been moving in the opposite direction for

00:24:37.560 quite some time. In fact, the dominant theme in media coverage up until about a week ago was an

00:24:45.640 attempt to blame Donald Trump for mishandling the coronavirus outbreak, even though he imposed a

00:24:51.000 travel ban very early, even though he assembled a task force in January. Of course, they were busy

00:24:55.880 impeaching Trump in January and February, so that certainly impeded things. Try to imagine the outcry if

00:25:02.360 Donald Trump had gone on television in late January and said he had to dismiss Congress

00:25:08.440 for the sake of their own health because of a potential pandemic as they were trying to throw

00:25:14.440 him out of office. That wouldn't have gone over too well. So our political system and our media

00:25:18.840 basically made it more difficult for us to respond in a timely manner, and they continued in that vein

00:25:24.200 for many days. But then Gavin Newsom came out from California and he said, the president's done

00:25:29.000 everything we've asked him to do. Andrew Cuomo from New York acknowledged the president, but then took

00:25:33.320 a few digs at him, saying that the administration felt chaotic or had a chaotic approach. Trump then

00:25:40.120 smacked him down to some extent, and that stopped right away. That sort of commentary stopped because

00:25:50.440 the feeling was, I think, not just politically, but in terms of the spirit of the country,

00:25:57.640 this sort of fight was not necessary. We did not need governors to be rebuking

00:26:01.560 the president. We needed them to be helping. The media tried to play up Andrew Cuomo for

00:26:07.160 a day or so as the alternative national leader to Trump, and when Cuomo fell in line, that basically ended

00:26:12.440 that. By Wednesday evening, you even saw Ilhan Omar, who is an avowed opponent of the president, called very

00:26:18.760 early on for his impeachment. She's on the far radical left. She's a member of the squad.

00:26:23.240 She said that his leadership had been incredible. That is shocking to hear coming from her. She

00:26:30.040 hates Trump in her DNA. I would say she hates America. To call Trump incredible, I had not even heard that.

00:26:40.120 Yeah, she had praised the president on Wednesday evening after he announced that there would be a

00:26:47.000 moratorium on foreclosures and rental payments and extension of tax deadlines. The Trump administration

00:26:54.200 has come in with a raft of relief measures aimed directly at working Americans. This is a contrast

00:27:01.320 to the Wall Street bailout of late 2008. Now, you can argue that bailout was necessary because that was

00:27:06.600 a financial crisis. This is not a financial crisis. The banks are very healthy right now, thanks to

00:27:13.000 a decade, really, of restructuring and the level of capital reserves, economic growth, both under

00:27:18.520 Obama and especially under Trump. So everything is actually in place that needs to be in place

00:27:23.640 financially for the system to keep functioning. That's different from 2008. But also in 2008,

00:27:29.400 the Bush administration and backed by John McCain and Barack Obama went straight to Wall Street with

00:27:34.920 the bailout and offered liquidity into the financial markets. You can argue whether that was necessary or

00:27:40.360 not, but it never really made its way down to Main Street. The Trump administration is taking on ideas

00:27:46.520 from Democrats like Andrew Yang and saying, at least as an emergency measure, we're going to give cash

00:27:52.440 payments to Americans just to keep the flow of money going because a lot of people may miss paychecks.

00:27:58.760 People are worried about being able to pay their bills. Essentially, the administration has said,

00:28:01.880 we're going to put all that on hold while we recover as a country. This is nobody's fault. This is not the

00:28:06.200 result of a bad business decision. There's no moral hazard. There's no risk that we're rewarding bad behavior

00:28:12.200 by giving people money, by helping small business and so forth. This is the result of government decisions

00:28:19.000 to shut down the economy. So government is going to provide compensation. And to bring together people

00:28:24.600 like Tom Cotton on the conservative right and Ilhan Omar on the radical left, that tells you something about how this

00:28:31.160 administration is moving forward. So they are picking up more and more political support by the hour.

00:28:37.000 You know, we've we've talked before. I mean, sometimes I've used the phrase blue collar billionaire.

00:28:42.840 There's that new book, The Republican Workers Party. I think Trump understands more than most

00:28:50.520 traditional Republicans that supporting individual Americans and up here, I would say individual

00:28:57.640 Canadians is more politically successful and in the end, maybe more a smarter policy than bailing out

00:29:06.200 the banks. I think that globalist worldview of the banks will take care of everything. Free trade without

00:29:11.640 any balance is I think Trump gets it as much as any Democrat does that those ideas have been somewhat

00:29:19.240 discredited either by themselves or by well, frankly, if you look at the mood in America from Bernie Sanders to

00:29:26.040 AOC, this anti-Wall Street, anti-capitalist theme, I think Trump's working around that. I think it's impressive.

00:29:34.200 I think it's politically smart and I think it's probably necessary.

00:29:39.240 It is necessary. The other thing that's happening is that private sector companies, individuals,

00:29:46.760 everyone's stepping forward to figure out what they can do to help. The delivery services

00:29:50.680 that people use to pick up lunch when they're at the office, those are now essential lifelines to

00:29:58.120 people who cannot get to the grocery store or are afraid to leave their homes. The delivery services

00:30:03.800 are innovating. They're bringing food to people. You're looking at medicine, pharmaceutical companies

00:30:09.720 that are coming up with vaccines and alternative off-label treatments. There are all kinds of internet

00:30:15.160 teleconferencing companies. Zoom, for example, has seen a massive increase in interest and use over

00:30:22.120 the last couple of weeks. People are working from home using all these new applications. So there are

00:30:26.760 many industries that are suffering. I saw an estimate that said upwards of 4 million jobs in the American

00:30:32.040 travel industry could be lost as a result of all these quarantines depending on how long they go. But

00:30:37.080 you're also seeing new jobs created in other industries. There's heavy demand for cleaners right now,

00:30:42.120 people who can clean an office, people who can clean a home, can disinfect a surface. Very, very high

00:30:48.200 demand. There's also incredible demand for people who specialize in handling infectious disease. I

00:30:54.760 happened to be on the New England Journal of Medicine website last night and a widget came up

00:30:59.080 advertising jobs and everybody's looking for infectious disease specialists. There are people putting

00:31:04.120 their minds to work on trying to manufacture ventilators as fast as they possibly can to deal with an

00:31:10.920 expected influx into hospitals. So there's this tremendous flourishing of private sector activity

00:31:16.280 that's being coordinated with the government that's being done in public-private partnerships and is

00:31:21.960 being done in a very positive spirit. This is not the private industry trying to make a buck off a national

00:31:27.960 crisis. This is everybody stepping up in their jobs to do what they can to help one another in a time when

00:31:34.920 we can't really contact one another too directly. You go to the grocery store, you see a few neighbors,

00:31:39.720 take a walk around the block or whatever. That's about the extent of it. So it's presenting new

00:31:45.320 challenges, but it's fortunate in a way that we have existing infrastructure and technology that we

00:31:51.160 can use to build out to sustain us for as long as we need to. The only challenge really is whether the

00:31:57.240 tech infrastructure holds up and Ajit Pai, the Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications

00:32:02.760 Commission has started a project to strengthen the nation's broadband to make sure that there's not

00:32:09.000 too much strain put on the system to build the capacity of the system because of course the

00:32:13.240 internet's become so much more essential for the functioning of the country. I heard today that Netflix

00:32:19.800 is being asked or is asking consumers to stream just a little bit less because you want people to be

00:32:26.200 able to work without interruption. So your entertainment at home might have to be curtailed

00:32:32.040 a little bit. You might not be able to binge watch that episode of Game of Thrones right now, maybe wait

00:32:37.640 till later at night when people aren't busy working and using the internet for vital services. So you're

00:32:42.520 seeing everybody pull together, everybody make sacrifices. And as that happens, the president's

00:32:48.200 leadership is becoming more important because he's in a sense the conductor. He's not playing any musical

00:32:53.720 instruments, but he's there with the baton making sure that everybody can do their best. And you're

00:32:59.560 seeing a symphony, a kind of harmony of American efforts come together. You know, you're so right.

00:33:05.640 And every day I see Trump making a new announcement of which CEOs he was talking to. And you know, Trump,

00:33:14.120 people make fun of him, people criticize him, but you can see when he's buttering someone up and you

00:33:20.280 can see when he's disparaging someone. And he uses those very simple and blunt instruments to get

00:33:26.360 what he wants. And I mean, he is the ultimate deal maker. He wrote a book, The Art of the Deal. He loves

00:33:31.880 making deals. And I actually think he is the best fit every time there's a new industry group, the truckers,

00:33:40.360 the grocery stores. Yesterday he was getting all the TV bosses to agree to run tons and tons of public

00:33:50.200 health ads for free. And maybe they would have on their own, but he pressed them. And you know that he

00:33:57.480 is a tougher negotiator than say Barack Obama. You just know it. And it's a pleasure to watch him

00:34:06.120 twist the arms of all these corporate CEOs day after day because you know he's getting something

00:34:11.480 out of him. And maybe they would have given it voluntarily. But when Trump calls and says,

00:34:15.800 be on my phone call, they come and he gets what he wants. I think it's quite impressive to watch.

00:34:23.080 It is impressive. I think that Obama had other skills. I'm not sure that any other president would

00:34:29.320 have had the skill set necessary for this crisis. And you're right. We've seen the media go from

00:34:34.360 telling us that Trump didn't have the skills to manage this to suddenly realizing that he does.

00:34:39.560 And you see that especially with regard to the confrontation with China. You know,

00:34:44.200 the Chinese government's trying to circulate a rumor, a conspiracy theory that the American military

00:34:49.160 created coronavirus. And Trump, who initially was simply calling it coronavirus, has now started

00:34:54.440 calling it the Chinese virus. And our media initially accused him of racism, but he explained

00:35:00.120 twice at his press briefings. The reason he did that had nothing to do with prejudice whatsoever.

00:35:05.640 He did it as a response to China so that people know where the disease originated. It's nobody's

00:35:11.480 fault, really, that this virus came into being. But Trump wants people to know that it started in

00:35:18.760 China and that China's efforts to deflect responsibility to the United States are not going to succeed.

00:35:24.200 Yeah. And that's exactly that style. He does tit for tat. If someone is nice to him,

00:35:31.320 he's super easy. He's over nice when someone does something for him. And so you can tell when he's

00:35:39.720 hyping praise on these business leaders, you can tell he got something from them. But the minute

00:35:44.680 someone shoots at him, it's like that old Peanuts cartoon where, you know, Charlie Brown would throw

00:35:54.040 one snowball and Lucy would throw back five. That's Trump's style is massive retaliation. So some

00:36:01.880 Chinese diplomat, no name, nobody tweets in English, a conspiracy theory that the US military does this,

00:36:10.440 you're darn straight. Trump is going to repeat endlessly Chinese virus because that's how Trump

00:36:16.600 plays. You work with him, you get ahead. And you need a tough guy like that if you've got a tough

00:36:20.920 problem like this. Yeah. And there's another point about that worth emphasizing. If Trump had been the

00:36:29.320 kind of person who wilts at an accusation of racism, he never would have followed through with the travel

00:36:34.760 ban. When he imposed the travel ban with China, Joe Biden called it racist and xenophobic. Now,

00:36:42.680 most people don't want to be called racist and xenophobic. And most Republicans bend over backwards to

00:36:50.040 show that they're not because they accept implicitly the media's and the Democrats assumption that if you

00:36:56.840 are for free markets and small government, you must be somehow racist because somehow that hurts people of

00:37:02.280 color or whatever. Trump doesn't care. Trump does not care about being called a racist. He is called

00:37:07.640 a racist all the time and he perseveres nonetheless. Had he been the kind of president who backs down

00:37:16.520 when accused of bigotry or xenophobia, he never would have insisted on that travel ban. And as a result,

00:37:23.880 there would have been many more travelers from China, from Europe also, coming into the country and

00:37:30.440 spreading this virus unintentionally. But it would have been a much bigger problem. So it tells you

00:37:35.480 there's a real cost in human lives to false accusations of racism and xenophobia. And you

00:37:42.520 needed a president who would stand up to that sort of false accusation. Otherwise, people would have died

00:37:48.600 and we would have lost a lot of time. We would have been in a much worse state than we are had he backed

00:37:55.560 down. Now, even saying that, I think the resistance he did get from people over the policy did cause him

00:38:02.760 to take stock and perhaps see if this could be managed some other way. But certainly having

00:38:09.480 someone there who would not back down again, and they were saying this was xenophobia. This was casting

00:38:14.920 aspersions on Chinese Americans. Somehow it had nothing to do with that. But that's what the opposition

00:38:19.720 were saying. That's what some public health experts were saying. We don't want to stigmatize people

00:38:23.720 and so forth. The WHO was saying it. Trump stood up to that. You needed someone who

00:38:27.960 is not going to be phased by false accusations of racism. There's a human cost to those false

00:38:33.400 accusations, not just in terms of the person who's falsely accused. But you may miss an opportunity to

00:38:38.760 do what's right in terms of public policy if you're afraid of offending people. Trump is not afraid to

00:38:43.800 offend people. His job is to keep us safe. Yeah. Well, I should tell you, Joel, I have made a personal

00:38:49.640 project of tracking all the Chinese flights into Canada, which are still coming in, by the way,

00:38:55.480 at least five a day between Vancouver and Toronto. In fact, there's another flight from Shanghai

00:39:01.160 that's about to land in Toronto as you and I conduct this interview. So I don't know what Trudeau is

00:39:06.280 worried about. Maybe he's worried about being called racist. Maybe he just believes so deeply in open

00:39:10.760 borders. It's shocking to me. Let me ask you one last question. I appreciate your time.

00:39:14.200 I see, I mean, I've been thinking, yesterday we had a guest on, former Canadian, very senior lawyer,

00:39:22.440 who talked about suing China. Now, obviously, top priority is public health and the economy. But

00:39:32.760 the idea of suing a foreign sovereign nation is very difficult to do. And traditionally, it's only done

00:39:39.000 to terrorist states, Iran, Sudan, because otherwise sovereign immunity protects those foreign states,

00:39:45.080 as it probably should. But there was a $200 billion tobacco settlement with American companies

00:39:52.840 for maybe covering up health records of tobacco. Do you think that whether it's by lawsuit or reparations

00:40:02.200 or political demands that America and the West will ever get some sort of compensation, not for the

00:40:09.320 virus itself, which you correctly point out probably emerged naturally, but for the cover-up and the delay

00:40:17.000 and the disinformation from the Chinese government that allowed that virus to propagate very widely? Do you

00:40:24.120 think that's something that would or should be followed through on, whether it's three, six, nine,

00:40:31.400 12 months from now? I don't see how it's productive. I think that reparations, when you're trying to

00:40:39.800 overcome an international crisis, can simply build up resentment. We saw that, of course, 100 years ago

00:40:46.360 with the Treaty of Versailles. It certainly didn't help prevent the next war. I think that

00:40:52.040 China is its own worst enemy and that the best way to punish China is already happening. People are

00:40:59.960 pulling companies out of China. They're pulling production out of China. We are pulling our

00:41:05.000 pharmaceutical industry out of China. The United States realizes now that we cannot rely on China

00:41:11.960 for ingredients in essential medicines. We are pulling production back. It's going to be a very

00:41:17.880 painful process for the Chinese. That is the cost they are paying for failing to protect the world's

00:41:24.120 supply lines. The supply chain of the world depends on China not allowing things like this to happen.

00:41:29.560 You want production in China to be inexpensive, not costly. This is the single greatest cost

00:41:35.320 that the world has absorbed since the Second World War. And it's a punishment in itself to China. I

00:41:44.120 don't see how making China pay anything would help. It'll just exacerbate tensions. We still

00:41:49.400 need to cooperate with them. This was a legitimate objection, one of the few, but one of the legitimate

00:41:55.000 objections to the travel ban back in January was we don't want to antagonize the Chinese. We still

00:41:59.880 need their data to fight the virus. We hadn't sequenced the genome of the coronavirus RNA. We needed to know

00:42:07.160 what was in the virus in order to start working on a vaccine. You can't do that if the Chinese

00:42:11.000 government's not sharing data with you. So you still need cooperation. The Chinese scientists

00:42:16.440 have given pretty good data to American scientists. It's one of the reasons we knew about some of the

00:42:21.480 early mitigation measures. All of these things are important. I think that there's a lot of

00:42:25.640 casting about for some, not a scapegoat so much, but just a kind of media narrative. A lot of people

00:42:32.040 want to keep doing what they were doing before. And a lot of that is involved or tied up in political

00:42:37.400 arguments. I get that. I'm tied up in some of them. Some of them are important. But

00:42:42.040 we have to focus on what exactly the problem is with China. China is not trying to destroy the

00:42:49.560 rest of the world. China wants to dominate the world. And the big penalty they're going to pay

00:42:54.360 is production moving out of China. It's not really reparations. It's in a sense the opposite. We're

00:43:00.520 denying them money. We're denying them prosperity rather than demanding that they pay us because of the

00:43:06.840 way they mismanaged this outbreak. There's all kinds of stories coming out now about how they

00:43:10.840 could have isolated it. They could have confined it. People involved in passing information of

00:43:15.240 the chain were punished. By the way, that's been a feature of the Chinese system since the Great

00:43:19.400 Leap Forward in the 1950s, when Mao tried to accelerate agricultural production and plunge his...

00:43:24.120 Sorry, it was steel production. And he plunged his country into famine because he was forcing farmers

00:43:28.440 to turn their steel implements into steel nuggets or metal nuggets that were supposed to boost

00:43:34.680 steel production but ended up starving the countryside. Tens of millions of people died.

00:43:39.320 And the information never got to Mao. The Chinese Communist Party planted crops along

00:43:44.200 the train tracks so that when he traveled through China, all he saw were fertile fields. And that's

00:43:49.480 how China has worked. That's why China has suffered famine after famine over the years. Not recently,

00:43:54.920 thankfully. But over the decades, the Chinese Communist Party, because of the way it operates, has

00:43:59.640 imposed incredible hardship on its people. And this coronavirus outbreak emphasizes the point that

00:44:07.400 free societies, although they have certain vulnerabilities, free societies do better at

00:44:13.080 adjusting and innovating to challenges. And China's biggest punishment is to continue running under

00:44:19.000 Communist Party leadership.

00:44:20.280 Yeah. Joel, I really learned so much from you. Let me ask one last question to you. I don't know if you

00:44:25.720 watched HBO's series Chernobyl. Have you watched that at all? You probably don't have time for TV. I

00:44:34.440 watched it. I know of it. I haven't watched it, but I know about the series.

00:44:38.360 I only watched it because I was stuck on planes for so long for a while there. And I found it riveting,

00:44:44.360 even though I knew how the story ended. It was fairly historically accurate, but it impressed on me

00:44:49.640 just what you're saying. The deception, the scapegoating, the hiding the truth, the saving face. If you

00:44:57.400 think saving face was important for Russian and Ukrainian communists 40 years ago, 30 years ago,

00:45:05.320 imagine how important it is for Chinese communists who have that extra sort of Confucian

00:45:11.320 face saving instinct. I believe, having had my memory refreshed by what happened in Chernobyl by this

00:45:21.480 fairly accurate miniseries, that more than any other thing, perhaps more than Reagan's arms build up,

00:45:27.320 perhaps more than the war in Afghanistan. I truly believe that Chernobyl is what undid the former Soviet

00:45:33.960 Union. Do you think it's possible or even likely that this disaster could be the undoing of Chinese

00:45:41.720 communism? I don't think so. I don't think China is a country that is historically prone to

00:45:53.560 free and democratic governance. If you read the Analects of Confucius, which, you know, I happen to do

00:46:01.560 time to time. No, I took a course in it in college, one of the benefits of the Harvard core curriculum.

00:46:09.480 You know, you had to learn from a variety of sources. And so I chose actually at the time,

00:46:15.960 in the late 90s, to study Chinese philosophy just on a lark. And the central preoccupation of Confucian

00:46:24.840 philosophy is governing a society, how to govern a society.

00:46:29.400 And given the size of China, even thousands of years ago, which was a vast, densely populated place,

00:46:38.440 the difficulty of managing that society is absolutely paramount in the minds of the people,

00:46:46.120 the thought leaders in that society. It's part of Chinese culture, the task of governing.

00:46:50.520 And it's not how we in the West think about our lives. You know, if you think about the Judeo-Christian

00:46:56.120 ethic, the individual has an inherent integrity that it doesn't have in any other system of philosophy.

00:47:04.760 The central preoccupation of our lives is how we each can live the best life, whether that's morally

00:47:11.240 the best, economically the best, sort of the happiest life, whatever it is. We're trying to

00:47:17.800 make our own lives as good as they possibly can be, again, morally or hedonistically or whatever.

00:47:24.600 In China, the central philosophical occupation is not how to be happy or how to be good,

00:47:28.760 but how to govern. And I first was exposed to that also in college when

00:47:34.440 Chinese environmental problems started becoming a topic of conversation. And we had a Chinese

00:47:39.080 environmental official visiting campus, and we had an opportunity to ask him questions, which is,

00:47:43.560 you know, not something that happens too often in China that you get to ask an official,

00:47:47.720 a high official, a direct question. So we used that opportunity. And I remember asking him,

00:47:51.720 what are you doing about all this local pollution in China? Thinking that his response would be

00:47:56.200 something like, well, we're going to clean it up. We're going to adopt new methods of production.

00:48:02.120 We're trying to mitigate some. No, that's not what he said at all. He said,

00:48:05.480 we're going to punish those responsible. That is a cultural reaction. It's not just a communist.

00:48:11.400 There's an element of communism in that too, of course. But China is preoccupied with governing.

00:48:17.240 It's also an intensely nationalistic society, even though it's run by the communist party.

00:48:21.480 There's a nationalism with that communism. And I just can't see Chinese society disintegrating.

00:48:27.000 If anything, China will invent some sort of national myth about how it's the unique ingenuity

00:48:33.000 of the Chinese people acting collectively that enabled the world to overcome this disease.

00:48:38.200 The history of how this escaped China and went everywhere else will be obscured.

00:48:42.760 And a couple of years from now, no one in China will remember it. And if you bring it up that way,

00:48:46.520 people will accuse you of anti-Chinese racist prejudice. They're doing that already.

00:48:50.600 So I can't see China falling apart. There's a cultural, I think, predilection in China

00:48:58.200 for governing. And by the way, it persists even in a relatively free society like Taiwan. I mean,

00:49:02.520 Taiwan's a free, open democracy and so forth. But Taiwan was able to adopt disciplines for dealing

00:49:08.520 with this disease very, very quickly. It's one of the reasons Taiwan reacted so well, so successfully.

00:49:15.240 And that's harder to replicate in a place like Italy. It's also hard in South Korea. It's hard in

00:49:22.600 Israel. It's hard in the United States. The freer the society, the more resistant people are to giving up

00:49:28.760 private personal information to being told what to do. So there's diversity within Asian cultures,

00:49:36.120 there's diversity around the world. But Chinese culture tends to emphasize that. And I think

00:49:41.160 that you're not going to see a disillusion. Contrast that to Iran. Iran is in big trouble

00:49:47.640 because the government there has been completely inept, incapable of responding. And Iran historically

00:49:55.480 also has been a monarchical society, Persian society and so forth, plus Islamic civilization

00:50:03.800 grafted onto the underlying Persian civilization. You have, in a sense, culturally a preference for

00:50:08.920 strong leadership. But you also have a pattern of revolution when the leadership is weak. And as

00:50:14.360 soon as people come out of their homes in Iran, once the quarantines are over and they need people to

00:50:18.520 go back to work, you're going to see protest. The government looks completely incapable of governing.

00:50:24.600 It failed the basic task of governance. The Iranian people now know that their leaders cannot protect

00:50:29.640 them and that their disastrous foreign policy has resulted in sanctions that have crippled

00:50:34.280 the ability of their society to sustain itself without help from the outside world. Iran is toast,

00:50:40.760 at least the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people. And China will be fine politically,

00:50:46.200 for better or for worse. There'll be lots of rivalry with the rest of the world, a lot of friction,

00:50:50.760 more so than in the past. And that may be a good thing. Iran, I think, and I don't make predictions

00:50:57.720 very successfully, but I think Iran is ripe for revolution. And we may see very dramatic changes

00:51:03.400 in the Middle East as a result of coronavirus. Wow, that's incredible. Joel, you're very generous

00:51:08.200 with your time. Thanks for letting us reach into your social distancing base camp there at your house.

00:51:14.440 Stay healthy. Stay safe. As always, we learn so much from you. Thank you so much.

00:51:20.040 All right. Thank you. And good luck to you guys up there. Thanks very much. Well, there you have it.

00:51:24.200 Our friend Joel Pollack. Isn't that very interesting? I certainly learned a lot today. Stay with us. More ahead on The Rebel.

00:51:30.680 Hey, welcome back. On my show yesterday about the Chinese coronavirus, Paul writes,

00:51:44.600 the Chinese government cares about the Chinese government and very little else. The American

00:51:48.360 government is taking action. The Trudeau liberals care about pleasing their UN globalist masters and

00:51:53.640 nothing else. It's very strange to watch Justin Trudeau. To me, the perfect comparison

00:52:01.320 is Donald Trump gets on the phone with the biggest CEOs in America of various industries, trucking,

00:52:07.000 restaurants, groceries, media, and he twists their arm until they squawk and give billions or tens of

00:52:14.760 billions of dollars worth of service or changes. He just calls them, gets it done. Trudeau, I showed you

00:52:21.800 yesterday. He literally put up a help-wanted website. Hey, guys, can you sell us some masks and gloves?

00:52:29.800 There's such a difference in leadership. It's almost like Trudeau's never done anything in his life.

00:52:34.440 Tyson writes, I think the good that will come from all this is the realization that the Chinese

00:52:38.840 government is extremely corrupt, not the Chinese people. Well, it's true. There were heroes.

00:52:44.840 There were doctors in Wuhan that believe in the Hippocratic oath. Do no harm.

00:52:49.800 Do no harm. Think about it. So there was this virus that was starting to spread like wildfire.

00:52:53.720 What does do no harm mean? Well, it means stop other people from being infected. They were arrested for

00:53:00.680 that. So obviously there were good people there. Unfortunately, the good people don't run China.

00:53:06.920 Yong Xin writes, I think that it would be more precise to call it a CPC, Communist Party of China

00:53:13.560 virus. You know that the CPC has ruled China for 70 years and the Chinese people are victims too.

00:53:17.880 Yes, I know. And as Joel Pollack pointed out, tens of millions. In fact, I heard that Mao is responsible

00:53:26.040 for close to 60 million deaths of his fellow Chinese people. So he's he's Chinese himself.

00:53:32.440 Obviously, I don't think in history there has ever been a virus that killed 50 million like that's on the

00:53:38.760 scale of of the plague, the Black Death, 50 million. And and who knows what the true numbers are now?

00:53:47.480 I follow some sort of renegade Chinese commentators who are publishing videos of giant burning pits in

00:53:56.760 China. Now, what is that? I have no idea. Are they burning bodies? That's the thing.

00:54:02.120 You can't really know because there's no free press allowed there in China. It's very dark days over

00:54:07.080 there. Hopefully we'll get through them on our side. That's it for today. Until tomorrow,

00:54:12.920 on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, stay safe,

00:54:16.200 stay healthy and let's keep fighting for freedom, too.

00:54:32.120 .

Rebel News Podcast - March 20, 2020

Should we sue the communist Chinese government for coronavirus？

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