Learn English with Stephen K. K. Bao. He is a former Navy SEAL and retired Navy SEAL who served in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Philippine Civil War. He served as the chairman of the Select Committee on China and is a regular contributor to CNN and the Wall Street Journal. He has been a member of the House Armed Services Committee and served as a foreign policy adviser to President George W. Bush and has served as an adviser to some of the most powerful men in the world, including John McCain and Hillary Clinton.
00:04:33.820But if you were to define it as the head of the Select Committee on China, explain to our audience, many of whom are not D.C. insiders, what that word means.
00:04:43.120Well, when I say that the Communist Party of China will steal the hair off your head, what I mean is,
00:04:50.000Communist Party of China controls all business in China.
00:04:53.660The Communist Party of China directs businesses to steal trade secrets, to surveil illegally American businesses, to steal intellectual property.
00:05:06.740And if Tesla, for example, opens a plant in China, as it has in part, if Tesla's not careful, China will steal all its intellectual property,
00:05:19.640and you'll start seeing a lot of counterfeit goods, a lot of little Chinese Teslas running around.
00:08:28.920Steve Cortez brought, you know, they see the Fox, the TV for stupid people finally waking up after years of Murdoch not allowing this to be on his network.
00:08:39.540By the way, Murdoch, who just bailed on, Murdoch, who just bailed on his latest catch, 60-year-old fiancee who he dumped because she had two profound and demonstrable evangelical Christian leanings.
00:08:55.160That's why she got rid of her after two weeks.
00:08:57.220He was married at one time to Wendy Dang, a Chinese Communist Party intelligence asset.
00:09:02.160He was married to her for many, many years.
00:09:26.480We do not use C.E., nor do we use B.C.E.
00:09:29.420Those are inventions of the academy of the ruling class to try to de-Christianize, to try to inflict a secular humanist worldview on the United States.
00:09:39.420And we should reject that kind of nomenclature.
00:10:25.380What's your assessment of Senator Claghorn?
00:10:27.260His great turn last night—by the way, that show on CNBC at 7 o'clock is a fantastic show.
00:10:33.640For anybody that, after we finish here at the War Room, it's absolutely fantastic, spectacular, quite frankly, for a good wrap-up of the day's news.
00:10:41.180Tell me about your thoughts on Senator Claghorn.
00:10:44.180Listen, you know, Senator Kennedy, I'll be the first to admit, is very good at turning a phrase.
00:10:50.300But he is very establishment in his thinking on a host of issues.
00:10:54.580And that's a shame, because he represents, of course, a deeply read, very patriotic state of Louisiana.
00:10:59.620He's somebody who should be much more populist in the long tradition of Louisiana politics.
00:11:04.960And he should be much more bold, because he has the electoral freedom to be bold.
00:11:08.920When it comes to China specifically, he doesn't understand that this isn't just a commercial mistake.
00:11:13.860It is certainly a business and commercial mistake, the way that we trade with China, the way that we have allowed and, in fact, incentivized and invited the Chinese Communist Party to abuse us through predatory trade practices.
00:11:27.320We need to recognize that we are in an existential battle with the Chinese Communist Party and that the CCP, in many facets of this battle, is winning, quite frankly, is winning this Cold War, this new Pacific Cold War that we're in right now.
00:11:41.960And so people like Senator Kennedy, you know, I think, again, skilled at the turn of a phrase, but somebody who doesn't really understand the crux of what is going on here.
00:11:50.060And by the way, so what should be the actionable items?
00:11:53.300You know, what should be the agenda for confronting China?
00:11:56.460In my view, to start with, there needs to be significant tariffs, not just because it makes economic sense, because we should be protecting and protectionism is not a bad word.
00:12:05.540It has been a bad word for the establishment Republican set, but it shouldn't be.
00:12:09.260We should be protecting American workers, protecting American industry.
00:12:12.360So we need protectionism, trade protectionism, to guard American workers and American industry against the predatory mercantilist practices of the CCP.
00:12:20.480So I think that is the first instance.
00:12:22.220And Trump made some important steps in this regard, but I believe we need to go much, much further on tariffs.
00:12:28.500Secondarily, we need biological war reparations.
00:12:31.780There was an epidemiological Pearl Harbor unleashed on the United States, in fact, the entire world, by the Chinese Communist Party.
00:12:38.660They knowingly, even if they didn't create the virus, and there's obviously a lot of evidence that they did, but even if they didn't, they knowingly, still the best case scenario for them is still terrible, which is that they knowingly unleashed it on the world.
00:12:51.360They got the fake imprimatur, the stamp of approval from the World Health Organization to insist to lie to the world that it was not being passed human to human in the earliest days of the virus.
00:13:02.220They owe massive reparations to the United States for that crime against the people of the United States.
00:13:08.320For starters, as a down payment on those reparations, I believe we are an incredibly indebted nation, of course.
00:13:14.220Unfortunately, this doesn't solve our debt problems, but it is a nice first step toward getting to a place of fiscal sanity.
00:13:21.580We owe a trillion dollars to the Chinese Communist Party.
00:13:23.580That trillion dollars, in my view, should be wiped away as a first down payment on the biological war reparations that the CCP owes to the people of the United States.
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00:17:01.400This is great power fights between two different views of the world, right?
00:17:11.780And what Gaffney said was so haunting, the American people are psychologically not ready for a massive military defeat in good old-fashioned combat.
00:17:19.800Not hunting bad guys in Afghanistan, not doing, you know, the three weeks it took us to get to Iraq, and then you had to deal with the insurgents.
00:17:52.240And the one way you don't have victory is you don't walk into a sucker punch.
00:17:55.560And that's where we're heading there right now.
00:17:58.480And we got to be very careful because I don't believe these guys can, as you said, maybe fight the ship.
00:18:04.220But they got, it's only 90 miles off the coast, and they are, they're armed to the teeth.
00:18:10.520And you see this envelopment they're doing, this exercises they're doing constantly.
00:18:15.080Frank Gaffney, Committee on the Present Danger of China.
00:18:17.220The reason we formed the committee, it was a committee on the present danger years ago, was to warn the American people that this was happening and why it was happening.
00:18:26.780And most importantly, your new book, The Indictment.
00:18:29.420We talk about not just Xi, the reason we're in this predicament, the reason we're in this predicament, Fox News, is because of the elites of this country, particularly the Wall Street capitalists and the technology guys in Silicon Valley.
00:18:46.140To which Sequoia Capital is a front for the Chinese Communist Party.
00:18:50.560It's the most powerful venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
00:18:53.880There's a fifth column in this country that has sold this country out and is restraining us from decoupling from the Chinese Communist Party.
00:19:02.940Not China, the Chinese Communist Party.
00:19:28.920And the Committee on the Present Danger, as you've pointed out, in the late 1970s, helped one of its members, a guy by the name of Ronald Reagan, devise a strategy that had a chance of winning without firing a shot.
00:19:49.100And he not only embraced that strategy, he ran for office as president of the United States, pledging to execute it.
00:20:05.000He was talking about rolling back what was, at that time, he was clear-eyed about it, the existential threat to freedom.
00:20:14.680And he not only got a mandate from the American people to do just that, he brought about 33 members of the Committee into his administration to execute the strategy which they did.
00:20:27.420And the rest, as they say, is history.
00:20:29.120And to today's point, we've taken the idea of a Committee on the Present Danger, applied it to China.
00:20:37.380With your help and vision, we have begun earnestly making the same sort of case the Committee did back in the 70s.
00:20:45.380To help, we pray, a new candidate to run for office seeking a mandate to take down the Soviet's successor as the existential threat to freedom of our time, namely the Chinese Communist Party.
00:21:01.640And, Steve, what I just want to underscore is your point that we can win, hopefully without fighting, if we take the fight to them using the tools in which we have strength.
00:21:18.300And, unfortunately, at the moment, it's not the United States military.
00:21:22.720It's not even probably the case that we could defeat the Chinese, but we're certainly not capable of deterring them at the moment.
00:21:32.920So we have to use these other techniques.
00:21:35.500And the Committee on the Present Danger, China, has been all about this decoupling from the get-go, particularly ending the underwriting of the CCP with our money.
00:21:46.380That means all of our money, the money that we've invested in pension funds and mutual funds and index funds and so on, that Wall Street has, through the problem of elite capture, insisted on investing massively, $3 to $6 trillion, by some estimates, in Chinese companies and, as a practical matter, the Chinese Communist Party.
00:23:13.620Because what we talk about, what's right out of the gate, Steve, is we've got to stop allowing people who are working for the Chinese Communist Party,
00:23:21.960the captured elites in political life as well as business and finance and academia and the media and so on,
00:23:29.500from being in leadership positions at a time when you can't possibly lead us to victory if you're working for the Chinese communists.
00:24:07.520I understand that from ESG to, you know, WOKE to the invasion on the southern border, lack of our sovereignty, the vaccines, all of it.
00:24:16.060And we're going to get to all of those.
00:24:16.960We're going to have the leading titles in all this.
00:24:19.460But I want to make sure people understand something.
00:24:21.240Larry Fink and his – and Ken Griffins and these oligarchs on Wall Street, the same guys that have the DEI index that are forcing the –
00:24:32.160and by the way, the companies are willing to comply with it, the same diversity, equity, inclusion crowd,
00:24:37.800the same ESG crowd, or the same people that are allied with the Chinese Communist Party and have shifted the jobs over there and made a ton of money.
00:24:48.140This is what I told Graham Allison with his big book, The Vicidities Trap, you know, Destined for War.
00:30:03.620Also, Frank, you're going to be at the Alliance for Freedom, American Alliance for Freedom, is going to be on the 21st and 22nd in Los Angeles.
00:31:18.140Remember, the purpose – and Politico – the purpose of what we do on this show is to set the path in a way that they eventually come to us.
00:36:18.520Go to BirchGold.com right now and get it totally free.
00:36:22.000The third installment is, wait for it, The Debt Trap, talking about what's going on right now with this massive fight about the debt ceiling,
00:36:31.580about now they're going to blame you, they're going to blame MAGA Republicans for the whole thing, they're going to blame me for the whole thing.
00:36:57.380The Hill newspaper's got that the debt ceiling fight with the MAGA hardcore Republicans is going to cause interest rates to go up, to get people to buy the bonds.
00:37:08.700The bonds are going to drop in face amount of value.
00:37:11.140We're going to exacerbate the bank crisis because it's always the fault of the American people.
00:37:18.620They're the ones that bring this upon us.
00:37:25.200The salt of the earth American workers are the victims of the economic pain, the economic failures that are being inflicted upon working class Americans right now.
00:37:37.260And that is why this debt ceiling showdown, it is absolutely imperative that the GOP hold the line.
00:37:44.300Now, I believe they're going to, Steve, but I also believe they're going to, at least in large part, because this audience, because the deplorables out there are going to insist on it, are going to put the pressure on through calls and emails and, if necessary, peaceful protests to make sure that this GOP majority, which was very hard fought, which we earned last November.
00:38:04.920And I know there were a lot of disappointments about last November's election.
00:38:07.720Believe me, I share in those disappointments.
00:38:09.800But there were also significant victories.
00:38:11.800And the most significant victory was taking that Speaker's gavel away from Nancy Pelosi.
00:38:17.920Now, unfortunately, a lot of that victory was effectively neutered by a lot of Republican establishment senators because they passed a budget in advance of that gavel being passed to Speaker McCarthy.
00:38:29.340So we don't have as many political weapons as we should, unfortunately, because people like Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton collaborated with Joe Biden to worsen and exacerbate the economic crisis that we're in and to politically steal away the momentum from our movement.
00:38:45.200But nonetheless, that's spilled milk at this point.
00:38:48.860What we can do is, from here forward, insist that the GOP leadership hold the line on the debt ceiling and restore fiscal sanity in this country so that we can get on the path toward reclaiming prosperity for Americans.
00:39:02.680Because right now, Steve, we are in such a terrible place economically that, according to surveys that go back three decades, 78 percent of American people do not believe their children will live a better life financially than they have lived.
00:39:18.100That is by far the worst read of all time.
00:39:22.32078 percent of Americans have no hope that their children are going to live an economically better life than they have lived.
00:39:32.660They are in despair and for valid reasons because of the reality they are living day to day, because of the stresses and anxieties that they are suffering, because of the economic pain that Washington, D.C. has inflicted.
00:39:44.580So, no, not only did they not cause it, regular Americans are the victims of this economic imbroglio.
00:40:31.060This is the individual that saw the future.
00:40:33.940In the 19th century, two thinkers saw the vision of the 20th century, Nietzsche and Pope Pius IX.
00:40:42.640One saw what modernity was going to be.
00:40:44.800The other saw modernity and said, we've got to stop this.
00:40:46.840Talk me through the syllabus of eras, sir.
00:40:48.540Yes, and by the way, I was reticent to even use this title because I have such regard for the real syllabus of eras that I don't want to seem flippant.
00:40:56.940But I do think that there is – I hope that I presented a cogent syllabus of economic errors, which are unfortunately being inflicted upon the American people right now.
00:41:04.920But regarding the real syllabus of eras, for folks out there, even if you aren't Catholic, I encourage you to read it.
00:41:10.700Because this man, Pius IX, the longest-serving pope in the history of the Catholic Church of two millennia, this man in the 1800s truly did see the future.
00:41:40.420It truly is a syllabus, meaning that it's an outline of the various eras that he sees in modernity, that he sees in the Enlightenment.
00:41:47.760And because of that, and because of my tremendous regard for Pius IX, who was known as Pio Nono – he was affectionately called by Romans Pio Nono, Pius IX – when I thought of the list of errors, the sequential errors that have led us to this place, to this economic precipice,
00:42:04.100I thought it would be useful for us to review them because if we don't know how we got here, we can't change the forward trajectory.
00:42:11.940And I believe right now that the biggest risk to the American economy is commercial real estate.
00:42:16.740And, you know, Steve, you and I talk a lot about comparisons to 2008 and 2009 and how the current situation is like that and how it's different, right?
00:42:24.680And in many ways, I think it's actually more dangerous right now.
00:46:20.340And this is my new article, The Syllabus of Economic Errors.
00:46:24.040And I titled it that, by the way, to pay homage to Pius IX, who wrote the actual syllabus of errors.
00:46:30.780If we can show chart number four, by the way, let's have a quick laugh or a smile if we can before we start to cry about the syllabus of the errors.
00:46:37.520So that's Joe Biden, of course, on the left.
00:47:05.940But nonetheless, the lockdowns, one of the economic, there were so many dire consequences that we're still dealing with, social, physical, mental, from the lockdowns.
00:47:13.800But in terms of the economic consequences of the lockdowns, the lockdowns taught a lot of individuals, by necessity, individuals and companies, both workers and employers, that they could effectively or at least effectively enough work from home.
00:47:26.520OK, so that was the first predicate of this march toward a commercial real estate crisis.
00:47:31.180We then had, in the summer of 2020, the BLM riots.
00:47:35.040We had violence and carnage all over the United States.
00:47:37.960And by the way, those same public health authorities, and I cite this in my article and give the links, those very same public health authorities who told us that for our own safety, we had to stay home, remember this, never forget this.
00:47:48.620They said, oh, but you get a hall pass.
00:48:01.600OK, so the BLM riots of 2020 created such carnage, lasting violence to this day, decimating city centers around the United States that have effectively made them into no-go zones.
00:48:12.480I was just back, Steve, in my home city of Chicago.
00:48:14.760And on a regular workday, the Chicago Loop is practically a ghost town.
00:48:18.800And the few people that you do see roaming around are generally unsavory characters, the same kind of situation in downtown San Francisco.
00:48:26.480So we taught people, by necessity, that they have to work remotely, that they can work from home.
00:48:31.000We turned the city centers into dangerous no-go zones.
00:49:24.420He engaged in absolutely exorbitant borrowing and spending with the help, with the assistance of collaborationist Republicans on Capitol Hill, particularly in the U.S. Senate.
00:49:33.820So you take this situation of an already very vulnerable commercial real estate market, particularly as it pertains to office buildings, and you throw on top of that massive amounts of inflation, inflation that was created by Joe Biden.
00:49:51.760This is a created crisis of inflation.
00:49:54.500And then what is the result from there?
00:49:56.460The result is bank failures, which we're now experiencing.
00:49:58.920So let's bring this all the way up to the present day.
00:50:01.100The Silicon Valley Bank failed for a lot of reasons, but as its depositors in tech who were suffering from the very inflation that Biden caused, as they were suffering from that inflation, as they were clamoring for cash and withdrawing their funds from the bank, the bank couldn't meet those obligations.
00:50:25.900And what is the result of this bank crisis that we are presently in?
00:50:29.400And we see a collapse in bank lending.
00:50:31.920If we can go to chart number three, this is a recent headline from Bloomberg talking about, and this is bringing it all the way to the present day, the most recent data we have.
00:50:39.800The last two weeks of March, bank lending, Steve, dropped by $105 billion, with a B, $105 billion.
00:50:48.780That is the most in history in data that goes back a half century.
00:50:55.840We have an absolute collapse in bank lending.
00:50:59.560That means that the American economy, particularly Main Street businesses, particularly smaller firms who rely on the smaller regional banks, have an absolute dearth, a desert of capital right now.
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