In this episode, we turn to strategic affairs with a look at a drone attack on a U.S. Air Force base in Virginia, and the response to it. Plus, a new report on Chinese drone overflights on the border with Mexico.
00:03:06.000No, no, no, you don't have authorization for that.
00:03:08.000They inspected one offshore vessel that was within a very close to the coast.
00:03:15.000They took it apart, couldn't find anything.
00:03:17.000But there were other offshore vessels that belonged to the Chinese that were not inspected.
00:03:22.000At the end of the day, Brian, these incursions just stopped.
00:03:25.000And Brian, Langley Air Force Base is the home of the Air Combat Command.
00:03:31.000It's also home to a very large percentage of America's F-22 stealth interceptor aircraft, a type of aircraft that Barack Obama stopped the production line of it.
00:04:08.000First of all, these were night operations, right?
00:04:11.000So you're having this happen at night.
00:04:14.000And some of these drones are as large as 20 feet long.
00:04:17.000These are not the sorts of things that civilians have access to.
00:04:21.000Now, at the end of this swarm, they did arrest one young Chinese national who had a small quadcopter that he was using to take pictures of nearby Norfolk Air Force Base.
00:04:34.000I think this guy, frankly, is a sacrificial lamb because the sort of drone he was operating and the sort of thing he was doing was not at all even remotely to the level that we saw with this action.
00:04:48.000Now, Brian, a couple of months earlier, we now find out in that Wall Street Journal article that there was a similar drone incursion into a nuclear testing range out near Las Vegas.
00:05:01.000And again, four days, nothing happened with that.
00:05:05.000Brian, since I wrote the article, I've now found out from former administration officials a couple more breaking developments that we have seen drone overflights now over the homes of the FBI agents who were investigating the drone incursions.
00:05:24.000Number one and number two, a drone was brought down just in the last few days on the border with Mexico.
00:05:32.000Now, this drone is a commercial drone that was made in China, has significant modifications to it.
00:05:40.080But this marks, I think, one of the very first times, if not the first time, that a drug and human trafficking cartel has been brought down.
00:05:48.000Now, Brian, we have the ability to bring these drones down.
00:05:51.000It's just not being used, and the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Mayorkas has only allowed two of the more sophisticated anti-drone teams to even be created and manned.
00:06:04.140And the problem is, is that it takes them so long to decide to deploy them and so long to get to the sites of these intrusions that by the time they get these special teams there, the drone incursions stop, and then they go elsewhere in the nation.
00:06:19.360So I believe 99.5% likelihood this is the People's Republic of China doing this.
00:06:25.920The only other nation state with the capability and the desire to do this would be Russia.
00:07:42.000And if there is any collateral damage, it is the Chinese's fault.
00:07:46.240It's not the fault of us for securing our airspace.
00:07:49.800And by the way, Brian, one of the things that was very disturbing to me in the Wall Street Journal article that appeared, like I said, last weekend, was that they cite this law that supposedly prevented the military from acting.
00:08:05.440And it was the – I think it was like the 2018 Aerial Defense Act or something like an Aerial Object Defense Act.
00:08:14.500And it gives to the attorney general and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security supposedly this authority to decide whether to take drones down if they pose what is called an imminent threat.
00:08:27.040Now, I may be just a retired lieutenant colonel, and maybe I wasn't paying that much attention when I went through my command and general staff college.
00:08:35.280But pretty much every military member, whether you're an officer or a noncommissioned officer, you know your chain of command.
00:08:44.420Your chain of command goes up through your officers to the secretary of defense, and eventually the last person is the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief.
00:08:52.940Nowhere in that chain of command is the attorney general or the secretary of homeland security.
00:08:57.240And I know for a fact that if you are a base commander, you have authority under Department of Defense regulations – some of them are classified depending on the base – as well as authority inherent in that position to defend your base.
00:09:14.160And if there are unknown flying objects over your base that are within very short distances to very valuable equipment or personnel, you have the inherent authority to defend your base.
00:09:27.860You don't have to seek authority from the attorney general or from the secretary of homeland security.
00:09:35.300And I think what we're seeing, Brian, is emblematic of what's happened in our government over the last couple of decades where increasingly large numbers of attorneys in government are telling people, no, you can't do this.
00:09:52.680Now, Brian, we have to cut through this.
00:09:55.560We have to allow our military members, our warriors, to be warriors and not somehow think that they need to go mother may I to a brainstorming session in the White House for 17 straight days with a bunch of attorneys saying, no, you can't act.
00:10:14.720You can't use a directed energy weapon.
00:10:17.180Maybe it will harm a civilian aircraft during Christmastime traffic.
00:10:21.500By the way, completely bogus concern, that wouldn't have happened.
00:10:28.720Now, look, I think that's very important, Chuck, what you just said.
00:10:33.500I mean, to underscore that, any of those drones could have held, you know, that collection of them could have had explosive devices, charges, some weapons within them that could have destroyed those F-22 fighters, F-22 Raptors.
00:11:01.640And so when the Biden-Harris administration heard about this, it should have been in their own self-interest to make sure that those drones were destroyed immediately to defend our government.
00:11:14.720Let me say quickly as an aside, I was just in Michigan giving a talk on national security.
00:11:22.800I know you were yesterday down in Texas.
00:11:25.100And in my remarks, I was talking about all these different Chinese threats.
00:11:31.860One of the sheriffs who was there defending his county, Oakland County, I believe, in Michigan, he said that there are so many restrictions on shooting down drones that next week he's going to defend, have to defend and protect Kamala Harris, who's campaigning in Oakland County.
00:11:53.560And later next week, Donald Trump, he said, if there are drones flying over either one of those events, his people do not have authority to shoot down those drones.
00:12:04.180So there's a kind of almost suicidal nature to how the American government is operating these days.
00:12:11.780And the sheriff thought, of course, it was nonsensical and there's some threat to either Harris or to President Trump.
00:12:20.140But that doesn't mean that our country today is operating with the kind of common sense it needs to.
00:12:26.520And so, you know, what you're seeing today, you know, make sense of what I'm describing.
00:12:34.180Well, I mean, it's it is very difficult to make sense.
00:12:38.780But I think that one of the things that we can trace it back to is if you go back to the 1990s, to the Clinton Gore administration and this whole idea of reinventing government, we did shed a lot of government employees, especially out of the Department of Defense civilian cadre.
00:12:55.820But what we did, Brian, is we hired several million people that we basically outsource more of the blue collar and more of the middle management functions to corporations.
00:13:06.260And during that time, the number of people in the federal government with advanced degrees, with with law degrees went up significantly as a share of the overall workforce.
00:13:19.560And so I think what's begun to happen to our federal workforce is we're like this muscle bound man on Venice Beach in California, you know, the these muscles on top of muscles, but they're not able to do basic tasks.
00:13:34.560They're not they're not they're not athletic. They're not able to to to to react to things.
00:13:40.360And that's what we're beginning to see is we the administrative state is increasingly bound, almost like Gulliver by the Lilliputians with the with thousands of ropes preventing action by by saying, no, you can't do that.
00:13:55.000There's rules and regulations and there's risk involved in all. It's this zero risk tolerance that we're beginning to see beginning, of course, that has spread into the military now where you have this zero defect, zero risk idea among the military officers who are supposed to be risk takers.
00:14:14.880They're supposed to understand how to take calculated risks in their jobs. And so I think that's what we're beginning to see.
00:14:21.940And of course, you put on top of that the Biden Harris attitude. They don't want to provoke anything with China, Brian, because at this point, this many days before the election, if it came out to the average American voter,
00:14:35.820that the People's Republic of China have been flying significant drones over American sensitive military installations on top of the spy balloon incident that we saw last year, I think that would that would not go well for them.
00:14:54.760Yeah, I totally agree, Chuck. Can I hold you over just for a few minutes, Chuck, on the other?
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00:16:44.520Nobody wants that more than Morning Joe, which was supposed to be and was created as sort of an island of civility and a sea of shrill voices where both sides could hash out issues they disagree on.
00:16:59.580And yet this campaign seems to be about something else.
00:17:09.780And, of course, in an America where we all come to the table of democracy as equals and we all respect each other, we can and should have vigorous debates about policy.
00:17:22.580You know, do you favor trickle-down economics or do you favor building from the bottom up in the middle out?
00:17:28.280And the contrast could not be starker between the two campaigns.
00:17:31.180However, there is something much more important at stake right now, and that's democracy itself.
00:17:36.680And the ability of us as Americans to actually enjoy the freedoms that the Constitution bestows upon us.
00:17:42.940So the thing that has not changed since Donald Trump came down that elevator, although he's gotten much better at being bad, is that Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency.
00:17:52.640Now, if you don't believe in Democrats or you don't believe the mainstream media or you don't believe Fox, that's okay.
00:17:58.080Donald Trump himself picked people to work for him at the highest reaches who know more about our national security than anybody.
00:18:05.480So when you have a General Milley or you have a General Mattis or you have a Mark Esper or you have a John Kelly, these are all men that Donald Trump picked.
00:18:13.740He picked them to beat him who are now telling us to please be careful because Donald Trump is actually using power to help himself and to hurt his enemies and is unfit.
00:18:24.480Besides the fact that he seems a little bit out of whack the last couple of months, as you can tell, that is a red flag that the people of America should pay attention to.
00:18:33.160Now, I am a political opponent of Donald Trump, so I take very seriously and I take literally his threats to hurt his political enemies because I stand against him, as does President Clinton.
00:18:42.920As I don't think we can take any more of that clip, anytime I hear that President Trump picked people to serve for him and that then they somehow turned on him, it doesn't call into question so much President Trump's judgment as the judgment of the men who swore a note to defend this Constitution and don't seem to be doing it by being in effect treasonous in their lack of fidelity to the president.
00:19:12.360And it also shows the power of the deep state before before we went to break, we had Chuck DeVore from the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
00:19:23.480Chuck's a strategic thinker of the first order, I imagine, in a next Trump administration, meaning next January.
00:19:33.800Someone like Chuck, if not Chuck himself, is going to be a senior person in a Trump administration.
00:19:39.720And he's exactly the kind of person you would need working in the Pentagon.
00:19:44.520He's worked in the Pentagon before, and President Trump needs someone like him and him again.
00:19:50.880Chuck, tell us in closing a bit about your work at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and your social media coordinates.
00:20:17.080It includes a public interest law firm that sues the federal government.
00:20:21.580So it's almost 50 people that do great work around the country.
00:20:26.220It's a real honor and a blessing to have that opportunity.
00:20:28.820I'm a senior contributor at the Federalist, so you'll find a lot of my work there.
00:20:33.540In fact, I had a piece there this morning about how if you want to see what the future of America would be like under Kamala Harris, you only have to look as far as California, because those are the policies she's going to bring with her.
00:22:03.220The piece in Epoch Times was a call to recognize the bravery of William Lai, the president of Taiwan, who was elected in January and came into office a few months later.
00:22:14.920And what William Lai has done is to call out the lies of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:22:20.440He said that really the Republic of China is the and should be the leader of China.
00:22:31.060It was the Chinese Communist Party who came years afterwards, coming to power in 1949, when the Republic of China was founded in 1912.
00:22:41.800William Lai has also just simply refused to accept the tutelage, right?
00:22:48.400The superiority or the domination of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:22:54.460And so he's an expert at political warfare.
00:22:57.100And he's chosen to call attention to the lies of the Chinese Communist Party, which too often are repeated by people in American foreign policy community and around the world.
00:23:09.960So he really is a hero for doing what he's doing.
00:23:14.280And the fact that the Chinese Communist Party recently, that is this week, conducted a military exercise joint, SOAR 2024B, against him shows that he's doing what he should be doing.
00:23:29.620He's calling attention to the lies of the Chinese Communist Party, refusing to accept them.
00:23:35.180And he's really making an appeal, Brian, although not directly.
00:23:40.080He's making an appeal for the recognition of the strategic realities of the 21st century, which is Taiwan is an independent nation.
00:23:51.380It's critically important for the global economy through chip production, as well as having a formidable economy on its own right, to say nothing of the chip production.
00:24:01.740It's a very important geostrategic space and should be a key military ally of the United States in conjunction with other allies that we have in the Indo-Pacific and partners also in the Indo-Pacific.
00:24:18.100But fundamentally, Taiwan shows what China can be.
00:24:24.040It shows that Taiwan shows that China can be a democracy.
00:24:29.580It can have a stable democratic government.
00:24:32.920And because of that, the Chinese Communist Party targets him, targets Taiwan, of course, and William Lai in particular, and his political party for ever-increasing coercive measures.
00:24:45.580And we should anticipate that those coercive measures are going to increase and that they may occur in the near term.
00:24:53.740These coercive measures are getting worse.
00:25:07.000And the mere fact that William Lai is doing these things and saying these things with Joe Biden as the president, who is not likely to come to their aid, shows just how courageous he is.
00:25:18.440But, Brad, the whole show I've been sort of assuming that President Trump is going to win.
00:25:26.140You can feel the energy on the ground.
00:25:28.040And so I'm assuming there's going to be a Trump presidency in January, and President Trump will need your vision of how to defend Taiwan in those early parts of the administration.
00:25:40.720Could you articulate over the next minute or so a beginning of such a strategy to defend Taiwan?
00:25:48.940Well, certainly, it involves having a robust conventional and nuclear deterrent on and around Taiwan.
00:25:59.900It requires reversing the neglect of the Biden administration for the U.S. Navy and for the U.S. Air Force presence in the region, U.S. Army presence, and broadly U.S. military presence in conjunction with our allies and partners in the area.
00:26:15.460It's going to require having individuals in the region.
00:26:18.740It's going to have individuals on Taiwan in an overt presence, Brian, which is very important to draw the line in the sand and to say that the strategic realities of the 21st century compelled the United States to recognize Taiwan and to defend it.
00:26:34.980Because of its critical role in the global economy, its critical geostrategic space, and its critical role in the fight, the political warfare fight against the Chinese Communist Party.
00:26:46.820And so that's going to require looking at Taiwanese defense in a new light.
00:26:51.540And that's going to require ensuring that the conventional and nuclear capabilities of the United States are brought to bear, again, in conjunction with allies and partners in the region.
00:29:15.220I'm Brian Kennedy, sitting in for the great Stephen K. Bannon, political prisoner of the Biden-Harris regime.
00:29:21.800I have a collection of my colleagues from the Committee on the Present Danger China.
00:29:26.420You just heard from Bradley Thayer, who's going to join us for the rest of the half hour.
00:29:31.500We have Sam Faddis with us, former CIA officer, writer, editor, and really a critical figure in understanding the strategic situation we find ourselves in today,
00:29:45.300as well as my partner in crime on the Committee on the Present Danger, Frank Gaffney.
00:29:50.580The four of us will be in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Saturday, tomorrow, for a conference of the American Freedom Alliance and the Committee on the Present Danger China.
00:30:04.700You'll have a lot of folks from the committee, but a lot of folks from the war room posse.
00:30:27.680Bradley was talking with us before we went to break, Frank, about William Lai in Taiwan and the courage it took.
00:30:37.040And before we go back to that, Sam has had a recent piece out where he describes the Congressional Committee here in Washington that has come out with a new report, a House Committee report on Chinese influence in the United States.
00:30:58.360Sam, could you tell us a bit about what you were thinking about all that and really the implications of that report?
00:31:07.400Well, first of all, if I knew that we were all going to appear in public, the whole gang of four here, I might have declined.
00:31:14.460I thought that was a violation of our tradecraft rules.
00:31:17.020But that aside, look, the House Committee on Homeland Security has come out with this, what they call CCP threat snapshot.
00:31:25.940And for those of us that are following this day to day, you know, it's kind of old hat and what I think probably shocking to bring it all together in one place.
00:31:38.680And just for the average American who, you know, has other things to do and really just convey that what we're looking at here with Chinese intelligence operations is literally a threat to the continued existence of the Republic.
00:31:52.760And certainly to our position as the preeminent power on the planet.
00:31:57.920I mean, in the article we wrote it in, we tried to go through and just grab a hold of some of the bullet points to try to get people's attention.
00:32:06.260I mean, amongst other things, the FBI is now opening a new espionage case against the CCP on average every 12 hours.
00:32:17.780So this is this is not, hey, there's a few of these cases floating around and and this is kind of a peripheral issue.
00:32:27.000This is this is being done on such a scale and they are stealing so much, co-opting so many people that literally is taking away the foundations of the Republic.
00:32:37.820And we go in some into some detail just talking to try to, again, grab a hold of a concrete example of the fact that they have these new stealth fighters, the Chinese.
00:32:46.120And we know as a fact, it is not conjecture because we caught the guy who was at the head of this and ultimately prosecuted him, that they literally built these fighters based on the blueprints and design specifications of ours.
00:33:00.540They literally stole from subcontractors of Lockheed everything, just like the Russians built their first atomic bomb from our blueprints down to the location and size of the bolts.
00:33:16.980That's how the Russians built their first nuke.
00:33:37.260No, it's a it's a it would suggest to you that we're in World War Three.
00:33:41.600And this is this is one of the things that's been the theme of these conferences we're doing and really the theme of my colleague Frank Gaffney's longtime work.
00:33:50.480Frank, thank you for being in the war room today.
00:33:53.200Hey, it's always a pleasure to be with you, my friend, in person.
00:33:56.460But but but give us your take on on this new report, because I do think it's dramatic.
00:34:02.200Yeah. Well, to the point you just made, Brian, I call this World War Xi, because I think really every aspect of it is a direct or at least an indirect product of what Xi Jinping, the emperor of China, is up to.
00:34:18.340And the home front piece of this is is particularly alarming.
00:34:23.040I understand before I got here that you were talking about this drone incident.
00:34:42.240The larger problem that the Homeland Security Committee is talking about in terms of influence operations and Sam and Brad have done incredibly important work laying all this out with the committee and in their own right.
00:34:56.680And it's hard to get your head around the extent of the penetration, the suborning, the capture, as the Chinese call it, of these elites.
00:35:11.880And when you put it all together, it puts us in extreme peril, especially when you add into the mix the who knows how many tens of thousands of people's Liberation Army personnel that we believe have been insinuated into the country, too.
00:35:32.220This gives Xi the option, I believe, all of these things together of taking down the country at will.
00:35:42.340Which is one of the reasons why typically at these conferences we've highlighted the point that Americans need to be very aware of this fact.
00:35:52.980Because there's no one in Washington, it would appear, who's adequately protecting them, thinking about this, defending them.
00:35:59.920I mean, really, we may be seeing a change here in this government where people even, as Sam just said, if the FBI is opening cases on this after having shut them down for many years, even they may realize this has gone too far.
00:36:32.680But if they're not spinning up about it, if they're not focused on it, if they're not actually moving beyond the investigations and rolling these guys up, I mean, for heaven's sakes.
00:36:43.440We've talked about this before with the committee and the war room, I think with Steve.
00:36:48.380We need a crowdsourcing operation trying to figure out where are these people's Liberation Army personnel.
00:36:54.440You know, the American people were told see something, say something.
00:36:57.340We need them helping the FBI, which is wildly outgunned here in the United States by the kind of presence – and that's before you even get to the students, 300,000 or so of them, businessmen and just plain old-fashioned spies.
00:37:14.120I mean, this is a time where the Chinese are waging a people's war against us, as you know, a whole-of-society one.
00:37:22.760We need a whole-of-society defense at the moment and a war footing.
00:37:28.300Sam, you have long experience in the intelligence community.
00:37:32.780I've been taking the theme this morning that we're winning the election, President Trump is winning the election, and that there will be a new sheriff in town, and we're going to get a lot of these things right.
00:37:42.060My choice for CIA director is Sam Faddis.
00:37:46.160So, Sam, humor me and just let me know and the audience know what would we do day one to start correcting everything we've been describing here.
00:37:58.420Well, the important thing to understand is that there's no mystery about what needs to be done, right?
00:38:04.840It's not like we got to – we have to get serious and we have to get real, and I don't mean to be – I don't mean to sound silly or simplistic, but, okay, let's start with this.
00:38:17.240We're allowing the Chinese to run rampant.
00:38:19.900So Frank's talking about the number of students.
00:38:22.040Well, every one of those students, whether they want to or not, works for the CCP because they have their choice because they've got a hammer over their head.
00:38:28.220So you have to begin by dramatically limiting the pool of people you're trying to keep an eye on.
00:38:34.220You can't monitor hundreds of thousands of students.
00:38:37.580So you're going to have to cut that pool, and then you're going to have to enforce really serious restrictions on access to information.
00:38:48.020You can't just say, let's go out and get serious and let's hunt down what amounts to an ungodly number of Chinese spies or co-optees.
00:38:57.100You've got to really begin to limit the pool, get serious, numbers of individuals, access, all of these things.
00:39:05.640And then you've got to get really hard-nosed about prosecution and investigation.
00:39:11.880Ultimately, we caught the guy who ran this op that gave all of the design specs for the F-22 and F-35 fighters to the Chinese.
00:39:23.340But he operated for six years on our soil and literally stole everything before we prosecuted him.
00:39:33.700So, I mean, it's great that he went to prison.
00:39:36.220But from a national security perspective, it's irrelevant because there was nothing left for him to steal.
00:39:42.280Now, what's missing here, I guess, is what I'm trying to say is just the political will.
00:49:26.060Brad, can you tell us the title of your book and where people can go to find you?
00:49:31.100My recent book with Jim Fennell is Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Mistake.
00:49:37.280Folks can find me at Brad Thayer on X or Bradley Thayer on Getter and Truth, Brian, and look forward to seeing you tomorrow in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
00:50:52.220PresentDangerChina.org is where you can find our webinars and a great deal of work, much of it featuring people that we've just been hearing from, including our chairman, Brian Kennedy.
00:51:02.080But I did also want to just mention one other thing.
00:51:05.960The Chinese are also beavering away at world government with Chinese characteristics, to be sure.
00:51:13.220We did a wonderful Sovereignty Summit yesterday, and you can find it at SovereigntySummit.org.
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