00:00:00.000this is the primal scream of a dying regime pray for our enemies because we're going to
00:00:09.840medieval on these people here's not got a free shot all these networks lying about the people
00:00:16.440the people have had a belly full of it I know you don't like hearing that I know you try to
00:00:20.520do everything the world to stop that but you're not gonna stop it it's going to happen and where
00:00:24.120do people like that go to share the big line? Mega Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any
00:00:31.640of these people had a conscience. Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that
00:00:38.360answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K.
00:00:46.940back. You're in the war room. It's Thursday, July 16th in the year of our Lord, 2026, the eve,
00:00:59.120the pregame, I guess, or I guess the show right before what will be a very historic day. President
00:01:05.540Trump hopefully delivering on the promise that we all elected him to do. I think the media gets
00:01:10.900it wrong. They myopically think it's just about the 2020 election. It's some self-centered,
00:01:16.000vindictive plot? No. As Steve always says, it's about exposing who really runs this country. And
00:01:22.140I think those who administer, run, and allow our elections to be hacked, that probably answers
00:01:26.720that question to a T. Honored to be joined by Captain James Fennell, which the audience probably
00:01:34.080knows by now means we're going to get into all things the Chinese Communist Party, which I guess
00:01:38.240is a very fitting topic ahead of likely, I guess, tonight's speech from President Trump.
00:01:43.660But Captain Finnell, before we get into some new reporting from The Telegraph talking about how China has what they call replicas of U.S. warships and fighter jets, they're practicing striking them, quite concerning.
00:01:56.680I'm curious to get your thoughts, putting the kinetic capabilities aside, you know, the legacy media acts like we're total buffoons for thinking that China has the cyber capabilities to interfere with elections, let alone the country at scale.
00:02:11.700I'm just curious your assessment, not necessarily if something like that did happen, but just how wrong the media is when they come to their diagnosis of the cyber threat that the PRC poses to the United States.
00:02:24.820well natalie it's it's good to be with you this is my first time with you so thanks for having me on
00:02:30.340uh your question is very very important and i listened to the uh the previous hour
00:02:35.780steve and his cold opens and and uh you know the the narrative that was put forth that you know
00:02:42.500china you know doesn't have these capabilities and couldn't possibly do this or doesn't have
00:02:47.640the intentions to do this and um you know they are pulsing things and taking surveys but you know
00:02:53.440They didn't do anything. And that defies the last 35 years of observed activity from the Chinese Communist Party and their efforts to come after the United States across all levers of power, national power.
00:03:10.760So I focus on the military domain and we'll talk about that. But they have also very much devoted a lot of attention to economic power, information power, and, you know, information warfare that they put out through their media.
00:03:28.600But they also have invested themselves in our academics and in our government institutions and think tanks, and they've, you know, infused themselves into our thinking to tell us that they're not a threat and they just want to, you know, rise up above the poverty that they were at, you know, when Mao created the PRC.
00:03:50.500But the reality is, is that China is using every facet of power that they can to disrupt America's security. They want to, by their own estimation, they want to displace the United States, and they want to become the world's superpower.
00:04:08.440And they're on an objective to do that. And so the idea that they got involved with the elections and somehow our intelligence community said that, oh, there's nothing to worry about here, that fits the pattern that we've had from the IC on so many other things, where they've told us, don't worry about this military issue.
00:04:28.680Don't worry about this economic issue. Don't worry about the yuan replacing the dollar. Don't worry about their navy. Don't worry about their air force. Don't worry about their diplomatic effort to isolate Taiwan.
00:04:40.860It's always one way, the IC and the academics. It's always don't worry about China.
00:04:48.420And Brad Thayer and I wrote a book about it, Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest
00:04:53.400Strategic Failure. And we talk about this notion of threat deflation. And so the threat has been
00:05:00.460deflated across many fronts, across many domains from the PRC. And I expect that tonight the
00:05:06.640president's going to lay out another area where the intelligence community has deflated the threat
00:05:11.940about the PRC. And we know that by what Steve played in the open with what MSNOW and their
00:05:18.700analysts have said, that it's classic. And it's only becoming exposed to the mainstream of America
00:05:25.240because they haven't really, you know, focused in on China analysis. But what those people said
00:05:31.120is, I've heard this for 30 years. It's the same approach and the same explanation of, you know,
00:05:39.580they're not capable or they wouldn't do that or they have their own problems and, oh, they want
00:05:44.940to work with us. And there's factions in China that are reaching out to us. And so they will
00:05:50.180use deception at every turn to get us to lower our guard. And we did in many ways. And I talk
00:05:56.600about the naval issue. You know, when I joined the Navy in 1986 and was commissioned, we had 600,
00:06:01.840almost 600 warships. Now we have 300. So in 40 years, less than 40 years, we cut the size of
00:06:08.600U.S. Navy in half, well, China's Navy went from a brownwater coastal Navy force to the Navy that's
00:06:15.780the largest Navy on the planet today. And we could examine air forces, strategic rocket forces,
00:06:21.720space force, cyber, you name it, in the military domain, you could do the same thing in the
00:06:27.180economic arena. They're using deception to make us lower our guard. And we've done that.
00:06:34.560Yeah, I mean, to be frank, I think those MSNBC guests who are really all a part of that cohort of people who I think are responsible, frankly, for the kind of original sin of the globalist economic model, which is letting right China ascend to the WTAO, the Lao Beijing being the kind of slave labor that allows that system to perpetuate to this day.
00:06:55.020But that they still show their face on TV, let alone give their opinions on what the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party is consistently underplaying it.
00:07:04.700It's not just that they have been duped by their white papers, by their friendly think tanks who, you know, happen to put your spouse on their payroll and all of a sudden your kids making hand over fist cash from some Chinese linked entity.
00:07:17.380It's truly absurd that these people still think that they can weigh in on the threat
00:07:21.820posed by the Chinese Communist Party, not just because they are not neutral arbiters.
00:09:24.520There's a number of outlines of ports.
00:09:26.700This is an image from 2021, actually, of an aircraft carrier that's on a rail line.
00:09:33.040And so the aircraft carrier, this simulated aircraft carrier can transit on this rail line.
00:09:39.240And the purpose of having these identical ship types of the U.S. Navy, our aircraft carriers, our destroyers, and having them to even be able to move in the desert is to allow the PRCs, the PLA, strategic rocket force.
00:10:00.380Well, they actually have a rocket force.
00:10:02.320And their rocket force is full of short-range, medium-range, intermediate-range, and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
00:10:09.420And these missiles have various seeker heads at the end of the cone of the missile.
00:10:14.540And so they're going to get targeting information about certain platforms, certain locations, and they'll have that uploaded into the missile before it launches.
00:10:24.560But after it launches, in mid-course, it can get an update from the sensor in the missile, in the cone of the missile.
00:10:32.880And so those mid-course updates can come from either electronic intelligence, so if the radar is emanating, it can detect the radar signature, or it can detect and look down and see radar, a radar outline.
00:10:46.480So it'll take a synthetic aperture radar scan. And if it sees something that fits what they think is the size of a U.S. Navy destroyer, then it'll hone in on it. It'll be more precise and more likely to strike that target.
00:11:00.560And so by practicing this out in the desert, away from American collection systems, away from the U.S. press, away from our attention, we start to understand that the Chinese have been actually doing this.
00:11:14.960I don't know if Cameron can bring it up, but I have a picture that shows the outline of Yakuska Naval Base in Japan, which is in the Tokyo Bay of Japan where I was stationed.
00:11:25.200There it is. So this telegraph article actually showed the picture on the right just now from new commercial imagery.
00:11:32.400But what you see in this picture is actually from 13 years ago.
00:11:37.220And on the left is the actual overhead commercial imagery of Yakuska Navy Base and one of our aircraft carriers at the time.
00:11:45.540And on the right is this simulated. It's a it's a mirror image of Yakuska Navy Base in the deserts of China.
00:11:53.520And they've been practicing for 13 years to identify that base with their sensors and then to be able to strike ships that are in port.
00:12:02.280And many times in the Christmas season, the U.S. 7 fleet, where I was stationed, I lived in Japan for four years, our ships sometimes at Christmas time are in port.
00:12:12.440And so what a better way to destroy the U.S. 7 fleet than to catch them when they're in port.
00:12:20.140They've developed the intelligence collection capabilities, the missile system to be able to actually destroy those ships while they're there.
00:12:29.640In addition, they've developed sensors that would be able to queue and be able to try to find our ships while they're actually steaming around in the Western Pacific.
00:12:39.100So and it's not just it's U.S. bases in Japan.
00:12:43.020So I want people to understand, you know, we talk about China wants to take Taiwan.
00:12:48.820that's their number one immediate near-term goal by 2030, I think. They want that, but they're
00:12:55.280willing to strike American naval forces that are forward-deployed, whether it's in Japan or Guam or
00:13:01.420on the Ryuku Island chain, or now as we start to expand our operations in the Philippines.
00:13:07.280So they're going to go there when they pull that trigger. Now, they'd rather not pull the trigger.
00:13:12.740They'd rather not have to use kinetic means to achieve their objectives. But when they get to
00:13:17.320the point where they say, we have no other alternative but to do this in order to be able
00:13:22.540to stay in our timeline, which is to achieve our world domination in 2049 when we're 100 years old
00:13:30.040as a nation and achieve the great rejuvenation of China. They're going to come, there's
00:13:35.120pressures in China right now to say we should be, we need to make, we made them make a decision.
00:13:42.140If diplomacy and information warfare and economic warfare is not going to get the people of Taiwan to capitulate, then there are people in the system in China, the Chinese Communist Party, that are arguing to say we're going to have to use military force.
00:13:57.500And Xi, and before him, Hu Jintao and likely Jiang Zemin, all ordered the PLA to be ready to have these capabilities. And Xi, who's been in power for 13 years, he's done the most of any paramount leader to get them ready to do that.
00:14:12.380and these images in the desert are a signal to us that they're practicing. And it's not just those
00:14:17.500images by themselves. We can see craters. We can see that they've been actually launching in and
00:14:22.860lobbying in test missile platforms to improve their accuracy and make sure that they're going
00:14:28.860to be ready in a combat scenario. And I think that's really important because a lot of times
00:14:33.220there's criticisms in Washington that says, well, you know, China, they've never saw a war.
00:14:38.120If I can hold you through the break, we're coming up again.
00:14:41.700So I want to get into that, this sort of timeline of 2028, Taiwan and beyond.
00:14:46.860We're impossible to continue this through the break.
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00:17:00.940You are back in the war room, still talking about the Chinese Communist Party, because yes, MSNBC here, or sorry, MSNOW, I know your show's so right all the time that you only had to rebrand because you couldn't afford to pay any of your staff, but sure, we'll take pointers from you on how to understand the Chinese Communist Party.
00:17:27.000um they always love to point out the fact captain finnell that you know well they don't prefer to
00:17:32.640go kinetic right if you read unrestricted warfare it's like well yeah that's not the preferred
00:17:36.920tactic or means for the end but the end doesn't change they just want to overtake the united
00:17:40.980states in every aspect possible they would prefer not to go kinetic they would just prefer to take
00:17:46.200over the country from the inside out right um but thank you to our erudite scholars over at ms now
00:17:52.240for explaining the China threat to us.
00:18:10.740competing interpretations of what it means.
00:18:13.360Is it the younger, more aggressive generals
00:18:14.960who are in there to just sort of affirm Xi Jinping?
00:18:17.280Are they going to, you know, move on Taiwan
00:18:18.800to deflect from certain economic things going at home?
00:18:21.740going on at home. I'm curious, looking at the Iran war, obviously, is a huge variable in all
00:18:27.720of this, of course, what's raging on in Russia and Ukraine. Do you still think that Taiwan is
00:18:32.160likely to be that first kinetic flashpoint? Or do images like these suggest that it might not even
00:18:38.780be there? I'm just curious your sort of assessment of where you think that flashpoint would actually
00:18:43.840be. Well, Natalie, I think, like you said, if they don't have to fight, they won't. They'll
00:18:52.360try to get it through other means. And I think right now what we're seeing is a China that's
00:18:57.120very confident. Xi is in total control. He's been able to, you know, purge out those that have not
00:19:03.560gone along with this program in terms of the modernization of the military. He's got us tied
00:19:09.340down with support in the Ukraine conflict. We're in that one way or another economically or with
00:19:16.380some military assistance. We're definitely involved. And we've got, you know, over 15
00:19:21.200warships, more than that in the off the coast of Iran right now, two carrier strike groups and
00:19:26.940amphibious ready group. So we're heavily tied down in that area. And he's been slowly moving
00:19:34.540and pressurizing Taiwan. One of the things that happened here in the last month in June was the
00:19:41.000Chinese kind of announced to their media that they have decided and declared that the waters
00:19:47.260of Taiwan, not just the Taiwan Strait, but east of Taiwan, are now part of China's near-shores
00:19:53.420waters, and they're claiming sovereignty over it. And after they made that statement in the last
00:19:58.940month, we've had two kind of waves of Chinese maritime forces operating east of Taiwan. First,
00:20:05.700we had their Maritime Safety Administration for the first time ever. It's kind of a smaller kind
00:20:11.860of the Coast Guard. They were operating east of Taiwan in the last month. And then the Chinese
00:20:16.820Coast Guard a couple of weeks ago was also operating east of Taiwan. And in the latter
00:20:21.360case with the Coast Guard, the Chinese Coast Guard, they started and stopped and inspected
00:20:26.160ships, commercial vessels transiting around eastern, east of Taiwan. They said, they claimed
00:20:32.280they inspected 198 warships, or not warships, commercial vessels. So we're all focused on
00:20:39.380keeping the Strait of Hormuz open and the right of international waters to be open. It's something
00:20:44.540that the U.S. has backed for 250 years. Well, we're watching China gobble that up. So that's a way to
00:20:52.980slowly kind of control something, and we may be asleep, but focused on other things,
00:21:00.400and we won't be able to react fast enough to stop, which is effectively the starting of a blockade.
00:21:06.160And then last week on July 6th, the Chinese launched a submarine-launched ballistic missile
00:21:12.2207,300 kilometers from the South China Sea over the Philippines, past Guam, across our
00:21:20.780territories of the Micronesia and the Federated States there, and they went into the areas in
00:21:27.520the South Pacific. It's the first time that the Chinese have ever launched an SLBM,
00:21:32.460submarine-launched ballistic missile, into the South Pacific. Two years ago, they had launched
00:21:38.160an intercontinental ballistic missile into those same waters. So in the space of two years,
00:21:43.220after essentially a 40-year gap of any kind of significant ICBM testing, China's done two
00:21:50.040strategic nuclear tests into the South Pacific, which is to say, in their own words in the Chinese
00:21:58.080press, they said, nuclear missiles launched from submarines deep under the sea surface are very
00:22:03.220difficult to detect and track and can be used on short notice. So they are tasked with realizing
00:22:09.060sea-based nuclear deterrence and counter-strike. So for 50 plus years, the Chinese have always
00:22:17.520claimed that they're a no-first-use state, that they will never use nukes in a first-use
00:22:23.280scenario. Well, what we've seen over the last five years, since 2021, when we saw 350 ICBM silos built
00:22:31.460out in central China, we've seen the development in advance of these JL-3 10,000-kilometer missiles
00:22:39.000on these newer, improved-class, GIN-class submarines, and they have this new H-20 strategic
00:22:45.060bomber. They have three legs of a triad. They've tested two of them here in the last two years. I
00:22:50.440would expect another test, which is to get to your point, which is to say, they may threaten us with
00:22:55.480nuclear weapons in order to achieve whatever they want to get Taiwan. So there's a lot of pressure
00:23:01.380points that they're bringing to bear, economics, diplomacy, raw military conventional power,
00:23:07.940and the threat of nuclear power, even though they say and claim we're not a first-use nation.
00:23:12.560And since they launched last on Monday, the 6th, the Chinese government has not reiterated that they are a no first use state.
00:23:21.180They just say, hey, this was a routine test, which it wasn't. We gave it ample notification, which they didn't.
00:23:28.160And they didn't tell us any specific details. So it's not transparent.
00:23:31.640And then they lied and said it wasn't targeted against any nation. It was obviously targeted against the United States of America.
00:23:37.380So there's a lot of things that the Chinese are, they game out, they call it comprehensive national power. It's an actual form of government function for the Chinese Communist Party. And they will basically do a roulette wheel of different scenarios and analyze.
00:23:56.380Well, if I do this here, what will happen? And they'll play it out. And if I do this in this domain, what will happen? And they'll play them all out and they'll do them in different combinations and variations. And they keep working it as they keep pressing forward, almost like the Argentinians last night in the World Cup. They just keep pressing towards the goal of what they want.
00:24:16.420And if they come to the point where they have to use military force because these other non-kinetic measures haven't worked, then they're prepared to do that as well, although it's their last resort.
00:24:28.160I also think there's such a brilliance to their plan, right?
00:24:32.720Obviously, what you're talking about is their rapid rate of buildup escalation through almost industrial capacity.
00:24:39.260Meanwhile, the United States has seen its factory, its industrial base, especially when it comes to the defense primes, our ability to build simple things like cheap drones, munitions, be completely atrophied.
00:24:52.000They've effectively seized the means of production when it comes to our manufacturing capabilities.
00:24:57.820We've got a few minutes before I let you go.
00:24:59.920I just want to sort of link this all together on yet another issue that the legacy media is glaringly wrong on, and I guess some Supreme Court justices.
00:25:08.560But this idea of birthright citizenship, I believe the number from Peter Schweitzer estimates it's up to like 1.5 million quasi-Chinese nationals being American citizens.
00:25:17.480Of course, you have an open border under Joe Biden. You could have sleeper cells galore here. We do.
00:25:23.940Your thoughts on the national security threat posed by the sort of actual human infiltration of the United States?
00:25:30.860Yeah, I'm not an attorney, but when I read the Constitution and when I read about our history and how we were founded, I find it incredible that anybody could defend the notion that in the 21st century, our founders would have said, oh, yeah, sure, it's fine.
00:25:48.700you can come from communist China, a sworn enemy of the United States. You can fly over here,
00:25:54.460have a baby, get a passport and fly back home and stay in China, get indoctrinated from the
00:25:59.500Chinese Communist Party in school, and then yet still somehow affect our elections. It's incredible.
00:26:06.000And it's very, very dangerous. And obviously the Supreme Court didn't agree with that or agreed
00:26:12.800with that it's legal. So we're going to have to find another way to stop it. But it is a danger
00:26:17.260to have that kind of infiltration into our system that allows people to vote and to vote
00:26:25.320against our government, our form of government, our constitution, the principles that we stand
00:26:31.460for. And then when you add in hundreds of thousands of Chinese Communist Party students,
00:26:37.760now they're not all card-carrying Chinese maybe, but they're still under the rules and regulations
00:26:42.880of the Chinese government. We have a lot of people in the country that we just don't know
00:26:47.020their status and who they're loyal to. So we have a real risk there. And you can see it reflected.
00:26:52.500People can say, oh, you're exaggerating, or it's a China threat, or it's even racist, they'll say.
00:26:58.040But the reality is, look at what you see in the Chinese military, just in the domain that I live
00:27:03.580in. Look at the platforms that they built. They're almost carbon copies across air forces, naval
00:27:09.780forces, submarine, across many different spectrums. They're building things that they clearly stole
00:27:15.840from us. And so we're giving away, we're paying billions and trillions of dollars to build these
00:27:22.800systems. And then we're essentially letting the Chinese steal it from us, build it to industrial
00:27:28.340scale, as you just mentioned, and then turn around and say, we're going to use it against you unless
00:27:33.160you do what we say. And so it's really, it can't keep going. I missed the federalist paper where
00:27:38.620they argued for, you know, Chinese nationals or nationals for many countries, let alone our
00:27:43.120I swore none of you to become citizens of the United States and vote in our elections.
00:28:11.320we will have you back on soon. We got Joe Allen and some more China repartee after the short break.
00:28:20.520Everyone's focused on how the conflict in the Middle East is raising oil prices,
00:28:24.280but there's another grim reality to this contention. Oil isn't the only resource being
00:28:30.520constrained. About one third of global fertilizer trade happens through this region. And with spring
00:28:36.700planting season on top of us, American farmers are sounding the alarm with some saying they
00:28:41.820can't afford to plant their fields. When one piece of the supply chain gets hit this hard,
00:28:47.120you know what comes next. Higher food prices, reduced availability, maybe even panic buying.
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00:29:45.040we wouldn't be celebrating america 250 if it wasn't for a strong foundation set by the framers
00:29:49.720hamilton built america's financial foundation on the principle of sound stable money a principle
00:29:53.500later embodied by the gold standard however we abandoned that discipline in 1971 and have seen
00:29:58.280inflation erode the dollar's value. Birch Gold Group has been helping Americans solidify their
00:30:02.520savings with gold for the past 15 years. They'll help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into a
00:30:07.680tax-sheltered IRA in gold. Learn how gold fits into your portfolio by texting Bannon to 989898.
00:30:13.620You'll receive a free, no-obligation info kit. Text Bannon to the number 989898 to get your free
00:30:18.660info kit now. War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:30:28.280We're back in the war room. We're going to hit AI imminently. But I was just thinking in the break,
00:30:35.760it is pretty absurd that these MSNBC betters of ours who have been wrong, what, about basically
00:30:44.420everything, sometimes intentionally, sometimes they're just retarded. I think I'm allowed to
00:30:49.720say that word now since President Trump won. I never stopped saying it. But more importantly,
00:30:55.720You know, we've seen, what is it, over the years, so many distortions of the founding fathers. We've got Nicole Hannah-Jones. I think that's that idiot's name. I think she's at the New York Times with the 1619 Project.
00:31:08.200But, like, I missed the part in America's founding where we would just allow people intentionally coming over to the United States to seek American citizenship for nefarious purposes to just get that and then go back to communist China.
00:31:22.540It's absolutely asinine. I feel like it's the kind of final boss endgame of idiotic diversity woke thought.
00:31:31.820It's like DEI admission into who can become an American citizen.
00:31:35.120Let's concoct the literal worst national security threat person and make them an American citizen, not just so that they can vote, but so they can have access to God knows what and work in the United States government.
00:31:46.360But I digress on that. But but here's the thing.
00:31:49.240Right. Today is one of those days, right, when President Trump is going to speak where you really remember and realize that our conspiracy theories are so much better than their conspiracy theories because they're actually true.
00:32:03.680Right. They want to party around and say that because Russia put some Facebook ad, they changed probably you in this audience, your entire conviction, your entire political ideology about who you were going to vote for, because some shoddily broken English ad maybe told you that Hillary Clinton was probably something which she is, is corrupt and a fraud.
00:32:22.400But it's, I think, really to the point of, remember, what was it back in the 2010s, all the peak of the culture war stuff, where you would have these crazy campus leftists, apoplectic over having conservative speakers.
00:32:36.300And the refrain from our side was always, well, if these people have such dumb ideas, then don't you want them to speak?
00:32:42.540Right. If President Trump is so wrong about the election, then why are these people so scared churning out an information operation that I have, frankly, not seen in recent history?
00:32:51.220Maybe you have to go back to 2020 itself to actually see this. It's quite ironic now that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, right? These same people who are now melting down over President Trump talking about the 2020 election, as Steve calls them, the media assassins are also responsible, you know, for ginning that up.
00:33:08.420you want to talk about stolen elections, how about calling to kill the people who helped us
00:33:12.960win 2024? They also got, what, everything about Wuhan wrong. We still don't have any answers on
00:33:19.420that. But it's so interesting because the only time these people will describe the Chinese
00:33:23.280Communist Party as a threat certainly never has to do with elections. It's solely when
00:33:28.280their defense contractor lobbyist friends and their defense prime owner friends can really
00:33:34.180buttress and bolster the idea of China as the existential threat of this nation, just so they
00:33:39.360can get a few more billions of dollars so they can build up America's defense industrial base,
00:33:45.300yet actually not do anything because it takes years to build anything. They're so behind on
00:33:49.540building anything that we need to actually keep this country safe. It's pretty wild. I'd also
00:33:54.580extend that critique to all of our newfound MAGA friends, the, you know, David Sachs and Chamaths
00:34:00.420of the world, the grifters galore, all those people who, you know, the reason why conveniently
00:34:07.840their companies seem to be on the, you know, profiting upside of this, but why we need to
00:34:12.300basically turn over America's strategic advantage in the form of AI chips to the Chinese Communist
00:34:16.920Party is because China is such a threat. So we should make peace with them, I guess, through,
00:34:22.980you know, cyber and digital means. It makes no sense. But, you know, where are these people
00:34:27.640talking about President Trump's speech tonight or the 2020 election or the cyber capabilities that
00:34:34.340the PRC has to actually hack. They're stunningly silent, right? But they're willing to talk about
00:34:39.500it if it means that their shady companies can make more money or their paymasters can see their
00:34:45.280stock values inflate to literally ridiculous levels. You know, all these people love democracy
00:34:50.840so much right over at MSNBC. Well, let's see how much they love democracy tonight. How about that?
00:34:59.740Joe Allen, I bring up AI. I bring up David Sachs. I should apologize preemptively to the audience.
00:35:05.560I do not like those people. They are so cringe. They almost make me want to be a Democrat. I'm
00:35:10.500kidding. But Joe Allen, you have a lot of new reporting that you want to get into. There's
00:35:16.040some stories, ironically, about what China is doing with AI. If you can sort of walk the audience
00:37:37.700Some of them turn to them as therapists and priests.
00:37:41.360Well, reporting from two days ago out of China shows that the Chinese government sees things very differently.
00:37:50.180While the American government is concerned about AI models like Mythos and GPT 5.6 hacking banking systems,
00:38:00.560China is taking steps to keep AIs from hacking brains.
00:38:05.120So China has officially banned AI companions, at least according to the reporting coming out.
00:38:14.160That would mean then, according to the rule book that China is turning to, no AIs will be allowed that excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction and damage real interpersonal relationships.
00:38:31.460And so as this comes into effect, companies like ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent and perhaps Highflyer that produces DeepSeek will no longer allow their bots to be sycophantic or they'll take steps to mitigate it anyway, be sycophantic and tell users what they want to hear or to engage in kind of emotional relationships with human beings.
00:38:57.000I think it's important to ask why China would make that decision.
00:39:01.840I can't pretend to know the motivation of the Chinese Communist Party or the people commanding the five government agencies that are enacting this new rule.
00:39:12.880But it could either be that China recognizes that these sorts of relationships are extremely harmful and unhealthy, and they want to make sure their citizens don't go AI psychotic.
00:39:23.580It could also be that Xi Jinping is a little bit jealous. Maybe he sees the way his citizens are bonding with these bots and looking to the bots for friendship.
00:39:34.800And maybe he feels like they should be looking to the party for that connection instead. I don't know.
00:39:39.820But what I do know is in the long run, if America doesn't take some kind of similar step, I don't mean federal law banning A.I. companionship or even state laws banning A.I. companionship.
00:39:52.520But I do think that if America doesn't use the freedom that we have to choose not to allow children or vulnerable people or lonely people or any people to become closer to AI bots than other human beings, then as we're worried about China racing ahead to superintelligence, we will race to the bottom as human beings lose their intelligence.
00:40:17.620And walk us through this Wall Street Journal story, how it all sort of links together.
00:40:22.520Yeah. The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the AI backlash leading to increased security
00:40:31.060concerns for tech executives. This is, I think, an important moment because what you see,
00:40:38.360if you'll recall when the assassination occurred, where Luigi Mangione shot the insurance executive
00:40:45.560And I was on with you. And my first response was that these sorts of acts of violence will be used to blame otherwise rational people who are making rational anti-tech or techno-skeptic arguments for these sorts of violent acts.
00:41:04.320There was a kind of AI angle with Luigi Mangione. And I think that that was you already had the first stirrings of it.
00:41:13.000Then now, what are we, a year, a year and a half later, even more now, you have a lot of kind of random psychopaths who have either threatened AI tech execs or a couple who have attempted some kind of violence, shooting at their homes or throwing firebombs.
00:41:31.580No one has been hurt, but what you see then is a justification to crack down on any kind of dissent when it comes to technology, and I think that will increase even more.
00:41:44.520In the Wall Street Journal article, they note that Palantir and Oracle have increased their spending tremendously on security, and I think that that kind of goes to show you that the more there is this kind of specter of violence, the more there is this boogeyman,
00:41:58.660And the more you can actually blame people who are simply talking and arguing against these people, the more justification you have for surveillance, the more justification you have to blame rational actors for irrational acts of other people.
00:42:13.880And for me, it infuriates me that the same people who talk about replacing all jobs with robots and AIs, the same people who talk about the ultimate succession of humanity into a technological species, the total replacement of humanity or the risk that their technology might cause the human species to go extinct.
00:42:36.660those people making those claims are furious that we are pointing them out and blaming us
00:42:43.180for the inevitable backlash yeah i don't buy it and i don't think uh anyone in the war room posse
00:42:48.800does either yeah the uh the plebs or i guess in this case the posse is not just rolling over and
00:42:55.300accepting that this is supposed to be the greatest thing for humanity which will conveniently i'm
00:43:00.400sure expand their wealth by orders of magnitude literally never even conceivable to the human
00:43:06.580mind before uh 2026 joelle and if you can hang with us through the break i want to drill down
00:43:11.920on some of this um expand a little bit more it's quite interesting how these articles interconnect
00:43:17.360we'll be right back after the show break bring it on and now we'll fight to the end just watch
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00:46:04.780I just wanted to let you flag if there's anything else for the audience to pay attention to be looking at right now or just sort of wrap up what you think we need to do in response to this.
00:46:16.940What almost seems to be a national security threat when you look at the birth rate of these AI companions, which I'm sure the Chinese Communist Party would love here in the United States, how to fix that problem.
00:46:27.520Yeah, it's interesting, Natalie, that you have the Chinese government taking such strong measures.
00:46:32.400I would imagine that a big part of it probably is that they see a kind of mass psychosis among their own population, and rather than sit on their hands, they're squashing it.
00:46:44.500But there's also probably the element that you don't want to have your subjugated citizens looking to bots for answers and granting them a kind of moral authority that the government doesn't have.
00:46:57.400Again, in the United States is going to be very different. But the conversation here is just completely toxic. You have, as I just mentioned, you have the anti AI thinkers being blamed for random acts of anti AI company violence. These anti AI thinkers are also being accused of foreign influence operations. So being the tools of countries like China or Russia, Ben Shapiro.
00:47:24.440I haven't watched it because listening to his voice is more odious than listening to a robot voice.
00:47:31.260But he came out with a video, I think just yesterday, entitled The Anti-AI Movement is a Foreign Influence Operation.
00:47:40.860Now, it's ironic because Fox News just apologized for platforming Kevin O'Leary, the data center magnate that is working on the 40,000-acre data center complex in Utah,
00:47:52.300because Kevin O'Leary accused group, the Alliance for a Better Utah, of being direct agents of
00:48:00.920China. And of course, he had no evidence. He admits that he had no evidence. He simply made
00:48:07.220it up. And so you've got that sort of idea percolating through the media sphere. And I think
00:48:14.780that if we're going to get to any kind of sane social response, religious response, political
00:48:21.380response to this profoundly disruptive and I would say, you know, kind of socially damaging
00:48:28.240technology, it's going to have to be a little less hysterical. You might say, well, Joe,
00:48:34.700aren't you being hysterical about these guys? I think I've basically said my piece in the
00:48:39.720sanest way one can when you have tech executives talking about chipping everyone's brains
00:48:44.440and linking them to AI systems to fight the evil super intelligence is going to kill us all. I think
00:48:50.560If you call me the crazy one for simply saying that's a bad way to do business, then I guess I'm guilty as charged.
00:48:57.840But, yes, Natalie, I think that the real key to all of this is going to be to keep trucking forward,
00:49:04.600to not ever accept the mantle of being either a foreign influence operative or not to ever accept the idea that your ideas are leading to violence.
00:49:17.100And certainly if people start Fed posting at you or they show up to your meetings talking about violence, you want to flag them as most likely either a Fed operative or a psycho.
00:49:29.140But again, you've got to keep trucking forward.
00:49:32.660The AI companies have all the money increasingly as they are fused to the security state.
00:49:37.820They have the guns, but we have the numbers and I believe that we also have the moral authority here.
00:50:47.380We will have you back on soon, since apparently you're responsible for all these threats faced by these horrible, money-hungry people who want to destroy this country in pursuit of profit.