Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - May 24, 2023


Ep 811 ｜ How Biden’s Helping China Take Over the World ｜ Guest： Peter Schweizer


Episode Stats

Length

36 minutes

Words per Minute

165.46841

Word Count

6,076

Sentence Count

358


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We all know that government is corrupt, but do you know the extent of the American government's
00:00:06.100 corruption? Until reading the work of my guest today, I had no idea how many Democrats and
00:00:12.600 Republicans are being directly funded by the Chinese Communist Party to do their bidding,
00:00:17.940 including our president. And not only that, but corporations and colleges have also become
00:00:24.100 vessels of the CCP. Exposing and explaining all of this is Peter Schweitzer, president of the
00:00:30.500 Government Accountability Institute and an expert on government corruption. Fascinating conversation
00:00:35.980 that will educate you, equip you on a huge problem that's threatening the safety of our nation. And
00:00:41.980 not only that, but also our local communities. This episode is brought to you by our friends
00:00:46.400 at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use promo code Allie at checkout. GoodRanchers.com. Code Allie.
00:00:54.100 Peter, thank you so much for joining us. For those who have not read one of your many books,
00:01:06.860 can you just tell them who you are and what you do? Yeah, I'm a writer, primarily a researcher,
00:01:13.500 and I investigate and explore corruption in our government, which is, as a former Air Force
00:01:19.920 pilot friend of mine says, is a target rich environment. There's a lot of it to go around,
00:01:24.940 but we try to focus on the corruption that's dangerous because it undermines our republic
00:01:30.600 by giving us leaders that are really accountable or in hock to people other than the people that
00:01:37.340 elected them into office. So that's been primarily my focus. And how long have you been exposing
00:01:42.220 government corruption? Probably for 20 years. In a previous life before that, I wrote books on the
00:01:49.640 history of the Cold War and foreign policy, but I saw that the biggest threat that our country faced
00:01:55.300 was really internal with this corruption. So I switched. And so, yeah, I've been doing it about
00:01:59.780 20 years. And I've just got to ask, is it a little bit depressing sometimes? Because I imagine the more
00:02:05.840 you dig in and the more you look at just all the different intricacies of Washington and how things
00:02:11.740 really work versus how how people think things work, like, do you ever just kind of get demoralized
00:02:18.200 and you think, wow, this I mean, this corruption runs deep? You know, it does run deep. I'm not really
00:02:25.180 an optimist or a pessimist. I'm a realist. And, you know, my view is very much informed by Judeo-Christian
00:02:33.400 values. I myself am a Christian. So, you know, embedded in my worldview is the notion that power
00:02:40.200 corrupts. And it doesn't really matter whether the person has a D or an R after their name.
00:02:46.020 When you have concentrated power, political power or corporate power, it tends to bring out the worst
00:02:52.540 in people. So I don't get surprised anymore. What I'm more concerned about is ensuring that the
00:02:59.440 American people hear about this. I looked at the founding fathers when I was young. And my favorite
00:03:06.360 among people from that period of our history was Paul Revere, because he warned everybody the British
00:03:13.880 were coming. And so I kind of like to believe that we're trying to warn people what is occurring,
00:03:19.940 what's going on. And our hope is that that will lead people to, in a sense, you know,
00:03:25.900 act like the Continental Army and forge a defense against the threat that we're facing. And so you
00:03:32.380 get discouraged sometimes when people don't seem to think it's that of importance or people get
00:03:37.140 cynical. But no, I don't lose the faith, because I think ultimately what we're fighting for is worth
00:03:43.140 fighting for. And what I'm being asked to do is certainly not as dangerous or as threatening
00:03:49.120 as a lot of other people that are defending our country on the battlefield.
00:03:52.640 Mm hmm. Mm hmm. We all have our different role to play when it comes to that. I want to talk
00:03:57.480 mostly about your most recent book, and it's called Red Handed, How American Elites Get Rich
00:04:04.900 Helping China Win. And, you know, that title alone honestly puts together a lot of puzzle pieces for me
00:04:12.500 because you do wonder, wow, why why are we in so many ways, not in every way, so soft on China? Why do you
00:04:19.100 see glowing reviews of China and how they're dealing with climate change in The New York Times? I mean,
00:04:25.700 why wouldn't we take more seriously the threat of China? It's very odd. And yet what you're saying,
00:04:32.860 what you've uncovered is actually that there are Americans in charge, American elites that are
00:04:37.520 helping China build its military and become stronger?
00:04:40.620 Yeah, that's right. I mean, China has an explicit strategy. They call it elite capture,
00:04:47.220 and it's pretty brilliant. You know, it's predicated on the notion that we can't go as
00:04:53.900 China, we can't go face to face with the United States in a military conflict. Their military is
00:04:58.660 stronger and more powerful than ours. Their economy is more dynamic. So instead of going head to head
00:05:04.320 with them, why don't we just basically try to buy off part of their political elites? We'll give them
00:05:09.280 lucrative commercial deals, or we'll give them access to the Chinese market, we'll make them
00:05:14.560 wealthy, and that will buy favor with them. This is a strategy they've employed in smaller countries
00:05:21.080 like New Zealand and Singapore and Australia with a lot of success. And they're doing it in the United
00:05:27.120 States. And it works. And what a lot of our elites have told us over the last 30 years is that,
00:05:33.920 you know, merging closer with China is a good thing, because the Chinese are going to become more
00:05:39.140 like us, they'll become less repressive, less Marxist Leninist, they'll become more free market
00:05:45.300 oriented. Yeah. The fact of the matter is, that consensus has been there with Republicans and
00:05:50.780 Democrats, and they have been categorically wrong. Under the new president, President Xi in China,
00:05:58.920 he's been in power, you know, more than 10 years, is far more repressive, far more aggressive
00:06:04.740 than it ever was 20 years ago. So the grand, you know, experiment of engagement, as they call it,
00:06:12.300 has failed. What it hasn't failed at is making elites in the United States rich. That's what it
00:06:20.040 has succeeded at. And that's been the linchpin of China's strategy of elite capture. And this affects
00:06:26.160 Washington, it affects Silicon Valley, and Wall Street, and some of the biggest names in those three
00:06:32.300 communities, I would argue are essentially captured by Beijing, because of the deals that have been made.
00:06:51.940 And before we get into the specifics of who we're talking about, because you do name names in this
00:06:57.380 book, I'm looking back at some of the some of the books that you've written, and you wrote a book
00:07:02.320 called Reagan's War in 2003. You know, I've been a big fan of Ronald Reagan, I read his autobiography
00:07:08.760 was inspired by that. But what you're describing was really part of his political idea that the more
00:07:16.640 we export capitalism to China, the less communist they will be. And he was sincerely anti communist.
00:07:22.900 But as much as we see him as a freedom fighter, and as much as we see his positive impact,
00:07:27.380 in the world, we do see that it was at least in part, Reagan's doing this idea of exporting
00:07:35.180 Americanism to China to try to make it less communist. And like you said, it didn't work.
00:07:39.660 So what do you think about that as someone who knows a lot about Reagan?
00:07:43.560 Yeah, I think, you know, in the 1980s, there was a lot of optimism about where China would go.
00:07:49.060 I excuse people more in the 80s. And even in the 90s, Bill Clinton was also a big advocate of this.
00:07:54.840 But really, by the early 2000s, with the George W. Bush administration, and then the Obama
00:08:00.300 administration, it was already crystal clear, this was not going to become anything resembling
00:08:06.420 a liberal democracy. I think in Reagan's case, when he came into office, he saw China as a counter
00:08:13.080 measure that could be used against the Soviet Union, which was the main threat at the time.
00:08:18.940 And then when the Soviet Union dissipated, a lot of people saw China as somebody to bring in,
00:08:25.740 as it were, to the Western world, that it would reform in the way that Gorbachev was trying to
00:08:31.520 reform the Soviet Union. That ended up, of course, being incorrect and wrong. So I think we have to
00:08:38.500 really rethink some of the assumptions about how we deal with China. I'm a big believer in free markets
00:08:46.560 and Americans' system of governance. But we have to recognize that it's not something you can easily
00:08:53.180 replicate, and that you have elites in places like China that don't want it. They're not interested
00:08:58.760 in it, because they don't want to give up their own political power.
00:09:02.440 Yeah. So there is an excuse for the optimism of people like Reagan and people in the 90s,
00:09:07.560 because we just didn't know. And I think at that point, it was hard to imagine what had been
00:09:12.460 a largely agrarian society becoming what it is today and, you know, having still the communist
00:09:18.280 sentiments on that it did then today. So I think, I mean, from my amateur assessment,
00:09:23.800 it seems like you're right. There was cause for hope then. But as it seems like you agree,
00:09:30.140 there is no excuse. Now we've seen what China is, what they want to do. And yet you write in your book
00:09:36.740 that of the five deals the Biden family made in China, every single one was with an individual
00:09:44.000 with deep ties to the leadership of the CCP's spy apparatus. What in the world is this? What do you
00:09:49.760 mean by this? Yeah, I think that there's been some, unfortunately, some mischaracterizing why the
00:09:57.660 Chinese deals that the Bidens have are so important. A lot of the focus has been on influence
00:10:03.460 peddling and corruption. And I'm not saying those are unimportant issues. But the real question here
00:10:09.620 is, how much money did the Bidens get? What did they do for the money? And who gave them the money?
00:10:16.620 Who, my kids would say, who made it rain for the Bidens in China? And when you look at it through that
00:10:23.500 prism, it's a pretty shocking and frightening situation. We know that the Bidens received tens of
00:10:29.920 millions of dollars from China. That's based on the laptop. I believe the number is at least $31
00:10:35.900 million based on actual wire transfers and deals that are discussed in the laptop. We know that
00:10:43.360 those deals came from a handful of Chinese businessmen. And when you look at who these
00:10:49.020 Chinese businessmen are, it's pretty troubling. One of the first deals and perhaps the biggest deal
00:10:55.940 that Hunter Biden got was arranged by a guy named Che Feng. That's his name. And it's identified
00:11:01.380 in the laptop. At the time that he is making this deal happen for Hunter Biden, he also happens to be
00:11:08.080 business partners with a guy named Ma Jian, who is the vice minister for state security in China.
00:11:15.980 The Ministry of State Security is their spy apparatus. It's the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA,
00:11:22.320 all rolled into one. So literally a man that is providing millions of dollars to the Biden family
00:11:30.280 happens to be business partners with the vice minister of state security at the same time.
00:11:35.580 That vice minister's responsibility includes recruiting foreign nationals to spy for China.
00:11:42.500 Then you move to another deal that was arranged by Henry Zhao. Henry Zhao transfers $5 million cash
00:11:49.020 to a Hunter Biden account. Who is Henry Zhao? Well, when he is arranging that deal for Hunter Biden,
00:11:56.760 he is business partners with the family of the former minister of state security who ran the entire
00:12:03.420 spy apparatus. In fact, the $5 million that is transferred to Hunter Biden's account comes from
00:12:10.600 an account in Hong Kong that is part of that partnership. That entity is one of the entities in
00:12:17.280 which the minister of state security's family is partners. Then you look at another deal that was
00:12:23.960 put together by Chairman Yee. This is the CEFC Energy Company. What is Chairman Yee's job before he runs
00:12:32.460 this energy company? He's running an organization that we know in the West is part of Chinese military
00:12:39.620 intelligence. He sends some $6 million to Hunter Biden. All this money is flowing to Hunter Biden and
00:12:49.360 the Biden family. It's all being done by individuals that have ties to Chinese intelligence, which is
00:12:56.180 highly unusual. Then the question becomes, what did they do for that money? Did Hunter Biden perform a
00:13:03.320 discernible business service? Did he bring capital into a joint venture or something? And the answer
00:13:10.640 is no. If you look at the emails, none of these deals really require much of anything on the part
00:13:17.540 of Hunter Biden. There's no discernible business service that's been provided. So again, businessmen
00:13:24.660 linked to Chinese intelligence are sending millions of dollars to the first family of the United States
00:13:30.700 before they're the first family. And they perform no discernible business service for that. To me,
00:13:36.860 we have to look at this from the standpoint of compromise, possible an effort to recruit,
00:13:43.500 you know, in some kind of intelligence scheme. That's the prism through which we need to look at this.
00:13:49.680 And that, to me, makes it even more troubling than trying to prove some sort of low rent influence
00:13:57.040 peddling scheme. This would be the equivalent in the Cold War of the family of Ronald Reagan or the
00:14:04.640 family of Jimmy Carter taking in millions of dollars from Russian businessmen at the height of the Cold War
00:14:10.720 who are linked to the KGB. That's what this is the equivalent of. Back then, this would have set
00:14:17.260 off alarm bells. It should be setting off alarm bells now as it regards to Biden's.
00:14:34.860 And you know, this makes a lot of sense with some of the things that Biden has said and done.
00:14:38.600 I remember being alarmed by a story that was reported last year, and this is NBC reporting it.
00:14:44.120 The DOJ abandons Trump era program aimed at Chinese spying. So this is Biden's DOJ saying that
00:14:50.780 basically the Trump administration wanted to target and then prosecute Chinese threats to national
00:14:56.080 security. And under the Biden administration, they said, oh, no, this might cause some anti-Chinese bias
00:15:02.780 in America. And so we're just going to drop this. I mean, you just have to wonder. You have to
00:15:07.140 scrutinize now all of Biden's policies, not just when it comes to China explicitly,
00:15:12.380 but when it comes to his energy policy, what else is he doing to benefit the friends who then benefited
00:15:18.440 him? I mean, and it's just funny because Trump was impeached for allegedly quid pro quo. I mean,
00:15:26.440 it seems like we've kind of got a lot of that going on here in America. And it seems like
00:15:31.120 people just don't care. You care. I'm sure a lot of people do, but people in the press,
00:15:36.300 people in Congress. And I think the rest of your book kind of explains why,
00:15:40.960 because Biden is not the only one in this business, right? There are other members of
00:15:44.820 Congress who are in on similar things. Yeah, that's right. I mean, Beijing doesn't care if
00:15:51.400 you have a D or an R after your name. What they're looking for, as they describe it,
00:15:56.100 is big help with a little bad mouth. What that means is there are some things that are very,
00:16:01.620 very important to them. They want access to our technology. They want access to our financial
00:16:07.160 markets. They want access to our general market to be able to sell their goods. If you help them
00:16:13.780 in those areas, they understand that you might have to criticize them for human rights or their
00:16:19.000 treatment of the Uyghurs. That's the little bad mouth. It's the big help that they are most concerned
00:16:23.960 about. And by that measure, Joe Biden has been enormously helpful. But you also have to look
00:16:29.740 as some other people that are very powerful in Washington on the other side of the aisle. You
00:16:36.240 look at Senator Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao. He's the Republican leader in the
00:16:41.400 Senate. Elaine Chao has been a cabinet officer in the George W. Bush administration and also in the
00:16:46.940 Trump administration. And her family has a shipping business, Foremost Group, which does enormous
00:16:54.360 business with the Chinese government. And it really traces back to 1993 when Mitch McConnell and Elaine
00:17:01.540 Chao go to Beijing, China as guests of the Chinese state shipbuilding corporation. And they basically
00:17:07.940 strike a deal with them. The Chinese state shipbuilding corporation says, we'll build all your ships.
00:17:13.860 We'll finance the construction of those ships. We'll find crews to help you put, you know, to operate
00:17:19.480 the ships and we'll get you contracts with Chinese state owned companies to send Chinese goods across
00:17:26.420 the Asia Pacific region. And you'll make a lot of money. And they actually have. The problem is you
00:17:32.700 now have the Republican leader in the Senate who were he to do something that Beijing really did not like.
00:17:39.880 They could destroy the family business overnight. In other words, China has control and leverage over
00:17:46.240 them, which is exactly what this elite capture strategy is all about. You look at former members of
00:17:55.080 Congress. There's some 23 former members of Congress who have left Congress, but are now lobbyists, not just
00:18:02.080 for Chinese companies, but for Chinese military and intelligence linked companies. So there are all kinds of
00:18:08.600 ways that this happens in Washington, D.C. The Bidens are the biggest concern because they're the first
00:18:14.100 family. But there are many other political figures that fit this category as well.
00:18:18.880 Yeah. And when it comes to the situation, like the one with Senator Mitch McConnell, we're not just
00:18:23.720 talking about having a business that does business in China. Yeah, there's a lot of people who might do
00:18:29.880 business in China that aren't necessarily compromised. We're talking about doing business
00:18:33.240 with the Chinese Communist Party. That's a whole different ballgame. We're not talking about China in
00:18:38.280 general. We're talking about what the Chinese Communist Party. You also talk about, though, it's not just
00:18:42.320 members of Congress. You talk about LeBron James and how the NBA, while they're bowing down here to BLM
00:18:49.340 saying, oh, we have so many social justice issues. They look the other way when it comes to the human
00:18:53.940 rights atrocities in China, refuse to criticize China. Same with a lot of celebrities here in
00:18:59.560 Hollywood. Why is that? What's going on there? Yeah, it's the same thing. You know, LeBron James
00:19:05.940 is and wants to be a global brand. And China now actually has more NBA fans than the United States.
00:19:14.480 Obviously, their population is much bigger, but the NBA is huge in China. LeBron James understands
00:19:19.640 this, and he's been on this trajectory for more than a decade. As I recount in the book, back in 2008,
00:19:26.060 there's a petition drive concerning the situation in Darfur, where the Chinese-backed government in
00:19:34.220 Sudan is killing black Christians in the southern part of that country. And there's a petition drive
00:19:41.040 that comes out to condemn China for supporting this repressive war that killed some 200,000 black
00:19:49.320 Christians in southern Sudan. LeBron James refused to sign that petition because he did not want to
00:19:57.000 offend China. So it really leads one to question when he says black lives matter. In his mind, it seems
00:20:03.760 like some matter more than others. If they're going to cost him commercial opportunities, he's not so
00:20:10.580 interested in jumping on board. And so, you know, he obviously wants to play basketball, but he has media
00:20:16.860 company. That media company has joint venture deals in China with Chinese state-backed companies.
00:20:22.760 He travels to China all the time. He has a special brand of his shoes. We know about the Nikes in the
00:20:29.400 United States, but he has special ones made by Nike simply for fans in China. So it's a huge part of
00:20:38.500 LeBron James's business empire. And that business empire has basically led him to shut up and avoid
00:20:45.460 criticizing China in any material way. The same thing applies to other people in Hollywood as well.
00:20:54.360 Wow. There was also just going back to politics, I just remembered, and as we're recording this,
00:20:59.920 he hasn't actually been approved yet, but Eric Garcetti, he's Joe Biden's nominee right now for
00:21:06.920 ambassador to India. He's the former LA mayor. It's been revealed by the Daily Caller News Foundation
00:21:13.160 that he also has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, that he has received apparently well over
00:21:19.100 a million in donations during Garcetti's tenure from two wealthy individuals tied to alleged CCP
00:21:25.200 influence and intelligence fronts. I mean, the only reason we know about that is because he is now
00:21:30.200 Biden's nominee. But I just wonder, okay, how many mayors? He was just a mayor.
00:21:35.860 How many mayors? How many governors? How many local officials? They just can't say no to the money.
00:21:44.460 I mean, the love of money, not money itself, but the love of money, Jesus says, is the root of all kinds
00:21:50.820 of evil. Doesn't mean that it's evil in itself, but people motivated, as you said, by power and money,
00:21:56.920 they will literally sell out anyone and anything, including their own country for it. That's scary.
00:22:02.240 Yeah, no, you're exactly right. This is part of the genius of the way China approaches this. They
00:22:09.380 understand that it's not red or blue, it's green. That's what motivates a lot of people that are in
00:22:15.120 public service. And so they use that motivation, that human weakness to their benefit. And, you know,
00:22:22.280 a lot of these people are smart. They convince themselves that what they're doing is going to
00:22:27.760 bring about closer relationships between the United States and China. But in fact, what they're
00:22:33.160 doing is effectively helping to disarm the United States by making the United States less resistant
00:22:40.040 to what China is doing. So when China engages in aggressive action, whether it's in the South China
00:22:46.960 Sea or, you know, involving, you know, military confrontations, the people that have been captured
00:22:53.880 by Beijing with these commercial deals, their answer is always greater engagement. So when China
00:22:59.940 does something good, when China does something bad, the answer is always to get closer to them.
00:23:05.780 And the problem is that this getting closer to China has not really made China more like us.
00:23:14.280 In a lot of respects, it has made us more like China. If you look at a lot of the things that have
00:23:20.660 happened in the surveillance state, the credit system that they have created in China to surveil
00:23:26.860 and control their population, elements of that have been adopted by big tech firms in the United
00:23:33.140 States when it comes to censorship and the control of information. So when you get closer to a power
00:23:40.180 like China, the dream, the idea was they're going to become more like us. The reality is,
00:23:46.120 unfortunately, that we have become more like them.
00:23:50.660 And, you know, one thing that maybe is is positive, or I would just like to I would like
00:24:05.980 to hear your take on this. So this is a news story as we're recording this. This is from the Wall Street
00:24:10.660 Journal. The title of the article is U.S. threatens ban if TikTok's Chinese owners don't sell steak. So
00:24:17.080 for people who don't know, TikTok owned mostly by China, huge national security issues, just
00:24:22.880 constantly collecting the data of its users here in the United States in ways beyond I think most
00:24:27.720 of us average non-technological people can even understand. And the Biden administration,
00:24:33.540 according to the Wall Street Journal, is demanding that TikTok's Chinese owners sell their steaks in
00:24:37.500 the video sharing app or face a possible U.S. ban of the app, according to people familiar with
00:24:42.560 the matter. Now, I'm not I'm not sure if I believe that this is actually going to happen. Not only
00:24:49.320 would this be wildly unpopular with a lot of young liberal voters, but I have a hard time believing
00:24:55.400 that the Biden administration would make this kind of strong move. What do you think?
00:25:00.360 Oh, yeah, it's a great question. I mean, let's remember Trump called for a ban, a forced sailor ban
00:25:06.780 back in 2020. Joe Biden in 2020 refused to allow members of his own campaign to use TikTok because
00:25:15.760 of security concerns. But then when he came into office in the spring of 2021, he reversed the Trump
00:25:21.540 decision and said, we're going to study it for a while, which is really what's been going on now
00:25:26.180 for a couple of years. The decision that you're talking about is being pushed by CFIUS, which is
00:25:32.220 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. These are the various government agencies
00:25:37.180 that are involved, like Treasury, the Pentagon, et cetera. It's ultimately going to be the president's
00:25:42.300 decision to make it. A ban makes complete sense. TikTok not only collects a lot of data,
00:25:49.500 it has been demonstrated. It is a known avenue of propaganda for the CCP. They use it to control
00:25:57.560 information. They use it to manipulate information. And the notion that we are somehow going to allow
00:26:03.140 a Chinese company that is linked to the hip with the Chinese state into the minds and hearts of our
00:26:09.560 children unfiltered is absurdly ridiculous. So I hope optimistically that they ban TikTok,
00:26:16.780 but I'm going to hold my breath until it's actually done.
00:26:20.340 Yeah. Wow. Wow. You just retweeted a story, a national review about how at Yale, Chinese students
00:26:32.920 that are critical of Beijing on an American college campus where they're supposed to be
00:26:38.100 First Amendment protection and some form of American patriotism, they're actually,
00:26:41.900 they face harassment and their families back home can be targeted. So tell me a little bit about that.
00:26:52.440 I mean, how pervasive of an issue is that, that actually people's First Amendment rights here when
00:26:56.700 they criticize China are in some way being trampled on? That's a great question. And it's a huge
00:27:03.340 problem. And again, you need to follow the money. What's happened at Yale and it's happened at other
00:27:08.060 universities is they are taking in a large amount of money from Chinese nationals who are donating,
00:27:14.900 but oftentimes it was strings attached. I actually have an entire chapter on this in my book, Red
00:27:20.420 Handed. And Yale is the focus. Joe Tsai, who is the co-founder of Alibaba, which is kind of the Amazon
00:27:27.940 of China, is worth some 20 to 30 billion dollars. He's been donating hundreds of millions of dollars to
00:27:36.660 American universities. Yale being the largest recipient. And this is a gentleman who is very
00:27:43.200 pro-CCP. He loves the credit score system. He talks about how great the Chinese government is.
00:27:50.480 The human rights criticisms are ridiculous. So we know where he stands politically. The problem is
00:27:56.600 that Yale University set up the Psy Center at Yale and they put out a lot of material that's pro-CCP
00:28:05.400 and they are engaged at Yale in preventing people who are critical of Joe Tsai and critical of the
00:28:12.900 CCP from speaking. Students that are from Tibet or students that are Uyghurs, these are the oppressed
00:28:19.620 minorities in China, talk repeatedly about how they're not welcome at Yale, even though they're
00:28:25.760 students at Yale. So again, it's about the money. And it's also about the fact that the universities are
00:28:31.240 trying to hide the source of this money. They're supposed to, they're required by federal law to
00:28:37.380 disclose who's sending them the money, but they oftentimes try to obscure it and hide the fact
00:28:43.000 that it's coming from China. It's a huge problem and not just at Yale. Wow. So, so many of our
00:28:49.460 institutions in this country are at least in part influenced by a foreign hostile regime that is
00:28:58.480 openly and explicitly hostile to America being the world's superpower. And what's interesting is that
00:29:06.020 so many of these institutions and politicians, not all of them, like you said, this happens on the
00:29:10.240 other, on the Republican side of the aisle too, but they claim to be progressive. They claim to be for
00:29:16.160 equality. They're anti-racist. They've got all of these DEI initiatives and they are partnering with
00:29:23.180 the regime that is explicitly against the things that they say that they're for. This is true of
00:29:27.800 the NBA. This is true of a lot of the corporations that are working with China yet, you know, after
00:29:32.600 George Floyd happened, apparently became champions of social justice. And I think people don't realize
00:29:38.400 how much propaganda is spun by the Chinese communist party. Like we actually saw after George Floyd,
00:29:45.480 a lot of the tweets going out, a lot of the stories that were actually being pushed by the CCP
00:29:50.780 because they wanted to latch onto this narrative that America is bad, that America is racist. Yes,
00:29:55.780 look over here. The real human rights atrocities are happening in America. I actually saw a study
00:30:01.100 the other day that a lot of people on the left were sharing, talking about the importance of gender
00:30:06.620 diverse families and gender diverse children and breaking those stereotypes of man, woman. And then when
00:30:12.260 we dug into it, it was actually funded by the Chinese communist party who does not allow that kind of
00:30:18.580 behavior at all, really, in China, certainly on a public sphere. And then if you look at something
00:30:25.180 like TikTok, they heavily restrict the usage of TikTok by their youth there and what content they're
00:30:31.900 able to access. Yet they push that stuff here. So a lot of the progressive values, actually, that I
00:30:37.800 think that we see manifesting themselves in the United States are, I won't say they're originated by
00:30:42.780 China, but they're actively pushed by China because I think China knows that those kinds of progressive
00:30:48.360 programs, DEI and all of that, make us a lot weaker and helps them then get stronger.
00:30:56.420 Yeah, I mean, it's really important for people to understand that what's happened, unfortunately,
00:31:01.380 with some progressive leaders is they have what I would call this sort of dictatorial impulse.
00:31:08.120 And they've talked about this. I mean, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, was asked 10 years
00:31:14.260 ago which political system he admired the most. And his answer was quite surprising and candid. He said,
00:31:21.640 I admire the Chinese system because you can just kind of get things done. There are people in Silicon
00:31:28.280 Valley, people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who have said on the record that they admire the
00:31:34.200 quote-unquote efficiency of the Chinese system. Well, if you don't have an independent judiciary,
00:31:40.540 if you don't have a legislative process, if you don't have public elections, it's pretty easy to
00:31:44.880 be efficient. So what's happened, I think the point that you're raising here is really important,
00:31:50.140 is that their goals, their goals of dealing with climate change or dealing with, you know,
00:31:57.000 oppression-related agenda or whatever they want to say, those are so important to them that they are
00:32:02.500 willing to jettison any notion of representative government. And in some cases, they're even
00:32:08.780 willing to partner with a foreign state that rejects their progressive values, but they admire
00:32:14.880 the fact that they can get things done with brutal efficiency. So they're willing to toss aside all their
00:32:20.520 principles and get into bed with them. It's really an atrocious situation. My hope is that there are going
00:32:26.600 to be some honest people on the left who will call them out on it. I'm not holding my breath,
00:32:32.940 but my hope is that that's going to happen because there have got to be people on the left who acknowledge
00:32:37.320 this problem.
00:32:38.040 I think even some people on the left, they're just, they're almost so cozy with communism or
00:32:56.480 they're, they don't call themselves communists. But then when you look at the socialists, which is not
00:33:00.300 far from communists, or open socialists in Congress, I think that is part of the reason,
00:33:05.520 it's a superficial reason, but part of the reason why they are scared to criticize the Chinese
00:33:10.440 Communist Party, because they're afraid that it would indict their own belief system. All right,
00:33:15.300 what do we, what do we do? This seems like a really, really big problem that seems beyond
00:33:19.640 our control, just as regular voters. But is there anything that we can do to help expose this problem,
00:33:26.260 push back on it?
00:33:28.300 Absolutely. I mean, a couple of things I would say is, first of all, you need to let your elected
00:33:32.440 officials know that you actually care about this. You know, I know people that are in elected office.
00:33:37.960 I don't know a lot of them because of the nature of the investigative work I do, but they will tell
00:33:42.860 you, I mean, they pay attention to emails and phone calls to their office. A lot of members of Congress,
00:33:48.680 I would say on both sides of the aisle, basically have the view that most voters only care about
00:33:53.780 themselves. They care about what the tax rate is. They care about, you know, their, if they're work for
00:34:00.580 the government, what their salary is, they only care about their schools. I don't think that's
00:34:04.680 true. People care about their country. They care about these kinds of issues. So you need to let
00:34:09.220 your elected officials know you care about it. Second thing I would say is, make sure that you
00:34:14.920 yourself are not funding the Chinese war against the United States. So what do I mean by that?
00:34:21.280 There are a lot of Wall Street investment firms that are investing in companies right now
00:34:27.320 that are part of the Chinese military industrial complex. I have my retirement accounts through
00:34:33.900 Fidelity and I went and looked at, I think it was the Fidelity worldwide account and found stunningly
00:34:40.660 that 30% of the companies in that worldwide fund were Chinese and a number of them were Chinese
00:34:48.660 military industrial complex companies. So look at your own investments. It doesn't mean you have to
00:34:55.760 have a huge mountain of money, but just make sure you are not investing in entities that are funding
00:35:01.760 the Chinese military industrial complex in their competition with us. And then the third thing I
00:35:07.280 would say is pay attention, be mindful of the forces that are at work. A lot of the media coverage,
00:35:13.960 unfortunately, is very superficial. It focuses at the surface. There are a lot of things going on below
00:35:20.000 the surface that I think help explain the sort of things that are going on. And the hand of China
00:35:26.840 and some of the decisions that are being made in Washington, D.C. is undeniably an important force.
00:35:32.860 And we need to be aware of that. We need to expose it. And we need to let other people know
00:35:37.780 that this is a key factor in how decisions are being made in Washington today.
00:35:42.180 Yes. And get off TikTok. Get your kids off TikTok. China is a brutal regime. It doesn't believe in
00:35:49.980 human rights. It doesn't have an idea of innate human worth the way that we do. It is a systematically
00:35:55.440 atheistic regime. And it follows the worldview and the morality of atheism, which basically people are
00:36:02.440 valued by how much they can offer, how much power they have, how much productivity they have that is
00:36:08.040 fundamentally opposed to what the West and specifically America is supposed to be.
00:36:12.620 We cannot even imagine the widespread atrocities that will take place if and when America or China
00:36:18.560 becomes the world's greatest superpower. And with every bit of corrupted connections that they have
00:36:26.840 here in the U.S., it gets closer to that. That's why our voice matters while it still does. Let's make
00:36:31.980 sure. Thank you so much. Thanks for taking the time. I really encourage everyone to go out and get
00:36:36.060 your book. We'll link to it red-handed in the description of this episode so people can get it.
00:36:40.600 Thank you so much, Peter. Thanks for having me.