00:00:00.000Hey everybody, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:02.000This is Andrew Colvett, executive producer of this fine show, filling in for Charlie, who's on assignment at Cal State Fullerton, arguing with a bunch of lefty students.
00:00:10.000Can't wait for him to tell us all about that.
00:00:12.000Today, we go into the question of the day.
00:00:26.000We bring in two China experts to discuss what they think about the bill and why China is such an intense and existential threat to American power, both domestically and abroad.
00:01:09.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:47.000So it is one of the messiest stories in the country to ban TikTok or to not ban TikTok.
00:01:56.000It truly is something that people on the right of good faith, that people we respect, people that have very, let's just say a track record of challenging the establishment, of challenging authority like Rand Paul, like Thomas Massey, guys that we have a lot of respect for, especially in certain topics, are seeing this differently.
00:02:18.000It seems like you've got Rand Paul, Thomas Massey, and these types, as well as maybe even President Trump, Matt Gates.
00:02:27.000They're saying this is a Trojan horse.
00:02:28.000RFK Jr. is out saying it's a Trojan horse.
00:02:31.000I mean, I was looking across social media this morning.
00:02:33.000It was like Cat Dird is calling it a Trojan horse.
00:02:36.000That seems to be, I would say, a very popular sentiment on the right currently that this is a Trojan horse that expands government power.
00:02:57.000Brendan Carr, who's a rock rib conservative on the FCC, who says, no, this is exactly the bill that we wanted during the Trump administration.
00:03:07.000And then you have people with a very large stake in the company, Jeff Yass, who has a history of donating campaigns like Rand Paul, like Thomas Massey, like Mike Lee, that has obviously a very large stake in TikTok.
00:03:28.000And so there is a lot of questions about, well, are people doing this to protect campaign donations?
00:03:35.000I'm not going to cast aspersions on any of these guys.
00:05:03.000It feels sort of random in the middle of an election year, total gridlock, and then swoosh, suddenly it's passing in about a week with near unanimous, it was unanimous through the committee, through the commerce committee, and then it was, it received a ton of bipartisan support from people like Nancy Pelosi, which is very weird, I admit.
00:05:26.000So I want to go through a couple of different points on this that I think are very important.
00:05:33.000I want to play the Rand Paul clip because he got into it with Brian Kilmead.
00:05:37.000And again, we have a massive amount of respect for Rand Paul.
00:05:40.000So my very public position is that Rand Paul, yes, in the past, he's taken campaign contributions from somebody that owns TikTok.
00:05:51.000But he is also a civil libertarian and he has been right about so much when it comes to government overreach that we deserve to pay attention to what he says.
00:06:37.000So he talks about how this danger of it going beyond that.
00:06:40.000Now, without getting too deep into the weeds, you guys have to understand something called a bill of attainder.
00:06:47.000So Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution bans all bills of attainer.
00:06:54.000And Rand Paul touches on that briefly.
00:06:56.000He says you're not allowed to target a specific company.
00:07:00.000It's ex post facto laws and bills of attainder.
00:07:03.000So basically, Congress can't declare someone or some group or some company guilty of a crime on its own or punish them retroactively, declaring an act to be criminal.
00:07:16.000A bill of attainder is a legislative bill declaring one guilty of a crime.
00:07:21.000It was an abuse by Parliament back in the UK, which is why they included it in the U.S. Constitution.
00:07:26.000So basically, you could be going about your business and think everything's fine and dandy and legal.
00:07:31.000And then Congress, in theory, could have passed a law and said all those things that you were doing ex post facto is illegal.
00:08:24.000But what you can do is you say that companies that fit these criteria.
00:08:29.000And then the challenge becomes how narrowly you can tailor that and still be constitutional.
00:08:34.000Now, this bill does specifically reference TikTok and ByteDance, but it also says that any other apps or social media companies that fit these parameters could also be subject to this law, meaning that they're not just targeting TikTok.
00:08:50.000Again, if you just targeted TikTok, that would be unconstitutional.
00:08:54.000So a lot of people are saying this is a Trojan horse.
00:08:58.000They have to also understand that there's no way to do a law like this.
00:12:26.000There's essentially four countries included in this: it's China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
00:12:33.000So, Russia is another question mark because it would include potentially Telegram.
00:12:37.000Although Telegram has an adversarial relationship with Putin, doesn't mean that some interagency report couldn't find that it was actually, you know, in cahoots with Putin or something.
00:12:48.000Or maybe there was a couple employees that were spying on the company and therefore controlled by Putin.
00:14:21.000If an American company owns it, so if Mnuchin's group owns the piece that is divested from Chinese control, does that instantly make it better?
00:14:35.000But it's kind of uncertain because the ownership would then control the algorithm and would be able to push different topics, different videos.
00:14:47.000So for example, when this bill was first brought up, when it started to become public knowledge that they were going to push this forward in the Commerce Department, TikTok put out an alert, asked for the zip code of its user.
00:15:03.000The user input the zip code, and then it would give you the name and number of your local representative and people engaged in an influence campaign.
00:15:17.000What the algorithm is pushing in America is usually trans ideology, gender ideology, anti-conservative values.
00:15:24.000Charlie has been very vocal about this.
00:15:25.000He's been kicked off the app about 100 times.
00:15:29.000We have other influencers like Isabel Brown at Turning Point USA, who has had a really good, has a really good following on TikTok, but she's also had to navigate the bans.
00:15:39.000It is absolutely a problematic app from the content perspective.
00:15:44.000Would that be better if it was in American hands?
00:15:46.000It depends whose American hands it's in.
00:15:48.000And this bill does not determine that either.
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00:17:45.000Explain, and either of you can take it, James or Bradley, please.
00:17:49.000Well, Andrew, it's great to have the opportunity to join you.
00:17:52.000Our thesis is that America made a fundamental mistake when Wall Street financiers, in conjunction with the Chinese Communist Party, came together to invest in China, to invest in the People's Republic of China, thus facilitating its rapid growth in the 1990s, the naughties, to where it is today.
00:18:16.000So China went from a very small economy, about 0.6% of 1% in 1990, to about 19% in 2019.
00:18:27.000And it became our greatest strategic threat as a consequence.
00:18:32.000And it was largely the United States that was responsible for funding and supporting the growth of its greatest adversary through what we call the engagement school.
00:18:43.000Those who believed that by engaging with China, you could change the Chinese Communist Party, when in fact, all that happened was that the Chinese Communist Party became stronger.
00:18:54.000And year after year, Andrew, we make the argument that the U.S. threat deflated.
00:18:59.000We consistently, year after year, underestimated the threat that the Chinese Communist Party essentially generated.
00:19:10.000Because the question is so obvious to our minds.
00:19:14.000How is it that the United States could not do what it would have done during the Cold War or previously in World War II, and that was balance the rise of communist China?
00:19:24.000It didn't do that, which is a gross aberration and our greatest strategic failure, as we argue in the book.
00:19:35.000We've got a lot to do to essentially repair the mistakes that we ourselves made.
00:19:41.000So, this is a multi-pronged attack that's threatening American influence both abroad, in the Middle East, in Africa, certainly in the South Pacific.
00:19:52.000But right now, we're also talking about domestic interference by China, namely with this TikTok app.
00:19:59.000I know that you guys, so we're sort of trying to work through this bill to see if it's something that conservatives should be supporting or not.
00:20:08.000You guys have come out, as I understand it, against this particular bill.
00:20:14.000But it's not that you're not pro-TikTok, obviously, but why is it that you do not think this is the right bill to solve this problem?
00:20:22.000Well, I think, yeah, well, we'll just say that TikTok is a cancer.
00:20:27.000TikTok is a cancer from the Chinese Communist Party.
00:20:31.000And so, that's the first point that we have to make.
00:20:34.000You know, we've had, you mentioned the word multi-prong.
00:20:37.000And so, in our book, we talk about the Chinese Communist Party's comprehensive national power that they're applying to the United States, who stands in the way of their strategic goal of becoming the global superpower.
00:20:52.000And they want to displace us from that role and they want to destroy us in the process.
00:20:57.000And they want to do it through all methods available.
00:21:01.000They would prefer not to have to fire shots if they can get away with demoralizing and destroying their enemy from within.
00:21:11.000So, what we've seen over the last several years, since the Communist Party's come to power, but really over the last 30-plus years since Deng Xiaoping took over and created this hide-and-buy strategy, what we've seen is the Chinese really go after us.
00:21:28.000And they went after us with, you know, we can talk about fentanyl.
00:21:32.000We have 70 to 100,000 people being killed every year for the last five or six years.
00:21:38.000That's as many men that were killed in World War II.
00:21:42.000So, now we have this other thing called TikTok, which is in a totally different domain.
00:21:45.000It's in the information domain, and it's being run and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
00:21:50.000Byte dance is a state-owned enterprise or subject to state-owned enterprise rules and regulations from the Chinese Communist Party, and it is a threat to us.
00:22:00.000So, the intent of Congressman Gallagher's legislation that he created in the House, I think, is a good idea in the sense that we have to deal with cancer.
00:22:24.000Do you use radiation or do you use surgery?
00:22:26.000So, right now, we're in this American process of debating how we can best get rid of this cancer of TikTok.
00:22:33.000And so, there's a lot of solutions out there, and there should be great concern by Americans to make sure that we don't empower our government to violate the Fourth Amendment and other amendments that give us the right to privacy and the right of assembly and free speech.
00:22:49.000But the fact of the matter is, TikTok is a lethal threat, and we have to deal with it.
00:22:54.000And so, this bill, as originally written, I think has some goodness to it because it basically says you can only ban somebody that's from one of the four designated adversary nations, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Iran, and the fourth one's escaping me right now.
00:23:17.000So, those four are designated in writing, and then it says, and they have to have the president buy off on that.
00:23:24.000And he has to have, you know, kind of a I say it's this, and he can't say it's anything else.
00:23:29.000So, if we can keep the law written in such a strict way that is clear, simple, concise, that restrains any kind of expansion of this, then we should move forward on it.
00:23:39.000That's the challenge that will be for all of us as citizens is to hold our elected officials accountable, both in the House and the Senate to make sure that they don't try to seek to expand this.
00:23:50.000So I think that's where we're at right now on this specific issue.
00:23:53.000And it fits in perfectly with our book.
00:23:56.000For 30 plus years, as we talked about, the U.S. government failed to protect this nation from the predatory threat of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:24:24.000That it is a cancer, as Jim said, or it's, you know, two major things.
00:24:28.000It's an intelligence collection device, TikTok is.
00:24:32.000And then, secondly, it's a weapon of political warfare to be put, you know, it's putting Xi Jinping, the communist dictator, on your phone if you've got TikTok.
00:24:42.000So the CCP is with you constantly, and Xi Jinping is with you constantly, and he's mining your data and he's influencing your opinions.
00:26:11.000These are necessary steps to take to separate ourselves.
00:26:15.000India went through the same thing in 2020 when they banned TikTok and a variety of other apps too, right?
00:26:20.000TikTok is not alone, and there are some other pernicious ones out there.
00:26:27.000But India went through that pain of doing it and dealt with the Chinese, the PRC's abuse as a consequence of it.
00:26:36.000Look, this is, again, it's an apt metaphor.
00:26:39.000This is a cancer, and you have to treat it like cancer and recognize, of course, that the PRC can retaliate.
00:26:48.000And a positive element which might come from that is to recognize: hey, we are in a Cold War with communist China.
00:26:55.000And it's time for all Americans to recognize that and act accordingly.
00:26:59.000From an economic standpoint, if they want to ratchet that up, they're not in a position of strength over us economically, even though we have serious problems.
00:28:51.000We have 70 to 100,000 Americans killed every year by that power, by the malign power of the Communist Party that's driving that drug into our nation and killing our fellow citizens.
00:29:03.000But on terms of the military, where I spent my career, and I just want to make it clear, I don't work for a defense contractor.
00:29:10.000I'm retired and I live in Switzerland where my wife is from, and I have no financial interest.
00:29:14.000But I have been preaching for a long time about the military threat from the People's Republic of China.
00:29:20.000And what you saw this past couple of weeks was the Chinese holding their National People's Congress, where they announced that they were setting the target growth of their gross domestic product to be 5% for the year 2024.
00:29:34.000But before they announced that 5% target growth, they went out and told all of China and the world that they would grow their defense, their defense or military, the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, by 7.2%.
00:29:48.000That is about 30 years where they have been growing their military greater than their own domestic economic growth.
00:29:56.000So, if you put it in terms that we all can live with, you have your budget, you have the money, you have your income.
00:30:02.000Would you prioritize spending guns and bullets over food to feed your family or hospital visits to see the doctor?
00:30:10.000That's what the Chinese have done for 30 years.
00:30:12.000And that's why they've gone from having a brownwater Navy that could only barely get past 20 miles off their coast in 2000 to having a Navy today that dominates the Western Pacific and threatens the U.S. 7th Fleet, where I served.
00:30:34.000And not only do they have more ships than us, their ships have anti-ship cruise missiles that fly at supersonic speeds that ours do not have, that are longer range.
00:30:45.000They have anti-ship ballistic missiles that they test launched a few years ago in 2020 with the DF-21D and a DF-26 that traveled thousands of kilometers, thousands of miles, and hit a moving target in the South China Sea.
00:31:00.000And we're seeing that now reflected in real time in the Red Sea as Houthi rebels shoot anti-ship ballistic missiles at our ships.
00:31:39.000Let's get on that economic angle too, though, Bradley.
00:31:42.000Size up how strong they are and how much they could retaliate against America using their economic might, or do we still have the leverage?
00:32:05.000So, every word that they say about their economic growth is a lie, including the words and and the.
00:32:11.000So, you know, you have to take whatever they say with a major grain of salt.
00:32:17.000So, those profound economic problems are not going to be resolved.
00:32:20.000And they're not just a result of the, you know, the draconian zero COVID issues.
00:32:26.000These are deep and lasting problems in their economy.
00:32:29.000In addition, you've got a layer of environmental problems, a layer of demographic problems, a layer of essentially structural economic problems.
00:32:38.000Additionally, and finally, you have a lot of the world's manufacturing and investment is waking up to the hazards of investing in communist China.
00:32:48.000And so they're beginning to go elsewhere.
00:32:51.000So the Chinese have been screaming for investment for over a year now, right?
00:32:56.000Touting about how China is still safe and that they want your investment money while money flows to Indonesia, India, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
00:33:08.000I think COVID woke a lot of the world up to what was going on in China and really is going to be seen, I think, in hindsight as a turning point in all of this.
00:33:16.000Gentlemen, thank you for your profound insights and congratulations on your book, Embracing Communist China.
00:33:25.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:33:27.000If you get anything out of this show, if it's important to you, if you find it a place of refuge, of information, if you find it a sea of calm and order in an otherwise chaotic world, please consider joining members.charlikirk.com.