Glenn Thrush is a columnist for the Washington Post and a political analyst for CNN. He has been to China and documents the whole twisted story in his new book, Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century.
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00:03:45.180You know, Glenn, I happen to believe that the origin story of how we got into this pandemic
00:03:50.740is the biggest story in the world and the most screwed up story in our public discourse.
00:03:56.560And it's for a number of reasons that you and I have discussed, including the fact that our leading scientists like Anthony Fauci have distorted and misled the American people as to what was our relationship with these Wuhan labs.
00:04:09.760Also because the Chinese Communist Party puts out like a series of ever-changing propaganda lines that don't make any sense on their face, including the one that you just mentioned, that it came from the United States and Fort Detrick or some other such nonsense.
00:04:22.080Including the fact that Democrats refuse to join congressional investigations to unearth the origin of the virus, including the fact that the Biden administration won't release the intelligence, including the fact that the media has screwed up the story by driving a false narrative, which is that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory for a year before admitting that it wasn't, but failing to examine how they got it wrong.
00:04:44.480And so it really is a failure of all of our public institutions in a grand way that we're struggling to scratch our way out of right now.
00:04:52.020And that's why I think it's so important to emphasize that, first of all, this is not a political question.
00:04:57.320The origin of the coronavirus has nothing to do with whether you're a Democrat or Republican.
00:05:01.260It has nothing to do with whether you like Trump or you don't like Trump.
00:05:03.960It's a crucial bit of history and a crucial bit of scientific information that tells us what we need to do to make sure that we don't have a pandemic every two years.
00:05:11.940And this is why I think that we're nowhere, you know, despite the fact that after a year and a half, finally, we can have a discussion on a podcast about the lab leak theory without getting canceled.
00:05:20.980That's nice. Don't get me wrong. That's better than it was a year ago.
00:05:24.520But in terms of actually uncovering the truth of how we got into this dystopian reality that seven billion people are living through, that's still going on.
00:05:32.920No, we're nowhere. There is no real investigation, partially because the Chinese government won't allow it and partially because the U.S. government won't push for it.
00:05:40.240It is. It is phenomenal to me that they still wonder why some people won't take the vaccines.
00:05:47.400You know, you've been lying to us in one fashion or another for the last year and a half.
00:05:57.400You and then at the beginning, you can say, well, we didn't know.
00:06:01.180We just didn't know this. We didn't know that.
00:06:03.240We were all kind of in it together, but we aren't all in it together.
00:06:23.720We have every institution has either lied or covered or was just smarmy every single institution in the United States that was involved in this.
00:06:39.580What do you expect a group of citizens to do?
00:06:43.060Of course, there are people that don't believe you.
00:07:24.380And sometimes they're actually corrupt.
00:07:25.920And, you know, sorting through those things is supposed to be the job of the media.
00:07:29.080But it failed because we the media got caught up in the mainstream media got caught up in its own war with the right wing media and its own war with the Trump administration, which, again, has nothing to do with the origin of the coronavirus.
00:07:40.360It has nothing to do with the lab leak theory.
00:07:42.280It's just Washington being Washington and getting caught up in its own BS.
00:07:46.440And, you know, it's one thing to say that, OK, in the first months of the pandemic, we can excuse a lot of those mistakes.
00:07:56.700But here we are 18 months into this thing, a year and a half after the outbreak.
00:08:02.140And not only is there no, you know, sort of accountability, there's no even sort of mea culpa to say that, OK, well, we our institution screwed up.
00:08:13.680We actually have to still do the work of coming together on fighting the virus and then also coming together and figuring out what happened.
00:08:21.100And, you know, like I said before, that's just not going on.
00:08:24.560And, you know, again, there's plenty of blame to go around and there's plenty of blame to still go around.
00:08:29.260But I don't blame people out there in in the country who look at all of these records of mistakes and the lack of accountability and saying, why should I believe you?
00:08:41.180But I can't blame people for not trusting Anthony Fauci when he says get it, because the fact is that there are some bad faith and some good faith attacks on Anthony Fauci.
00:08:49.820Not every attack on him is valid, but some of them are.
00:08:53.420And the ones that I agree with happen to be the ones about how he is thwarting congressional investigations and distracting people from looking into this lab leak theory.
00:09:03.160And there's a reason that he's doing that.
00:09:04.700And the reason is because in this case, he has a conflict of interest.
00:09:08.120I don't believe in this case he's a bad person or he's trying to get the world sick.
00:09:11.580I think he has a conflict of interest.
00:09:36.560But this is where I sort of think that, you know, as we were talking about before, you know, he could give you a scientific or an academic explanation for why that's not illegal.
00:09:48.260In other words, it's not whether or not.
00:09:53.080The point is that is not whether or not the specific contract led to the pandemic.
00:09:57.060The point is that Anthony Fauci was in charge of a system that was transferring huge amounts of scientific knowledge into these risky labs that have no oversight and no transparency in a crisis.
00:10:07.000And it was his fiduciary responsibility to keep an eye on that, to oversee that, to make sure he knew what was going on in those labs that the U.S. government was funding and he won't even answer basic questions about it.
00:10:18.780And how can we have a society where public officials are above questioning by Congress, by the media, where they can just tell all of us to go pound sand and thwart help the Chinese government, in fact, thwart the investigation into the pandemic?
00:10:32.900I think this is a case that I haven't seen.
00:10:36.640I haven't seen anything like this probably since Nixon, where the crime is not as bad as the cover up.
00:10:44.700I think if Fauci would have come out early and said, yep, we were doing work with the lab.
00:10:54.060And I take responsibility if he would have done that right away.
00:10:58.420I think Americans would have accepted him and said, OK, all right.
00:11:03.240But because of this weird cover up, I don't think there's going to be any forgiveness in the end if we ever find out.
00:11:12.140Right. And there's a reason that not just Anthony Fauci, because I think there's a group of people, including Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes for Health, Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, and several other people who are in the business of working with Chinese labs to dig up viruses and play around with them.
00:11:30.940OK, and that is their business and that is their industry.
00:11:34.200And I think the reason that they don't want that business to be thoroughly investigated as a possible source of the pandemic is because they're looking to expand that business greatly.
00:11:44.760And if you just read what Anthony Fauci said in The New York Times about a week ago, he said, we're going to need billions of more dollars of U.S. taxpayer money in order to greatly expand our digging up of viruses all over the world and then bringing them back to labs, including labs in China.
00:11:58.940And that's his plan. He wants to double the size of his organization.
00:12:04.020He wants to his theory is that we didn't do enough of this research.
00:12:08.320And all I'm saying is, OK, well, shouldn't we find out if this research caused the pandemic before we expand it sixfold?
00:12:14.620Correct. Shouldn't we at least do the investigation?
00:12:16.740It's not to accuse Anthony Fauci of starting the pandemic.
00:12:19.660It's to say, hey, you now admit begrudgingly that you don't know what was going on in these Chinese labs.
00:12:27.600That's what the Trump administration released on January 15th.
00:12:31.580That the Biden administration confirmed is that they had another side of the lab, the side that they worked on with the Chinese military, that where they were doing the coronavirus research, they didn't tell Anthony Fauci about.
00:12:41.040So I can believe Anthony Fauci when he says, OK, we didn't fund the pandemic.
00:12:44.740That's not the point. The point is that you didn't do your job to oversee your collaboration with these labs that in the crisis tell us to go screw ourselves.
00:12:52.740And if you think about that problem, you have to ask yourself, OK, well, is it a good idea to continue throwing U.S. money into these labs, especially when we can't even get in, when they won't even let us in the door, when the coronavirus pandemic breaks out on the doorstep?
00:13:06.860And Anthony Fauci's answer to that on CNN a couple of weeks ago was yes. He says, yes, we have to do.
00:13:11.860So why would we do this in Japan if we want to do it? You know, it's it's like, you know, oh, look how unsafe nuclear power plants are.
00:13:20.800Just look at Chernobyl. No, that was that was made by the Soviet Union.
00:13:26.360That's that's not a good case to say nuclear power is dangerous.
00:13:30.360The Soviet Union was dangerous and sloppy, right?
00:13:35.580The same thing could be say, I you know, if we want to do this research, then let's do it ourselves and do it right.
00:13:43.080Let's not farm it out to somebody where we don't have any kind of what I mean, why are we moving it to China?
00:13:50.220Well, originally, a lot of it was moved to China just for that reason.
00:13:55.200You know, the Obama administration banned gain of function research in 2014, a lot easier to sponsor in a country that doesn't have that ban.
00:14:02.740You know, and then when you think about it, OK, well, then we had cables in 2018 that told us that U.S. diplomats visited those labs and said they were too risky and that they were not following the proper safety standards and that they were doing research on that coronaviruses and how they could affect humans.
00:14:19.760They essentially told us if the lab leak theory is true, that it was that this could happen at this very lab.
00:14:25.720And our policymakers failed. OK, and that's because we put the scientists in charge of overseeing the scientists.
00:14:31.620And that's because when the Obama when the Trump administration actually lifted the pause, the rules under which they lifted it were devised by the NIH and Anthony Fauci.
00:14:41.300And that's why Anthony Fauci can stand in front of Rand Paul and say, I didn't break the rules because he wrote the rules and he knows the loopholes.
00:14:47.780And he drove a truck through those loopholes. And now he's bragging about those loopholes.
00:14:53.400And now he's asking for more money to expand those loopholes. And I can't think of anything more dangerous, again, if the lab leak theory is true or even if it's not true, because what we now know is that these Chinese labs can't be trusted.
00:15:05.780We now know and even Anthony Fauci begrudgingly admits that they're not doing open science.
00:15:11.240Actually, they're doing what they're doing for the party, because in China, the science is run by the party.
00:15:17.400And in China, the scientists only say what the party tells them to say or they die or they get jailed and or disappear or worse.
00:15:24.520OK. And so Anthony Fauci is not in charge of U.S.-China relations.
00:15:30.000And this is why, because it's not just a science issue. It's not. It's a it's a national security issue.
00:15:36.320And well, didn't we know research? Didn't we know that when the head of the military's biological weapons program was running it?
00:15:45.580I mean, isn't that clear? You know, you have this battle and this is, you know, detailed extensively in my book, Chaos Under Heaven, which which I wrote in the middle of this pandemic.
00:15:57.800And it details that what happened inside the Trump administration was that the national security people said we have a problem here and this might have come from the lab and we need to look into it.
00:16:06.760And the health officials said, no way, don't worry about it.
00:16:10.140And Xi Jinping told Donald Trump, no way, don't worry about it.
00:16:13.540And then they threatened the United States and said, if you want your PPE and masks, this was in the first months of the pandemic, you'll shut up about these labs.
00:16:20.820And then they went around the world and did the same thing, bribing and coercing and threatening countries all over the world.
00:16:25.320There's a reason that the Chinese government cover up is centered around the labs.
00:16:29.140Right. There's a reason that they won't let anybody into the labs, that they've squashed all the science.
00:16:33.320They're censoring all their scientists.
00:16:35.320Any journalist who said anything different was jailed or disappeared.
00:16:39.280And so if you there was a ton of people inside the national security community, including inside the Trump administration, were sending this alarm.
00:16:47.160But they were shouted down. And then when it burst into public awareness, the media took the side of the scientists.
00:16:52.940And this was led by, you know, a combination of sort of source bias and anti-Trump bias and confirmation bias and, you know, basic laziness and incompetence that runs most of the mistakes in the mainstream media.
00:17:06.420You see to this day. I mean, I've worked in when I worked in eight different mainstream newsrooms.
00:17:10.660OK, it's not really a conspiracy. It's usually just group thinking and competence.
00:17:14.700That's exactly right. And I think a lot of these newsrooms followed Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci.
00:17:20.320You told them, you know, don't write anything about the lab like theory.
00:17:23.240That's crazy. And they can't admit that they got captured by their own sources, that actually they didn't do their jobs.
00:17:29.840And, you know, they don't want to get dunked on by the right wing media and the mega media.
00:17:33.260But, you know, I'm part of the mainstream media.
00:17:35.420I have no problem admitting when they get something wrong and when the right wing media got something right.
00:17:40.600And it's the same thing with Trump. If you read my book, you'll see that there's some praise of Trump and there's some criticism of Trump.
00:17:45.820None of our figures are public figures are infallible.
00:17:48.800We don't live in a society where we have dear leaders and supreme leaders and kings and princes.
00:17:53.920Right. We live in a society ruled by men. Right.
00:17:56.820With systems of oversight and accountability.
00:17:58.860And that's what broke down here, because all of those systems didn't want to admit that even people like Anthony Fauci could make mistakes, could have flaws, could have conflicts of interest.
00:18:10.880But that's the reality. And that's what we have to sort through right now.
00:18:13.920I don't think the Biden administration is ready to come around to that, frankly.
00:18:17.100They still want to just throw up their hands and say, oh, well, we'll never figure it out.
00:18:20.320That's what you're going to see when they have this 90 day intelligence review.
00:18:23.380You know, first of all, what about the intelligence community?
00:18:25.320How can we have the intelligence community review its own failure?
00:18:29.740Right. Think of the failure that's ongoing.
00:18:31.840And if you read the articles about this review, it's really crazy and shocking, because what they always say is, well, the intelligence community is starting to look at a bunch of data that they didn't look at from the Wuhan labs until last month.
00:18:45.400And to me, that strikes me as why didn't they look at it?
00:18:48.420Why is it why did it take them 18 months to look at their own data?
00:18:52.560Right. And then every article you'll see about this review says the next thing it will say invariably will be, well, it's really it's a lot of stuff.
00:18:59.400And, you know, they don't really know what to make of it.
00:19:01.620They don't have any Chinese speaking, you know, scientist intelligence guys, to which my reaction is, why not?
00:19:07.820How is it that we spend 80 billion dollars a year on these agencies?
00:19:12.560They don't have any Chinese speaking scientist analysts.
00:19:26.120But if it is true, it's the biggest intelligence failure since, I don't know, 9-11 and WMD put together.
00:19:32.280It means that we've been spending our national security budget 10 times that of the rest of the world combined on the wrong stuff, on targeting jihadis in Yemen and nothing on watching a bunch of risky labs run by the Chinese military right next to where the pandemic broke out.
00:19:48.360So the intelligence community is good.
00:19:50.260But no, I was just going to say this is this is what happens.
00:19:53.860It is a scandal, but that's what happens when the group think, if you will, all says that China is the is the, you know, model for the, you know, the next generation.
00:21:01.640And in order to avoid that, what I say is that we have to do more to confront the problem now that inevitably, as you look through history,
00:21:09.200totalitarian, pseudo-religious, genocidal, expansionist dictatorships expand until confronted.
00:21:17.920Invariably, it happens every single time.
00:21:20.180And so by ignoring the problem, we actually make the situation much more dangerous.
00:21:23.280And that's why I think you saw in the Trump administration a lot of different groups of people push for a turn of American foreign policy,
00:21:30.440that the Biden administration, to its credit, has continued.
00:21:33.180But the problem is that we're moving way too slow.
00:21:36.620And yes, as you point out, now there's this sort of counterargument.
00:21:44.300And to me, that seems that part of that is driven by the corruption of people in the business class and the Wall Street elite
00:21:50.400who are making money off of funneling our money and technology to China.
00:21:54.400Some of it is the simple fact that a lot of these communities haven't woken up to the realization that our collaboration with China is being weaponized on their side.
00:22:03.400It doesn't matter if we think engagement and cooperation is wonderful and that's going to cause the Chinese government to liberalize economically and then politically,
00:22:11.780and then they're going to become just like us.
00:22:19.580And we have this like, you know, crazy discussion about China in Washington where no one listens to what Xi Jinping says.
00:22:27.380And what he says is very clear that he wants to shape a world order to make it safe for China to achieve its dream.
00:22:34.880And that dream includes making the world safe for autocracy, repression, and all sorts of malfeasance that affects us in our daily lives.
00:22:43.340And if you're sitting at home wondering if you're going to get the coronavirus and you haven't seen your grandmother in a year,
00:22:49.020then you know that somehow we can debate how much that, you know, what happens in China affects us.
00:22:56.040The pandemic should have made clear to every single human being that what happens in China relates to us.
00:23:00.900It affects our national security and our public health.
00:23:02.940And if you can't collaborate on a pandemic, and we can't because they are telling us to go screw ourselves when we asked to go inside the lab that is right next to the outbreak,
00:23:11.840which had all the bat coronaviruses in it where they were doing all the bat coronavirus research.
00:25:05.760You know, I think, first of all, what I say is that, you know, we have to understand that, you know, the China issue in our politics is getting hyper-politicized to our detriment.
00:25:17.160And we have to understand that, you know, what it's actually going to take is for both sides of our politics and our society to come together on what essentially is a shared problem.
00:25:27.980OK, but what I see is that these debates over how to deal with a China that is increasingly expansionist, aggressive, repressive and interfering in our lives are are taking place not just in Washington, but in academia, in the tech sector, on Wall Street, in our in our sports, in Hollywood.
00:25:47.860Right. These are all of these major industries are affected by the CCP's strategy and malign behavior.
00:25:54.140And we all need to start talking to each other about it.
00:25:57.100We all need to start finding where we overlap in terms of we can't we can't really we can't find those places because if we disagree, we're hate mongers, bigots, racist, whatever.
00:26:07.840I mean, how do we how do you have a conversation with the NFL or the NBA about China when they'll ban anyone from saying the truth about China and it's turned around on people that are just saying, oh, can we just talk about the facts here?
00:26:28.180You know, they're doing the Chinese government work for them.
00:26:31.880Right. It's a perfect example, because, you know, when when the NBA got punished to the tune of four hundred million dollars for one tweet, one tweet against I stand with Hong Kong.
00:26:44.360One guy tweeted that and they were all of a sudden four hundred million dollars of their revenue disappears in a second.
00:26:53.560Right. Maybe not for Joseph Tsai, who is that owns the Nets and is an Alibaba founder.
00:26:59.300But for millions of NBA fans who realized in that instant that, you know, if we want to preserve our freedom here in America, we have to stand up to China exporting its repression onto our shores.
00:27:12.080Now, of course, the NBA totally screwed that up.
00:27:15.300But what I say is that, OK, well, the NBA is not actually a foreign policy organization.
00:27:18.720And rather than dunk on them, what if the government went in and said, hey, listen, NBA, rather than just bashing on you for doing the wrong thing, which you clearly did.
00:27:26.820What if we offered to use our diplomatic power and our economic sanctions and all this to stand with American corporations to tell the CCP, no, you know, screw you.
00:27:35.820You can't punish the NBA for one tweet. We're not going to stand for it.
00:27:39.460What if we brought together all the leagues that Chinese people like to enjoy and they all got together and said, no, our people can tweet what they want or you'll have no NBA in China.
00:27:48.020And then you'll have to explain to your own people why LeBron James is no longer coming to town.
00:27:52.360You know, these are ways that the public and private partnership could be established.
00:27:56.920We're not doing that, of course, because we're not sophisticated enough in our policy and in our discussion, which leads me to the next way that we sort of get at this, which is to have conversations like the one we're having right now, Glenn, this conversation.
00:28:08.460Right. This is an hour and a half of thinking about this problem in a nonpartisan, nonpolitical way.
00:28:12.820Right. You and I come from different parts of the media environment, different parts.
00:28:16.080I'm sure we have different ideologies on various.
00:28:18.320It doesn't matter because on this issue, you and I both realize an essential truth, which is that this is a problem that can no longer be ignored.
00:28:25.040That where it's going to take the entire country and our entire society to wrap our heads around.
00:28:29.000It doesn't mean we all need to overreact.
00:28:31.220It doesn't mean we need to rush into toppling the CCP.
00:28:33.980It just means that no longer can we countenance the part of our political discourse, which says, never mind.
00:28:41.240It doesn't matter. You can. The CCP is not going to take over the world and we can just let it go.
00:28:45.840Because it's clear to everyone that I talked to when rolling out this book and I talked to people on the left and the right.
00:28:50.540I went from Joe Rogan to Steve Bannon. I don't care.
00:28:53.960I say the same exact thing, which is that this is an American problem.
00:28:57.800This is a problem of free and open societies battling what is a rising danger and a rising threat.
00:29:05.300And, yeah, it's a complex problem that's going to require solutions that make that have costs and that have risks and that force Americans to sort of choose between competing interests.
00:29:15.740And go against our sometimes instinct to map maximalized profits.
00:29:20.120And that's a really difficult conversation.
00:29:22.280I'll tell you, when Trump first put the sanctions on them, I was not I'm not a fan of sanctions.
00:29:29.300I don't like, you know, trade barriers.
00:29:32.500But I called him and said, I have to tell you what you're doing with China.
00:29:39.340I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's right.
00:29:41.920You're the first one that's actually taking a tough stand against China.
00:29:47.360Every single one Republican and Democrat have bowed to China.
00:29:52.260And I don't want to get into a war with them.
00:29:54.580I don't I don't have anything against China, except we're living through what is probably going to end up being another Holocaust.
00:30:03.100And we'll all go, gee, I didn't know when we clearly know.
00:30:08.580You know, I don't want to war with them, but I also don't want them to rule the world.
00:30:14.180And what they did with the PPEs, what they're doing with with 5G, if I'm not mistaken, that is what they traded for.
00:30:30.880And again, yeah, the goal here is to avoid the conflict with China that neither side seeks.
00:30:37.220Right. To find an accommodation whereby they can have their country.
00:30:40.220It doesn't mean we're going to shut up about their human rights, but that we're primarily concerned with how they operate in our societies.
00:30:45.080That we're primarily concerned with protecting ourselves and ensuring that we have the same national security and public health and economic freedom and prosperity that we that we have had this whole time, more or less.
00:30:57.380And that the Chinese Communist Party has not agreed to that.
00:31:01.320They are they are not on board with that plan.
00:31:03.020They are not convinced, despite the tariffs, despite the sanctions, despite all of the public condemnation.
00:31:08.280We have to be honest about the fact that nothing has changed their calculus so far.
00:31:12.480And there's a risk of going up this escalation ladder that we have to be conscious of.
00:31:16.460But that's still not an excuse to ignore the problem.
00:31:19.100You know, and when it comes to China's actions around the world, what they did in Brazil was they said, if you want your shots, you have to take our Huawei and Brazil folded.
00:31:27.820Right. Because how could they deny their people life saving medication in a crisis?
00:31:33.000Although I would just say that the Chinese shots are largely not really that good, especially against Delta.
00:31:57.560But at the same time, it caused that government to suffer greatly and those people to suffer greatly.
00:32:01.880So they're torturing and blackmailing countries.
00:32:04.220They punished Australia in the middle of a pandemic by shutting down its beef and wine imports, which is like 40 percent of their their agricultural economy in the middle of a pandemic for asking about the covid origins.
00:32:15.860OK, that's a capricious form of cruelty.
00:32:17.960And what the world is seeing now is that China is a national.
00:32:21.660Everyone thinks, oh, America is not a superpower.
00:32:54.180And I think and that's that's what that's what people are coming around to realize.
00:32:58.400And that doesn't just apply to free and open societies.
00:33:00.840If you're in Africa, if you're in Latin America and you're dependent on your country's survival to to to to pretend that like the Uyghur genocide doesn't exist.
00:33:10.680That's that's a tough position to be in.
00:33:12.220We should be more active in engaging those countries.
00:33:14.680We should learn from the mistakes of the 20th century.
00:33:16.660But the bottom line is that a Chinese led world order is a very scary world to live in.
00:33:22.700It's it's a world where not only are are we not able to sort of practice our our what we call our way of life, you know, our ability to speak freely and to to to.
00:33:33.540But we have a world where the Chinese model would be exported, a package of authoritarian tools, surveillance and A.I.
00:33:40.680and prisons and monitoring that they will sell to any dictator who's willing to purchase it.
00:33:48.040Sometimes they'll just give it to them, you know, and we could see many examples of that all over the world.
00:33:53.480And that means millions and millions of more people in horrible suffering on our watch.
00:34:46.700So she can only really say the party line.
00:34:48.400But two is that what she is saying actually is demonstrably false in some cases and in other cases is at odds with what the U.S. government is saying.
00:34:58.580In other words, she's lying in some cases and in some cases she's calling the U.S. government liars.
00:35:04.400So picking through all of that and understanding it through the lens of a Chinese Communist Party propaganda operation is an interesting project in and of itself.
00:35:12.980But all that gets us to, you know, to spare the viewers the details of this lie and that lie, is that we can't trust what Dr.
00:35:28.860But the core of what she's saying, I think, is in this particular instance is true, which is that we are only in the third or fourth wave and there will be many more coming.
00:35:40.100And the longer that this festers, the worse the variants will get.
00:35:48.940Well, that's a good point, because if you ask Robert Redfield, who is the head of the CDC, who went on CNN in February and said that it probably came from the lab and then disappeared.
00:36:01.640He gets on CNN, says, not only do I think the virus came from the lab because I know what was going on in that lab.
00:36:07.420Remember, he's a virologist, unlike Anthony Fauci, immunologist, unlike Peter Daszak, zoologist, virologist.
00:36:14.620And Robert Redfield said, I think it came from the lab because of the way it acts, because a super virus that acts this way, that's so that came out so transmissible to humans and is even that much more efficient at being transmissible to humans as it as it mutates, indicates that somebody tinkered with it.
00:36:38.400So I think what you're seeing is that a lot of these countries, again, more and more scientists are coming out now just to say, first of all, there's no way to rule out that the outbreak was linked to the lab.
00:36:50.480Second of all, just because some scientists say you can't see the lab's work in the virus doesn't mean anything because it could have been connected to the lab, but you wouldn't be able to detect it.
00:37:00.840In other words, scientists don't have the final word on this.
00:37:02.960And third of all, we have to investigate the labs, whether the Chinese government wants us to or not.
00:37:08.380And that's not going to be easy, but that's something that we must, must do.
00:37:11.580And the intelligence community can't do it by itself because they have a conflict of interest because they screwed it up already.
00:37:17.140OK, and that means more congressional investigations, more public investigations, more releasing of intelligence and more coalescing of the international community around a real look into this thing.
00:37:27.680I mean, we didn't even get to talk about the WHO yet, but if you just look at what the WHO is proposing, it's laughable.
00:37:36.860They're proposing to negotiate with China to get back into the lab, which the Chinese government has already rejected, which they already tried once and wasted a year trying to do.
00:37:46.600And so, again, Glenn, this is this is not to be an attack on Anthony Fauci.
00:37:52.480This is just to say we he can't be in charge of this investigation.
00:37:56.700He could be a witness. He could be a material witness.
00:38:10.640That's the only way I see it going down.
00:38:12.060And that means we're going to have to have some Democrats or wait until see if the Congress flips the Congress flips and you've then you've got subpoena power in a day.
00:38:19.440And, you know, Anthony Fauci is going to be in a lot of hot water.
00:38:22.860If it doesn't, then we're going to need some brave Democratic senators, I think, to say this is important.
00:38:29.420I think you see some of that now they're testing the waters.
00:38:31.720They're waiting to see what the Biden administration comes up with.
00:38:33.960I'm here to tell you the Biden administration, you know, doesn't have any political incentive to get to the bottom of the pandemic.
00:38:41.960They don't they're not invested in the lab leak theory or the market theory or anything because they weren't around.
00:38:47.560It wasn't on their watch. Their hands are clean.
00:38:49.680At the same time, if it does turn out to be the lab leak theory or if they press too hard for an investigation, well, that upends their delicate relations with Beijing.
00:38:58.240They're going to need a climate change deal with Beijing.
00:39:00.220That's going to make that more difficult.
00:39:01.720It's going to throw their progressive left wing members under the bus because they've been saying the lab leak theory is racist for a year and a half.
00:39:08.240Even though it's not racist. I mean, if you think about it for two seconds, I always thought the, you know, wet mark.
00:39:13.540Oh, the markets in China have bat soup.
00:39:16.080I always thought that was way more racist.
00:39:17.620If you just think about it, then lab that there was a mistake in a lab.
00:39:20.860Right. That's not a racist thing to say.
00:42:11.420There was huge the Nazi booned party in in New York and New Jersey that was happening.
00:42:18.380You had Nazis or or sympathizers in our universities.
00:42:24.680We have we just scooped up military spies that were in our university from China.
00:42:31.020And for some reason, Joe Biden decided to let the DOJ not prosecute any of those guys.
00:42:37.440I can't think of a reason why we would do that, but it seems very reminiscent of of another decade.
00:42:47.400Yeah. I mean, again, I think the World War Two references, like the Cold War references, tell us some things that we that we can learn from and are also imperfect in fundamental ways.
00:42:57.860And so what I get from because everyone's like, oh, well, you know, what do you want?
00:43:03.420A Cold War? We're going to go into a Cold War.
00:43:05.260And like, wait a second, don't use the the the Cold War as a political cudgel tell me not to confront the Chinese Communist Party.
00:43:12.220And there are some things we can learn from the Cold War. Similarly, the main thing that I learned from, you know, from my reading of the history of how we got into World War Two is that when it comes to nationalist socialist regimes that are willing to commit genocide and are increasingly militarily aggressive, their appetite grows with the eating.
00:43:32.420And that the exact wrong thing that you can do is to appease their ambitions because it emboldens them to become more powerful and more dangerous.
00:43:39.960OK, and that's when I look at Hong Kong and I look at the Uyghur genocide.
00:43:43.840That's what I think. I think, oh, that's appeasement because the world is standing by and doing nothing.
00:43:48.580And a few sanctions here and there from the Biden or Trump administration doesn't mean squat when it comes to two million people in concentration camps right now as we're having this conversation.
00:43:57.180And in my book, I describe in great detail how the U.S. and the rest of the international community stood by while millions of Hong Kong residents fought valiantly to preserve the limited freedoms that they had and lost.
00:44:10.100OK, and we didn't do squat to help them. And now we're trying to clean up the mess afterwards. It's too late.
00:44:15.080And then I look at Taiwan and I think, OK, they're next and they know it.
00:44:18.640OK, and do we know it? And are we going to stand up this time or are we going to let up?
00:44:22.600But it's essentially a democratic country. OK, and I've been to Taiwan.
00:44:25.380And it's a country for all intents and purposes. I don't care whether the U.S. government recognizes it or not.
00:44:30.300Those people are not part of the PRC and they don't want to be.
00:44:34.380And they're but they're they're not powerful enough to stand up to Beijing on their own.
00:44:38.120Is that going to be the next domino to fall? And if you think about what had we done something different in Munich or had we done something different at this stage of the World War Two?
00:44:46.380Yeah, I think that's the lesson that we need to draw. Not that we're at World War Two, but that, hey, appeasement is how we made the situation much, much more dangerous.
00:44:54.720That's a pattern that we're repeating right now, for sure.
00:44:57.020If we would have stood up in Hong Kong, Taiwan would not be next.
00:45:01.720Exactly. And why would and why would Xi Jinping and a lot of people talk about a military invasion of Hong Kong?
00:45:07.040I don't think that's what's going to happen. You know, the model that Xi Jinping used in Hong Kong was to threaten military invasion,
00:45:12.080but to use all of the other elements of coercion to just get it under heel.
00:45:16.520And that's political interference, economic coercion, you know, just screwing with their information environment, buying up all their media,
00:45:24.280jailing all the people that say anything that you don't like and turning the country from within.
00:45:29.060That's what they did in Hong Kong. And yes, there was a lot of violence, too, but not a really full scale invasion.
00:45:34.840So I think that's what you're going to see in Taiwan. Tons and tons of coercion, of course, of pressure and selling them a bunch of tanks is not going to fix that.
00:45:42.340So can the United States under the Biden administration marshal the international community to give Taiwan the the the the ability,
00:45:49.440the capability to defend itself from those things? I don't see that happening at all.
00:45:53.840And then if they take Taiwan, then I think we're it's all downhill from there.
00:45:57.820Yeah. If they take Taiwan, don't they? I mean, where is the stop? There is no stop on them.
00:46:05.520Exactly. And, you know, again, the appetite grows with the eating. That's how expansionist nationalist socialist regimes tend to operate.
00:46:13.720So, again, I think we have a window of time that's dwindling fast to convince the leadership in Beijing that there's another way.
00:46:20.500And that will include some decoupling and some tradeoffs and some costs and some behavior changes on their part for sure.
00:46:27.840And they're not convinced yet. All signs point to this getting much worse.
00:46:32.040Everything we see, all the data, all of their actions, you know, and the Trump administration was good in flipping over the chessboard,
00:46:39.340but they were bad at setting it back up again. And that's what the Biden administration is trying to do.
00:46:43.560But they're slow at it and they're caught with their own internal contradictions.
00:46:47.620And they're still thinking in sort of a 2016 kind of world when the Chinese are thinking in a 2025 kind of world.
00:46:53.480And, you know, when you talk about the pandemic, we think of it as like we're having these discussions.
00:46:58.720Oh, should we should kids get masked? Can we go out for a beer?
00:47:01.780They're thinking about which industries to invest in.
00:47:04.280They're thinking about which continents to purchase.
00:47:06.640OK, they're thinking about the economic devastation, how they can first take advantage of that and then take advantage of the rejuvenation and the reconstruction
00:47:15.180and then use that to advance their political agenda in countries all over the world.
00:47:19.700We're not playing that game. Why is it that China has vaccine diplomacy with all of these countries and, you know,
00:47:25.340who don't want to be under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party just to save their citizens lives?
00:47:29.860And we have no counter to that at all. We're giving our shots mostly to the COVAX system, which is the WHO,
00:47:37.580which, crazily enough, is not only taking our good graces, but then taking our money and paying it to guess who?
00:47:45.660The Chinese government to buy Chinese shots that don't work, to give third world countries crappy Chinese shots that were paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.
00:47:54.680Because that's how stupid we are. That's the how far we are behind in this thing we call competition.
00:48:00.620If we're funding the U.N., which is getting fleeced by the Chinese to actually make the situation worse,
00:48:06.060because if you have bad shots, you have a false sense of security and these countries make bad policy and it just leaves us in this nightmare even longer.
00:48:14.960But the Chinese get paid off of that. That's crazy. That's a broken policy.
00:48:19.480That's only one of the hundred things I could I could mention that we need to fix.
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00:50:08.300Tell me about the Uyghurs and what's really happening there and how much we know.
00:50:14.400Yeah, Glenn, I mean, this is the issue that I find in talking about China that connects with people the most, you know.
00:50:20.320But it's also one of the issues that the Chinese government spends the most time trying to lie about and spread disinformation about for good reason.
00:50:26.640It's because it's horrific and it is the largest mass atrocity on our planet.
00:51:11.920In other words, we know their intent because of the documents, because of what they say and what they do and what they write, that people are too lazy to read and translate.
00:51:18.380But it's very clear, okay, when you have things like mass forced sterilization, when you have things like mass forced abortion, when you have things like stealing tens of thousands of children from their parents and educating them in schools thousands of miles away, you know, implantation of IUDs on a mass scale.
00:51:36.280That's an intent to reduce the size of a population.
00:53:03.740And if that all wasn't bad enough, right, millions of people who lost all dignity and agency, lost their children, their homes, their culture, their language, their right to wake up and do the job that they want to do or any job that they want to do, practice their religion, all of that.
00:53:22.160If that wasn't bad enough, what we see now is that the Chinese government is expanding that model to other places.
00:53:27.440And the camps are coming to Tibet, which has been through enough, believe me.
00:53:31.080And then next they're going to go to Inner Mongolia.
00:53:32.940And there are 57 Chinese ethnic groups, right?
00:53:36.500And each of them has got to be living in morbid fear, okay?
00:53:40.720And, you know, I don't believe that, like, our country is perfect when it comes to race relations or its treatment of Muslim Americans, but we never put 2 million of them in camps, okay?
00:53:50.080In other words, whatever criticisms you have of the U.S. government – and I have many – this is not the same.
00:53:55.040This is something that our society was supposed to have evolved past.
00:54:00.400It is – the only word that you could use for it is evil, which is a very serious word, which is a word that deserves justification and explanation.
00:54:09.820But it's a word that somehow we can't seem to do without because when we see it, we have to call it out because we see it so plainly.
00:54:17.820So why are these companies – I mean, is it just money?
00:54:22.440Why are these companies knowingly engaging?
00:54:25.900Why is Facebook, why is Google, why are they engaging and actually helping them do these things?
00:54:35.580Is it just an IBM and the Holocaust kind of situation?
00:54:53.880Some of it is that they're corporate hostages, that they've gotten into a mess by doing business in China that they thought was going to be fine and it's not fine.
00:55:02.500And now they have no choice because they have to kowtow to the CCP at every opportunity.
00:55:06.520Now, none of these companies is going to voluntarily do the right thing.
00:55:11.560And what we're finding is that only through dragging them into the reality that this is actually not just the right thing to do but also in their long-term business interests because essentially if you're in the business of being complicit in slave labor or genocide or crimes against humanity, eventually that's going to catch up to you.
00:55:29.720The problem with U.S. corporations is that they only care about the next quarter.
00:55:33.120And the problem with the Wall Street firms is that they actually understand the long-term risks but they don't care.
00:55:36.900And really, I have more sympathy for the corporations that are corporate hostages of the CCP than I do for the Wall Street firms that are funneling money into the Chinese system, including the companies that build the concentration camps, including the companies that build the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls, including the companies that build the missiles that are pointed at us and that are hacking our intelligence services.
00:55:58.140And that's just the greatest transfer of wealth and power and influence from America to China that I've ever seen.
00:56:06.620And just look what's going on on Wall Street these days, Glenn.
00:56:08.340Did you see, like, in the last month – and I wrote a column about this in The Washington Post – in the last month, the Chinese government started cracking down on its own companies, right, because they're in their own existential power grab mess and they're evil and nasty to each other.
00:56:23.300I think of it like a mafia organization, Glenn.
00:56:25.540That's what the CCP – that's how you have to think about it.
00:56:27.940It's the largest extortion racket in the world.
00:56:30.440So the party goes around to all of its corporations.
00:56:33.620They're like, oh, nice company you got there.
00:56:35.280It would be a shame if something happened to it.
00:56:37.040Then they go do that to every country.
00:56:39.720And sure enough, each one of these companies has to pay up.
00:56:42.360But the crazy thing is that when they did that, they cracked down on Tencent and DD Global and just ruined these companies.
00:56:51.020Hundreds of millions of Americans are invested in these companies that are building the machines that are pointed at us.
00:56:55.720And that's because Wall Street is making fees on both ends, and that's because they're prizing short-term profits over the long-term credibility and integrity of our capital markets and our stock exchanges.
00:57:07.760And if you just think about the grand strategic competition, how can we have a government that's going to sanction a company in China for building concentration camps?
00:57:15.580And then Wall Street comes in and gives it ten times as much money from your pension fund, from my pension fund, from the Army's pension fund.
00:57:25.340That's how far behind we are in this competition, that we have a system where the Congress passes a law, and then a year and a half later, the State Department says, okay, this company is going to – on an entity list, you can no longer trade with this company.
00:57:37.900And then Wall Street comes in and gives them a trillion, $10 billion, and they're richer than ever, and that's – and people at Wall Street – even Wall Street journalists are always mad at me.
00:57:57.080We're dealing with a nationalist, socialist, totalitarian, expansionist, genocidal, psychotic, mafia organization that's funding the richest country in the world, and we have to think about it differently.
00:58:12.420You know, the CCP is communist, but I'm not sure communist is the right way to describe them.
00:58:19.080They're becoming, and maybe have been for a while, an oligarchy where you have these oligarchs that kind of rule, except unlike Russia – well, I guess maybe the same is in Russia, too, with Putin – you step out of line and you're dead.
00:58:56.080Does President Xi believe in anything?
00:58:58.180They believe in their own – they believe in their own survival and accumulation of power, which for them is going swimmingly, by the way.
00:59:27.600Now, you know, the problem with that is that we still think of it as like, oh, just a regular government.
00:59:32.620So we send our deputy secretary of state to meet with their foreign minister, to sit around the table, and think about what – let's have a committee, to build a commission, to have strategic discussions.
00:59:44.760And that's what we've been doing for 40 years.
00:59:47.600The strategic and economic dialogue became the economic and strategic dialogue.
00:59:51.720Then it became the comprehensive economic dialogue.
00:59:54.040Then it became the comprehensive economic and strategic dialogue.
00:59:56.400And the Chinese are laughing the whole time because they're sending all of these bureaucrats at us to keep us busy while they actually do what they want to do at the party level.
01:00:06.340And there's a ton of stories like this in my book where people go to China, and they meet with the foreign ministry guy, and they're like, oh, this is great.
01:01:05.700I think you deal with that like the FBI deals with any criminal organization, right?
01:01:09.420Like if you were the Justice Department and you were trying to bust up the mob, that's how you deal with the CCP.
01:01:14.240And so it leads you to a bunch of different policies than the ones that we're performing now, which is to like, you know, let's start seven dialogues about arms control and check in in two years and see what happens, which is, you know, really, really awful.
01:02:05.320It was in Chinese, so nobody in the NIH or the intelligence community can read it because apparently no one speaks Chinese for some reason.
01:02:14.440They said they want to become the best in biowarfare, dealing with viruses in the next 10 years.
01:02:18.660Now, if you read that and you understood it and then you thought, OK, well, maybe we should pay attention to our virus collaboration, that would lead you to a number of steps.
01:02:32.240Apparently, we can't leave the oversight of investing in Chinese companies to JPMorgan Chase because they don't have our best interests at heart, OK?
01:02:41.560And so it means we have to inject national security into our discussion about protecting our capital markets.
01:02:46.340It means we have to figure out what to decouple and what not to decouple.
01:02:49.400We can't live in two different worlds.
01:02:51.280We can't live in two different existences.
01:02:55.800We want exchanges with Chinese people.
01:02:57.620We have to separate the Chinese Communist Party from our discussion of China or from the Chinese people because, you know, they're not responsible for the things that their leaders are doing in most cases.
01:03:09.680You know, you wouldn't blame the Italian people for the mafia, right?
01:03:11.860So you wouldn't blame the Chinese people for the CCP.
01:03:22.120So in other words, there are no simple solutions.
01:03:24.260And if you look at a sector like the academic sector, well, that's where things get a little sticky because we want to have exchanges, but we don't want to have them on China's terms.
01:03:32.400We don't want to have, you know, we don't want to have to shut up about the Dalai Lama in order to have an exchange program with the Chinese university.
01:03:39.020Of course, that's what they would want, right?
01:03:41.060When Chinese students come here and we want their money, right, the schools want all that money.
01:03:45.520That's like how all our colleges are surviving or getting rich or whatever.
01:03:51.020We have to make sure that their rights are protected, right, that they're not getting spied on and that they're allowed to actually participate in our universities and not just sit there and monitor each other until they all get scooped up or their families get scooped up.
01:04:01.980You know, so in essence, there's a thousand things that we need to do, and all of these things have costs and risks and require us to have tough conversations and often put our own political BS aside.
01:04:17.500You know, when you think about like information and how to deal with Chinese propaganda, right?
01:04:21.240It's not really a Democratic or Republican problem.
01:04:24.900When you think about, you know, the NBA, well, that's something that the private sector and the public sector are going to have to put their heads together on.
01:04:30.960We just don't operate that way, you know, because, you know, as I'm sure you believe in America, we guard our institutions, guard their independence from the government fiercely and rightly, right?
01:12:27.980So, yeah, I get it that there's a need for transparency in the paper.
01:12:32.340But, yeah, I have a job where I can my boss likes to say we like to figure out what's going on before we figure out what we think about it.
01:12:40.400I try to give my opinion, show my work, be transparent with my biases and also tell my readers something that they didn't already know before.
01:12:48.160And if I do that, then that's a good day of being a Washington Post columnist.
01:12:51.180Now, you know, what goes on in the news side of The Washington Post?
01:12:55.280But I'll just say that, like in newsrooms across the country, I think what you're seeing is a blurring of the line that as I look around the newsrooms, not singling out anyone specifically, I see a ton of opinion on the news pages and a ton of news on the opinion pages.
01:13:09.080And that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as readers know what they're getting and are educated enough to sort through it.
01:13:17.120That's that's where my confusion comes, because there is more news in the opinion pages many times than there is in the actual news section.
01:13:28.640It seems like the news section is afraid or corrupt.
01:13:32.860And the newspaper says, well, let me give this to you and you do that.
01:13:44.520I mean, again, I think that my theory is let a thousand flowers bloom, that I think in America we have a long tradition of straight news, opinion news and hybrid news.
01:13:55.320And that dates back to our founding fathers.
01:13:58.560And, you know, The Washington Post doesn't tell me anything to write.
01:14:01.200I write I write what I want and no one's ever told me what to write or what not to write.
01:14:05.920And and so I've used that freedom to report on this story because I think it's the most important story in the world that the pandemic affects all of us.
01:14:13.600And that to understand the pandemic, we have to understand the U.S.-China relationship and vice versa.
01:14:19.240So sorry, not sorry for doing a ton of reporting.
01:14:21.520That's what that's what I'm going to do as long as they allow me to do it.
01:14:24.520And, you know, as for the newsrooms, again, I think, again, not talking about The Washington Post specifically, but what I've noticed in watching what's happened with the lab leak story, just for one example, is that they're just not perfect, that they make mistakes, that they are susceptible to groupthink and confirmation bias and source bias.
01:14:42.500And it doesn't matter what part of journalism you're in.
01:14:44.940Those are things you have to be aware of.
01:14:46.680And, you know, I know from watching you all these years, that's something that you pay attention to very carefully, that you're constantly examining your own assumptions.
01:15:19.460And that's where I think a lot of journalism has gone wrong, is that they've forgotten about the process of professional journalism, which is not really about news or opinion.
01:15:27.680It's about am I doing my best to understand my biases, to do the legwork, to make sure that what I'm saying is true, and then to engage the counterarguments honestly and truthfully, even though I disagree with them.
01:15:40.380And that's what I think about when I go to write a column, whether it's news or opinion or what else.
01:15:44.680And I think there are still a lot of people in mainstream journalism who are doing that every day.
01:15:49.160But the lab leak theory was not a great example of that.
01:15:55.420When you look at what happened because of COVID and the steps that the American government took to pour money into big business, into Wall Street, into the banks and just screw the little guy.
01:16:12.500How is this going to be written 100 years from now, do you think?
01:16:16.780You know, I think it will be an example of sort of the severe damage done by the Beltway lobbying complex, right?
01:16:28.280This is – the people who get paid off during these crises are always the people who are well-connected in Washington.
01:16:33.400And this is just the latest, latest boondoggle.
01:16:36.260And we're talking about trillions of dollars.
01:16:37.680It doesn't matter if you're looking at those COVID bills.
01:16:39.940Remember, they're like, oh, it's a trillion there, three trillion there.
01:16:44.420But just so chock full of corruption that no chance of achieving the aims that they were set to achieve.
01:16:51.900And then the second thing I think we'll realize is that throughout this pandemic, which, again, is only beginning, right?
01:16:57.600This will be a many, many, many year event.
01:17:00.280That's if we don't get another one, but just this one in terms of the economic effects, the industrial effects, the humanitarian effects that will happen all over the world from countries that are still suffering.
01:17:11.300As the international economy is destroyed, that will hamper our own recovery.
01:17:15.380And then the actions of bad actors like the Chinese government, which are going to come in and exploit all of that.
01:17:19.660I think what we're going to realize is that we were – we failed to look past our nose and that we're stuffing money into every hole that water is coming out of without thinking about what happens in six months from now, much less two years from now, much less ten years from now.
01:17:32.220Think about the different industries that we're going to need.
01:17:34.240Think about the technologies that we're going to need to onshore, right?
01:17:54.420Because last time we were in a pandemic, we got blackmailed over masks to shut up about the coronavirus origin, and there's going to be another pandemic.
01:18:01.760So I guess we're going to have to have our own masks and our own vaccines and our own chemicals and our own medicines.
01:18:06.280And these are big, big reorientations that the infrastructure bill, you know, laden with fat as it is, doesn't even try to address.
01:18:14.380So I think that's what history will judge us for.
01:18:43.600And Mao is said to have believed that the more his enemies found themselves in internal disarray, whether it was the Japanese or the Guomondang or whoever,
01:18:51.680the better it was for the Chinese Communist Party.
01:18:54.080That's the attitude that Xi Jinping has right now.
01:18:56.240That the more we're caught up in our own personal dysfunction, talking past each other, debating minutiae, attacking each other,
01:19:06.660and living in a society where our focus is on what can divide us rather than what can unite us,
01:19:12.920that all redounds to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.
01:19:15.540And that's what I saw during the Trump administration.
01:19:18.920I saw a lot of good people inside the Trump administration trying to get their heads around this very serious and very urgent problem,
01:19:24.880but that the chaos, not just of the Trump administration, although it was extremely chaotic, as you well know,
01:19:30.080but in our society and in our discourse made that effort all the much more difficult and less successful.
01:19:35.860So until we fix that, until we fix ourselves, until we realize that we all have some sort of shared patriotism,
01:19:44.200if not shared humanity, you know, the chaos will only continue.
01:19:48.500I remember saying about 2009, I said the operative word in the future is going to be chaos.
01:19:58.120And anyone's that trying to add chaos is going to be a big part of the problem, because there are too many people inside and outside.
01:20:08.080They understand if we can just divide and just keep us fighting.
01:20:13.060I keep thinking, what are all of the things that are actually being done?
01:20:17.680What's actually happening while we're arguing over nonsense, just nonsense?
01:20:24.020The world is changing under our feet and people will wake up one day and go, when did that happen?
01:20:33.980Yes, we have to wake up to the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party.
01:20:38.900We have to wake up to the fact that this is the most important foreign policy issue that any of us will ever deal with, in my opinion.
01:20:45.920And we have to wake up to the fact that we're dealing with an organization that means us harm.
01:20:49.540Okay, that is not a benign actor in the world that is intentionally and deliberately and comprehensively seeking to undermine our security, our prosperity, our freedom, and now our public health.
01:21:02.980And that's a problem of a scope and scale, the likes of which we haven't dealt with in our history.
01:21:07.700It is the greatest challenge that our country has ever faced.
01:21:10.100And we do have the capacity to rise to it if we decide to do so.