The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 113 ｜ Why COVID's Origin Is the Biggest Story in the World ｜ Josh Rogin ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.160 We're going to speak the unspeakable.

00:00:03.120 That's tough to do.

00:00:04.220 We live in a world that no longer values courage.

00:00:07.080 A world that rewards cowardice.

00:00:10.120 Oh, so brave.

00:00:11.320 So brave.

00:00:12.720 It's really important to recognize the people who will stand up for what is right.

00:00:17.500 And today's guest has courage.

00:00:20.300 He is a columnist for the Washington Post, a political analyst for CNN.

00:00:25.320 Why would I have him on?

00:00:27.020 Because he speaks the truth.

00:00:28.860 He's an award winning journalist.

00:00:31.240 And when I say journalist, I mean, he's one of the few people who can actually call themselves a journalist.

00:00:36.660 His allegiance is not to the right or to the left, but to the truth.

00:00:42.060 Until recently, roughly about the time Joe Biden took office, questioning the origin of COVID-19 was completely forbidden.

00:00:52.040 COVID began with a bat and it was in a wet market.

00:00:56.200 And anyone who challenged that was quickly labeled a conspiracy theorist.

00:01:01.980 Well, today's guest was not intimidated.

00:01:05.120 He questioned.

00:01:06.480 He challenged.

00:01:07.860 He's been to China.

00:01:10.080 His courage has paid off.

00:01:12.080 He documents the whole twisted story in his latest book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Z, and the battle for the 21st century.

00:01:22.640 If the greatest test of courage is the willing to sacrifice, he's passed.

00:01:28.300 Please welcome Josh Rogan.

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00:02:59.860 So, Josh, when we first spoke about COVID,

00:03:04.220 you were exposing the possibility of a lab leak.

00:03:10.060 Then we spoke when Fauci, I think, lied to Rand Paul.

00:03:14.560 Would you agree with that?

00:03:18.460 I don't know what his intentions were, but he definitely said things that were false.

00:03:23.500 In the old, in my day, that was called a lie.

00:03:27.760 In other words, he could just be totally wrong.

00:03:31.740 I don't know.

00:03:32.820 Doubtful.

00:03:33.180 Now China, this week, is saying that the virus is man-made, except we made it and sent it over there.

00:03:41.800 Is that where we are?

00:03:45.180 You know, Glenn, I happen to believe that the origin story of how we got into this pandemic

00:03:50.740 is the biggest story in the world and the most screwed up story in our public discourse.

00:03:56.560 And 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.

00:04:09.760 Also 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.

00:04:22.080 Including 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.

00:04:44.480 And 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.

00:04:52.020 And that's why I think it's so important to emphasize that, first of all, this is not a political question.

00:04:57.320 The origin of the coronavirus has nothing to do with whether you're a Democrat or Republican.

00:05:01.260 It has nothing to do with whether you like Trump or you don't like Trump.

00:05:03.960 It'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.

00:05:11.940 And 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.

00:05:20.980 That's nice. Don't get me wrong. That's better than it was a year ago.

00:05:24.520 But 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.

00:05:32.920 No, 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.

00:05:40.240 It is. It is phenomenal to me that they still wonder why some people won't take the vaccines.

00:05:47.400 You know, you've been lying to us in one fashion or another for the last year and a half.

00:05:57.400 You and then at the beginning, you can say, well, we didn't know.

00:06:01.180 We just didn't know this. We didn't know that.

00:06:03.240 We were all kind of in it together, but we aren't all in it together.

00:06:07.200 The the big corporations won. 0.64

00:06:09.920 The little guy was screwed. 0.52

00:06:12.240 Some became little mini dictators in different states. 0.99

00:06:17.040 The mask was good.

00:06:18.380 Then the mask was bad.

00:06:19.400 Then the mask was good.

00:06:20.360 And then 20 masks you had to wear.

00:06:22.300 I mean, it's crazy.

00:06:23.720 We have every institution has either lied or covered or was just smarmy every single institution in the United States that was involved in this.

00:06:39.580 What do you expect a group of citizens to do?

00:06:43.060 Of course, there are people that don't believe you.

00:06:46.620 Well, right.

00:06:46.900 But I happen to have to agree with everything that you just said.

00:06:50.120 All of our institutions failed.

00:06:51.380 All of our medical leaders, all of our government leaders, our media leaders, they failed us.

00:06:58.080 The first responders, they performed valiantly and continue to do so.

00:07:01.720 And they are the true heroes of the pandemic.

00:07:04.160 Everyone else.

00:07:05.040 And, you know, I was trained as a mainstream media journalist for 17 years to trust the scientists.

00:07:10.140 Right.

00:07:10.340 That's what you would think.

00:07:11.600 But then it's shocking to people to learn that.

00:07:14.440 Oh, wait a minute.

00:07:14.940 Scientists, even public health officials.

00:07:17.260 Are human beings.

00:07:18.680 And sometimes they make mistakes.

00:07:20.000 And sometimes they have conflicts of interest.

00:07:21.980 And sometimes they actually lie.

00:07:24.380 And sometimes they're actually corrupt.

00:07:25.920 And, you know, sorting through those things is supposed to be the job of the media.

00:07:29.080 But 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.

00:07:40.360 It has nothing to do with the lab leak theory.

00:07:42.280 It's just Washington being Washington and getting caught up in its own BS.

00:07:46.440 And, 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.

00:07:52.260 A lot of people were getting sick.

00:07:53.400 There was a lot of confusion.

00:07:54.680 There was a lot of misinformation.

00:07:55.780 I get that.

00:07:56.700 But here we are 18 months into this thing, a year and a half after the outbreak.

00:08:02.140 And 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.

00:08:12.820 It's not too late.

00:08:13.680 We actually have to still do the work of coming together on fighting the virus and then also coming together and figuring out what happened.

00:08:21.100 And, you know, like I said before, that's just not going on.

00:08:24.560 And, you know, again, there's plenty of blame to go around and there's plenty of blame to still go around.

00:08:29.260 But 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?

00:08:38.820 I happen to believe the vaccine.

00:08:40.160 People should get the vaccine.

00:08:41.180 But 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.

00:08:49.820 Not every attack on him is valid, but some of them are.

00:08:53.420 And 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.

00:09:03.160 And there's a reason that he's doing that.

00:09:04.700 And the reason is because in this case, he has a conflict of interest.

00:09:08.120 I don't believe in this case he's a bad person or he's trying to get the world sick.

00:09:11.580 I think he has a conflict of interest.

00:09:13.280 His research is tied to those labs.

00:09:15.520 He helped fund those labs.

00:09:17.180 It doesn't mean he funded the virus.

00:09:18.400 It just means that he was involved with them and he was giving our money to them.

00:09:23.060 And that was his job was to oversee them.

00:09:25.060 But he also did give money for the research that may have led to this virus.

00:09:35.740 Absolutely.

00:09:36.560 But 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.

00:09:48.260 In other words, it's not whether or not.

00:09:51.360 So but it's not the point.

00:09:53.080 The point is that is not whether or not the specific contract led to the pandemic.

00:09:57.060 The 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.

00:10:07.000 And 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.

00:10:18.780 And 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?

00:10:32.900 I think this is a case that I haven't seen.

00:10:36.640 I haven't seen anything like this probably since Nixon, where the crime is not as bad as the cover up.

00:10:44.700 I think if Fauci would have come out early and said, yep, we were doing work with the lab.

00:10:50.540 Here's what happened.

00:10:51.420 It may have been a problem.

00:10:54.060 And I take responsibility if he would have done that right away.

00:10:58.420 I think Americans would have accepted him and said, OK, all right.

00:11:03.240 But 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.

00:11:12.140 Right. 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. 0.66

00:11:30.940 OK, and that is their business and that is their industry.

00:11:34.200 And 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.

00:11:44.760 And 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.

00:11:58.940 And that's his plan. He wants to double the size of his organization.

00:12:04.020 He wants to his theory is that we didn't do enough of this research.

00:12:08.320 And all I'm saying is, OK, well, shouldn't we find out if this research caused the pandemic before we expand it sixfold?

00:12:14.620 Correct. Shouldn't we at least do the investigation?

00:12:16.740 It's not to accuse Anthony Fauci of starting the pandemic.

00:12:19.660 It's to say, hey, you now admit begrudgingly that you don't know what was going on in these Chinese labs.

00:12:25.980 That's what the intelligence shows.

00:12:27.600 That's what the Trump administration released on January 15th.

00:12:31.580 That 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.

00:12:41.040 So I can believe Anthony Fauci when he says, OK, we didn't fund the pandemic.

00:12:44.740 That'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.

00:12:52.740 And 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?

00:13:06.860 And Anthony Fauci's answer to that on CNN a couple of weeks ago was yes. He says, yes, we have to do.

00:13:11.860 So 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.

00:13:20.800 Just look at Chernobyl. No, that was that was made by the Soviet Union. 0.99

00:13:26.360 That's that's not a good case to say nuclear power is dangerous.

00:13:30.360 The Soviet Union was dangerous and sloppy, right? 0.99

00:13:35.580 The 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.

00:13:43.080 Let'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?

00:13:50.220 Well, originally, a lot of it was moved to China just for that reason.

00:13:55.200 You 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.

00:14:02.740 You 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.

00:14:19.760 They essentially told us if the lab leak theory is true, that it was that this could happen at this very lab.

00:14:25.720 And our policymakers failed. OK, and that's because we put the scientists in charge of overseeing the scientists.

00:14:31.620 And 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.

00:14:41.300 And 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.

00:14:47.780 And he drove a truck through those loopholes. And now he's bragging about those loopholes.

00:14:53.400 And 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. 0.95

00:15:05.780 We now know and even Anthony Fauci begrudgingly admits that they're not doing open science.

00:15:11.240 Actually, they're doing what they're doing for the party, because in China, the science is run by the party.

00:15:17.400 And 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.

00:15:24.520 OK. And so Anthony Fauci is not in charge of U.S.-China relations.

00:15:30.000 And this is why, because it's not just a science issue. It's not. It's a it's a national security issue.

00:15:36.320 And well, didn't we know research? Didn't we know that when the head of the military's biological weapons program was running it?

00:15:45.580 I 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.

00:15:57.800 And 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.

00:16:06.760 And the health officials said, no way, don't worry about it.

00:16:10.140 And Xi Jinping told Donald Trump, no way, don't worry about it.

00:16:13.540 And 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.

00:16:20.820 And then they went around the world and did the same thing, bribing and coercing and threatening countries all over the world.

00:16:25.320 There's a reason that the Chinese government cover up is centered around the labs.

00:16:29.140 Right. There's a reason that they won't let anybody into the labs, that they've squashed all the science.

00:16:33.320 They're censoring all their scientists.

00:16:35.320 Any journalist who said anything different was jailed or disappeared.

00:16:39.280 And so if you there was a ton of people inside the national security community, including inside the Trump administration, were sending this alarm.

00:16:47.160 But they were shouted down. And then when it burst into public awareness, the media took the side of the scientists.

00:16:52.940 And 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.

00:17:06.420 You see to this day. I mean, I've worked in when I worked in eight different mainstream newsrooms.

00:17:10.660 OK, it's not really a conspiracy. It's usually just group thinking and competence.

00:17:14.700 That's exactly right. And I think a lot of these newsrooms followed Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci.

00:17:20.320 You told them, you know, don't write anything about the lab like theory.

00:17:23.240 That's crazy. And they can't admit that they got captured by their own sources, that actually they didn't do their jobs.

00:17:29.840 And, you know, they don't want to get dunked on by the right wing media and the mega media.

00:17:33.260 But, you know, I'm part of the mainstream media.

00:17:35.420 I have no problem admitting when they get something wrong and when the right wing media got something right.

00:17:40.600 And 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.

00:17:45.820 None of our figures are public figures are infallible.

00:17:48.800 We don't live in a society where we have dear leaders and supreme leaders and kings and princes.

00:17:53.920 Right. We live in a society ruled by men. Right. 0.97

00:17:56.820 With systems of oversight and accountability.

00:17:58.860 And 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.

00:18:10.880 But that's the reality. And that's what we have to sort through right now.

00:18:13.920 I don't think the Biden administration is ready to come around to that, frankly.

00:18:17.100 They still want to just throw up their hands and say, oh, well, we'll never figure it out.

00:18:20.320 That's what you're going to see when they have this 90 day intelligence review.

00:18:23.380 You know, first of all, what about the intelligence community?

00:18:25.320 How can we have the intelligence community review its own failure?

00:18:29.740 Right. Think of the failure that's ongoing.

00:18:31.840 And 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.

00:18:45.400 And to me, that strikes me as why didn't they look at it?

00:18:48.420 Why is it why did it take them 18 months to look at their own data?

00:18:52.560 Right. 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.

00:18:59.400 And, you know, they don't really know what to make of it.

00:19:01.620 They don't have any Chinese speaking, you know, scientist intelligence guys, to which my reaction is, why not? 0.89

00:19:07.820 How is it that we spend 80 billion dollars a year on these agencies?

00:19:12.560 They don't have any Chinese speaking scientist analysts.

00:19:14.920 How did they miss that?

00:19:15.840 And that's what that leads you to is the inevitable conclusion that this Wuhan lab thing, again, we don't know if it's true.

00:19:22.100 I'm just saying we need to check it out.

00:19:23.660 Why can't we check it out?

00:19:24.680 Don't tell me not to check it out.

00:19:26.120 But if it is true, it's the biggest intelligence failure since, I don't know, 9-11 and WMD put together. 0.92

00:19:32.280 It 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. 0.93

00:19:48.360 So the intelligence community is good.

00:19:50.260 But no, I was just going to say this is this is what happens.

00:19:53.860 It 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.

00:20:06.000 And and they're not really enemies.

00:20:08.920 And we got to work together with them and see their point of view.

00:20:13.000 No.

00:20:13.600 I mean, there's a growing number of Americans that are very, very clear.

00:20:20.960 China is not the friend of humanity, free humanity, not just the United States, but freedom itself. 0.90

00:20:30.600 And we are just we've been playing footsie with them.

00:20:34.980 I mean, we just elected a guy whose son is deeply in bed with the Chinese Communist Party.

00:20:41.580 What are we doing?

00:20:43.600 Well, you know, I'm glad you framed it that way, because it really is the existential challenge of our time.

00:20:50.500 It is not the same as the Cold War, but it's on the scope and the scale of a Cold War.

00:20:56.240 And by the way, a Cold War is not the worst outcome of the grand competition with China.

00:21:00.400 A hot war is the worst outcome.

00:21:01.640 And 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,

00:21:09.200 totalitarian, pseudo-religious, genocidal, expansionist dictatorships expand until confronted.

00:21:17.920 Invariably, it happens every single time.

00:21:20.180 And so by ignoring the problem, we actually make the situation much more dangerous.

00:21:23.280 And 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,

00:21:30.440 that the Biden administration, to its credit, has continued.

00:21:33.180 But the problem is that we're moving way too slow.

00:21:36.620 And yes, as you point out, now there's this sort of counterargument.

00:21:39.420 Oh, China is not 10 feet tall.

00:21:40.760 They're only six feet tall.

00:21:41.660 So we can all go to sleep again.

00:21:42.800 And don't worry about it.

00:21:44.300 And to me, that seems that part of that is driven by the corruption of people in the business class and the Wall Street elite

00:21:50.400 who are making money off of funneling our money and technology to China.

00:21:54.400 Some 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.

00:22:03.400 It 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,

00:22:11.780 and then they're going to become just like us.

00:22:13.880 China doesn't feel that way.

00:22:15.140 Xi Jinping doesn't think that way.

00:22:17.020 We know it because that's what he says.

00:22:19.320 Okay.

00:22:19.580 And we have this like, you know, crazy discussion about China in Washington where no one listens to what Xi Jinping says.

00:22:27.380 And what he says is very clear that he wants to shape a world order to make it safe for China to achieve its dream. 0.82

00:22:34.880 And that dream includes making the world safe for autocracy, repression, and all sorts of malfeasance that affects us in our daily lives.

00:22:43.340 And 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,

00:22:49.020 then you know that somehow we can debate how much that, you know, what happens in China affects us.

00:22:56.040 The pandemic should have made clear to every single human being that what happens in China relates to us. 1.00

00:23:00.900 It affects our national security and our public health.

00:23:02.940 And 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,

00:23:11.840 which had all the bat coronaviruses in it where they were doing all the bat coronavirus research.

00:23:15.620 Hey, can we look inside that lab? 0.98

00:23:16.740 No, go screw yourself.

00:23:18.100 If you can't collaborate on that, what can we collaborate on? 0.98

00:23:20.280 What's the thing that we're supposed to collaborate on?

00:23:22.180 Climate change?

00:23:23.140 Well, to be honest with ourselves, China's building coal plants faster than the rest of the world combined.

00:23:29.360 You know, human rights?

00:23:30.620 I don't think so.

00:23:31.260 They're committing a genocide.

00:23:32.760 Trade?

00:23:33.240 No, it doesn't look like that's going to work either.

00:23:35.180 Oh, how about pandemic prevention?

00:23:37.220 Well, they just showed us in very clear terms that that's not going to work either.

00:23:40.960 They're going to weaponize our engagement against us if they can.

00:23:43.920 And our job is to, you know, protect ourselves and to protect the American people.

00:23:47.640 And if we can do that in collaboration with free and open societies around the world, that would be great, too.

00:23:52.820 It's about a year and a half ago that I brought Rough Greens home to Uno. 1.00

00:23:56.540 And my dog is a completely different dog now.

00:24:01.060 I hear from people all over the country all the time.

00:24:04.160 They've had the same experience.

00:24:05.720 They've heard me talk about Rough Greens on the program.

00:24:09.180 And, you know, a lot of times, as I would be, they're skeptical.

00:24:12.500 But they get a little bit from a free bag from Rough Greens for their dog.

00:24:17.720 And as soon as they sprinkle it on his food, the dog wolfs it down.

00:24:21.620 It's good for him.

00:24:22.600 It's chock full of vitamins and minerals and probiotics and omega oils, all the things that make your dogs healthy.

00:24:28.600 Now, my dog was easy from the first time he tried Rough Greens.

00:24:32.020 Uno was in love.

00:24:34.020 Some dogs might take a little bit of time to get used to the new flavor.

00:24:37.620 Dr. Dennis Black, he's the inventor of Rough Greens, doesn't want you to not try it because of that.

00:24:44.900 So he's got a special gift available right now, a free bag of Rough Greens for your dog to try out.

00:24:50.240 All you pay for is shipping.

00:24:51.620 Just go to roughgreens.com slash Beck or call 833-GLEN-33.

00:24:55.920 833-GLEN-33.

00:24:57.700 Roughgreens.com slash Beck.

00:25:00.360 So what's it going to take?

00:25:02.500 If not this, what's it going to take?

00:25:05.760 You 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.

00:25:17.160 And 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.

00:25:26.780 I realize that's a tall order.

00:25:27.980 OK, 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. 0.90

00:25:47.860 Right. These are all of these major industries are affected by the CCP's strategy and malign behavior.

00:25:54.140 And we all need to start talking to each other about it.

00:25:57.100 We 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.

00:26:07.840 I 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?

00:26:26.780 You're turned out right.

00:26:28.180 You know, they're doing the Chinese government work for them.

00:26:31.880 Right. 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.

00:26:44.360 One guy tweeted that and they were all of a sudden four hundred million dollars of their revenue disappears in a second.

00:26:50.500 That was a wake up call.

00:26:51.840 OK, maybe not for Adam Silver.

00:26:53.560 Right. Maybe not for Joseph Tsai, who is that owns the Nets and is an Alibaba founder.

00:26:59.300 But 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. 0.80

00:27:12.080 Now, of course, the NBA totally screwed that up.

00:27:15.300 But what I say is that, OK, well, the NBA is not actually a foreign policy organization.

00:27:18.720 And 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. 0.95

00:27:26.820 What 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.

00:27:35.820 You can't punish the NBA for one tweet. We're not going to stand for it.

00:27:39.460 What 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.

00:27:48.020 And then you'll have to explain to your own people why LeBron James is no longer coming to town.

00:27:52.360 You know, these are ways that the public and private partnership could be established.

00:27:56.920 We'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.

00:28:08.460 Right. This is an hour and a half of thinking about this problem in a nonpartisan, nonpolitical way.

00:28:12.820 Right. You and I come from different parts of the media environment, different parts.

00:28:16.080 I'm sure we have different ideologies on various.

00:28:18.320 It 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.

00:28:25.040 That where it's going to take the entire country and our entire society to wrap our heads around.

00:28:29.000 It doesn't mean we all need to overreact.

00:28:31.220 It doesn't mean we need to rush into toppling the CCP.

00:28:33.980 It just means that no longer can we countenance the part of our political discourse, which says, never mind.

00:28:41.240 It doesn't matter. You can. The CCP is not going to take over the world and we can just let it go.

00:28:45.840 Because 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.

00:28:50.540 I went from Joe Rogan to Steve Bannon. I don't care.

00:28:53.960 I say the same exact thing, which is that this is an American problem.

00:28:57.800 This is a problem of free and open societies battling what is a rising danger and a rising threat.

00:29:05.300 And, 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.

00:29:15.740 And go against our sometimes instinct to map maximalized profits.

00:29:20.120 And that's a really difficult conversation.

00:29:22.280 I'll tell you, when Trump first put the sanctions on them, I was not I'm not a fan of sanctions.

00:29:29.300 I don't like, you know, trade barriers.

00:29:32.500 But I called him and said, I have to tell you what you're doing with China.

00:29:39.340 I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's right.

00:29:41.920 You're the first one that's actually taking a tough stand against China.

00:29:47.360 Every single one Republican and Democrat have bowed to China.

00:29:52.260 And I don't want to get into a war with them.

00:29:54.580 I don't I don't have anything against China, except we're living through what is probably going to end up being another Holocaust. 0.99

00:30:03.100 And we'll all go, gee, I didn't know when we clearly know.

00:30:08.580 You know, I don't want to war with them, but I also don't want them to rule the world.

00:30:14.180 And what they did with the PPEs, what they're doing with with 5G, if I'm not mistaken, that is what they traded for.

00:30:21.380 Right. We'll give you the PPEs.

00:30:23.240 But you're going to take Huawei's 5G.

00:30:26.540 Explain why that's so bad.

00:30:27.820 Yeah, that's what happened in Brazil.

00:30:30.880 And again, yeah, the goal here is to avoid the conflict with China that neither side seeks.

00:30:37.220 Right. To find an accommodation whereby they can have their country.

00:30:40.220 It 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.

00:30:45.080 That 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.

00:30:57.380 And that the Chinese Communist Party has not agreed to that.

00:31:01.320 They are they are not on board with that plan.

00:31:03.020 They are not convinced, despite the tariffs, despite the sanctions, despite all of the public condemnation.

00:31:08.280 We have to be honest about the fact that nothing has changed their calculus so far.

00:31:12.480 And there's a risk of going up this escalation ladder that we have to be conscious of.

00:31:16.460 But that's still not an excuse to ignore the problem.

00:31:19.100 You 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.

00:31:27.820 Right. Because how could they deny their people life saving medication in a crisis?

00:31:33.000 Although I would just say that the Chinese shots are largely not really that good, especially against Delta.

00:31:38.720 But that's a separate issue.

00:31:39.580 What they did in in Paraguay was they said you have to drop diplomatic recognition of Taiwan.

00:31:45.060 In other words, the party doesn't just operate in its economic interests.

00:31:49.180 It threatens and blackmails countries in its political interest.

00:31:52.140 OK, and that's a different kind of problem. 0.98

00:31:55.000 And the Paraguayans said, no, screw you. 0.99

00:31:56.860 We can't do that. 0.97

00:31:57.560 But at the same time, it caused that government to suffer greatly and those people to suffer greatly.

00:32:01.880 So they're torturing and blackmailing countries.

00:32:04.220 They 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.

00:32:15.860 OK, that's a capricious form of cruelty.

00:32:17.960 And what the world is seeing now is that China is a national.

00:32:21.660 Everyone thinks, oh, America is not a superpower.

00:32:23.560 That's no good.

00:32:24.160 Oh, look at all the mistakes that we've made.

00:32:25.620 Like, yeah, I agree with that.

00:32:26.620 OK, mistakes have been made.

00:32:28.080 Right.

00:32:28.300 The interventions.

00:32:29.240 I get that.

00:32:29.960 People are sick of our military interventions.

00:32:32.180 I totally I'm you know, we may differ on the exact policies.

00:32:35.400 But I there's no doubt that mistakes have been made in American expansion around the world.

00:32:41.320 But people are getting it.

00:32:42.860 The last 20th century, a lot of it is because of America intervention one way or another.

00:32:48.180 But but here's the crazy thing.

00:32:50.300 The alternative, a Chinese led world order is much, much, much. 1.00

00:32:53.840 Oh, yeah.

00:32:54.180 And I think and that's that's what that's what people are coming around to realize.

00:32:58.400 And that doesn't just apply to free and open societies.

00:33:00.840 If 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.

00:33:10.680 That's that's a tough position to be in.

00:33:12.220 We should be more active in engaging those countries.

00:33:14.680 We should learn from the mistakes of the 20th century.

00:33:16.660 But the bottom line is that a Chinese led world order is a very scary world to live in. 1.00

00:33:22.700 It'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.

00:33:33.540 But we have a world where the Chinese model would be exported, a package of authoritarian tools, surveillance and A.I. 0.99

00:33:40.680 and prisons and monitoring that they will sell to any dictator who's willing to purchase it.

00:33:48.040 Sometimes they'll just give it to them, you know, and we could see many examples of that all over the world.

00:33:53.480 And that means millions and millions of more people in horrible suffering on our watch.

00:33:57.380 And we should care about that.

00:33:59.400 Let me go back to the coronavirus for a second.

00:34:01.400 You mentioned the the Delta virus being worse.

00:34:06.040 The the bat lady has come out and said, oh, there is much worse than that coming. 0.99

00:34:14.380 What are your thoughts on this and what what what is coming in?

00:34:18.800 Why should we listen to the bat lady? 1.00

00:34:21.480 Right.

00:34:21.720 Well, let me tackle the last question first, because, you know, the Dr.

00:34:25.420 Shuzhong Li, who ran the bat coronavirus research, still does at the one Institute of Virology.

00:34:30.640 For 15 years has been the one that they put out to talk to the international community.

00:34:36.860 The problem is twofold.

00:34:38.260 One, as we mentioned before, if she says anything that counteracts the party line, she goes to jail.

00:34:43.400 We never see her again.

00:34:44.320 And her whole family goes to jail.

00:34:45.460 She knows that.

00:34:46.400 Right.

00:34:46.700 So she can only really say the party line.

00:34:48.400 But 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.

00:34:58.580 In other words, she's lying in some cases and in some cases she's calling the U.S. government liars.

00:35:04.400 So 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.

00:35:12.980 But 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.

00:35:20.540 Xi says.

00:35:21.540 OK.

00:35:21.720 And we can't trust what the lab says because, again, if they say the wrong thing, they're going to die.

00:35:27.180 So we just have to understand that.

00:35:28.860 But 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.

00:35:40.100 And the longer that this festers, the worse the variants will get.

00:35:44.300 And isn't it usually the opposite?

00:35:46.400 Is it doesn't it?

00:35:47.980 Well, if we ask.

00:35:48.940 Well, 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.

00:35:57.960 Right.

00:35:58.260 He's like in the federal protection program.

00:36:00.480 Where is that guy?

00:36:01.640 He 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.

00:36:07.420 Remember, he's a virologist, unlike Anthony Fauci, immunologist, unlike Peter Daszak, zoologist, virologist.

00:36:14.620 And 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.

00:36:32.520 That's what he said.

00:36:33.600 OK, and then they called him a racist and he got canceled and he's gone.

00:36:36.980 And we haven't heard from him since.

00:36:38.400 So 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.

00:36:50.480 Second 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.

00:37:00.840 In other words, scientists don't have the final word on this.

00:37:02.960 And third of all, we have to investigate the labs, whether the Chinese government wants us to or not.

00:37:08.380 And that's not going to be easy, but that's something that we must, must do.

00:37:11.580 And the intelligence community can't do it by itself because they have a conflict of interest because they screwed it up already.

00:37:17.140 OK, 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.

00:37:27.680 I 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.

00:37:34.940 OK, it doesn't make any sense.

00:37:36.860 They'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.

00:37:46.600 And so, again, Glenn, this is this is not to be an attack on Anthony Fauci.

00:37:52.480 This is just to say we he can't be in charge of this investigation.

00:37:56.700 He could be a witness. He could be a material witness.

00:37:59.720 OK, but he can't be the prosecutor.

00:38:01.640 And we're going to need somebody else to do that investigation.

00:38:04.280 And if that person would like to stand up, that would be great.

00:38:06.660 Yeah. And I was going to say, who would that be?

00:38:09.680 It's got to be Congress.

00:38:10.640 That's the only way I see it going down.

00:38:12.060 And 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.

00:38:19.440 And, you know, Anthony Fauci is going to be in a lot of hot water.

00:38:22.860 If it doesn't, then we're going to need some brave Democratic senators, I think, to say this is important.

00:38:29.420 I think you see some of that now they're testing the waters.

00:38:31.720 They're waiting to see what the Biden administration comes up with.

00:38:33.960 I'm here to tell you the Biden administration, you know, doesn't have any political incentive to get to the bottom of the pandemic.

00:38:40.300 They don't care. Right.

00:38:41.960 They don't they're not invested in the lab leak theory or the market theory or anything because they weren't around.

00:38:47.560 It wasn't on their watch. Their hands are clean.

00:38:49.680 At 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.

00:38:58.240 They're going to need a climate change deal with Beijing.

00:39:00.220 That's going to make that more difficult.

00:39:01.720 It'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.

00:39:08.240 Even though it's not racist. I mean, if you think about it for two seconds, I always thought the, you know, wet mark.

00:39:13.540 Oh, the markets in China have bat soup. 1.00

00:39:16.080 I always thought that was way more racist.

00:39:17.620 If you just think about it, then lab that there was a mistake in a lab.

00:39:20.860 Right. That's not a racist thing to say.

00:39:21.940 That's a happens all the time.

00:39:23.900 But Chinese people eat bat soup seems more. 1.00

00:39:25.980 But anyway, that's totally wrong.

00:39:29.640 Are we really China?

00:39:31.080 No, I have not.

00:39:33.200 I have not.

00:39:33.880 There's markets everywhere.

00:39:34.740 You go everywhere.

00:39:35.160 There's markets.

00:39:35.640 They call them wet markets.

00:39:36.440 There's markets.

00:39:37.140 Yeah.

00:39:37.320 You can't go anywhere without running into a market.

00:39:39.940 OK.

00:39:40.420 It doesn't mean that it's all weird and that the pandemics are coming out of the markets.

00:39:44.220 We've got to close down all the markets.

00:39:45.280 That's crazy.

00:39:46.320 Of course, the Chinese are never going to do that. 0.99

00:39:47.540 They disavowed the market theory.

00:39:48.880 The Chinese CDC said it didn't come from the market.

00:39:51.580 But, you know, the Fauci's of the world don't care. 1.00

00:39:54.040 They're just like, oh, yeah, it's got to be the market.

00:39:55.420 And maybe there was a palm civet and we got to go look for raccoon dogs and markets all

00:40:00.640 over Southeast Asia until we find the one with the pandemic virus in it.

00:40:05.780 And I say to those people, go, go to those Indonesian caves for 10 years. 1.00

00:40:10.160 Don't call us.

00:40:10.740 We'll call you.

00:40:11.920 Have fun.

00:40:12.400 If you find the palm civet, that's the source of the pandemic.

00:40:15.280 Let me know.

00:40:16.320 And meanwhile, someone else has got to investigate all these bat coronavirus labs. 1.00

00:40:19.960 I mean, don't we don't we pretty much know the the origins of almost all of these viruses

00:40:25.980 pretty quickly?

00:40:28.260 You know, it depends because because this kind of gets into the statistics argument where

00:40:32.720 a lot of people say, well, most of the viruses statistically come from nature, which, again,

00:40:36.860 is like interesting, but not actual evidence and not relevant.

00:40:40.660 We only care about this one.

00:40:42.040 Right.

00:40:42.340 We don't care about, you know, and I think the lessons that you can draw from the SARS pandemic

00:40:47.700 was that, yes, they eventually did find the source host.

00:40:50.960 Yes, it did take a very long time.

00:40:53.180 But the other things that we can draw from the SARS pandemic is looking at the Chinese 1.00

00:40:57.840 government's response.

00:40:58.640 They had the outbreak for four months.

00:41:00.080 They had the science.

00:41:00.960 They lied to the world about the outbreak.

00:41:03.020 People died because of that.

00:41:04.560 OK, and they did the exact same thing here.

00:41:07.620 So, you know, people are focused on the science.

00:41:09.960 I'm saying focus on the party, focus on the system of the country where the where it broke

00:41:14.740 out and you'll understand much more about how we got into this terrible, terrible mess

00:41:18.600 and how we're still in it, you know, and that's what people don't understand, is that

00:41:22.640 we're not dealing with open science.

00:41:24.620 We're not dealing with an open society.

00:41:27.120 We're dealing with a genocidal regime that has no compunction about killing its own people,

00:41:34.080 much less killing us.

00:41:35.720 This is once you sort of go ahead.

00:41:37.540 No, go ahead.

00:41:39.160 Once you internalize that, then it explains a lot more about how they've been acting.

00:41:43.260 And then you realize the soup that we're in, you know, and that's when you realize, oh,

00:41:47.060 maybe it's not a good idea to give them billions of more dollars to dig up more dangerous viruses

00:41:51.120 or bring them back to more Chinese labs to play around with that. 0.90

00:41:53.740 Crazy.

00:41:54.200 That's a crazy thing to to do if you understand what's going on in that country right now.

00:41:57.760 Are we kind of America, early 1930s with Germany, where now history, you kind of look back

00:42:06.280 and you're like, oh, that was a really bad idea.

00:42:08.940 But we had Nazis here in America. 0.73

00:42:11.420 There was huge the Nazi booned party in in New York and New Jersey that was happening.

00:42:18.380 You had Nazis or or sympathizers in our universities.

00:42:24.680 We have we just scooped up military spies that were in our university from China.

00:42:31.020 And for some reason, Joe Biden decided to let the DOJ not prosecute any of those guys.

00:42:37.440 I can't think of a reason why we would do that, but it seems very reminiscent of of another decade.

00:42:47.400 Yeah. 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.

00:42:57.860 And so what I get from because everyone's like, oh, well, you know, what do you want?

00:43:03.420 A Cold War? We're going to go into a Cold War.

00:43:05.260 And 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.

00:43:12.220 And 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.

00:43:32.420 And 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.

00:43:39.960 OK, and that's when I look at Hong Kong and I look at the Uyghur genocide. 0.92

00:43:43.840 That's what I think. I think, oh, that's appeasement because the world is standing by and doing nothing.

00:43:48.580 And 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.

00:43:57.180 And 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.

00:44:10.100 OK, and we didn't do squat to help them. And now we're trying to clean up the mess afterwards. It's too late.

00:44:15.080 And then I look at Taiwan and I think, OK, they're next and they know it. 0.98

00:44:18.640 OK, and do we know it? And are we going to stand up this time or are we going to let up?

00:44:22.600 But it's essentially a democratic country. OK, and I've been to Taiwan.

00:44:25.380 And it's a country for all intents and purposes. I don't care whether the U.S. government recognizes it or not.

00:44:30.300 Those people are not part of the PRC and they don't want to be.

00:44:34.380 And they're but they're they're not powerful enough to stand up to Beijing on their own.

00:44:38.120 Is 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?

00:44:46.380 Yeah, 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.

00:44:54.720 That's a pattern that we're repeating right now, for sure.

00:44:57.020 If we would have stood up in Hong Kong, Taiwan would not be next. 0.54

00:45:01.720 Exactly. And why would and why would Xi Jinping and a lot of people talk about a military invasion of Hong Kong?

00:45:07.040 I 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,

00:45:12.080 but to use all of the other elements of coercion to just get it under heel.

00:45:16.520 And that's political interference, economic coercion, you know, just screwing with their information environment, buying up all their media,

00:45:24.280 jailing all the people that say anything that you don't like and turning the country from within.

00:45:29.060 That's what they did in Hong Kong. And yes, there was a lot of violence, too, but not a really full scale invasion.

00:45:34.840 So 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.

00:45:42.340 So can the United States under the Biden administration marshal the international community to give Taiwan the the the the ability,

00:45:49.440 the capability to defend itself from those things? I don't see that happening at all.

00:45:53.840 And then if they take Taiwan, then I think we're it's all downhill from there. 0.54

00:45:57.820 Yeah. If they take Taiwan, don't they? I mean, where is the stop? There is no stop on them. 0.98

00:46:05.520 Exactly. And, you know, again, the appetite grows with the eating. That's how expansionist nationalist socialist regimes tend to operate.

00:46:13.720 So, again, I think we have a window of time that's dwindling fast to convince the leadership in Beijing that there's another way.

00:46:20.500 And that will include some decoupling and some tradeoffs and some costs and some behavior changes on their part for sure.

00:46:27.840 And they're not convinced yet. All signs point to this getting much worse.

00:46:32.040 Everything we see, all the data, all of their actions, you know, and the Trump administration was good in flipping over the chessboard,

00:46:39.340 but they were bad at setting it back up again. And that's what the Biden administration is trying to do.

00:46:43.560 But they're slow at it and they're caught with their own internal contradictions.

00:46:47.620 And they're still thinking in sort of a 2016 kind of world when the Chinese are thinking in a 2025 kind of world. 0.57

00:46:53.480 And, you know, when you talk about the pandemic, we think of it as like we're having these discussions.

00:46:58.720 Oh, should we should kids get masked? Can we go out for a beer?

00:47:01.780 They're thinking about which industries to invest in.

00:47:04.280 They're thinking about which continents to purchase.

00:47:06.640 OK, 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

00:47:15.180 and then use that to advance their political agenda in countries all over the world.

00:47:19.700 We're not playing that game. Why is it that China has vaccine diplomacy with all of these countries and, you know,

00:47:25.340 who don't want to be under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party just to save their citizens lives?

00:47:29.860 And we have no counter to that at all. We're giving our shots mostly to the COVAX system, which is the WHO,

00:47:37.580 which, crazily enough, is not only taking our good graces, but then taking our money and paying it to guess who?

00:47:45.660 The 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. 1.00

00:47:54.680 Because that's how stupid we are. That's the how far we are behind in this thing we call competition. 1.00

00:48:00.620 If we're funding the U.N., which is getting fleeced by the Chinese to actually make the situation worse, 1.00

00:48:06.060 because 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.

00:48:14.960 But the Chinese get paid off of that. That's crazy. That's a broken policy. 0.97

00:48:19.480 That's only one of the hundred things I could I could mention that we need to fix.

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00:50:08.300 Tell me about the Uyghurs and what's really happening there and how much we know.

00:50:14.400 Yeah, Glenn, I mean, this is the issue that I find in talking about China that connects with people the most, you know.

00:50:20.320 But 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.

00:50:26.640 It's because it's horrific and it is the largest mass atrocity on our planet.

00:50:32.880 And it's getting worse, not better.

00:50:35.000 And, you know, people will quibble over the definition of genocide, right?

00:50:38.660 Definition of genocide is a legal determination, to be sure.

00:50:41.840 And essentially it has two requirements.

00:50:46.120 Destroying a group of people in whole or in part with the intent to reduce their population.

00:50:52.700 Now, there's two things in there, destroying the people and the intent.

00:50:55.540 So what some defenders of the CCP will tell you is that, well, we don't really know what their intent is.

00:51:00.240 Maybe the Chinese government screwing with the Uyghurs because they screw with everybody. 1.00

00:51:03.780 And maybe they're just concentration camps are terrible, but they're not genocide.

00:51:07.760 What I say is, first of all, that's wrong.

00:51:09.620 Second of all, it's irrelevant.

00:51:11.920 In 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.

00:51:18.380 But 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.

00:51:36.280 That's an intent to reduce the size of a population.

00:51:39.040 That's genocide as far as I can tell.

00:51:41.220 Now, even if you don't believe in that, what's happening there is horrific.

00:51:45.660 And what I did in the course of reporting my book, Chaos Under Heaven, is that I interviewed a bunch of the survivors, okay?

00:51:51.480 Because whatever statistic you want to throw at me, these are real people, and their stories are horrific, and their stories are true.

00:51:58.880 Their scars are real.

00:52:00.620 They didn't invent the scars that they showed me.

00:52:03.120 And the stories make your skin crawl because, essentially, what started in Xinjiang as sort of a slow erosion of their freedoms, you know?

00:52:14.440 Now you can't go to the mosque.

00:52:16.400 Now you can't eat pork.

00:52:17.600 Now you can't wear a beard.

00:52:19.720 Now you can't study your own language.

00:52:22.060 Now you've got to go to, you know, school in Mandarin.

00:52:26.600 Evolved into something much more sinister, which was massive surveillance and monitoring at all times.

00:52:31.940 In other words, the entire province is an open-air prison before you get to the camps.

00:52:35.580 Your life is already horrible.

00:52:36.780 And then there were the camps.

00:52:39.180 Political indoctrination, torture, all that stuff.

00:52:42.960 And then when you get out of the camps, your nightmare is just beginning because then you've got to go to the factory.

00:52:48.160 What factory? 0.99

00:52:48.640 Shut up. 1.00

00:52:49.020 Get in the car. 1.00

00:52:49.500 We'll take you to the factory.

00:52:51.000 And now you're, you know, stitching together Nikes or picking cotton for the rest of your life.

00:52:54.900 You're not – you can leave the factory.

00:52:57.120 You can't go home.

00:52:58.300 You don't have a choice, right?

00:53:00.100 You're not a slave because they'll pay you, but it's forced.

00:53:02.600 You're not allowed to say no.

00:53:03.740 And 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.

00:53:22.160 If that wasn't bad enough, what we see now is that the Chinese government is expanding that model to other places.

00:53:27.440 And the camps are coming to Tibet, which has been through enough, believe me.

00:53:31.080 And then next they're going to go to Inner Mongolia.

00:53:32.940 And there are 57 Chinese ethnic groups, right?

00:53:36.500 And each of them has got to be living in morbid fear, okay?

00:53:40.720 And, 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?

00:53:48.860 So it's not the same.

00:53:50.080 In other words, whatever criticisms you have of the U.S. government – and I have many – this is not the same.

00:53:55.040 This is something that our society was supposed to have evolved past.

00:54:00.400 It 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.

00:54:09.820 But 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.

00:54:17.820 So why are these companies – I mean, is it just money?

00:54:22.440 Why are these companies knowingly engaging?

00:54:25.900 Why is Facebook, why is Google, why are they engaging and actually helping them do these things?

00:54:35.580 Is it just an IBM and the Holocaust kind of situation? 0.81

00:54:40.520 Some of it is corporate greed.

00:54:42.020 Some of it is that these companies are actually not American companies anymore.

00:54:44.860 They're international companies.

00:54:46.060 They don't really have any allegiance to our country or to our values at all.

00:54:50.460 Some of it is willful ignorance.

00:54:53.880 Some 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.

00:55:02.500 And now they have no choice because they have to kowtow to the CCP at every opportunity.

00:55:06.520 Now, none of these companies is going to voluntarily do the right thing.

00:55:11.560 And 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.

00:55:29.720 The problem with U.S. corporations is that they only care about the next quarter.

00:55:33.120 And the problem with the Wall Street firms is that they actually understand the long-term risks but they don't care.

00:55:36.900 And 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.

00:55:58.140 And that's just the greatest transfer of wealth and power and influence from America to China that I've ever seen. 0.79

00:56:05.500 And it's happening all the time.

00:56:06.620 And just look what's going on on Wall Street these days, Glenn.

00:56:08.340 Did 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. 0.96

00:56:23.300 I think of it like a mafia organization, Glenn.

00:56:25.540 That's what the CCP – that's how you have to think about it.

00:56:27.940 It's the largest extortion racket in the world.

00:56:30.440 So the party goes around to all of its corporations.

00:56:33.620 They're like, oh, nice company you got there.

00:56:35.280 It would be a shame if something happened to it.

00:56:37.040 Then they go do that to every country.

00:56:39.720 And sure enough, each one of these companies has to pay up.

00:56:42.360 But the crazy thing is that when they did that, they cracked down on Tencent and DD Global and just ruined these companies.

00:56:48.980 American investors paid the cost.

00:56:51.020 Hundreds of millions of Americans are invested in these companies that are building the machines that are pointed at us.

00:56:55.720 And 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.

00:57:07.760 And 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? 0.53

00:57:15.580 And 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.

00:57:22.420 It doesn't make any sense. 1.00

00:57:23.320 That's how stupid we are. 1.00

00:57:24.520 That's how crazy we are. 1.00

00:57:25.340 That'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.

00:57:37.900 And 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.

00:57:49.840 They're like, well, that's risk.

00:57:53.540 People are doing – no, it's not the regular risk.

00:57:55.880 It's when – they don't understand.

00:57:57.080 We'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.

00:58:07.620 So you just used a lot of terms.

00:58:12.320 Yeah.

00:58:12.420 You know, the CCP is communist, but I'm not sure communist is the right way to describe them.

00:58:19.080 They'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.

00:58:36.220 You're gone.

00:58:39.200 So what system do they actually have now?

00:58:44.800 I think it's a cartel.

00:58:46.220 I think that's the most accurate way of describing the party.

00:58:49.860 It's a criminal organization that runs a country.

00:58:54.100 And, you know, they have –

00:58:54.920 Do they believe in anything?

00:58:56.080 Does President Xi believe in anything?

00:58:58.180 They believe in their own – they believe in their own survival and accumulation of power, which for them is going swimmingly, by the way.

00:59:04.800 Yeah.

00:59:05.140 They are the richest organization in the world.

00:59:06.880 They're much more powerful than any other organization.

00:59:09.420 Donald Trump – the reason – one of the reasons he admired Xi is because Xi had all this power.

00:59:13.880 Donald Trump couldn't control his own legislature.

00:59:15.620 He couldn't control his own economy.

00:59:16.840 He couldn't do the things that he wanted to do because he was mired in this broken, dysfunctional Washington system.

00:59:20.840 He was very jealous, and he told Xi this all the time, that Xi could just do anything you want, president for life.

00:59:26.100 Doesn't that sound great?

00:59:27.600 Now, you know, the problem with that is that we still think of it as like, oh, just a regular government.

00:59:32.620 So 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.

00:59:44.760 And that's what we've been doing for 40 years.

00:59:47.600 The strategic and economic dialogue became the economic and strategic dialogue.

00:59:51.720 Then it became the comprehensive economic dialogue.

00:59:54.040 Then it became the comprehensive economic and strategic dialogue.

00:59:56.400 And 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. 0.93

01:00:06.340 And 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.

01:00:12.180 Everything's going to be great. 0.59

01:00:13.240 And then they don't realize that that guy is worthless.

01:00:15.980 And think about the trade negotiations, right?

01:00:18.220 Even the Trump – who was it?

01:00:19.520 Lighthizer. 0.65

01:00:19.920 He kept saying, oh, yeah, we've got to bet on the reformers in China.

01:00:22.700 We've got to – if we just support the reformers, they're going to liberalize.

01:00:25.860 It's going to be great.

01:00:26.940 That's not happening, okay?

01:00:28.940 And we just have to be honest about that, that the party controls everything.

01:00:33.060 And it's merged with the security state in a very nefarious way.

01:00:36.560 So basically what you have is a security state, like call it a deep state, the MSS, the Ministry of State Security. 0.80

01:00:42.600 Some really evil guys, murderers, okay, and crooks, right?

01:00:46.840 And then you've got the party, and they've melded together into a super faction. 0.83

01:00:51.080 And it's all factional, like any mafia family.

01:00:53.260 You've seen The Sopranos, right? 0.59

01:00:54.420 They will kill each other.

01:00:56.000 You know, Tony killed Chrissy in the end. 0.98

01:00:58.340 He strangled him to death.

01:00:59.280 That's how they are, okay? 0.98

01:01:00.940 And Xi Jinping will murder anybody who gets in his way.

01:01:04.600 So how do you deal with that?

01:01:05.700 I think you deal with that like the FBI deals with any criminal organization, right?

01:01:09.420 Like if you were the Justice Department and you were trying to bust up the mob, that's how you deal with the CCP.

01:01:14.240 And 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.

01:01:25.460 So what should we be doing?

01:01:27.000 Give me some example of the way you would treat the CCP.

01:01:35.140 You know, again, so this is like, it depends on which part of the problem that you're talking about.

01:01:39.640 But first of all, I think we have to be honest and clear about what we're dealing with.

01:01:43.800 In other words, we have to view every engagement with them through their lens.

01:01:49.700 In other words, if we have a scientific collaboration for just for one example, we have to read their documents about viruses.

01:01:56.480 You know what they say about viruses, Glenn, in their own documents?

01:01:59.080 They say that viruses, especially coronaviruses, are a dual-use technology that has military applications.

01:02:04.720 That's what they said.

01:02:05.320 It was in Chinese, so nobody in the NIH or the intelligence community can read it because apparently no one speaks Chinese for some reason.

01:02:13.660 But that's what they said.

01:02:14.440 They said they want to become the best in biowarfare, dealing with viruses in the next 10 years.

01:02:18.660 Now, 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.

01:02:26.260 It doesn't mean we can't do it.

01:02:27.440 It just means you have to have more oversight, more account.

01:02:29.280 You have to be clear about what you're dealing with.

01:02:31.000 Same thing in our markets, right?

01:02:32.240 Apparently, 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?

01:02:41.560 And so it means we have to inject national security into our discussion about protecting our capital markets.

01:02:46.340 It means we have to figure out what to decouple and what not to decouple.

01:02:49.400 We can't live in two different worlds.

01:02:51.280 We can't live in two different existences.

01:02:53.940 It's not going to work.

01:02:54.620 We're going to have to have trade.

01:02:55.800 We want exchanges with Chinese people.

01:02:57.620 We 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.

01:03:09.680 You know, you wouldn't blame the Italian people for the mafia, right?

01:03:11.860 So you wouldn't blame the Chinese people for the CCP.

01:03:13.820 It's not their fault.

01:03:14.500 And in order to have a relationship with China that doesn't veer off into that, where we have to have those exchanges.

01:03:20.560 Now, that's all very complex.

01:03:22.120 So in other words, there are no simple solutions.

01:03:24.260 And 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. 0.78

01:03:32.400 We 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.

01:03:39.020 Of course, that's what they would want, right?

01:03:41.060 When Chinese students come here and we want their money, right, the schools want all that money. 1.00

01:03:45.520 That's like how all our colleges are surviving or getting rich or whatever.

01:03:51.020 We 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.

01:04:01.980 You 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.

01:04:17.500 You know, when you think about like information and how to deal with Chinese propaganda, right?

01:04:21.240 It's not really a Democratic or Republican problem.

01:04:23.540 It's an American problem. 0.88

01:04:24.900 When 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.

01:04:30.960 We 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?

01:04:40.540 That's our system.

01:04:41.900 But this is a problem that they can't handle on their own.

01:04:44.300 Is that a problem?

01:04:47.100 I mean, is that our system anymore?

01:04:49.760 The government and your FBI, pardon me?

01:04:52.540 Right.

01:04:53.180 Look at your FBI example.

01:04:54.300 The FBI went and charged and the DOJ charged a bunch of Chinese scientists, right?

01:05:01.040 That's an expansion of the security state, clear as day.

01:05:04.500 But that's one that I support because there were a bunch of Chinese spies spread throughout our institutions. 0.99

01:05:09.160 So that's two different values.

01:05:10.260 I'm against an expansion of surveillance and monitoring.

01:05:13.400 But at the same time, I want them to find the actual right.

01:05:16.600 So but it seems to me that we're using now many of the early techniques of China to monitor.

01:05:24.820 We are starting to see tech and the government start to merge together.

01:05:30.440 We're seeing our Justice Department, our Capitol Police are now.

01:05:34.920 I mean, this is a quote.

01:05:36.640 They're now becoming an intelligence agency.

01:05:40.440 The Capitol Police, the Capitol Police, what is happening to us?

01:05:45.040 I don't think we have.

01:05:46.460 I think there's we're on the same road, it seems.

01:05:49.740 Yeah.

01:05:49.900 No, I again, I find myself agreeing with you.

01:05:52.640 I we can't become the thing that we're fighting.

01:05:54.820 Yeah.

01:05:55.080 OK.

01:05:55.360 We have to figure out a way to be the best version of ourselves without sliding into the

01:05:59.920 authoritarianism that makes them so effective.

01:06:02.480 But doesn't how many what is the give me the thoughts on how many in Washington a really

01:06:10.840 know the threat be are interested in in it or see look at it as a friendly situation or worse

01:06:24.440 yet, I kind of like their system.

01:06:27.240 I mean, how many people are actually like the regular American that says, I don't want to

01:06:32.580 be like that?

01:06:34.760 Yeah, I'll give you the lowdown inside Congress.

01:06:37.340 There's a bipartisan consensus for being very, very upset about what's going on in the U.S.-China

01:06:42.600 relationship and then doing essentially nothing about it.

01:06:45.540 And there are thousands and thousands of bills that get introduced.

01:06:48.860 And every single time the congressman or the office or the senator's office calls, Josh,

01:06:53.740 we just we got a solution.

01:06:54.920 We just introduced the bill.

01:06:56.120 OK, tell me when it passes, because almost none of it gets implemented.

01:07:00.300 And if you just saw the huge China bill that came through the Senate, the Schumer bill,

01:07:04.780 right, because Schumer is supposed to be the Democrat who's tough on China, it doesn't 0.99

01:07:08.640 really do shit. 0.98

01:07:09.420 And the problem is that the House is not even going to pass it. 1.00

01:07:12.540 So it doesn't even do the little things that it's supposed to do because there's very little

01:07:16.040 chance it's going to become law. 0.51

01:07:17.120 So Congress cares a lot, but it's so dysfunctional they're basically useless.

01:07:21.760 Now, they're good in terms of education and public pressure and getting the government

01:07:25.840 to do things.

01:07:26.460 Now, the Biden administration is split between those three camps, right?

01:07:29.960 One camp is people who want to do more on China, right?

01:07:32.760 The other camp is people who think, no, no, no, we just got to go back to business as

01:07:36.500 usual.

01:07:37.100 These are the business interests.

01:07:38.140 These are the Wall Street interests, the trade groups.

01:07:40.400 That's what you see right now.

01:07:41.360 You see the pushback to the pushback. 0.97

01:07:43.580 That's the phase of this thing that we're in, where they say, wait a second, you crazy 0.92

01:07:47.340 China hawks in Washington. 0.60

01:07:50.040 China's not 10 feet tall.

01:07:51.100 They're only six feet tall.

01:07:51.880 Go back to sleep.

01:07:52.600 We're fine.

01:07:53.300 OK, and that's pretty nefarious because that's fueled by lobbying money that's directly linked to their

01:07:59.460 business inside China.

01:08:00.480 So it's by its nature corrupt.

01:08:02.980 And then the third team is the political team.

01:08:04.860 Now, it's interesting because in the Biden administration, they know how to read polls,

01:08:08.260 right?

01:08:08.560 And the polls say that Americans want a tougher approach to China.

01:08:11.200 Democrats and Republicans, you know, across the board, you know, except for even the both

01:08:18.280 sides of the Republican Party.

01:08:19.400 Now, the Democratic Party still have the progressive left, which is warning that this is going to

01:08:23.300 become another military industrial complex, you know, destination for trillions of wasted

01:08:30.360 funding.

01:08:30.980 And we can get into that if you want to.

01:08:33.080 But almost the entire political spectrum of voters now realizes that they want their government

01:08:38.160 to protect them from increased Chinese malevolence. 1.00

01:08:41.800 But the Biden administration, despite the fact that they lean towards that, you know, is basically

01:08:47.180 caught up in its own processes.

01:08:48.780 And they're just not doing enough.

01:08:51.300 They're just not doing it fast enough.

01:08:52.600 How much of those processes?

01:08:54.640 I mean, you know, when I saw Hunter Biden's art show, it was so clear to me, even before

01:09:02.180 I knew that they were marketing this art to the Chinese, not to Americans, not to the European,

01:09:09.080 to the Chinese.

01:09:09.880 It is so clear how much of the the way we react or don't react to China is influenced,

01:09:20.420 do you think, by direct money?

01:09:24.200 Yes, on both sides.

01:09:25.560 And to be clear, I think the public record shows quite clearly and just from what we is

01:09:31.660 not in dispute that Hunter Biden and James Biden were doing business with shady Chinese

01:09:36.600 characters by trading on the Biden family name for years, to the tune of millions.

01:09:40.440 I don't think that can be honestly disputed.

01:09:43.140 Nevertheless, it's something that we're not allowed to talk about.

01:09:45.700 And what I would say is that I think that's nefarious and that they and corrupt and that

01:09:52.680 they know what they were doing and that they should answer fair questions about that.

01:09:57.380 At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party does that to everyone, to any elites they

01:10:02.100 can capture on both sides.

01:10:03.060 There's a story in my book about Neil Bush, you know, who shows up in China and strange 0.99

01:10:08.620 women keep arriving at his hotel rooms to have sex with him. 0.61

01:10:11.980 And they ask him that in his divorce proceedings, in the transcript that his wife's lawyer says, 0.85

01:10:17.480 Mr. Bush, didn't you find that unusual that strange women in China kept coming into your 0.98

01:10:21.380 room to have sex with you? 0.98

01:10:22.480 And his answer was, yes, I find that very unusual. 1.00

01:10:25.740 That was it.

01:10:26.840 So this is what this is what we have.

01:10:28.620 We have the Chinese government willing to throw money and or favors at any elite who's

01:10:33.480 willing to be corrupted.

01:10:35.160 And so we're only as strong as our weakest link.

01:10:38.300 And the best way to prevent that corruption is by exposing it and by naming and shaming

01:10:42.920 those Americans who are on the dole, who are taking the money.

01:10:46.480 And that's tough because what the Chinese government does is they launder it through something called 0.75

01:10:53.040 the United Front, which is a network of organizations and entities, Hong Kong billionaires, Thai billionaires,

01:10:59.840 Malaysian billionaires, whatever, Taiwanese billionaires, who do the party's bidding by funneling 0.78

01:11:05.340 billions of dollars into our institutions, into our systems to corrupt them from the inside. 0.51

01:11:09.440 And that United Front system is a very tough thing to talk about.

01:11:13.560 But there's a ton of it in my book, Chaos Under Heaven, if you if you want to learn more.

01:11:17.380 But the bottom line is that rooting that out is part of the essential part of the competition.

01:11:21.820 And it's not just one party.

01:11:24.000 It's they will literally corrupt anyone who is who will take the cash, who will take the dangle.

01:11:29.440 Let me let me go to journalism for a second.

01:11:33.900 You you've been a journalist for how long?

01:11:36.960 18, 19, 17 years.

01:11:38.880 OK, except you are now being positioned as an op ed writer when you write things.

01:11:48.800 I am an op ed writer.

01:11:50.180 So you don't have what you're all of the research that you're doing on China.

01:11:56.200 The Washington Post, you haven't you don't think belongs off an op ed page and into news.

01:12:03.500 OK, so I'm I'm employed as an opinion columnist of The Washington Post in that opinion column.

01:12:09.920 I do a ton of reporting because of my background is the first 15 years of my career.

01:12:14.100 I was a straight news reporter for seven different major publications.

01:12:19.040 That's not uncommon at The Washington Post.

01:12:20.640 You know, they have a long history of columnists who do reporting.

01:12:23.680 David Ignatius, Robert Novak.

01:12:25.780 You name it.

01:12:26.480 Walter Pincus going all the way back.

01:12:27.980 So, yeah, I get it that there's a need for transparency in the paper.

01:12:32.340 But, 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.

01:12:39.300 And that's what I try to do.

01:12:40.400 I 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.

01:12:48.160 And if I do that, then that's a good day of being a Washington Post columnist.

01:12:51.180 Now, you know, what goes on in the news side of The Washington Post?

01:12:53.860 I have no idea.

01:12:54.400 We have a firewall.

01:12:55.280 But 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.

01:13:09.080 And that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as readers know what they're getting and are educated enough to sort through it.

01:13:15.500 Well, that's where I think.

01:13:16.440 Hang on just a second.

01:13:17.120 That'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.

01:13:28.640 It seems like the news section is afraid or corrupt.

01:13:32.860 And the newspaper says, well, let me give this to you and you do that.

01:13:39.240 But it's in an opinion.

01:13:40.140 That way we can distance ourself from it.

01:13:43.960 Right.

01:13:44.520 I 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.

01:13:55.320 And that dates back to our founding fathers.

01:13:56.880 And that's all good.

01:13:58.560 And, you know, The Washington Post doesn't tell me anything to write.

01:14:01.200 I write I write what I want and no one's ever told me what to write or what not to write.

01:14:05.920 And 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.

01:14:13.600 And that to understand the pandemic, we have to understand the U.S.-China relationship and vice versa.

01:14:19.240 So sorry, not sorry for doing a ton of reporting.

01:14:21.520 That's what that's what I'm going to do as long as they allow me to do it.

01:14:24.520 And, 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.

01:14:42.500 And it doesn't matter what part of journalism you're in.

01:14:44.940 Those are things you have to be aware of.

01:14:46.680 And, 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.

01:14:54.760 You have to.

01:14:55.180 And that's not a you have to, because with new information, it changes.

01:14:59.540 And the important thing is not to be right at the beginning.

01:15:01.400 The important thing is to be right at the end.

01:15:03.160 And the only way that you could be right at the end is if you're willing to admit you might not have been right in the beginning.

01:15:07.700 So, in other words, the process of journalism should be a constant revision.

01:15:11.000 And that doesn't matter if you're an opinion guy like you or me or if you're on the news guy or whatever.

01:15:16.240 It's the process.

01:15:17.360 The integrity is in the process.

01:15:19.460 And 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.

01:15:27.680 It'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.

01:15:40.380 And that's what I think about when I go to write a column, whether it's news or opinion or what else.

01:15:44.680 And I think there are still a lot of people in mainstream journalism who are doing that every day.

01:15:49.160 But the lab leak theory was not a great example of that.

01:15:51.940 When you look at what's happened.

01:15:54.400 Does that make sense?

01:15:54.600 Yes, it does.

01:15:55.420 When 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.

01:16:12.500 How is this going to be written 100 years from now, do you think?

01:16:16.780 You know, I think it will be an example of sort of the severe damage done by the Beltway lobbying complex, right?

01:16:28.280 This is – the people who get paid off during these crises are always the people who are well-connected in Washington.

01:16:33.400 And this is just the latest, latest boondoggle.

01:16:36.260 And we're talking about trillions of dollars.

01:16:37.680 It doesn't matter if you're looking at those COVID bills.

01:16:39.940 Remember, they're like, oh, it's a trillion there, three trillion there.

01:16:42.160 It's another three trillion.

01:16:43.120 What's in it?

01:16:43.620 Don't worry about it.

01:16:44.420 But just so chock full of corruption that no chance of achieving the aims that they were set to achieve.

01:16:51.900 And then the second thing I think we'll realize is that throughout this pandemic, which, again, is only beginning, right?

01:16:57.600 This will be a many, many, many year event.

01:17:00.280 That'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.

01:17:11.300 As the international economy is destroyed, that will hamper our own recovery.

01:17:15.380 And then the actions of bad actors like the Chinese government, which are going to come in and exploit all of that. 0.96

01:17:19.660 I 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.

01:17:32.220 Think about the different industries that we're going to need.

01:17:34.240 Think about the technologies that we're going to need to onshore, right?

01:17:37.680 I mean, it could be anything.

01:17:38.820 It doesn't have to be 5G, by the way, Glenn.

01:17:40.260 It could be masks, right?

01:17:41.940 Never in 2018 could you pitch a mask factory in the United States.

01:17:45.460 It doesn't make any sense, right?

01:17:46.840 Why would you build a mask factory in the United States?

01:17:48.920 It makes no sense at all.

01:17:50.500 But in 2021, you don't have to make that argument.

01:17:52.620 We're going to need our own masks.

01:17:53.760 You know why?

01:17:54.420 Because 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.

01:18:01.760 So I guess we're going to have to have our own masks and our own vaccines and our own chemicals and our own medicines.

01:18:06.280 And these are big, big reorientations that the infrastructure bill, you know, laden with fat as it is, doesn't even try to address.

01:18:14.380 So I think that's what history will judge us for.

01:18:18.060 One last question.

01:18:20.760 Your book is Chaos Under Heaven.

01:18:22.760 And if I'm not mistaken, that comes from Mao.

01:18:28.520 Right?

01:18:29.120 That's right.

01:18:30.460 Why Chaos Under Heaven?

01:18:31.800 Explain what that is.

01:18:34.060 The quote, which was attributed to Mao, but we couldn't actually figure out if he actually ever said it, goes like this.

01:18:39.800 There is great chaos under heaven.

01:18:41.840 The situation is excellent.

01:18:43.600 And 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,

01:18:51.680 the better it was for the Chinese Communist Party.

01:18:54.080 That's the attitude that Xi Jinping has right now.

01:18:56.240 That the more we're caught up in our own personal dysfunction, talking past each other, debating minutiae, attacking each other,

01:19:06.660 and living in a society where our focus is on what can divide us rather than what can unite us,

01:19:12.920 that all redounds to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.

01:19:15.540 And that's what I saw during the Trump administration.

01:19:18.920 I saw a lot of good people inside the Trump administration trying to get their heads around this very serious and very urgent problem,

01:19:24.880 but that the chaos, not just of the Trump administration, although it was extremely chaotic, as you well know,

01:19:30.080 but in our society and in our discourse made that effort all the much more difficult and less successful.

01:19:35.860 So until we fix that, until we fix ourselves, until we realize that we all have some sort of shared patriotism,

01:19:44.200 if not shared humanity, you know, the chaos will only continue.

01:19:48.500 I remember saying about 2009, I said the operative word in the future is going to be chaos.

01:19:58.120 And 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.

01:20:08.080 They understand if we can just divide and just keep us fighting.

01:20:13.060 I keep thinking, what are all of the things that are actually being done?

01:20:17.680 What's actually happening while we're arguing over nonsense, just nonsense?

01:20:24.020 The world is changing under our feet and people will wake up one day and go, when did that happen?

01:20:31.360 While you were arguing.

01:20:33.980 Yes, we have to wake up to the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party. 0.65

01:20:38.900 We 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.

01:20:45.920 And we have to wake up to the fact that we're dealing with an organization that means us harm.

01:20:49.540 Okay, 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.

01:21:02.980 And that's a problem of a scope and scale, the likes of which we haven't dealt with in our history.

01:21:07.700 It is the greatest challenge that our country has ever faced.

01:21:10.100 And we do have the capacity to rise to it if we decide to do so.

01:21:16.000 Josh, thank you.

01:21:17.120 We'll talk again.

01:21:17.720 Thank you.

01:21:18.740 Anytime.

01:21:19.540 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

01:21:31.960 Thank you.

01:21:32.960 Thank you.

The Glenn Beck Program - August 14, 2021

Ep 113 ｜ Why COVID's Origin Is the Biggest Story in the World ｜ Josh Rogin ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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