The Megyn Kelly Show - January 26, 2023

Erasing What Makes Women Women, and COVID Lockdown Protests, with Mary Katharine Ham, Bethany Mandel, Winston Sterzel, and Matthew Tye ｜ Ep. 480

Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 35 minutes

Words per Minute

191.96082

Word Count

18,262

Sentence Count

1,250

Misogynist Sentences

60

Hate Speech Sentences

106

Summary

Summaries are generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ.

A 17-year-old girl claims to have seen a "naked male" at a YMCA in San Diego, California. Megyn and her co-hosts Mary Catherine Ham and Bethany Mandel discuss the latest. Plus, a new segment on China.

Transcript

Transcript is generated with Whisper (turbo).

Misogyny classification is done with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny.

Hate speech classification is done with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target.

00:00:00.560 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.860 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.220 She's had a very funny laugh with Abby. Sorry, she's sitting here. We crack each other up some days.

00:00:20.820 Later today, we're going to have a fascinating discussion on China from two Americans,

00:00:24.520 well, two non-Chinese citizens who went over there and thought,

00:00:28.600 hey, let's give this a try. It's beautiful. It's all made. Holy shit.

00:00:32.780 And promptly got out of there and had a very eye-opening experience. And they're here to

00:00:37.680 tell you all about it. But first, major follow-up to a story we brought you last week regarding the

00:00:43.080 teenage girl who spoke out after she encountered a, quote, naked male in a local YMCA bathroom in

00:00:51.060 Santee, California. Since then, there have been several updates in this story, and it all culminated

00:00:58.340 last night in a very heated local city council meeting. Excuse me. I better not be getting

00:01:04.020 Doug's flu. Doug is battling the flu. No, I feel good. I'm good. And say a prayer for Doug,

00:01:08.500 who is not doing so well. Joining me now to discuss all the latest, Mary Catherine Ham,

00:01:13.280 host of the Getting Hammered podcast, and Bethany Mandel, editor of the children's book series,

00:01:18.760 Heroes of Liberty, and contributing writer at Deseret News. Great to have you both. Welcome,

00:01:24.620 ladies. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. Thank you. Yes. All right. So congrats,

00:01:29.920 Bethany. I see you've got your little one. Is this your latest? Yeah. And Mary Catherine is

00:01:35.140 showing me up by being kid-free and more newly postpartum. You know what? I'm just not as brave

00:01:41.520 with my brain or my baby as Bethany is. So separate room for the baby so that the brain can do what it's

00:01:47.860 supposed to do. Same, same. I hope, Bethany, you had the same reaction that I did to Meghan Markle

00:01:53.460 being like, and I did the Australian tour where everyone was applauding me and loving me while

00:01:59.280 pregnant. I know. It was so hard. It was so hard walking around while working. How difficult for you

00:02:07.820 to juggle gestating? Literally, all you have to do is just exist to gestate. It's so true. Okay,

00:02:16.000 sorry. I'm sure she had no help, guys. No staff. I'm sure she had absolutely nobody taking care of

00:02:20.120 her whatsoever. And by the way, no one was asking how she was either. No one. Let's talk about what's

00:02:26.540 happening out in California, in SoCal. So we've had Carrie Prejean and Britt Mayer coming on. We've been

00:02:34.500 talking about their efforts as these two sort of mom warriors to fight back against the overreaches by

00:02:40.480 the very activist trans community, right? Very activist in sort of taking over women's spaces.

00:02:47.380 And these two, they don't care what they get called. They show up and they say,

00:02:52.040 no, hard pass. And they do get called a lot of names, but it's not about them.

00:02:56.740 It's about this 17-year-old girl who came out and her name is Rebecca Phillips. And she showed up at

00:03:01.900 the Santee City Council meeting to say, I'm 17 and I was at the Y and I saw a naked male. And

00:03:08.520 I object. I object to having been put through that. I object to the thought of my five-year-old

00:03:13.720 little sister potentially having to deal with that. And I will say this. She didn't say she saw

00:03:19.480 a naked penis. Sorry to drop the P word in the first three minutes of the show. But she said she saw

00:03:24.920 a naked male just to take a walk down memories lane. Here's what she said in part. Rebecca Phillips

00:03:30.560 sought six. As I was showering after my workout, I saw a naked male in the women's locker room.

00:03:37.620 I immediately went back into the shower, terrified, and hid behind their flimsy excuse

00:03:42.380 for a curtain until he was gone. So the Y has to allow people like a trans woman to use the women's

00:03:51.780 bathroom because California state law says they must. It's a law out there. The Y wasn't particularly

00:03:59.400 apologetic either. Well, now the person who says that she is the trans woman that was seen by Rebecca

00:04:08.020 has come forward. And I don't know whether that's true or not, but I know this person has a history

00:04:13.460 at this Y of being a biological male, but going in and using the women's locker room and doing protests

00:04:19.600 and having all sorts of commotion around the fact that this was this was this person's preference.

00:04:25.280 This person goes by Kristen Wood now. Kristen is 66 years old. Six years ago,

00:04:32.460 she was a man. She was living as a biological man. She wasn't transitioned. So six years ago,

00:04:38.960 it was very clear this person would have had to use the male facility. Now, Kristen Wood says

00:04:43.420 she has transitioned. As recently as December 2021, she definitely had not had sex reassignment

00:04:50.660 surgery on her penis. All right. This her, her penis. I mean, this is the bizarre world in which

00:04:55.920 we're now living. Um, but now she claims she has stay with me. And she's very, very angry at Rebecca

00:05:03.860 Phillips. Um, she came out and spoke in to a local publication saying the following here's a stop for

00:05:11.740 people, entire families were coming up to get their picture taken and to introduce me to their

00:05:18.980 children. It's important that they finally get to hear the truth and they finally get to put a face

00:05:24.340 on this scary transgender woman who was misgendered. All right. So that's obviously a biological man.

00:05:33.480 There's, it wouldn't take much to figure that out as Rebecca Phillips did. So here's the twist of the

00:05:37.940 story. Kristen Wood is defending Kristen Wood's behavior by saying I had sex reassignment surgery.

00:05:44.460 And where would you have me go? I went to the women's room because I am a woman. It's separate

00:05:49.380 and apart from California law. I am. And you're a bigot. If you object, well, it's not just Carrie

00:05:55.020 Prejean and Rip Mayer who object. Uh, but they're two of the women who showed up at the meeting, uh,

00:06:02.340 last night, I think it was city council meeting. That's where Rebecca first, uh, stood up to object.

00:06:06.880 And here's, you know what? I should play this longer soundbite from Kristen Wood before I let

00:06:13.400 the ladies respond. Here's a longer soundbite by Kristen, uh, in her defense. Okay. Sot one.

00:06:19.760 On the morning of Thursday, December 12th, my aqua sister, Vicki called to say, Chrissy,

00:06:24.440 I'm so sorry about what happened last night. I replied, what happened? Her answer was only God,

00:06:30.540 you don't know. Do you let me send you the Instagram video. I watch it. And I collapsed in tears.

00:06:35.700 I'm here to spread the light of truth in the face of these inaccuracies. I'm a mom, a grandmom.

00:06:42.420 Now, please look at me. Listen to the sound of my voice. I am a threat to no one. In the year,

00:06:48.200 I've been a member of the Y children have attended summer camp and have been with their parents and

00:06:52.840 grandparents in the women's locker room with me. And there has never, ever been an incident ever.

00:06:58.080 Not until one was manufactured using this forum to do so. I am fully transitioned asking to be

00:07:05.740 confirmed that my doctorate sharps, who is also my gynecologist. I am sorry that this forum was

00:07:11.680 previously used to spread lies and a hateful political agenda. God's bless you all for this

00:07:17.980 opportunity. Christian wants us to believe that Kristen needs a gynecologist. Even if you've had

00:07:24.780 sex transition surgery, you don't have an actual vagina. Okay. You don't have a female reproductive

00:07:29.160 system. You don't have anywhere near the actual worries of an actual woman when it comes to what

00:07:34.720 goes on down South in Rio. That's the truth. All right. Looking at three moms here who have had

00:07:39.420 babies in the not too distant past. My last one was nine years ago, but I just like, can we not

00:07:46.020 pretend that a gynecologist is behaving toward Kristen the way a gynecologist actually must to

00:07:51.740 maintain one's medical license? What they do is create a hole. That's what they do. They create

00:07:55.940 a hole in what the area that used to have a penis and they want to clear, just clear that a vagina,

00:08:01.940 which it isn't. I'm sorry. Okay. Sorry. That's me, but whatever I'm leading. I'm going to give you

00:08:08.440 the floor in one second. I'm just as a long setup for the story. Carrie Brit, others go to say

00:08:14.800 what the hell's happening here. And they don't accept, uh, Kristen's protestations that Kristen

00:08:21.140 belongs in the female locker room. I'll give you a sampling of what they said. Here's Carrie sought

00:08:25.380 to. I'm identifying tonight as Christie Lynn Wood. So I have three minutes, a war on women,

00:08:31.900 children, and the truth, capital T. And the enemy is disguised in high heels, lipstick,

00:08:37.760 and a shaved beard. Cultural appropriation is wrong. And gender appropriation is wrong.

00:08:43.040 And I, my job is to protect my children. And that's why I'm here. This is not about equality.

00:08:49.840 This is about complete domination and superiority. We're not going to accept this. There is no such

00:08:57.100 thing as a trans transitioning gender. That is a made up fantasy. It doesn't matter if you chop your

00:09:02.720 penis off. It doesn't make you a woman. It doesn't make you a woman. It makes you unwell. We want,

00:09:09.840 we are not going to bow down to your gender ideology cult. So here's what needs to happen tonight.

00:09:16.280 You guys, while you still have your balls, do something about it. We need protection for the

00:09:21.500 little Rebecca. I get more time. Your time is up. Stop. Stop. The microphone is turned off. Nobody's hearing you.

00:09:33.540 Oh boy. And here's the last piece of it, which is Brit getting up. And by the way, these two have come

00:09:38.580 on the show and they, they, according to what, I don't know if we got this directly or if we heard

00:09:44.320 them responding in written form, they were subjected to such harassment. They had to be escorted out by

00:09:52.220 the sheriff's department because of the place was filled with trans activists who honestly, you should

00:09:56.980 distinguish from trans people because the activists are just in a class, a special class of angry.

00:10:02.720 Um, not to be confused with the trans community writ large. Yeah. They told us that. Okay. Here's

00:10:07.660 Brit. This radical new reworked language to force everyone to play by the rules of an ideology that

00:10:14.360 is based on feelings rather than biology. And truth is unsustainable and it's dangerous.

00:10:20.960 If everyone can be a woman, then no one is a woman. I pulled up in the vice mayor spot was open.

00:10:25.420 If I identify as vice mayor and maybe even get it, get a tattoo that says vice mayor and hand out

00:10:31.260 business cards as vice mayor, am I legally vice mayor? And am I allowed now to the table? Can I

00:10:36.600 yell discrimination? If you don't play by my rules, the logical conclusion of policies that are catered

00:10:41.540 to ideologies that are not based in any truth is utter and complete chaos. We are asking you to step in

00:10:48.620 and to put forward an ordinance that will protect women and girls play the hero. We're at the tipping

00:10:54.720 point in society. Hmm. Okay. I'm done. And, uh, I would love to get your thoughts on all of this

00:11:01.520 ladies, uh, Bethany, you were trying to jump in a second ago. I'll start with you. Yeah. So I just

00:11:06.780 have sort of a technical question. So this person is asserting that they have been fully transitioned

00:11:12.800 medically. If that's the case, then how did a 17 year old girl recognize that this was a biological

00:11:19.100 male? I presume that she wasn't that close to this person's genitalia. So obviously it's obvious enough

00:11:28.360 from afar, from across the room that there's something there that shouldn't be there when

00:11:34.240 you're a biological woman. So this, this sort of presumption that this is a full transition

00:11:41.580 and this person has a gynecologist. I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna call the S on. I, I don't believe

00:11:48.360 it's true. I know because we know from the earlier reports, cause she's been causing trouble at this

00:11:53.540 YMCA. Um, she was not transitioned as of December, 2021. So, you know, that's a year plus ago. Doesn't

00:12:01.120 mean it couldn't have happened in the last year, but it would have been awfully recent. And by the way,

00:12:05.500 I don't know if it matters MK, because this girl never claimed she saw male genitalia. She said,

00:12:13.280 I saw a naked male. I think I would recognize that Kristen wasn't, was a male was a biological male.

00:12:21.040 If I saw Kristen from behind as well. Yeah. Well, so your question earlier was,

00:12:27.380 do we have to pretend about the gynecologist? And the answer is yes, we are. The demand is that we

00:12:32.860 pretend. Uh, and the demand is that you do not object in any way, shape or form. And that is not

00:12:39.700 something that is acceptable to me. This young woman is a minor who was in this setting, saw something

00:12:46.140 that made her uncomfortable and made her wonder about the safety of this locker room. She is allowed

00:12:51.100 to have those concerns. It is crazy town to tell her she's not allowed to. And the way this is being

00:12:57.940 covered is just insane. Uh, there's a headline, I believe it was daily beast that called it her

00:13:02.880 gym freak out, a 17 year old gym freak out. It's like, well, maybe we should respect the fact that

00:13:08.860 she's a little concerned about this and that 17 year old girls maybe should be protected in some way,

00:13:14.960 uh, and should listen to their guts on things like this. Another, uh, PBS headline out of San Diego

00:13:19.980 protests over use of Santee YMCA locker room by trans woman, part of a troubling national trend.

00:13:26.660 Is that the national trend where we care what our daughters are exposed to in locker rooms? Like I,

00:13:32.300 I have three daughters. I would like them to be able to use their spidey sense to understand when

00:13:38.660 something might be making them uncomfortable and not be ashamed to say it. And what this is,

00:13:43.280 is a national trend toward making them ashamed that they are uncomfortable and that is dangerous for

00:13:49.600 them. That's exactly right. And, and she was called a bigot. Um, we've seen it over and over again,

00:13:55.780 where anybody who raises an objection to this is called a bigot. And the, the insufferable piece

00:14:01.060 of it, Bethany is the people really calling women like Carrie and Brit and this young girl, Rebecca

00:14:08.380 and me and possibly you two, as a result of this segment, bigots are biological men. So they could

00:14:14.840 take a seat because I don't want to be lectured to by a biological man about how I need to be quiet

00:14:20.800 about them entering my child's all female space, right? That's exactly my role is to speak up for

00:14:27.800 her. And in Rebecca's case, to try to find the voice to speak up for herself. Yeah. At our local

00:14:33.700 community center where we do some classes, my seven year old son isn't allowed into the locker room

00:14:38.580 anymore with me. And we have to go get changed in the family locker room because men aren't allowed,

00:14:44.140 but at the same time, an adult male would be allowed into that locker room. But my seven year

00:14:49.880 old male child wouldn't, unless I start calling him, I don't know, whatever. I can't think of a

00:14:55.800 female name, but if I start calling him a girl, then all of a sudden I can let him into that room.

00:15:01.180 But sort of touching back on what Mary Catherine just said, what's really troubling to me is the safety

00:15:06.480 aspect and that we're teaching young girls to ignore that spider sense. Yep. And there's,

00:15:11.800 there's so much of the female experience that these trans men who claim to be women will never

00:15:17.880 understand. But one of the most sort of traumatic moments in that transition, when you go from a

00:15:24.540 young, young girl to a woman is when you start fearing for your physical safety. And that's not

00:15:30.480 an experience that they have ever had. Um, when it comes to sexuality, they've never had to sort of

00:15:36.480 look behind them with their keys in their hand and the panic and the finger on the panic button on their

00:15:41.100 key chain because they're scared of who's walking behind them. And while there is a fear of physical

00:15:46.860 violence, the fear of sexual violence is something that is unique to the female experience. And we are

00:15:52.540 teaching young girls that they have to ignore the spider sense that has kept every woman safe since

00:15:57.860 the beginning of time. We have that spider sense because men can be predators. And this idea that if a,

00:16:04.940 if a man calls himself a woman, then there's no way that he could ever be predatory is absolutely

00:16:10.700 absurd because men will do literally anything to take advantage of a woman, to see a woman naked,

00:16:17.380 except, except this one thing, they would never lie about their gender. That's something that's

00:16:21.800 beyond the pale. They would, however, rape and kill a woman, but they would never lie about their gender.

00:16:27.180 Right. This, this is such a good point. My God. And it's like you, we had Debra. So on here, um,

00:16:33.300 just last week, she was responding to a viewer who had called in concerned that her 23 year old is,

00:16:38.300 is seeming to think she's, uh, the opposite gender. And, um, Debra. So is saying this story

00:16:44.160 really disturbs her because again, we don't know if the male genitalia was still intact or not,

00:16:48.520 but she was saying transgender women, you know, biological men who want to live as women,

00:16:53.680 they don't, they don't run around with their penises out. They'd be horrified to walk around

00:16:58.880 naked. They don't really love having the penis. They really want to lean into the female role.

00:17:03.580 And so if you see that it's actually a serious red flag. So again, we don't know what the truth

00:17:10.380 is here. I have no idea, but the point is there is reason to be concerned. And even if it has happened

00:17:17.320 in this particular case, it's a bigger issue because there will be men who take advantage of this law

00:17:23.020 and what we're doing is not allowing for that at all. Mary Catherine. Well, yeah. And the problem

00:17:29.200 is, look, I am a person who wants to have like maximal freedom for as many people as possible.

00:17:35.300 Right. And to, to make sure that we can live together in harmony, right. Uh, more libertarian

00:17:39.780 leaning. However, like there has to be a compromise position here because a locker room is a special

00:17:46.620 place. These all may all females faces are important to women. And then you have the issue

00:17:52.920 of when the standard is subjective, how do you deal with the idea that someone could be not well-meaning

00:18:00.340 guys. And in fact, it has happened. I believe there's a spa in LA where someone got in trouble,

00:18:04.540 um, over something like this, where a trans woman was in the, uh, hot tub, I believe, uh, with young

00:18:11.600 people. And this is something that can be obviously dangerous to young women and to minors in general.

00:18:19.160 And we're just sort of not allowed to object to it or point it out. And that is not a compromised

00:18:25.180 position that protects my freedom or the freedom of my kids. Yeah. It's, it's a question of what's,

00:18:31.940 what's takes precedence, the physical safety of young girls and not just young girls. I'd like to be

00:18:38.320 physically safe too, but the physical safety or the emotional wellbeing of people who, who call

00:18:45.520 themselves transgender. And I'm sorry, I will take physical wellbeing over emotional satisfaction any

00:18:52.680 day of the week. And, and we are all supposed to swallow our, our physical needs to not see a penis,

00:19:00.820 not encounter a penis, all of those that we're supposed to just ignore those feelings and that safety

00:19:07.980 aspect because people might have their feelings hurt. And I don't care. Why, why is it making my

00:19:14.220 blood boil that Kristen claims to have a gynecologist? I, I really like it's making my

00:19:20.780 blood boil and I it's, I'm having like a real reaction to it in a way I actually didn't expect

00:19:24.920 and I'm thinking it through live. And part of it is I just actually went to the gynecologist.

00:19:31.080 Actual women have to go to the gynecologist once a year. When you just delivered a baby,

00:19:34.480 you spend your life in with your gynecologist, your OBGYN. And it's never particularly pleasant

00:19:40.980 to go see the gynecologist. The exam doesn't feel particularly good. The pap smear is very

00:19:46.260 uncomfortable. No one looks forward to that. We actually have things we need to worry about like

00:19:50.440 ovarian cancer or other kinds of cancers that you can get in the OB field. Um, you, you have to

00:19:57.300 get a breast exam. You're constantly worrying whether they're going to find a lump and how that could go.

00:20:01.680 There are things that are particular to that exam and that relationship that no fucking man is ever

00:20:05.860 going to have. All right. So that guy doesn't have a gynecologist. That guy has a hole that a surgeon

00:20:11.400 created at best. I'm sorry. It's like infuriating to me because there are things that make women

00:20:17.380 special and there are things that we've overcome and that we must overcome as women in order to thrive

00:20:23.580 in them in this life, whether it's the threat of sexual violence or, you know, being attacked as we

00:20:27.820 walk home from college bars to our dorms or the, the fears that you have when you go to the gynecologist

00:20:35.140 or when you are pregnant with a baby, all those things they're baked in. And it's part of what

00:20:40.280 makes women so incredible and strong. And you can't just become one and take all of our things

00:20:45.160 because you did or did not have a surgery or you put on a dress. It's, it doesn't work like that.

00:20:50.200 My, my favorite thing is when people say we're pregnant, when men say it, we're pregnant,

00:20:56.920 we're expecting a baby. We had a baby. No, no, no. There's no we involved here. The woman,

00:21:03.580 the mother is the one that's throwing up for nine months. She's the one that is having heartburn,

00:21:09.840 like come out of her nose. And then she gets to experience the joy of pushing a watermelon out of

00:21:16.080 something the size of a lemon. It is awful. Very clear memories. It was too recent, very, very clear.

00:21:25.580 Those memory had a baby this month. Yeah. Mary Catherine, not Mary, Megan Kelly, you had a baby

00:21:33.140 nine years ago and yet it's still vivid. It never goes away. And this idea that men can do all of

00:21:40.140 these things, it's, it makes me equally enraged when we talk about birthing persons, because what it does

00:21:45.920 is it breaks us down as women into vessels. That's the handmaid's tale stuff. When they take

00:21:53.440 away everything that is unique and powerful for women and my God, men, society would never have

00:22:00.160 survived. Humanity would not exist if men had to be pregnant. They take all of that away from women.

00:22:05.920 And then they try to, to take it on and say, you know, we are birthing persons. Men can be pregnant

00:22:12.800 too. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's, that's a joy that is only for us. And it comes with bragging

00:22:18.780 rights. Well, yeah, I'm at, I'm at a point in my life where I'm keenly aware of all that's going on

00:22:24.700 in that, uh, in those special ways. And I just delivered a baby three weeks ago and it is really

00:22:31.580 special. And I'm with you, Megan, that I don't want my stuff taken from me. And I believe that there

00:22:36.520 are ways to appropriately and politely deal with all people without just sort of abrogating all of

00:22:44.320 the language that we use to deal with us, because I think that is offensive. And there are, it is

00:22:49.720 amazing to me that so many feminists who will, they will stipulate that women are special in these ways

00:22:57.140 and they face special threats and that they, that all these things are true while also contending that

00:23:02.220 we're not allowed to worry about this at all or the appropriation. Yes. The appropriation of the

00:23:08.380 special things about us. Um, we're not allowed to object to that. Those two things don't go together.

00:23:13.480 We are special for these reasons. And you see it when you, you know, when you look at your husband

00:23:20.060 too, it's like, we, I don't just like not to get too poetic about it, but it's like, you see that

00:23:26.540 beautiful male bicep, you know, that great shoulder that the guy gets and that sort of V

00:23:31.760 ideally shape from the torso down to the waist. And like those firm bottoms that we'll never have,

00:23:38.180 no matter how much time we spend. I'm just going to play this for my husband and tell him you were

00:23:40.900 talking about him. I'm just saying their natural instinct to protect us, like their chivalry,

00:23:47.660 their, the way they, you know, seeing a man show his tenderness toward a baby in a way that's

00:23:52.340 different than the mom does. And you know how the mom tries to sort of make excuses for a little

00:23:56.720 junior, but the dad tries to shore him up to get tougher. All those things are so beautiful and

00:24:01.480 they're meaningful. They they're there because of thousands of years of evolution and the way we,

00:24:06.960 we used to have to live in the way we do now. And they cannot be dismissed as a nothing because you

00:24:12.520 went to see a surgeon. I it's God. And, and to turn. Yeah, go ahead.

00:24:18.980 And I mean, that's just something that I think that a lot of trans activists ignore the biological

00:24:24.180 evolutionary aspect of all of this, all of these things exist for evolutionary reasons. And these

00:24:30.080 are the folks that have the, have the thing on their front lawn in this house, we believe in science,

00:24:34.900 except for biology and evolution. Yeah, that's true. And, and to turn the page, literally this is

00:24:42.080 continuing. Like it's not just for Rebecca, who's being dismissed as a bigot or not to mention

00:24:47.160 Carrie and Brit. This woman just got fired for liking a JK Rowling tweet. Okay. So she's,

00:24:56.540 her name is Kara Lynn. She gave an interview to national review. Uh, I think there's a national

00:25:03.760 review or daily mail. Yeah. National review. And she worked for a gaming company, limited run games,

00:25:10.620 which you wouldn't think is like the most progressive far left woke company. I don't know.

00:25:15.460 It's like, I would think they cater to young guys for the most part, but in any event, she was a

00:25:21.420 community manager, which I think meant she did press for them, uh, for limited run games. She worked

00:25:26.560 for there for more than two years and she just got fired because she enjoyed Harry Potter and followed

00:25:34.300 some politically disfavored accounts on Twitter. Again, reading, uh, from national review. She,

00:25:40.620 the first domino fell, she told national review when a friend of hers, an influencer for Twitch

00:25:46.320 and other streaming platform asked his followers for their thoughts on the new Harry Potter themed

00:25:52.200 game, Hogwarts legacy. She, Carolyn made the response, the mistake of responding.

00:25:59.440 I'm personally looking forward to it. The more I see gameplay, the more excited I get. It's hitting

00:26:04.720 all the marks I've been wanting for a Harry Potter game. Well, that's fireable. Like obviously

00:26:11.720 I'll be. So then this activist, uh, who goes by the, by the name purple tinker on Twitter. Um,

00:26:23.060 according to the Washington post, the person behind that name is Jessica blank. Who's actually a

00:26:28.560 biological man going as a transgender woman and the founder of Bronnie con an annual convention for

00:26:35.540 adult fans of my little pony. Yeah. Yeah. These are sick. No, no danger signs there, by the way,

00:26:44.880 there, I have a friend, no red flags convention. And he called, he like group texted all of us.

00:26:50.720 As soon as he walked in, he's like, Holy shit. There's a, my little pony convention here. It's all

00:26:55.580 freakish men attending. It gets, they get off on it. They get off on little girls. Okay. My little

00:27:01.840 pony dolls. Okay. So this is Jessica who's behind the attempt to take down Carolyn and Jessica decided

00:27:09.560 to go look through Carolyn's old tweets and found that she follows people like libs of Tik TOK in

00:27:18.580 miles. Chong yet. Same by the way. And, uh, exposed that she at one point had tweeted out something to

00:27:25.780 the effect of, um, Oh, seven year old tweet criticizing transgender inclusive bathroom

00:27:29.800 legislation and called her a bigot, blah, blah, blah. The company caved. She's fired because of this.

00:27:36.260 And they're not even trying to pretend it was for any reason other than this campaign against her.

00:27:42.040 Did they put out a statement that was like, we respect other people's views. However,

00:27:47.500 we just fired her for liking tweets. Cause that, that usually comes right after the cancellation.

00:27:53.100 Yes. Here's what they said. Here's my notes from what they said. I don't know if you can read this,

00:27:57.520 but I wrote F you. I, my potty mouth, my mom told me to stop swearing so much. So did Deseret

00:28:03.240 news, Bethany, but I, it's hard. Um, sorry. Okay. I know I need to do it, but I, it's really hard.

00:28:10.620 It's hard. It's so hard, especially when you're from New York. I feel your pain. Right. It's in

00:28:15.500 our blood. It's in our blood. It's like in the bagels. Um, what's really crazy. Wait, well, let me

00:28:25.520 read their statement. They said limited run games respects all personal opinions. Yes. You called it

00:28:31.320 exactly. Mary Catherine. Yeah. However, we remain committed to supporting an inclusive culture

00:28:37.640 upon investigating a situation. An employee was terminated. That's it. Upon investigating a

00:28:42.840 situation and employee was terminated passive, passive voice. Our goal as a company is to

00:28:48.580 continue to foster a positive way for it and safe environment for everyone. Go ahead. Cause it is

00:28:56.340 indeed dangerous when someone likes a tweet and they work at your office, probably remotely,

00:29:01.660 by the way, it's super dangerous. Right. What were you going to say, Bethany?

00:29:07.300 So I just think it's really funny that they once again have thrown a woman under the bus

00:29:12.380 in order to cater to the feelings of a biological male. That's, that's the theme for all of these

00:29:17.080 things. Women are thrown under the bus to cater to the feelings of biological.

00:29:21.160 Right. Right. Right. Back to the original theme. And I guess, um, this person, Jessica blank,

00:29:26.740 AKA purple tinker, AKA founder of brawny con an annual convention for adult fans of my little pony

00:29:32.740 has made the point that it's been a long time since they have held a my little pony convention or

00:29:40.900 went to one, which I have news for you is really no defense, Jessica to the fact that you found it and

00:29:48.940 used to love that stuff as recently as I guess, a few years ago. Um, these companies need to stand

00:29:54.540 up. Yes. They need to stand up. This cannot keep happening or it's the end of our society.

00:30:01.420 Yeah. No, the, the, the words, your concerns are noted are a lost art. Like, like, let's just

00:30:09.360 enact that. Like you can, you can tell someone, I hear what you're saying. We will not be making

00:30:14.760 this person pay consequences for disagreeing with you. Now the left will say, this isn't cancel

00:30:19.700 culture. This is consequences, culture consequences for liking tweets, for following people whom

00:30:25.080 other people disagree with. I follow a lot of people that I disagree with and people might find

00:30:30.080 objectionable and I am allowed to look at their thoughts. That is, that is not a thing that is a

00:30:36.040 fireable offense. It's me too. Me too. I followed Nicole, Nicole, Hannah Jones, and she and I have had

00:30:42.900 some dust ups and so on that I want to hear what she has to say. I think she's interesting. I don't

00:30:47.180 agree with her, but she's interesting. Um, it's absurd to be doing this kind of thing and it's,

00:30:52.940 it's branching out out up next. I'm going to take a quick break and we're going to talk about

00:30:56.860 what's happening. Um, it's John O Caldwell at Fox news who just got thrown out of a restaurant

00:31:04.820 for openly expressing his conservative views. This is a crazy story. That's next. Don't go away.

00:31:12.900 This is crazy to me. Gianno Caldwell, uh, who is, he works for Fox news. You guys may know him,

00:31:20.320 uh, was down in North Miami. So it's Florida and like Florida, that's supposed to be like

00:31:26.060 where you can say things that you want to say, not get canceled. Um, he went into the pair. I,

00:31:33.180 is it paradise? It's spelled without the E at the end. I think paradise parody. Okay. I mean,

00:31:39.460 it's French, um, books and bread, paradis books and bread. They kicked him out of the restaurant.

00:31:46.520 Okay. As he told the story to Fox and friends and daily wire reporting on it, kicked him out

00:31:49.920 of the restaurant, claiming the behavior and words of the group he was with. And I think of

00:31:55.600 Caldwell as well made the employees and other patrons in the space quote, very uncomfortable.

00:32:01.560 Okay. Now for the, for the listening audience, if it matters, Gianno's black, but that would not save

00:32:07.980 him with these woke warriors down at the, at this book and bread store. What, what, um, he told Fox

00:32:15.360 and friends, the story saying one of the owners came over to their table as they were eating breakfast

00:32:21.500 and told them she'd been listening to their conversation, a creepy, and that they were not

00:32:26.800 welcome. He, uh, asked if he had said something triggering to her to which she responded. No,

00:32:33.160 but said their politics are not aligned and asked him to leave because she did not feel comfortable.

00:32:39.040 He was there with a few people. This is a white woman. He said, um, he said the group had discussed

00:32:44.880 several topics, including Caldwell's time working at Fox news, his values, violent crime and progressive

00:32:51.420 district attorneys. Keep in mind that general's brother was shot and killed in Chicago, um, last

00:32:57.520 year. So he's got a lot of thoughts on these soft on crime DAs. And apparently he was discussing them

00:33:01.740 and, uh, this person comes over and tells him get out and she's not denying it. She responded on

00:33:10.080 Instagram saying, um, that she found him offensive. She said, uh, I don't want to get to it. Once it was

00:33:17.820 clear that they were finished with their meal, we told them that our views do not align and that the

00:33:22.280 language they were using was unwelcome in our space. And, uh, she claims that they were talking

00:33:27.980 about women in degrading ways, as well as using eugenic arguments around their thoughts on Roe versus

00:33:34.620 Wade. You know what? It's none of her business, what they were discussing. This is so crazy. Now,

00:33:40.800 even speaking conservative thoughts in a restaurant or bookstore unclear can get you booted out of a

00:33:49.760 public space. What do you make of it? Well, just a review quickly, uh, of things that are dangerous

00:33:54.980 people having conversations, uh, people who like tweets, uh, a person in a locker room that you have

00:34:02.140 concerns about. No, no chance that could be an issue, but the tweeting and the talking huge issues.

00:34:08.120 Yes. Good point. It's going on a very slippery slope.

00:34:14.580 What's interesting is the feelings of one side have take precedence here. So the feelings of this

00:34:21.940 white woman, those have more weight than that of a black man who has experienced the effects of

00:34:29.760 violent crime. If we're going to talk about eugenics and all of those things related to Roe versus

00:34:36.160 Wade, I feel like a black man's opinion. When you, when you look at the fact that I think it's 85 to

00:34:43.840 90% of black babies in New York city where he lives are aborted, I feel like that should carry some weight,

00:34:50.420 but not really because he works for Fox news. Yeah. It's a good point. Why, why isn't he entitled

00:34:56.540 to talk about that? Why? And it's, it's not, it's like someone in our facility found your views

00:35:03.200 offensive. She says our political views don't align. So get out. I mean, is this the future?

00:35:09.200 You know, there was a story like some bank was talking about don't come here. If your values

00:35:14.900 aren't aligned with our, like, is this the future where we're just going to have two systems for

00:35:19.640 everyone? We're gonna have two different restaurants, two different banks, two different

00:35:23.680 real estate brokers. Like you, you know, for the left and the right, for the red and the blue.

00:35:27.580 I'm, I'm afraid it is. I hope it's not. I've written about this a lot of times. Uh, it is an

00:35:34.740 unhealthy way of being in a society, even if you have the right to refuse service, which many people

00:35:41.080 do. Right. But like the idea that you need to check your bagel places politics before you go in and grab

00:35:48.600 a sandwich is not a healthy way to operate in society. And if you're the one who insists that

00:35:54.700 your customers align with you on all politics, you are being a giant baby and intolerant.

00:36:00.420 So what I want to know is filing these lawsuits over and over against the cake baker and this other

00:36:07.800 woman whose cases that they have to provide service, they have to, and they've been defending

00:36:12.880 themselves saying we don't, not if it's compelled speech and they've been winning, but now you've got

00:36:18.020 the left saying, I don't have to provide service to you, even though I'm a public business, I can

00:36:24.240 make you get out. I was compelled to hear your speech. That's not real.

00:36:26.760 Right. Right. Like the, there could be a lawsuit brewing here, Bethany.

00:36:31.660 I, I think it's worth a visit from lots of folks to sit there and talk about Roe versus Wade. Um,

00:36:38.200 what I want to know is, did he get a free mail out of this? She says that she waited until after his

00:36:43.200 meal was over. Was that after he paid the check too? And then he was asked to leave. Cause if I can get a

00:36:49.440 free meal in North Miami beach for just talking about how I don't think that black babies should

00:36:55.740 be aborted on mass. And that I, I think that that has sort of eugenics undertones. I am all in favor

00:37:03.800 of getting a free meal while also talking about my political beliefs in a way that makes someone

00:37:09.520 feel uncomfortable.

00:37:12.000 Bethany and I could get kicked out of so many restaurants by this standard.

00:37:15.580 We're just everywhere we go. As long as we get kicked out after we eat before the check

00:37:21.900 house, at least the free bread. Why don't we just pull our funds and create right next to this store

00:37:28.940 paradise books and bread where you can say whatever the hell you want. We welcome lefties. We welcome

00:37:35.780 righties. We welcome the crazy libertarians. We have one as an owner apparently. And, uh, and,

00:37:42.020 and see how we do next to old paradis book and bread. I don't, this is, this cannot be our future.

00:37:48.500 We have to shame these people and call them out of this bad behavior. I will say now, um, on Sunday,

00:37:55.000 he went on Fox and friends this weekend. The business was closed and on Instagram, they posted that they

00:37:59.960 were starting their winter break early instead of when it was supposed to start on January 29th.

00:38:06.020 They've now made their Instagram account private. So you can no longer see their posts. Um, but the

00:38:12.240 owners had apparently bragged before that in their facility, you would see their enviable library of

00:38:18.680 politically charged books. So you see political views are very welcome just so long as they don't

00:38:25.800 promote Harry Potter or biological women and their spaces and so on. I mean, we could go on.

00:38:31.700 And by the way, I could sit next to books that think different things than I think. I know it's

00:38:36.620 like a superpower, but I can eat lunch next to people and books that profess things I don't agree

00:38:42.700 with. You might be doing it right now. Look at both of you. I have, you can check. I don't know

00:38:46.640 that what's back there. I didn't check them all out. We snuck some books back there about end of

00:38:52.060 discussion about how the left is shutting down speech available on Amazon. Mary Catherine Ham,

00:38:59.240 guy Benson, 2015 memory serves. That's correct. That's correct. I know I was about to say,

00:39:05.540 I was like, you have to rewrite that book to refresh it. You and guy have to get in,

00:39:11.240 get in with all of the craziness. You, you were a little too soon on the jump. You predicted how

00:39:16.900 crazy things were going to get, but then you missed all the best content. You may have,

00:39:20.800 but as we say for the book, it's great for the book, bad for America.

00:39:23.460 Yes. Okay. Now speaking of guy Benson, he is one of our favorite people. You and I were both at his

00:39:29.860 wedding. You were in his wedding. MK. Um, he is a gay conservative. Uh, I only mentioned his

00:39:36.060 sexual identity because it's potentially relevant to my next point. Um, people like guy, people like

00:39:43.360 Dave Rubin, they, they don't run around talking about who they like to have sex with, who they love,

00:39:49.400 what their preferences are any more than you or I do. They, they don't, um, we bring it up because

00:39:54.740 gay rights have been an issue over these many years. However, I don't think guy Benson or Dave

00:40:01.280 Rubin or any of these, I don't think they're going to be in favor of things like the latest Burberry

00:40:05.240 ad Burberry has now decided that they're going to do a new ad campaign. And it's not just showing a

00:40:13.720 same sex couple kissing it's showing, which, I mean, I think we're kind of used to at this point,

00:40:19.500 I don't know if they're trying to be provocative or something like that, but they're showing

00:40:23.000 a woman, a biological woman who's had a double mastectomy. Yeah, here it is. Uh, this, this person

00:40:32.800 on the left is a biological woman who said a double mastectomy and is living as a man kissing another

00:40:37.580 man. How is this selling Burberry? How is this? This is where I genuinely believe the LGBTQIA whole

00:40:46.460 thing has separated like this. I don't see how this is healthy for society to see a woman who's

00:40:52.080 cut her breasts off kissing another person in an ad to sell a weather company's gear. Like help me,

00:40:59.040 MK. No, I think luxury brands in particular, as we noticed with the, uh, the, the, the last

00:41:05.720 controversial one, which is escaping my mind. Cause I had a baby too recently. Yes. Uh, they are

00:41:12.580 just uniformly populated with people who believe one thing. And it is the farthest left thing.

00:41:18.360 One can believe on all of the, on all of the issues, partly because, you know, if they liked

00:41:23.120 any other tweets or listened to any of them or followed them, uh, they'd get fired. Right. So you

00:41:27.180 have, I think this distortion of what might play with people. And I think there is an attempt to be

00:41:32.860 provocative. I'm not that provoked because we see a lot of this content because the entire media is

00:41:37.780 aligned with this point of view, but like, how are you selling the raincoats? Yeah. Where are the

00:41:43.320 clothes in this Burberry ad? I don't, I find this upsetting because I don't want it marketed on a mass

00:41:49.540 basis, uh, that little girls can just chop, chop off their breasts. Go ahead and chop off your

00:41:54.140 breasts. There's absolutely no downside. Have you ever known somebody who's had a double mastectomy?

00:41:57.900 Um, it can be extremely painful and it can cause ongoing medical problems for a long, long time.

00:42:03.500 Um, and like to just pop it up there, like, Hey, there's nothing wrong. See those scars right

00:42:07.280 there. Yeah. It's beautiful. Bring it. It's an, it ain't but a thing just buy a Burberry raincoat to

00:42:12.240 cover it up. Like, what are they trying to say, Bethany? Yeah, that's something that has always sort

00:42:17.360 of bothered me about all of this trans activism is the no consequences messaging behind all of it.

00:42:23.360 No consequences of hormones, no consequences of the, the physical maiming that takes place with

00:42:29.940 all of these surgeries. And I find that as someone who is very nervous about how society is going when

00:42:37.120 it comes to gender messaging, um, the, I mean, there's so many components of it, but the, the no

00:42:44.700 consequences thing is something that really bothers me because we're telling young girls and, and this is a

00:42:51.080 social contagion really among young girls. It's not really happening among men in the nearly the same

00:42:55.700 numbers that it's happening among young women. And we're lying to them about the physical, physical

00:43:01.280 consequences. Uh, they are terrifying. These young women are left usually infertile. Um, they can't

00:43:08.880 breastfeed. Uh, they're making all of these life altering, physically altering decisions that are

00:43:16.180 permanent with the belief that they are not permanent, that they, they, everything can be

00:43:21.580 reversed. And you're right, Megan, that they're showing these scars as something that's beautiful.

00:43:27.640 When the reality is I have a friend who just underwent a double mastectomy because she tested

00:43:32.560 positive for the breast cancer gene. And she just went in for her fourth surgery. And the most sort of

00:43:39.060 troubling stories from people who have detransitioned are about the physical ramifications of everything

00:43:46.240 that they had to undergo. And before they've even tried to reverse it, it it's, it's real physical

00:43:52.120 maiming. And it's at the hands of people who claim that they, they at first and foremost, do no harm.

00:43:59.720 Yeah, that's exactly right. I, it's really disturbing to me. I, I'm interested in this story as well,

00:44:05.800 because honestly, I feel like the people who sort of speak for the trans community and, and to a

00:44:12.280 lesser extent, uh, the lay, the, the lesbian, lesbian and gay community, um, are not always the

00:44:17.780 best spokespeople. And so they do things like the queer prom. Have you seen this from the libs of

00:44:22.000 TikTok account? They're celebrating the queer, queer prom. I actually have no problem with that.

00:44:25.660 Like if maybe if you're gay and you don't know who else is gay, you'd love the queer prom because it

00:44:29.560 might help you. I don't know, but why do they have to sexualize it? Why do they have to treat

00:44:33.740 young gay men and young lesbian women as though they're sex fiends at all times? Like somehow

00:44:38.380 it turns on at 14 for a young lesbian in a way it doesn't for a young straight girl. It's ridiculous.

00:44:43.560 So here's from libs of TikTok, the, the, what they're talking about when they're advertising

00:44:46.720 this queer prom. It's not 12.

00:44:48.220 They're so great. Everyone's going to get a crystal, uh, star shaped pendant and a little

00:45:09.240 charm in there, a progress pride flag, a Planned Parenthood bracelet, amazing stuff from

00:45:18.080 our friends at NAMI, condoms, lube, dental dam, latex dam. Thank you. Evolution candy. Oh my gosh,

00:45:26.600 Carter. Hi, I see you there. Uh, and cute little cards with information.

00:45:34.920 All right. This is Pennsylvania happened in October. Kids as young as 13. You tell me why

00:45:40.020 they're offering dental dams and lube to 13 year olds who are just there to, you know,

00:45:44.840 maybe meet somebody or make a connection. Like I don't help. This is a hypersexualization

00:45:51.280 of an entire generation. I mean, this is, this is everything that they want to do. It's not just

00:45:57.200 about gay rights and, and all of these things and being free. It's also about sexualizing children.

00:46:04.240 It's what it all comes down to. I, you know, it's so aggravating. I'm okay. I always tell my kids what

00:46:09.440 my mom told me, no, if you're gay or lesbian, don't worry about it. Mommy loves you. But I,

00:46:13.760 I don't, I wouldn't send them to a queer prom if they were going to be offering them dental dams at

00:46:17.760 age 13. We, we have out couples at our regular prom. And is this a school sponsored event, by the way,

00:46:26.000 that that's what talks about. Yeah. Good question. Um, I don't know. I know that they,

00:46:33.000 there was a state Senator who was a sponsor of it, uh, state Senator, Steve Santar Ciero. Um,

00:46:39.980 and they held it at the cosmic colors, queer prom. It was called at the, I don't know,

00:46:44.020 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And even, I really think we need to get over this kids who are gay

00:46:49.040 or lesbian. They don't need to see a drag queen. They don't need to be offered condoms at age 13

00:46:53.160 or any, or lube. This is insulting, right? There are a lot of Christian families that also have gays and

00:46:59.120 lesbians who wouldn't support or premarital sex like that anyway, but can get behind gays,

00:47:02.940 lesbians like the Pope just did in any event. Um, more for another day. There's so much,

00:47:08.040 we have 25 other stories on this sadly that we could get to, but, uh, we have to move on Bethany,

00:47:12.860 Mary Catherine. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Love ladies. When we come back

00:47:17.980 China. Now we switch gears to focus on China, major protests against China's zero COVID policies broke

00:47:28.640 out late last year. And they're still ongoing as Chinese health authorities have relented a bit

00:47:34.720 on the zero COVID, but now claim that a staggering eight in 10 people have contracted COVID since they

00:47:41.600 lifted those restrictions. Thanks to the protesters as of December, right? This is why they say it all

00:47:47.260 happened just since then. Although no one outside of China can verify these numbers here to discuss it.

00:47:52.960 All our two new guests, Winston Sturzel and Matthew Tai. They both lived in China for a decade and

00:47:59.920 they're now popular YouTubers covering all things, China. Winston, Matt, welcome to the show.

00:48:05.240 Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Yeah. Great to have you. So this is an,

00:48:08.760 this is an amazing story. So, uh, Winston, you were from South Africa, Matt, you're American,

00:48:14.640 right? Yeah. Upstate New York. Yeah. Like me where Binghamton. Oh yeah. Right around the corner.

00:48:20.640 So, um, Syracuse and then Albany for me, but so what, I mean, I don't understand because people

00:48:26.460 from upstate New York, New York normally have sense and they appreciate the natural topography

00:48:33.920 and the beautiful, you know, sort of outdoors. Well, I don't, what would make you move to China

00:48:37.820 and stay there? Honestly, it was, uh, you know, it was a little bit bored coming out of college.

00:48:42.780 Um, I had just backpacked through Europe, uh, seen the world and I didn't want that,

00:48:46.800 you know, adventure to stop, um, to make it quick. I was planning on doing like a,

00:48:51.560 maybe a year abroad, teach, teach a little bit of English, maybe in Japan or Taiwan,

00:48:55.500 someplace like that. And, uh, ended up getting a call from a job prospector in mainland China,

00:49:01.200 sold all my stuff and said, you know what, I'll give China a shot.

00:49:04.920 Hmm. Okay. Now, uh, Winston, what are, what are we looking at behind you guys in front of a green

00:49:09.060 screen and I'm seeing, it looks like people are like stomping on you on the sidewalk. What's

00:49:12.600 happening? Oh yeah. Sorry. We actually, before leaving China, I used to go out very often and

00:49:18.420 just take, um, footage of the street, really set up a tripod and stand there for about 10,

00:49:25.240 15 minutes at a time. After leaving China, um, I actually got some of our contacts there to do

00:49:31.420 the same thing. So every once in a while, go out and film and, uh, you know, send us the footage.

00:49:36.660 This is actually a government building in Beijing. And, um, it's just, uh, a random clip of from a

00:49:43.900 couple of months ago, actually. The Chinese government's not super keen on, uh, on that.

00:49:48.280 Yeah. Ah, it looks so drab and depressing. I mean, can you just walk us through, I've never been to

00:49:53.140 China. Um, what was it? Cause Winston, you had a similar story where you moved over there to take

00:49:58.680 a teaching opportunity, as I understand, and decided you would stay. Like, what was it about China that

00:50:03.720 made you stay? Cause I will be honest. Most of the stories in America about China are not good.

00:50:08.780 And you don't normally have somebody saying, here's, here's the beautiful part. Here's the

00:50:12.200 stuff that I found alluring. Well, I mean, it was very straightforward. When I went to China,

00:50:17.500 I went on a business trip. Um, I was 25 years old at the time. And I went, I went on a three day

00:50:22.840 business trip to go and take a look at some factories and some products that my client was

00:50:26.660 importing to South Africa for, um, security camera technology that he was buying from there.

00:50:31.440 And, uh, I ended up in Shenzhen, which I know a lot of people don't really know Shenzhen,

00:50:36.880 but it's probably the most important city in China. It's the first city to open up when it comes to

00:50:42.460 trade and investment and that kind of thing back in 1979. And, um, it was such a mind blowing

00:50:50.540 experience to me, those three days, just vibrant. And, um, the amount of people will blow your mind.

00:50:57.980 It's just so many people, so many things happening at the same time, all night, you could go out and,

00:51:03.820 uh, the lights are on and people are having street side barbecue. And it was just such an amazing

00:51:09.660 vibe for a young man. Uh, and it really attracted me this whole, um, in, in Chinese, they say,

00:51:16.540 which just means very sort of, uh, bustling and, and, and happening. So it was, it was that that

00:51:22.380 attracted me to China. So I went home and I sold everything. And I went back to China with this

00:51:27.740 idea that I would find work and I'd be able to make a life there because it looked like such an

00:51:33.160 adventure. But when I got there, I figured out very quickly that, uh, China is a very difficult

00:51:38.540 place to navigate. And I ended up actually losing all my money in it. I actually ended up homeless for

00:51:44.600 a number of days in China for what ended up being about three days until I found, uh, an agent that

00:51:51.420 got me a teaching job. I slept on his couch and I'd used to teach kindergarten in the beginning.

00:51:55.820 And I built myself up, got an apartment and basically went from there. And I ended up living

00:52:00.440 for 14 years in China, um, and doing some incredible adventures, uh, along with Matt here,

00:52:07.800 we rode motorcycles throughout the whole of China. We made a couple of television documentaries and,

00:52:12.520 um, we, what, what really blew me away was how different China was to my expectations when I

00:52:19.900 first got there. Uh, because as you say, uh, Western media and American media and so on,

00:52:25.960 you used to paint a very bleak picture of China at the time, but China was changing and China was

00:52:31.800 changing rapidly. And I could see that there was a lot of good there and a lot of interesting things

00:52:36.300 to share with the world. And that's why, um, I started my YouTube channel, which happens to be the

00:52:40.960 first YouTube channel out of mainland China ever. Um, but of course, yeah, as things progressed,

00:52:48.700 things changed and China stopped being this country that was opening up and all this opportunity and,

00:52:54.500 and really growing and started to revert and kind of go backwards and become more closed up and locked

00:53:00.960 down and more, um, hostile towards, uh, foreigners and so on. And so it reached a point where, uh,

00:53:07.400 we had to leave. When, when did it change and why? Honestly, if I'm looking back at it, you could,

00:53:13.760 you know, you, you have the boiled frog syndrome. You don't really notice it because it's just

00:53:17.460 gradually happening. But I really think there was a turning point for me in 2015, when we shot our

00:53:23.380 first documentary, when we were riding motorcycles through these kind of places where nobody had seen

00:53:29.660 before, at least in the West, um, through provinces like Guizhou or Yunnan, these areas where we had

00:53:35.820 previously been before with no problems, all of a sudden problems started creeping up. So we started

00:53:41.220 seeing police minders following us around. There were people literally like cops on the side of the

00:53:45.760 road as we would ride by marking our location and radioing to the next police officer. We would go to

00:53:51.440 an area where the police would tell all of the hotels that we are not allowed to even be there or stay

00:53:56.860 there. So we'd have to go to the next area. All of this started ramping up around 2015 and really

00:54:02.180 came to a head. I think around 2017 ish, when we shot our second show, um, you know, we were busted,

00:54:09.200 the, the SWAT team busted in, in our hotel. When we were filming, we were filming very innocuous

00:54:13.580 things. We're filming camels and minority cultures and things that are very pro China to make China look

00:54:19.380 good to the rest of the world, to show people things that we found beautiful about China. But still the

00:54:24.700 government was so paranoid, became so paranoid about anyone with a camera that wasn't Chinese or

00:54:30.100 anyone that wasn't approved by the government to be filming or even traveling around China at all.

00:54:35.200 Um, you know, and putting it out there for the rest of the world to see. So I'd say 2015 to 2017

00:54:39.980 is where it got really hot. Yeah. That's what changed for you guys. But Winston, do you feel like

00:54:44.080 China itself was changing or do you feel like you were just kind of unaware prior to that?

00:54:49.060 Absolutely. China was changing. Um, and we saw this happen. Definitely. We can trace it back to

00:54:56.020 when Xi Jinping, um, took office and it was when he rose to power that he decided to change things.

00:55:02.320 Um, and he was sick and tired of the old hide your strengths and bide your time. Um, this has always

00:55:07.940 been what China has done in the past since Deng Xiaoping. And so Xi Jinping came along and he said,

00:55:12.780 you know what? We're powerful enough now. China is powerful. We're not going to hide our strengths

00:55:17.080 and bide our time anymore. It's our turn to be in the spotlight. We're, we're going to be the center

00:55:21.360 of the universe now. And so he started to really enact a lot of nationalist policies. And, you know,

00:55:28.060 when I first got to China, you could still see the remnants of, um, communism as in all the banners,

00:55:33.780 you know, you'd see a lot of hammers and sickles. You'd see the one child policy, uh, propaganda

00:55:38.080 all over the place on the buildings and, you know, Soviet style artwork. Um, but throughout the years,

00:55:44.780 that stuff started to be taken down, they'd paint over that stuff that you wouldn't see

00:55:49.160 the hammers and sickles everywhere. You wouldn't see all that communist symbolism. But after

00:55:54.360 Xi Jinping took power, he started to bring that back and you'd see more and more of these banners,

00:55:58.600 these propaganda banners and all the hammers and sickles came back and, uh, you could see

00:56:03.380 it was really regressing. And, you know, we, we didn't just live in China. Both of us learned

00:56:09.240 the language. I studied the language at Shenzhen University. Um, we both married, you know, locals.

00:56:15.080 So we both have Chinese wives. We both have, um, you know, uh, children, half Chinese children,

00:56:21.180 and we really invested a lot into the country. And, um, we really understand the country very

00:56:27.800 well, having lived there and had businesses there and, and all the rest of it. Um, and so we are very

00:56:33.780 knowledgeable when it comes to China and we could see it changing. And it wasn't like, uh, just us

00:56:38.300 changing over time, maturing and getting older. It was really just, uh, uh, a very sudden shift

00:56:44.300 in the attitude that China had towards dealing with the rest of the world that drove us off in the

00:56:48.660 end. What take us to sort of the day in day out, uh, business of living in China. I'm wondering how

00:56:56.440 communism manifested other than we'll get to the crackdown on YouTube, but what, how, how did

00:57:02.420 communism show up on a day-to-day basis there? Honestly, if you, if you were to go to China back

00:57:08.540 in 08, when I went there, and like I said, maybe up to 2015, you wouldn't really see communism. In

00:57:14.500 fact, like Winston said, it was being dismantled in a way, at least the symbology of it was being

00:57:19.500 removed. It was almost exotic to see something like a hammer and sickle or a, or a propaganda banner.

00:57:25.280 Um, those things were coming down and it was being replaced with free market capitalism. And it was

00:57:31.100 almost like it was government policy to make sure that people, uh, you know, the things that they

00:57:36.400 saw and the lives that they lit, they live, the lives that they lived were conducive to China

00:57:41.180 growing economically. So that meant more foreign investment, more welcoming for foreigners to come

00:57:45.680 over there and start the businesses and things like this. So I would say in that time period,

00:57:49.860 you wouldn't really see communism outside of maybe, uh, you know, thousands of kids gathering to do

00:57:55.580 their salute to the flag raising and their, uh, morning exercise to the coordinated

00:58:00.700 communist sounding songs and the, you know, the Chinese flag going up with the national anthem.

00:58:05.180 Those things were remnants of that, uh, pieces of the education system that had very heavy handed

00:58:10.380 with nationalism, things like that. Very, very, uh, clear that this was an authoritarian power,

00:58:15.120 but the communist stuff again was being removed. So would, to see that come back was a huge shock for

00:58:21.580 us because it wasn't just the banners. It wasn't just the huge Xi Jinping, uh, you know, billboards

00:58:26.620 waving at everybody in like a really poor rural village. It wasn't just a symbology. It was also the state

00:58:32.800 that was going from talking about why China should grow economically. And maybe that's why we should

00:58:38.220 be nice to other countries and cooperate to, no, we don't need those countries anymore. We are better

00:58:44.140 than the rest of the world. We don't need these aggressors. The rest of the world wants to see China fail

00:58:49.160 and really turn inwards. And I think that state media narrative, you know, China's blocks, most of

00:58:55.100 the internet, China controls all, you know, the state controls, all the media going out to the

00:58:59.220 people. So that can really flip a switch. And I saw that change when, uh, Russia is no longer

00:59:06.060 communist, but, uh, obviously has its roots there. And I've been over there a few times over the past

00:59:11.080 few years and Moscow and St. Petersburg and elsewhere, you go over there, looks very much,

00:59:15.980 feels very much in some ways like America. You could, you go out to a restaurant, you go out

00:59:20.680 having drinks with friends at night. Now, in my case, I was followed around by government agents

00:59:25.660 the whole time because I was there to meet with Putin. But I think the average American wouldn't

00:59:29.460 necessarily have that experience with their bags being sifted through by, you know, his, his people

00:59:34.420 in any event. Um, but it was absolutely lovely. It felt very European. It like if you were to go

00:59:40.120 there, you wouldn't necessarily know you were in a country with those kinds of roots. And that kind of

00:59:44.200 history was China like that ever for you, or is it more like curfew bed, no drinking, no carousing?

00:59:52.460 No, absolutely. Listen, if you go to any of the first tier cities or, or even second tier cities

00:59:57.560 in China, so we're talking Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, you know, any of these big

01:00:01.400 cities, you will think that you're just in a first world country. You've got your Starbucks there.

01:00:05.980 You've got your McDonald's. You've got your, you know, very good infrastructure. You've got your

01:00:10.160 subway systems. You've got, uh, you know, very good roads. It looks fantastic, shiny buildings.

01:00:15.240 Um, and you do think that you're just in a normal, um, first world country and you can walk around

01:00:20.520 freely. It's very safe and you can go and do your banking or do whatever you want to do. Um,

01:00:25.860 it's when you leave the big cities that you really get to see what China is really like. Um, and for

01:00:31.840 instance, you just need to drive about an hour out of any of these cities and you will start to see a lot

01:00:37.200 of poverty. You will start to see a lot of, um, old style worn out propaganda everywhere. You'll

01:00:42.980 start to see, you know, uh, the, the real China. Um, and you know, this whole idea of China being

01:00:49.100 communist, it's, it's a weird one because in China, they call it communism and, or socialism with

01:00:54.880 Chinese characteristics, which just means that it can be whatever they want it to be. And they change

01:00:59.960 it all the time. You know, um, if you work for a big government, if you work for the government,

01:01:04.480 so if you're a policeman or you, you work for any government office, you still get this whole

01:01:09.640 remnants of communism stuff. They still give you a year's supply of rice and oil as your yearly end

01:01:15.360 bonus and toilet paper. It's kind of this whole, you know, the state providing thing, but that's

01:01:19.420 about as far as it goes, really. Um, they don't look after, there's not good social programs for the

01:01:24.360 average person, for instance. So, um, it's really communist in name only. You don't really get to see the,

01:01:30.100 the so-called fruits of communism, uh, so to speak. I always make a joke that America is more

01:01:35.380 communist than China. If we're talking about social, you're talking about the roots of like

01:01:38.680 communism, socialism, America has much more social programs than China does. China is probably the

01:01:44.120 least hospitable country in terms of social programs I've ever seen for calling for a country

01:01:48.640 that calls itself socialist or communist. And we're getting more authoritarian by the day,

01:01:52.380 uh, as we discuss often on this show. All right. So you're over there. That's good. That's a good

01:01:56.380 scene setter. So you're over there. You're doing your YouTube show. You're out on your motorcycles.

01:02:00.240 You marry Chinese women. Life sounds like it's pretty good. And then you, you mentioned Matt,

01:02:05.440 that you just started to see like people following you and like sort of a crackdown began not, not

01:02:10.580 being able to check into hotels that you would have expected. There would have been no trouble

01:02:13.980 checking into. And I, I've read you, you've said before, one of the things that was odd to you about

01:02:20.460 it was you were pro China. You were not, I understand, you know, a discussion like this,

01:02:25.460 the Chinese might not like, we'll see how the YouTube people respond, but you were saying

01:02:31.080 positive things about China. So it, you, there must've been a period initially where you were

01:02:35.340 like, what's the problem? Yeah, absolutely. I think there was a huge wake up call, but I think

01:02:40.680 what Winston had a good point earlier, if you just go to China and you just walk around, you might think

01:02:45.480 that everything's normal, but when you understand the language and see how society is run, especially

01:02:48.960 how the government intertwines with people's daily lives, then you start to understand how things work.

01:02:53.300 And I think he realized, I think I realized over time is that that script of being an authoritarian

01:02:59.680 country with full control over everything was always there. Nothing changed necessarily. There

01:03:04.560 was on paper, it was always going to be an authoritarian country, but in that kind of golden period,

01:03:10.680 as we call it under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, those two, those two leaders before Xi Jinping,

01:03:15.620 we saw China be in a gray zone. It was a gray zone where yes, those rules were on paper,

01:03:21.400 but in reality, people could kind of do what they want as long as they were earning money

01:03:24.820 and they weren't really getting super involved or critical of the government.

01:03:28.240 So that kind of paper, that script was enacted again by the leadership under Xi Jinping, where

01:03:35.900 now all of these kind of secret police and all these things that were on retainer in the

01:03:40.980 background could now be enacted. And it doesn't matter if you're pro-China or not, because

01:03:45.500 there's a disconnect there. Nobody in Beijing was sitting down looking at our material saying,

01:03:50.020 wow, all of this is very pro-China. This is great. What they're seeing is, well, the leadership told

01:03:55.600 us that foreigners walking around with cameras and then posting to websites that we've blocked

01:03:59.720 in China is probably a bad thing. So we should make sure that they're being monitored. And that

01:04:04.680 gets out of hand. It's just like any authoritarian state. There's no, there's no real balance there.

01:04:10.100 It's either on or off. And they turned it on. And then all foreigners were bad with cameras at

01:04:14.340 that point, unless they can be co-opted. It's crazy to think in a country with a billion people,

01:04:19.420 they've got that close an eye on two guys like you, you know, with all due respect.

01:04:24.840 Like, this is the level of detail that they hone in on and pay attention to and punish if it's not

01:04:31.200 going their way or if they have even a suspicion. So when you talk about like how it started to

01:04:36.780 escalate. So you first, you have the people following you. You can't check into the hotels.

01:04:40.500 And then I know there was, you believe that there was, I've read you say that they wanted

01:04:45.260 to destroy you psychologically, targeting you, targeting your wives, targeting family members.

01:04:51.240 Walk us through some of that. Well, first of all, something that your audience needs to

01:04:55.780 understand is that in China, every single foreigner is watched. All right. Even before any of this

01:05:01.460 YouTube stuff, even before any of this, when you rent an apartment or move into a neighborhood,

01:05:06.820 you must report to the local police station within 24 hours of actually coming into China.

01:05:12.760 You're supposed to, but you know, you have to register, even if you're staying in a hotel,

01:05:17.060 usually the hotels actually do it for you. So when you sign in, they will send the paperwork

01:05:21.160 off to the local police to say, yeah, they're supposed to, all your details, your passport and

01:05:25.360 stuff. This foreigner is staying here. But when you move into an apartment, you must register with

01:05:29.700 the local police so that they know where the foreigners are. Now you get assigned basically a

01:05:34.920 minder who looks after all the foreigners in that particular area, maybe in that housing complex,

01:05:39.820 maybe in that neighborhood.

01:05:40.860 Like it's open. It's open that you have a minder. Everybody knows it.

01:05:43.960 Yeah. Yeah. You have to, you know, and I found this out right in the beginning because a plain

01:05:48.200 clothes guy, I wasn't aware. He just got to China and the rules are not very clear. And when I moved

01:05:52.320 into my first apartment, I got a knock on the door and a plain clothes police officer and a bunch of

01:05:57.300 his support and it's all walked in and started taking photos of me and stuff. And I couldn't really

01:06:00.760 understand what was going on. But it turns out he was the local police guy. He's very friendly and

01:06:05.240 all that. It wasn't a terrible experience or anything, but it wakes you up. Okay. You're

01:06:10.840 being watched. And later on, when I went to go and renew it, because you're supposed to renew it

01:06:17.900 whenever your visa changes or whatever. And I went into the local police station. And by that point,

01:06:22.980 I could read Chinese because I'd been studying Chinese. And they have like a, what's called a

01:06:28.800 temporary residence permit type thing that they keep in their system. And so they updated it and

01:06:34.960 then they stamp it and you have to give them your passport photo and all that. And when I looked at

01:06:39.040 it, I could see in the notes section, they had written down where I worked. They written down,

01:06:43.840 oh, he can speak Chinese and he can do this and that. Like a bunch of my movements and stuff were

01:06:49.620 written down in there. So they'd been keeping an eye on me. So everybody is watched, but it's,

01:06:55.840 it's an interesting situation because depending on your nationality, you're either watched more or

01:07:00.240 you watched less. So for instance, because I'm South African, in China, they don't like Africans at

01:07:06.360 all. They keep a very close eye on Africans. They put a priority on that. And because my passport is

01:07:11.420 African, they would come and knock on my door in the middle of the night, sometimes at 11, 12 at night

01:07:16.920 to just check up and check on my paperwork. Whenever something was happening, like for instance,

01:07:20.840 just before the Beijing Olympics, they ramped up this whole thing to make sure that all the

01:07:26.680 foreigners were in check. So they would come and quite often come and check up on me. But my

01:07:31.160 Australian friends or American friends, et cetera, wouldn't get the same sort of harassment because

01:07:36.860 they were from first world countries. So, you know, it all depends on your nationality,

01:07:41.320 how much you would be harassed, so to speak, by your minders. But it did then reach a point where

01:07:48.140 we started to become too famous and people started to know us too well. And I would start to get

01:07:54.260 visits from the police quite often. And things really, really degraded to a point where the

01:08:00.940 nationalists turned on us. And that's when things were really, really went crazy.

01:08:05.340 Well, like what happened, what started happening, Matt? Like, how did your life begin to change in

01:08:09.080 ways that scared you?

01:08:10.780 Well, you got death threats. You had people posting, you know, the area that you live on these

01:08:14.640 nationalist forums. And that if you were to complain to any of these forum owners or the

01:08:20.200 government or the police, none of these posts would be removed. It was clear that a switch had

01:08:24.140 been flipped. When, you know, what we saw happening was people would take our videos that would be very

01:08:31.120 positive. Let's say, for example, I'm thinking of a video we made. We're walking around and talking

01:08:35.040 about how China has cleaned up so much in the past few years, like how it's clean the streets have

01:08:39.580 become. And what happened was people uploaded that video, put it on the Chinese internet. So they

01:08:44.340 stole it off YouTube, put it on the Chinese internet, and then put fake subtitles up for

01:08:47.680 the people that didn't speak English. So what it would say is that, wow, look at how disgusting

01:08:51.920 everything is. It's so gross around here. Look at how awful China looks. And then people, you know,

01:08:57.520 it would rile up the nationalists. And this, we found out, was kind of by design. It was almost like

01:09:02.940 clockwork that this was happening. There was teams of people that were just kind of going after us.

01:09:07.420 And we realized it was an official capacity, like I said before, when people like the SWAT team and

01:09:12.980 detectives were showing up, knowing your entire history throughout China, knowing all your details,

01:09:18.040 your work contracts, your wife, where you shop, all this kind of stuff, you realize that you've

01:09:22.420 been being tracked the entire time. And they're trying to make you feel unwelcome for a very good

01:09:27.660 reason.

01:09:28.320 What happens when the SWAT team shows up? I mean, you say SWAT team, I think guns drawn.

01:09:32.600 That happened in Inner Mongolia, by the way. So the SWAT team, it's not like they turned up at our

01:09:37.380 house. We were out filming the tribes in Inner Mongolia, where they herd camels and things like

01:09:44.860 that.

01:09:45.080 Inner Mongolia is a province of China, by the way. So no one's confused.

01:09:47.660 Yeah. So it's all the way up on the border of Russia, like near the border of Russia and all

01:09:50.500 that up there. It's up there. So we're out there in the grasslands doing our thing in the middle of

01:09:54.620 nowhere. And China has this thing where you can't stay in hotels in the rural parts of China if you're

01:10:01.820 a foreigner. They have designated hotels that are allowed to have foreigners stay in them.

01:10:09.100 So it's kind of difficult to find a hotel in this particular rural area. There was only one hotel in

01:10:14.000 one town that could have foreigners stay in it.

01:10:16.100 It's kind of like North Korea.

01:10:17.080 Yeah. So we head to that town. And they had been tipped off that we'd be there by a nationalist.

01:10:24.740 It's a bit of a long story, but a nationalist who was kind of out to get us. And so we got raided in

01:10:30.740 the middle of the night in Inner Mongolia, thousands, like thousands of kilometers away

01:10:34.660 from where we live. And they brought in the PLA. They brought in the local Communist Party sort of

01:10:42.080 head official. They brought in detectives, like you said. And they were discussing where our wives

01:10:48.740 worked and all this kind of stuff when we were all the way up there in Inner Mongolia.

01:10:52.660 It's pretty wild.

01:10:53.040 So what about your wives? Because it doesn't sound like they caught a break just because they were

01:10:58.680 Chinese.

01:10:59.920 No, that's the thing. The Chinese government has this mechanism that it uses. It uses family to

01:11:04.760 intimidate people. So they know that if they bring your family into anything, it's like the mafia,

01:11:09.080 right? They want to silence you. They want to affect you. They threaten your family. So this is a very

01:11:14.980 well-known tactic. So they know that if they bring your wives into it and they threaten the stability

01:11:19.840 of your wife's livelihood or her life or whatever the case, her lifestyle, that it will intimidate

01:11:26.600 people into silence, for instance.

01:11:28.160 Yeah. Yeah. So there are things that were happening to them. Like my wife had quit her

01:11:32.520 previous job, but she worked at, I won't give the company details or anything, but she worked as a

01:11:37.160 sales manager for a big electronics company. And what was happening is there were people within the

01:11:42.700 government and nationalists and things that were reporting to her boss, thinking she was still

01:11:48.060 working there and sending official, like you're looking government documents saying that she's a spy,

01:11:53.200 saying that she's a traitor to the nation and all this kind of stuff. And this stuff was allowed

01:11:58.700 to proliferate. Even though it wasn't true, it was allowed to proliferate because it was a way to get

01:12:02.520 to us, to silence us. And we, at some point we just said that that's enough. You know, we had seen

01:12:08.220 how sinister and evil the Chinese government can actually be. And that's honestly, that's why the

01:12:13.440 Chinese government doesn't like us so much is because we live there. We're not just guys that are,

01:12:17.160 you know, reading the newspaper saying, wow, China's, you know, become so evil because of the

01:12:21.260 government. We lived through it. We see what they do. The tactics have been employed on us. So we

01:12:25.540 know how, how it works and probably what they're going to do going forward. And that's why we do

01:12:30.440 what we do now. Yeah. You know, you were a far cry from upstate New York in those moments. I can't

01:12:35.140 imagine. Hello, Binghamton. Go ahead. Shout out to Binghamton. You know, my wife is a doctor and that is

01:12:44.060 a government position in China, you know, because any kind of policeman doctor, it's all, you know,

01:12:50.540 it's not like in the States where it's a high paying job. It's that you're a civil servant,

01:12:54.140 basically. So she is a doctor and, um, they went after both my wife and his wife at the same time.

01:13:00.860 And what happened here was this was a nationalist movement. So the, the ultra nationalists of China,

01:13:06.800 of which there are many, and the government relies on the nationalists and they turn them on and off to

01:13:11.300 boycott products or, you know, boycott a certain nation or whatever at any time, given time.

01:13:16.480 Um, they put together like a 24 page document with screenshots of me and my wife and so on,

01:13:22.200 and you and your wife, uh, online and, uh, you know, sent them through to the public security bureau,

01:13:28.380 sent them through to the medical board, the, the, all the hospitals in, in the city that I used to

01:13:33.740 live in and all, you know, basically all the different levels that they could, uh, calling my

01:13:38.040 wife a traitor and saying that she sympathizes with foreign powers and that she report. Yeah,

01:13:43.060 it was the same report, just differently worded with the pictures of us. And it actually resulted

01:13:47.540 in my wife getting a disciplinary hearing. She had to get pulled in and, you know, they had to figure

01:13:51.800 out what was going on. Of course, she'd been a doctor for many years and, uh, they, they knew that

01:13:56.840 none of this was true because, you know, she's, she knows all her higher ups and her bosses and so on.

01:14:02.140 So it was taken care of. Luckily it didn't, uh, result in her getting fired or any, any detention or

01:14:07.800 anything, but that was their end goal was to try and disrupt my life by going after my wife and,

01:14:14.160 uh, going after your wife. And it's, it's really cowardly and, and disgusting tactics, but that was

01:14:20.060 really just part of it. I still stayed in China after that. We still stayed in China after that.

01:14:25.540 We still continued and we were not very critical of China. That's the thing that the kind of things

01:14:30.420 that we were homing in on and, uh, discussing were the, uh, social problems that affected not only us,

01:14:36.560 but our Chinese families and the Chinese people around us. For instance, the horrendous kidnapping

01:14:41.220 issue in China, you know, you're going to have a child in China. You have to watch out. Kidnapping

01:14:45.520 is huge. It's a big problem, you know, but we talk about kidnapping and all of a sudden we're enemies

01:14:51.400 of the state. Why, why is it a big problem? Is it related to the one child policy? Oh, there's a huge

01:14:56.780 industry. Uh, there's a lot of very, very sinister industries going on in China. I think a lot of people

01:15:01.420 rely on China's public data for like crime and safety when that's absolute nonsense,

01:15:06.480 they can put out whatever they want, just like their COVID numbers. Um, it's all manufactured.

01:15:10.760 So when you live in China, you start to see some of the ills. Oh, I mean, I don't want to shock your

01:15:14.520 audience too much, but like one of the first things I saw when I went to China was I was going down an

01:15:19.740 escalator just to go shopping outside of a massive, you know, wealthy looking supermarket slash mall.

01:15:25.580 And I see a child alone, maybe three years old, um, missing, missing a limb and covered in severe

01:15:33.740 acid burns. And it was begging, uh, this child was begging with a, with a bowl. I couldn't tell if it

01:15:39.760 was a boy or a girl, um, just right there on the street. And people were walking by the police were

01:15:45.280 walking by, nothing was being done. And it was kind of like a light bulb went off in my head. I was

01:15:49.700 like, maybe the, maybe the stuff I've been reading about China's like, you know, crime and safety and

01:15:55.360 this kind of stuff. The statistics are not correct. Maybe this is supposed to be one great thing

01:16:00.180 about China that if you live there, you don't have to worry about crime because of all the things

01:16:04.660 you're discussing. We've talked about this multiple times. You have to live in China to see how the

01:16:10.080 crime works. It's, I mean, my house is almost broken into, you know, successfully broken into

01:16:15.080 multiple times. There's one time my wife, there's a guy scaling the building, trying to get into her

01:16:19.200 window. She threw a flower pot at him to get him to fall down off the building. It's petty crime.

01:16:23.860 Wait, why are kidnapping so bad? Is it because of the one child policy, which was in place for so

01:16:28.780 many years? There's some of that, you know, as far as the kidnapping is concerned, rural families

01:16:33.840 who can't have children, who want children, um, they pay for children so that they can have a son

01:16:39.780 to look after them and to take care of things. And they pay a lot of money for that sort of thing.

01:16:44.000 There's all the human trafficking when, when it comes to beggar gangs and, you know, the more

01:16:48.220 sinister stuff too. Um, there's a lot of terrible things happening, but kidnapping is such a

01:16:52.760 massive issue in China that it's never, it's never covered, but Chinese people know about it.

01:16:57.140 Oh yeah. They're so afraid to leave their child anywhere by themselves. You know, it's, uh, it's,

01:17:03.000 it's a terrifying, terrifying situation, but you know, I actually stopped a child trafficking gang on

01:17:08.660 the subway of, uh, Shenzhen. Oh, sure. As you do. Yeah. No, seriously. And it really, it really,

01:17:15.280 it really annoyed me because, um, I was taking the subway and I noticed begging is not allowed on the,

01:17:21.540 on the Shenzhen Metro, which is the underground train system there. But, uh, one day there was a

01:17:26.220 woman there came in with an overcoat and then she took off her overcoat and she's wearing kind of shabby

01:17:30.860 clothes and she had a child strapped to her back and she started begging and people were giving her money.

01:17:35.500 Um, but I thought it was kind of weird cause the child was about two years old and was very silent

01:17:41.200 and, and, uh, not moving around really looked drugged and groggy. So, um, I kind of took some

01:17:46.980 photos of her and the next day I took the Metro again and there was a different woman, um, same emo,

01:17:53.560 took off the overcoat, had raggedy clothes underneath and a child on her back. And I noticed it was the

01:17:58.800 same child. So I took photos of her too. And then the third day when a third woman came along and had

01:18:04.720 the same child on her back, I actually physically grabbed her and pulled her off of the train and

01:18:08.700 called security. And so the security guards came down and the police came and, uh, I Bluetooth all

01:18:13.960 the photos to them. And then, uh, they actually took her away. Hopefully the child was, uh, taken care

01:18:20.580 of properly. And then they actually put up banners in the Metro stations to say, don't give money to

01:18:25.020 people like this and put some of the pictures I'd taken. So, you know, it's the complacency of society

01:18:31.640 that allows this kind of thing to happen as well, because you don't want to stand out in,

01:18:36.260 in China. If you try to stand out and make a fuss, you, you, your life gets destroyed basically.

01:18:41.420 I can't, I cannot imagine walking past a three-year-old who's been burned and is missing

01:18:46.060 a limb and just not doing anything about it. It's just, it's hard to understand how you get into that

01:18:51.260 headspace. And it's also very scary to think when you were saying that they're following you,

01:18:55.680 I was thinking in my own head, what would somebody who is following me see like the most boring life

01:19:00.600 there. She's gone to the school again. She's gone to the vet again. She's back at the vet,

01:19:04.880 the school, the vet. It's like, it's not exciting, but it, it doesn't matter. That's the point you're

01:19:09.100 making that they're there. The whole point is to make things up about you. So they're not actually

01:19:13.220 out for an earnest search of who Winston and Matt are. They're out to ruin you and your wives.

01:19:19.660 And it's really tough to fight back when that's from a government. Let me pause it here.

01:19:24.460 And then we'll turn the page when we come back. There's so much more to go over. And Winston and Matt

01:19:28.100 have a lot of thoughts on China in general and what it's doing with respect to the United States

01:19:32.120 and the world that we need to keep our eye on. But we aren't. Some are, but for the most part, we're

01:19:36.780 not. China's zero COVID policies are in the news these days because of major protests breaking out

01:19:45.080 in the country. These major protests led to the government changing its zero COVID policy,

01:19:50.240 which was so restrictive. And since they've lifted it now, Chinese health authorities suddenly willing to

01:19:56.180 volunteer all sorts of information. And that information is that 80% of the country has

01:20:00.280 contracted COVID since they lifted those restrictions to appease the citizenry just

01:20:05.140 this past December. I'm sure. I'm sure every single case happened post that. Although, of course,

01:20:10.940 nobody outside of China can verify these numbers. So they're pretty good at misinformation.

01:20:15.160 Winston and Matt, we have no idea what to believe when China releases any sort of facts and figures.

01:20:20.280 What do you think about that issue in particular? Zero COVID. What's happened there? And,

01:20:24.240 you know, this new attempt to spin. Honestly, I think a huge part of this was the protests that

01:20:30.860 followed. But first of all, so your audience understands that when people talk about lockdowns

01:20:35.360 in Australia or in America or in any of these other countries, it's not the same lockdowns that

01:20:40.340 were happening in China. In China, we were talking about lockdowns where people were getting welded

01:20:43.940 into their houses. People were starving out because the government programs weren't giving them enough

01:20:48.460 food. We were talking about lockdowns where people were separated from their families. I mean,

01:20:52.400 they were taking kids from families and putting them into quarantine camps. It was crazy. It was

01:20:57.520 like something, you know, it was unprecedented. And so when we're talking about lockdowns,

01:21:02.460 we're talking about people for years being locked into prison-like state. And it takes a mental toll

01:21:08.420 on everyone, physical, mental, economic toll on everyone in the country. So when these protests,

01:21:13.880 they were bound to happen, right? But even for us, it was quite a shock to see people taking to the

01:21:19.080 streets to protest really anything. Because in China, protesting is not allowed. It's not allowed

01:21:24.900 to gather people together and stand up for any sort of issue unless it's government-sponsored or you

01:21:31.580 apply ahead of time and the issue has been agreed upon by the government. So for example, popular topics

01:21:37.120 to protest about in the past were like anti-Japan protests.

01:21:40.140 Yeah, I was going to say America.

01:21:42.020 Yeah. So going back to that, to see these people protest and go out there and then to watch the

01:21:48.480 protests morph into from, you know, stop these lockdowns into step down Xi Jinping, step down

01:21:55.120 CCP. Let's like, you know, the government needs to step down. That was crazy. It was mind-blowing.

01:22:00.520 We called it almost like a mini revolution or a Tiananmen Square 2.0 because we've never seen anything

01:22:05.980 like that since 1989. But we did have a major issue with how this was kind of being spun.

01:22:12.980 Although the protests led to the government having a knee-jerk reaction in lifting those COVID lockdowns

01:22:20.560 and all these crazy archaic, you know, measures that they were taking, although that caused that

01:22:25.360 to happen, it's not that the protesters won. Because I think a lot of people stopped the story

01:22:30.100 after that. I think they said, wow, their demands were achieved. I guess the government buckled.

01:22:34.520 What they don't realize is that after the fact, the police, the secret police, the government

01:22:39.880 tracked every single person that was even near the protests. I mean, we're talking to people

01:22:44.220 the other day that didn't even participate in the protests, but they were near them and

01:22:49.000 they were visited by police. And the people that participated were disappeared. And we're

01:22:53.800 talking about kids that were just holding up blank pieces of paper and the protests were

01:22:57.200 taken away by secret police. So that's where the conversation stopped. And we were really

01:23:01.680 disappointed to see that people didn't realize that the protests weren't necessarily successful.

01:23:06.860 China is still a very, very authoritarian, crazy, you know, archaic system where they will go after

01:23:13.580 anyone for standing up against the government. It's just this time they got away with it because

01:23:17.360 they did it silently.

01:23:18.960 The following up on what we've discussed in the last segment about the crime and what's actually

01:23:24.620 happening there and listening to you describe these government tactics of disappearing people and so on.

01:23:29.180 Um, I've got to ask you about this op-ed in the New York times, which I'm sure you saw by Heather

01:23:33.080 Kay talking about what a lovely experience it was raising her children. She's American in China.

01:23:38.980 Um, I work in the fashion industry, took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next

01:23:43.320 16 years, started a family in China. Government co-parenting begins in the womb. They opted to send

01:23:50.460 their twins, I think to Chinese kindergarten. You know about that Winston, um, lecturing us on everything

01:23:56.880 in the Chinese kindergarten, including how many hours our daughters should sleep, what they should

01:24:00.980 eat and their optimal weight. Most of us, Heather can figure that out without the government. Just

01:24:05.320 FYI. Um, people have been doing it for, since the beginning of time, she goes on to say, um, each

01:24:10.160 morning, all the students performed calisthenics in straight rows and raised China's red flag while

01:24:14.780 singing the national anthem. Now I have to say, I would like to see some more civics here in America,

01:24:18.880 and I would like to see the pledge and a little bit more push toward patriotism like we used to have.

01:24:23.520 So there's a piece of me that felt a little envy when I read just that tiny piece of it.

01:24:27.600 Um, but then she goes on to talk about how we sometimes felt as if our children were on loan

01:24:32.620 to us for evenings and weekends to be delivered back to school each weekday. She loved how,

01:24:38.840 how academically driven they were because they didn't want to disappoint their teachers.

01:24:44.060 They would repeat Chinese propaganda concerning keeping up with their peers, despair, whatever.

01:24:48.780 Uh, then she goes on to say, um, that the surveillance state results in its own kind of

01:24:55.700 freedom with crime and personal safety concerns, virtually eliminated. Our daughters were riding

01:25:00.900 the subway unsupervised in a city of around 26 million people from the age of 11. I got to tell

01:25:07.020 you guys, I'm so glad to hear you tell the truth because part of me was like, well, that'd be nice

01:25:11.320 as a person who had kids in New York for nine years. You can't do that there. But this,

01:25:16.140 what is this? Is this propaganda by this woman? There's a, there's a couple of things. And I know

01:25:21.040 you've got a lot to say on this, but the first thing that I want to address strangely enough is

01:25:25.700 the idea of her children traveling by themselves on the subway. Well, because the children are not

01:25:32.160 Chinese, the chances of them actually being targeted by crime are zero because in China,

01:25:38.160 if you're caught messing around with foreigners, um, the penalties are so much higher. So your

01:25:45.880 pickpockets, your general criminals, your kidnappers will not, first of all, you can't kidnap a foreign

01:25:51.080 child. You will not be able to sell them. It's too, you know, you can't pretend that this is someone

01:25:56.280 else's child if you're selling it to someone in the rural countryside. So a foreign child will be safe

01:26:01.640 a hundred percent. And foreigners, foreigners in general are very safe in China because,

01:26:06.020 you know, they just aren't messed with because the repercussions are too high. And the second

01:26:10.780 thing I want to say is that this, this woman went 2006 is when I went to China, February of 2006.

01:26:16.900 That's when I first arrived in China. And I lived through the entire period all the way up to 2019.

01:26:22.480 And I saw what she's saw in the beginning was a China that was changing for the positive. So she

01:26:29.580 got a positive, um, uh, experience in the beginning, but not only that Shanghai is not China. All right.

01:26:36.500 Shanghai is the most cosmopolitan, most foreign friendly city in China. So it's like going to New

01:26:44.340 York or something like that. You know, you can't compare New York to rural Alabama or something like

01:26:49.040 that. You just can't do it. It's Shanghai. Um, we call it the Shanghai bubble and that's where most

01:26:54.700 foreigners end up because it's so much more like home. You know, you have a certain, I mean,

01:27:00.040 they got a Hooters there for crying out loud. Okay. I shot a video there. Yeah. Yeah. Shanghai is,

01:27:05.460 is, is the most international, um, cosmopolitan city of China. So to use that as an example is a very

01:27:12.560 bad example. And when it comes to teaching children in kindergarten, because I actually did teach

01:27:17.400 kindergarten children for about a year and a half, right in the beginning. Sure. They get to do the

01:27:23.300 flag raising and the calisthenics and all that nonsense in the morning, but they also get taught

01:27:27.020 to hate Japanese people. For instance, I remember four and five year old children being told by the

01:27:32.880 teaching assistant, never trust Japanese people. They're all liars and cheats and, and, uh, you know,

01:27:37.320 that type of thing. And I was thinking to myself, why, why do you have to teach young children to hate

01:27:41.460 so much? And they also keep getting taught that the outside world is out there to, um, take advantage of

01:27:47.240 China and so on and so forth. And you're just thinking it's unnecessary to teach so much hate

01:27:51.920 to such young children. You know, I, I was going through this op-ed a couple of times. Um, I, I

01:27:57.560 would never go after someone for having an opinion and I'm never going to call someone's experience a

01:28:01.360 lie, but I can say that again, it doesn't represent China as a whole. China is a massive country and

01:28:07.660 Shanghai is very, very specific place, but all of these, you know, so-called advantages she's talking

01:28:14.120 about, one of them really bothered me. And that was being, you know, uh, walking out from the,

01:28:19.080 walking away from the article, thinking that now her kids are going to have a better experience

01:28:23.480 having gone through all that because they might see the world from a different perspective. I like

01:28:27.720 that. I like that idea. I think that's a great idea, but China, the Chinese education system teaches

01:28:33.180 xenophobia. It teaches nationalism. It teaches very, very, not just not patriotism, blind patriotism in

01:28:40.820 all the worst ways. I mean, they take students when they're seven, eight, nine years old to museums

01:28:45.360 to go see mutilated bodies from the, from the Japanese war experiments and the war crimes that

01:28:50.140 they, they, um, did in China. All of these things are to brainwash children at a very young age to

01:28:55.140 make them feel like they are separate from the rest of the world. And I think it's teaching the

01:28:59.600 opposite of inclusivity. I think all of these things that Heather was talking about in the article

01:29:03.560 about how there's more community aspects, there was more like camaraderie, there's more people

01:29:08.260 coming together. I think is, I had the exact opposite experience in China. I saw some of the

01:29:13.140 worst bullying I've ever seen in my life in the Chinese education system. The kids treating each

01:29:17.800 other very, very poorly. This sense of community I think is fantasy. I think the Chinese public

01:29:22.500 education system breeds contempt. It's not, it doesn't breed any sort of individuality, individuality.

01:29:29.040 It doesn't reward any sort of creativity. And I see the polar opposite in the American education

01:29:34.040 system, which obviously a lot of people criticize, but I see such nice attributes coming out of my

01:29:40.020 kids and such nice things being taught where people are equal, where everyone has the same

01:29:44.740 opportunity and chance. It doesn't matter where you come from. It doesn't matter. Uh, maybe you're an

01:29:48.940 immigrant from another country. People cater to your needs. People want to learn more about you.

01:29:53.340 It's such a better system and a more healthy system to raise your child in than compared to the

01:29:58.880 Chinese system. So I found this article mostly fantasy.

01:30:01.500 Don't forget about the competition that the education system breeds. You know, in China,

01:30:06.080 especially, uh, the Gaokao, which is this, um, entrance exam into universities, the most

01:30:10.700 important part of Chinese education. If you fail at that, or if you don't do well, um, in that

01:30:15.900 particular test, you will not go to a university or you will not go to a good university. It doesn't

01:30:21.220 matter who you are. You see, it doesn't matter. Obviously rich people, they pay their way through and

01:30:25.200 so on, but like supposedly it doesn't matter who you are. Um, and so the amount of pressure that's put

01:30:31.060 on children in order to pass that, um, really it drives, it actually does drive children to suicide

01:30:37.720 and it's a very bad system, but what it does is it breeds this, um, this, this horrible sort of,

01:30:43.840 uh, a situation where all the children are competing for these spots in the university. So they,

01:30:48.340 they turn on each other and they, um, they over study and they over focus on this stuff. And it's

01:30:54.260 very detrimental to the mental health of the children anyway. Yeah.

01:30:57.620 All right. Let me, let me, um, shift gears cause we don't have a long time left. You guys got to

01:31:02.240 come back because I want to hear all your thoughts on all the stuff China's doing to us. I want to

01:31:06.160 hear about the land buys. I want to hear about what they're doing in the oceans. I know you guys

01:31:09.480 are great on that. Um, the, the technological theft, the trademark theft, there's so much to go

01:31:14.600 over, which we won't get to in our first time together, but talk to me about what's happened

01:31:19.280 since you, you peaced out of there. You came back to America. Um, first of all, I'm interested

01:31:24.080 Winston, whether your wife, does she have to go back to medical school here? Is she working?

01:31:28.480 Like, how does that work now? Oh, no, she's, she's on a dependence visa,

01:31:32.760 so she's not allowed to work. So she's a full-time housewife at the moment.

01:31:37.140 So I assume, I mean, I'll just give you one example. I had a very contentious interview

01:31:41.000 when we first launched this show with Mark Cuban, in which I tried to get him to say something mildly

01:31:45.620 critical of China's human rights record, um, in the way he's criticizing America through BLM and so

01:31:51.760 on. And he wouldn't do it. I mean, he tried so hard not to do it until I almost made him.

01:31:56.220 And then weirdly, I not only sounds paranoid, but weirdly that my phone got completely bombed with

01:32:00.120 all those like fake phone calls. And like, I mean, for a month and a half, it just was nonstop just

01:32:06.040 right after that interview. And then we put the super blocking technology on it and it's been okay.

01:32:10.220 But am I crazy to think that the Chinese did something to me? Are you, do you suffer consequences

01:32:16.060 for your China critiques to this day? Absolutely. Um, I think that it's not good

01:32:21.940 to inspire them. So, you know, there's not a whole lot. Yeah, for sure. Uh, but that being said,

01:32:29.100 uh, we did a major, you know, shift after we, we moved to America and that's because

01:32:33.360 we found like-minded individuals. It wasn't just us. Like, I don't want to make this about us. We

01:32:38.460 talked about the SWAT team. We talked about getting harassed and followed around China. But again,

01:32:41.760 by and large, if you're a foreigner, that's not famous in China, you have a certain privilege

01:32:46.360 over the average Chinese person. You get away with a lot more. But that being said, when we moved to

01:32:51.680 America, we met dissidents, Chinese dissidents from mainland China that we could converse to in

01:32:55.880 Chinese and found out what they went through. It inspired us to start telling the truth about what

01:33:01.420 we were holding back when we were in China. All the things that we were seeing under the surface,

01:33:05.900 we could now talk about, and we could give a voice to the thousands and thousands of dissidents that

01:33:11.500 we meet here in the U S that can't speak up because either they have family back home or,

01:33:15.640 you know, they'll be targeted more so than maybe, um, you know, a native English speaking voice out

01:33:21.480 there. So it was almost like fuel to the fire. It was like, finally, we have met people that are

01:33:27.700 ostracized, marginalized, and also harassed by this horrible authoritarian government. And we wanted to

01:33:34.280 speak up on their behalf, but not only for that reason, because we also saw that the Chinese

01:33:38.800 government has been creeping into different political systems or not just political systems,

01:33:43.080 but in different Western countries in general and trying to exploit them.

01:33:47.180 I have to say that what shocked me the most when I came to America is just how easily the Chinese

01:33:52.460 government is able to take advantage of systems here. And they've crept into everything. And it's

01:33:57.400 so easy to see how they mold and shape the diaspora here, the way they control people here in the States,

01:34:03.660 the way that they control universities and opinions about China through things like the Confucius

01:34:08.360 Institutes, for instance, and all these language and cultural programs and all these, these things

01:34:13.280 they have with universities, for instance, where they, they give money and so on. Um, it's just crazy just

01:34:18.280 how easily they've gotten in here and gotten their tentacles into every part of life in America.

01:34:23.220 And the, really the biggest victims are the Chinese people that come here to America

01:34:26.860 to use the freedom and the free education system into it, learn new ideas, share new ideas,

01:34:32.560 and then still get harassed by the tentacles of the Chinese government here on American soil.

01:34:37.420 And that's what we can.

01:34:38.300 You're talking about the university system, thinking about the Penn Biden Center, which,

01:34:41.540 you know, you know, you Penn got all this money once it affiliated with him from the Chinese

01:34:45.880 50 million bucks. It's not a coincidence. It's, you know, they try to buy influence and we

01:34:50.520 ignore it at our peril to be continued. Let's do a part two guys. Thank you so much for being on.

01:34:55.740 Thank you, Megan.

01:34:56.960 And tomorrow folks, Michael Knowles and Mike Baker will be here. We'll see you then.

01:35:03.340 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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