Trump's Looming Prosecution, and Fired For Not Being ＂Woke＂ Enough, with Alan Dershowitz, Dr. Tabia Lee, and Michael Cunningham ｜ Ep. 513
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 36 minutes
Words per Minute
170.98596
Summary
Alan Dershowitz joins me to discuss the growing number of potential criminal charges against President Trump, including hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with Trump. We also hear from a woman who says she was fired from a California college for questioning anti-racism policies, and an ex-collegiate employee who says, "I'm the wrong kind of black."
Transcript
00:00:00.580
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.980
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live from Montana on
00:00:16.340
day four of our spring break. I have yet to ski. Every day after the show, I think I'm
00:00:23.000
going to get out there, but we had this huge blizzard yesterday. And the day before that,
00:00:26.640
my daughter's here with a sprained ankle, so I hung out with her.
00:00:30.380
For the two days prior. Anyway, I'm going. Today after the show, I'm going. And I'll let
00:00:35.420
you know how it goes. Should be a great day because we had some sick, sick blizzards yesterday
00:00:39.780
like you only get in places like this. It's fun being out here and it's fun bringing you
00:00:43.980
the show from out here as well. And we have a packed program for you today. A diversity,
00:00:49.620
equity, and inclusion director fired from a California college for questioning the campus's
00:00:55.920
anti-racism policies. She says, quote, the school wanted a black person to do the job,
00:01:00.660
but apparently I'm the wrong kind of black. We'll talk to her coming up. Plus a deep dive
00:01:05.680
on China just a bit later in the show. But we begin today with President Trump, Stormy Daniels
00:01:11.380
speaking to prosecutors yesterday in Manhattan about the New York criminal investigation
00:01:15.560
over alleged hush money payments. And now in new reporting out of Georgia, jurors,
00:01:21.700
remember the grand juror who took the she went on the whirlwind media tour, the foreperson? Well,
00:01:27.400
now some of the other grand jurors are irritated by that woman's behavior. Who could blame them?
00:01:31.960
And they have quietly spoken out, sharing some new details on the case against Trump down there,
00:01:37.560
with one claiming the publication of their final report will be, quote,
00:01:41.140
massive. Joining us now to discuss all of this is the perfect person. Alan Dershowitz is a professor
00:01:47.340
emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of the brand new book, Get Trump, the threat to civil
00:01:53.600
liberty's due process and our constitutional rule of law. Alan, so great to have you. Welcome back to
00:01:58.800
the show. Well, thanks. Enjoy skiing. You know, I won't give you the greeting that you usually give
00:02:04.740
actors when they go on the stage. Break a leg. Don't break a leg. We don't need that nonsense in our
00:02:11.160
lives. No. So it's almost like they knew your book would be coming out this week and decided to ramp up
00:02:17.180
the two most likely criminal prosecutions against Trump. Your book is the perfectly titled
00:02:23.000
missive on this and takes a deep dive on all these prospective criminal prosecutions against him. So
00:02:29.180
let's start with New York, where the case is about an alleged payment of one hundred and thirty thousand
00:02:34.820
dollars made by Trump. Allegedly was really made by Michael Cohen, his fixer, his lawyer, his conciliary at
00:02:41.380
the time to Stormy Daniels, the porn star who allegedly had an affair with Trump or some sort of
00:02:46.880
tryst with Trump and they were paying her. The allegation is to keep her quiet. Now, if this was
00:02:53.200
so that he wouldn't lose the election, then he could be in legal trouble. That's what happened to John
00:02:59.220
Edwards. If this was a payment that was indeed authorized by Trump because he didn't want Melania
00:03:05.280
to find out or he was just embarrassed and it didn't have to do with winning the election, that's not
00:03:11.020
really illegal. But this prosecutor in Manhattan, Alan, it seems hell bent on getting Trump. And
00:03:18.260
what have you gleaned from what he's revealed about the grand jury proceedings this week, which are
00:03:22.640
underway right now? I think his main witness shouldn't be Cohen. It should be Sigmund Freud trying to
00:03:28.420
analyze what part of Trump's brain motivated this action, whether it was a desire to keep his family
00:03:37.800
from knowing about an alleged affair or a desire to win the election or both. I mean, it's so impossible
00:03:43.640
to make those kinds of distinctions. Look, nobody in their right mind would believe that Bragg would
00:03:49.840
be going after John Smith or even John Edwards on a case like this. It's obviously an example of get
00:03:57.200
Trump. And it's so, so dangerous. And it asks the wrong question to ask, is he technically guilty of
00:04:03.860
a violation? I don't know the answer to that question. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. I want to
00:04:08.400
tell you how dangerous this is by reading a brief quote from probably the greatest attorney general
00:04:13.840
in America's history, Justice Robert Jackson, who served as the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg and then
00:04:19.780
was the attorney general of the United States. With the law books filled with a great assortment of
00:04:24.660
crimes, a prosecutor has a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of
00:04:32.060
almost anybody. In such a case, it's not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then
00:04:38.600
looking for the person who committed it. It's a question of picking the man and then searching
00:04:44.180
the law books or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him. Could there be a better
00:04:50.840
description of what Bragg has done, what is going on in Georgia, what Letitia James did when she ran for
00:04:58.560
office on the campaign promise to get Trump? This is the worst kind of danger to justice.
00:05:07.120
You know, as Lavrenti Beria once said to Stalin, I don't want to make comparisons to the Soviet Union,
00:05:12.200
but he said, show me the man and I'll find you the crime. And that's what's going on with Trump.
00:05:18.680
People are determined to get Trump. I'm not a Trump supporter. I have a constitutional right to vote
00:05:24.560
against him for the third time. And I don't want to see any prosecutors prevent anybody from voting
00:05:30.380
for him or voting against him. That's something the American public should do. In a banana republic,
00:05:36.340
we have a former banana republic head once said, for my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.
00:05:43.540
And that's what we're seeing done. Today, it's Democrats going after a Republican. Tomorrow,
00:05:47.900
it could be Republicans going after Democrats, as they did with Hillary Clinton. So this is a nonpartisan
00:05:54.020
problem that America is facing, the weaponization of the criminal justice system against political
00:06:00.140
enemies. Mm hmm. Just look at the number of investigations open against him right now,
00:06:05.120
and he's out of office. And that's where they intend to keep him. I mean, that's what we
00:06:08.800
believe these are really about. Just to stay on the New York case for a minute,
00:06:12.860
I neglected to mention the second piece of it, which is they're going to allege it looks like
00:06:18.200
then what Trump did after authorizing this one hundred and thirty thousand dollar payment to
00:06:22.820
Stormy Daniels, who is going to take the stand and reportedly did so, I think, yesterday in front
00:06:27.640
of the grand jury. They're going to say that instead of just recording properly in the Trump
00:06:33.680
books, one hundred and thirty thousand dollars paid by Trump to Michael Cohen as a payoff to Stormy
00:06:37.880
Daniels, that would be stupid if you're committing a crime. But they didn't record it like
00:06:42.680
that. What they did was document it as legal expenses because Cohen was Trump's lawyer.
00:06:47.760
Legal expenses paid by Team Trump to Michael Cohen. And this is the second piece of it
00:06:51.940
that Alvin Bragg may have used to get Trump. My understanding is in most circumstances,
00:06:56.080
you can twist the law in a way to make it a felony. But in most cases, that's a misdemeanor.
00:07:00.240
And it really does require one to ask, Alan, is this what it's come to? The most likely
00:07:06.680
indictment against Trump is going to be a for a misdemeanor on his record keeping.
00:07:11.840
Well, first of all, it's not even a misdemeanor to pay hush money and to try to keep it secret.
00:07:18.020
That's what hush money is. Many prominent people have paid hush money over the years.
00:07:23.180
What turns it into a felony is if this was designed to cover up an unlawful campaign contribution.
00:07:30.940
And this combination of statutes has never previously been used, as far as I know.
00:07:35.940
And it's not the job of the criminal law to create new crimes. You're supposed to prosecute
00:07:41.980
people for things that were obvious. Thomas Jefferson once said, for something to be a crime,
00:07:46.720
a reasonable man reading it while running should be able to understand the law. Reading it while
00:07:53.460
running. That's a wonderful image. I'm sitting and I can't understand how you can combine these two
00:07:59.600
statutes and turn a non-crime into a misdemeanor. It's not a crime to pay hush money. Then they turn it
00:08:05.600
into a misdemeanor. And then they turn the misdemeanor into a felony simply in an effort
00:08:11.020
to to get Trump. And it might work because you can indict a ham sandwich, as we know. And so there
00:08:17.060
can be an indictment in New York. You can probably convict Trump of anything. And or in the District
00:08:24.900
of Columbia, where overwhelmingly people don't want Trump to run for election. Now it'll be up,
00:08:31.940
therefore, to the courts of appeals. And that's that's probably a prosecutor.
00:08:36.440
DC is where the special prosecutor. OK, so wait, but so let me offer this. So just to clarify so
00:08:41.840
that the viewers understand where we are. So they're going to say you misrecorded the reasons
00:08:46.540
why you paid Michael Cohen those monies. That that was not legal fees. That was to reimburse
00:08:51.120
the one hundred thirty dollar hush money. And the hush money itself was illegal. That was a
00:08:56.120
that was the underlying felony that makes your sloppy record keeping go from a misdemeanor
00:09:01.580
to a felony because you were covering up a felony. So in other words, we can get you
00:09:05.380
on the bookkeeping if it was to cover up a felony. And we're going to allege that you
00:09:09.080
committed a felony by paying hush money to Stormy Daniels. And the only way we can get
00:09:12.540
you on that is to prove it wasn't just to avoid embarrassment or getting in trouble with
00:09:15.740
Melania. It was to win you the election. So this is the long logic of Alvin Bragg, the
00:09:21.040
D.A. in Manhattan. Michael Cohen has already served time. He admitted this is what he went
00:09:27.040
to jail for. He admitted that he did this because the prosecutors had him and he went
00:09:31.160
to jail and he's a sour grapes guy. I mean, this is the other problem. He went on the
00:09:35.080
mediator. He's now become a darling. I mean, can I just give you one piece of background
00:09:38.160
on this, Alan? I remember when I went to make up with Trump at Trump Tower. You know, he'd
00:09:42.960
been coming after me in the whole debates and all that nonsense. So I went to Trump Tower
00:09:46.200
and Trump couldn't have been nicer. He was totally gracious. And Michael Cohen saw me
00:09:53.780
outside of the Trump office. And I mean, daggers in his eyes toward me. This guy was such a
00:09:59.420
Trump loyalist. If looks could kill, I would have been dead on that floor. And frankly,
00:10:04.120
vice versa, because I'd known what he'd been doing to me behind the scenes as well. Trump,
00:10:08.640
totally magnanimous, let it go. You know, we were over it. But Michael Cohen was such a fixer.
00:10:14.040
He couldn't. Now he's done a 180. Now he wants to kill Trump. He's got the daggers in his eyes
00:10:19.740
for his old employer who didn't bring him with him to Washington, who didn't really think that
00:10:25.100
much of Michael Cohen and had embarrassed him in a couple of settings. And now he's doing his
00:10:30.180
MSNBC media tour, among other places. And here's what he told Nicole Wallace about what's happening
00:10:36.180
at the grand jury and how this case is likely to go yesterday.
00:10:38.400
I met with the DA's office 20 times for interviews and then two times for grand jury.
00:10:48.180
Because that was the pledge that I made when I stood before Judge William H. Paulie and I said
00:10:53.980
that I will cooperate. Democracy is more important than anything. And I know it sounds hokey, but my goal
00:11:01.820
is to ensure that truth comes out. If in fact that Stormy is someone that they are going to look at
00:11:09.740
as a substantial witness for this case, I am certain that she will do a fantastic job.
00:11:18.760
The most important thing that needs to be remembered here is that the truth is what will prevail.
00:11:25.360
Not facts, not fiction, not fiction, but merely the facts and the facts do not benefit the former
00:11:34.320
president. OK, there's one other piece of Michael Cohen. This is the same guy who said it's you can't
00:11:41.500
rape your wife, can't rape your wife. It's this is Michael Cohen's character. Now he wants to come
00:11:46.200
back in as I'm a man of truth and the law and just hope I just want to do what's right. I mean,
00:11:52.080
give me a break. Yeah, well, the worst mistake the prosecution could make would be to use Michael
00:11:57.880
Cohen as an actual witness in front of the jury. That would be the best thing that any defendant
00:12:02.640
could have, because then it becomes an issue of do you believe Michael Cohen? Do you like Michael
00:12:08.340
Cohen? He's the main, main witness. They're much better off just trying to prove it through tapes
00:12:12.740
if they can. The biggest mistake the defense would make, and the lawyers already said he might make
00:12:18.120
this mistake, is if he tries to prove that Trump did not have an affair with Stormy Daniels. The way
00:12:25.280
to win a case like this is to persuade the jury that your side has credibility and their side does
00:12:30.280
not. So if I'm the defense in this case, I don't put on Trump. I cross-examine both Stormy Daniels,
00:12:38.340
but not try to disprove her story and cross-examine vigorously Cohen. But I think there's a temptation
00:12:46.360
by lawyers to put everything on. And I think it would be a big mistake for the prosecution to
00:12:53.040
actually use Cohen as a witness. But they may do that. And and in New York, who knows how it how it
00:12:59.280
will go. They're going to put Stormy Daniels on the stand, who is also not a credible person. I mean,
00:13:04.100
let's let's be real. It's like some porn star. OK, how is she going to go over? Not to mention that
00:13:09.080
the other witnesses that they've reportedly talked to include Kellyanne Conway, David Pecker of the
00:13:13.880
National Enquirer. I mean, this is going to be quite the cast of characters going in front of
00:13:17.680
this jury. I don't I don't like the chances of this DA and I don't like the chances of this
00:13:21.660
criminal prosecution at all, although I do do think he's very politically motivated, Alan,
00:13:26.100
and he's probably going to bring it. No, he's probably going to bring it and probably help him
00:13:29.980
get reelected. But look, if he brings a case against Donald Trump in the eve of the election
00:13:36.800
and Donald Trump is either acquitted or wins a reversal on appeal, what this does to the American
00:13:42.620
criminal justice system? It turns it into a political weapon. And that's why any good
00:13:48.940
prosecutor will tell you, you don't bring a case against a future presidential candidate unless it's
00:13:54.680
a slam dunk, unless you're going to win, unless you have them on tape, unless you have clear evidence
00:14:01.460
in this case just doesn't meet that criteria. So I think it's a terrible prosecutorial decision.
00:14:07.340
And he should listen to Justice Robert Jackson, again, one of the greatest lawyers in our history
00:14:13.560
who understood this problem. He understood it because he looked at the the the prosecutions
00:14:19.840
that were going on in the Soviet Union in Nazi Germany. And we don't want to ever weaponize our
00:14:26.180
criminal justice system. It's the glory. It's the glory of our Constitution that we have a Fifth
00:14:32.200
Amendment and a Fourth Amendment and a First Amendment and all these amendments. And I show this
00:14:37.320
in my book, one after the other in the book, Get Trump, that the people on the other side are so anxious
00:14:44.260
to get Trump. They're willing to sacrifice the entire Constitution. They're willing to do things that
00:14:50.380
they never would previously have done. For example, the Espionage Act. There are efforts to try to get
00:14:54.700
them under the Espionage Act. Every liberal has hated the Espionage Act since was used against all the
00:15:01.300
liberal icons in the 1920s during the civil rights movement, etc. Now the same leftists are saying,
00:15:09.680
let's expand the Espionage Act. Let's change the law. Let's fit the law onto Donald Trump. That's the
00:15:16.060
thesis of my book. You cannot fit the law and target an individual. And that's what's being done. And
00:15:23.000
that's not a danger only to Donald Trump. It's a danger to every Democrat. And it's a danger to you
00:15:28.240
and to me, because if they can do it to Trump, they can do it to anyone.
00:15:34.120
You know what? Alvin Bragg's never seen a real criminal he wants to indict in Manhattan. But
00:15:38.800
this he's salivating over. And it's for exactly the reasons you're stating. It's about politics,
00:15:43.820
which is really destructive. Your book posits, and I think it's smart, that we really should have an
00:15:49.400
understanding that no criminal prosecution would happen of a presidential candidate or a former
00:15:55.980
president unless both parties could get entirely behind it. That is definitely not the case in New
00:16:04.960
York City with Stormy Daniels and even down in Georgia, where these grand jurors may be so excited
00:16:10.460
about this alleged phone call that Trump had. Now there's a new testimony today by some of these
00:16:15.100
grand jurors speaking out to, I think it's the Atlantic Journal-Constitution, saying,
00:16:19.840
we have at least three recordings of Trump making these requests to the officials in Georgia saying,
00:16:26.720
find me the fraud, urging the investigator to look for fraud in the 2020 presidential election,
00:16:32.320
telling her she'd be praised for overturning the results that were in favor of Biden.
00:16:36.380
They don't have it there either, because this is yet again something that's subject to
00:16:40.680
interpretation. The way he spoke on that call, it is another non-slam dunk, and it's another one
00:16:45.700
that's moving really close to actually getting filed against Trump. Yeah, and it would require
00:16:52.140
proving beyond a reasonable doubt that when he said find, he didn't mean find. He meant invent.
00:16:58.180
Find means something is there. Look for it and find it. What Trump was saying, at least the most likely
00:17:05.420
interpretation, we don't know what he meant, but what he was saying was there may be votes that haven't
00:17:10.620
been counted. Find them. He didn't say invent them. He didn't say concoct them. And you cannot
00:17:16.980
prosecute a person based on an ambiguous statement, which the dictionary supports his interpretation,
00:17:23.840
and you have to be creative. The criminal law is not supposed to be creative. It's not supposed to be
00:17:29.340
something that you create and invent along the way. It's supposed to be existing, and somebody
00:17:35.840
knowingly did the to be or not to be stood there and said, now I'm crossing the line. I am becoming
00:17:41.880
a felon. Unless you can demonstrate that kind of mens rea, it is not appropriate to charge somebody
00:17:48.820
with a criminal offense. Appropriate to use all this to vote against him. I intend to do that.
00:17:53.080
I don't like that conversation. I don't like his January 6th speech. I don't like the way he handled
00:17:59.140
classified material. I don't like the payoff to Stormy Daniels. That's why I'm voting against him,
00:18:05.280
and that's why people have the right to make that decision. But to turn that into criminal conduct
00:18:11.640
is to destroy protections of our Constitution, because precedents, again, to quote Justice Jackson,
00:18:19.720
lie around like loaded guns ready to be used by any politician against their political enemies.
00:18:27.480
That's not what we want to see happen in America. That's why I wrote Get Trump. People are going to be
00:18:33.140
furious at me because they're going to think, based on the title, it's a pro-Trump book. It's a pro-Constitution.
00:18:40.120
It's an anti-violation of civil liberties book. Trump happens to be the target today. But if it were
00:18:47.540
somebody else, if it were Hillary Clinton, I'd have written the same book.
00:18:51.020
See how fair he is, everybody. He's so fair. He doesn't like Trump. He's not a Trump voter, but he's not blinded.
00:18:56.580
He doesn't have Trump derangement syndrome, where all of his principles go out the window because he's so opposed
00:19:02.580
to Trump. That's what his book argues has happened to the radical left wing in particular, which Alan posits is
00:19:09.960
even more dangerous right now than the radical right wing for these reasons. We're talking about eroding
00:19:14.280
constitutional principles. All right, let's spend one minute. Let's spend one minute on. Yeah, go ahead.
00:19:20.940
Okay. One other reason. The hard left are young. They're in college. They're the people who are
00:19:26.520
shutting down Stanford University guests to speak. They're the future. That's why they're more dangerous
00:19:32.520
than the right. The right is largely the past. And McCarthyism was largely a thing of the past.
00:19:39.020
But these young people, these woke people, these professors and deans, these civil libertarians
00:19:45.360
that want to get Trump, they're our future. That's why it's so much more dangerous on the left today
00:19:50.860
than on the right. Was that not horrifying, what happened at Stanford, what they did to that
00:19:54.780
Fifth Circuit judge? Wasn't it horrifying? Horrifying at what the dean did, essentially justifying it. By the
00:20:00.860
way, it was all organized by the National Lawyers Guild. This was not just a spontaneous event. The
00:20:06.540
National Lawyers Guild, which, as you know, started as a communist organization and still calls itself
00:20:11.520
Marxist-Leninist, they organized this. And they're going to be organizing these around the country. So
00:20:16.500
Stanford is only the beginning. It's coming to a university near you.
00:20:21.240
Oh, horrifying. Quickly, because I don't want to spend too much time on this, but do you think the
00:20:25.280
prosecution in D.C. by the special prosecutor is going anywhere based on January 6th and Trump or
00:20:31.000
classified documents down at Mar-a-Lago and Trump?
00:20:33.540
Well, I don't know whether there'll be indictments, but there shouldn't be. January 6th,
00:20:38.020
again, I hated the speech, but he said, obviously, peacefully and patriotically,
00:20:42.940
the January 6th committee doctored the tape to leave those words out to create a false impression.
00:20:48.640
I don't think they have it. I think it's protected by the First Amendment.
00:20:52.840
And as far as classified material is concerned, I think that the best thing that ever happened to
00:20:58.500
Trump was Biden. Biden and Pence and others having this material makes it impossible. Even if there
00:21:06.100
are distinctions between the cases, the public will see the cases as sufficiently similar so that
00:21:11.540
unless there is an investigation, an indictment of others who have done this, it will seem like
00:21:17.200
selective prosecution if they only go after Trump, even if what Trump did was worse. In some respects,
00:21:22.840
it was less worse because he does have the ability to declassify while he was president. In other
00:21:27.640
respects, it was worse. That is, he didn't cooperate, whereas Biden immediately cooperated with the
00:21:32.680
authorities. But I do not believe there would be valid prosecutions in the District of Columbia,
00:21:38.560
in Florida or in New York, although I think they could get convictions in the District of Columbia and
00:21:44.740
So just given the jury pool, I agree with every word you just said. Totally agree with all that
00:21:48.980
analysis. Last thing I want to ask you about is not in Get Trump, but it's interesting is the Alec
00:21:54.160
Baldwin case, which I know you've been following, too. And the latest headline today is that the special
00:22:00.100
prosecutor has resigned. This is after Alec Baldwin's lawyers had been going after her saying this is a
00:22:06.360
woman who was assigned to be a special prosecutor. She was brought in. They say they may have multiple
00:22:10.240
prosecutions. They needed help. She was brought in to prosecute me. This is Alec Baldwin.
00:22:14.720
Speaking. But she, in the meantime, ran for the state legislature and won. And you can't be both
00:22:20.240
a member of the legislative branch and also as a special special prosecutor, sort of one foot in
00:22:26.540
the executive branch and one foot in the judiciary. So and that was persuasive, or at least that she
00:22:32.060
thought it was going to be. And so she stepped down in this involuntary manslaughter case against
00:22:37.960
him. That doesn't necessarily mean the case is going away. They'll replace her. There'll be another
00:22:42.540
prosecutor who presumably continues these charges against him. And I had a guy whose opinion I
00:22:49.060
really respect as a lawyer, Andrew Branca, who runs the law of self-defense. He got Kyle Rittenhouse
00:22:53.900
totally correct from the beginning on the show a couple of weeks ago. And he he's always calls him
00:22:59.760
like he sees him. He likes this case against Alec Baldwin. He likes it a lot. And let me play the
00:23:05.640
soundbite as to why he likes it. And I started covering this the day after the shooting and
00:23:12.220
pointed out that if you point a gun at another human being without first making sure it's not
00:23:18.220
loaded and it discharges and you kill them, that's the dictionary definition of legal recklessness,
00:23:23.660
creating an unjustified risk of death to another person and then they die. That's reckless manslaughter
00:23:29.300
every day of the week. So I've always felt the reckless manslaughter charge was was pretty much
00:23:35.820
an open and shut charge from the very beginning. Wow. So what how do you how does that come out?
00:23:40.960
If he if he goes to trial and he's found guilty on that, what happens to him? 18 months is the
00:23:47.680
maximum sentence in New Mexico. So what do you think in the broader context? Not a lot of time for
00:23:52.780
having killed somebody. Your thoughts on that, Alan? Well, he didn't kill anybody. He was not
00:23:59.940
given. He didn't have a gun and he didn't look to see. He had a gun, which he was given and told
00:24:05.840
by the person responsible, had no bullets in it. Look, I consulted on the two previous movie cases,
00:24:14.640
the John Landis case. You remember that where a helicopter decapitated actor and two young kids
00:24:21.440
and also the Brandon Lee case. So I involved in both cases and both of those cases did not result
00:24:28.500
in criminal prosecution. I think this was an accident. If there was negligence, it was broadly
00:24:34.400
spread around. And I think the last person who can be held responsible is the actor who was told he
00:24:41.880
was told the gun was safe. You can point it at somebody. Somebody else had the job. Now, I would hope
00:24:49.820
in the future, no weapons ever would be allowed on a movie set. I've argued that since the previous
00:24:56.740
case, since the Brandon Lee case, we should be using CGI or whatever they call it. Every gun scene
00:25:03.680
in a movie should be done without real weapons on the set. But that's not the responsibility of the
00:25:11.180
actor or even the associate or producer who says, look, I have somebody whose job it is to tell me
00:25:17.360
the gun is safe. And they told him the gun was safe. So I don't think I think this case is very much
00:25:23.600
tragically like the case of Kim Potter, who pulled the wrong gun and killed somebody with a real gun
00:25:31.080
instead of a taser. And she's now serving two years. That's not a good precedent, obviously, for
00:25:37.120
Landis for I'm sorry, for for our actor. But it it it I think she was improperly convicted. And and I
00:25:45.260
think that the current case should be dropped or should result in an acquittal. But you never know,
00:25:50.980
because once you're in a jury room, you're playing Russian roulette, particularly when you're a famous
00:25:57.480
person like that. Fame cuts both ways. In this case, it could obviously hurt him. But I think the
00:26:04.780
criminal as a criminal matter is an element of the crime. You know, if this were a negligence case,
00:26:08.980
you could argue, yes, technically, he caused the death of Helena Hutchins because he pulled the trigger
00:26:13.780
or he was handling the gun, however you want to look at it when she died. But then when you get
00:26:18.500
to the next element of negligence, negligence case, which is proximate cause, right, is it was he really
00:26:24.200
the cause like without him? Would it have happened? It would fail, I think, in this case. But this is
00:26:31.380
not a negligence case. It's sort of a super negligence case because it's recklessness. It's
00:26:34.280
involuntary manslaughter. So could he get out, Alan, on the principle that while, yes, technically,
00:26:39.560
he was the cause and fact of her death. If you actually look at what would have happened
00:26:43.200
if Alec Baldwin had opened up the gun and checked to see what the bullets, whether it was loaded or
00:26:48.980
what in the perfect world, in the world in which this was supposed to go down, he would have seen
00:26:53.860
dummy rounds. He wasn't expected to see nothing in there. The gun was supposed to have dummy rounds.
00:26:58.780
It's a Colt 45. You're supposed to see the bullets. That's what a dummy round is. It's like a model
00:27:03.040
bullet. And what the prosecution's really arguing against him is he should have checked. And he,
00:27:09.920
unlike the armorer and anybody else who looked at this gun, should have been able to distinguish
00:27:14.580
between dummies and live rounds, which if the armorer failed to make that distinction in looking
00:27:21.780
at these things, how would the actor on the set be expected to do it?
00:27:25.400
Yeah. And I think this is not a case that will turn on proximate cause because that's essentially
00:27:32.440
the civil standard. Even if there was proximate cause here, the element that's missing is intent.
00:27:38.480
And the element that's missing is the kind of gross negligence that sometimes substitutes for intent.
00:27:44.480
The statute, if you read it, is the worst form of draftsmanship. And it would give nobody any kind
00:27:51.760
of fair warning that you can have a criminal prosecution based on this lack of intent.
00:27:58.720
And so I think a properly instructed jury will acquit in this case, but there's a death. And often the
00:28:06.320
way jurors operate is who killed Cockrobin? They first ask the question, somebody's dead. Somebody
00:28:12.300
must be responsible for that. You point the finger at the armor person, you point the finger at the person
00:28:19.000
who pulled the trigger and a jury might make the mistake of thinking that there was criminal liability
00:28:24.160
here. But having taught criminal law now for over 50 years, I think this is a paradigm case that falls
00:28:30.660
on the not guilty side, but on the civil side, he should be held responsible civilly. But there are
00:28:36.880
big differences and different standards for civil liability and criminal liability. In both previous
00:28:42.840
cases that I did, the Brandon Lee case and the John Landis case, there was civil liability.
00:28:48.180
So that distinction was made. But in both cases, there was no successful criminal prosecution.
00:28:55.280
In the Landis case, the jury acquitted. And in the Brandon Lee case, the prosecutor decided not to
00:29:01.080
bring the case. I think in this case, they should not have brought the case.
00:29:04.540
But you raise a good point, though, because in this case, the shooter is a big celebrity star who people
00:29:11.220
will come in with preconceptions about. That wasn't the case in those other two film accidents. So,
00:29:16.640
you know, his celebrity is going to weigh potentially against him, potentially for him.
00:29:20.560
I mean, we'll have to do a thorough voir dire of the jury pool. All right. I got to leave it at that.
00:29:24.820
The book is called Get Trump from the one and only Alan Dershowitz, the most fair man in America.
00:29:30.340
Don't believe what the left tells you. And it's out right now. Great to see you.
00:29:35.160
All right. We'll be right back with a story on DEI that takes an unexpected twist. Wait until you hear
00:29:42.160
this. A diversity, equity and inclusion director has been fired from a California college for
00:29:51.240
apparently having a mind of her own. Dr. Tabia Lee questioned the campus's anti-racism policies.
00:29:57.680
And for that, she says she was called derogatory names, accused of supporting white supremacy and
00:30:03.920
ultimately fired. She joins us now to tell her story. Welcome to the show, Dr. Lee. Great to have
00:30:09.160
you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. There's this unbelievable quote that
00:30:15.140
they said they wanted a black person to do this job. Apparently, I'm the wrong kind of black.
00:30:20.260
What do you mean by that? What happened? Well, you know, soon into my work at De Anza College,
00:30:26.760
I was being accused of white speaking and white explaining and supporting white supremacy,
00:30:34.600
all for the offensive act of attempting to, you know, set an agenda for my team meetings
00:30:40.880
and to collaborate on identifying projects that we could work on together. It was something that I
00:30:49.740
never encountered in my lifelong track of teaching, especially in diversity, equity and inclusion
00:30:56.080
spaces. And from there, I had to unpack and uncover what they were meaning. Because I'm from the
00:31:04.460
Central Valley, I was born in Stockton and raised in Lodi, California. And my understanding of white
00:31:13.580
supremacy always had to do with organizations like the KKK and neo-Nazi organizations. So to have someone
00:31:21.560
call me a white supremacist was something that I just never encountered in my life as a racialized
00:31:30.000
black woman. My goodness. I mean, this is like the, you know, this is the sort of the line that we hear
00:31:36.800
all too often, like what they said, Larry Elder was the black face of white supremacy. Now, even being
00:31:41.340
black does not save you from being called a white supremacist with this sort of crazy leftist group that is
00:31:47.180
so ideologically bent on injecting race and their beliefs into everything. I understand one of the
00:31:52.420
complaints they had against you was you had at one point been critical of Patrice Cullors, one of the
00:31:57.780
founders of BLM, who is all over the news for having allegedly done some sketchy things financially when
00:32:05.600
it comes to that group. They were mad that you had that you deigned to criticize her?
00:32:09.500
Um, actually, Megan, it was, um, it was Alicia Garza. Alicia Garza. Yes. Um, uh, when I started my
00:32:18.560
position in 2021 at De Anza, uh, they were doing this program where the school, uh, the president's
00:32:24.900
office purchased hundreds of Alicia Garza's book, um, uh, the purpose of power. And so when I came in,
00:32:32.240
uh, one of my first tenure track, um, uh, assignments was to, in very short order, organize, uh, students
00:32:41.220
to, and, and to facilitate a fireside chat with Alicia Garza. And, uh, this would be on Zoom.
00:32:48.800
And so I, uh, very quickly without knowing very much, um, organized and reached out to colleagues
00:32:55.280
who were kind enough to recommend students to me. I organized those students. Um, we collaborated
00:33:01.440
on how the event would flow. Uh, the students were very excited that Alicia Garza was going to be,
00:33:08.660
uh, visiting and that they would get to, you know, directly ask her questions. Uh, we collaborated
00:33:14.300
on those questions and ranked them and we decided, you know, which student would ask theirs first. And,
00:33:20.900
uh, there was just a lot of excitement around it. At the 11th hour, I was informed by the Dean of
00:33:27.620
Equity and Engagement that per Alicia Garza's contract, uh, she, uh, would not ask any questions,
00:33:35.000
uh, answer any questions, uh, that her management team did not write and that she did not have the
00:33:42.680
prescripted answers for. And this was quite surprising. And I had to take this back to the
00:33:48.360
students and, uh, we were directed, we were given a list of questions and we were directed to use those.
00:33:53.760
The students were very offended by this. Uh, they said, you know, we developed our questions and
00:33:59.540
they're very different than what they're telling us. Um, and so I circled back to the Dean of Equity
00:34:05.120
and Engagement and I said, Hey, can I see the contract? You know, I, I'm familiar with speaker
00:34:09.420
contracts and I've never heard anything like that. Um, and she refused to allow me to see it.
00:34:14.820
It actually took a, um, Freedom of Information Act request from the Foundation Against Intolerance
00:34:21.320
and Racism who assisted me with that to discover, uh, that A, the contract didn't say anything about
00:34:28.160
questions that could or could be answered. And then B, that Alicia Garza was paid $10,000 to come
00:34:34.940
onto Zoom, um, and to perform questions that she had written with her management and that she had
00:34:42.900
prescripted her answers for. So I'm so thankful to, uh, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism
00:34:48.380
for helping me to get to the truth of the matter, uh, you know, a little after it happened.
00:34:52.880
Now, the disrespect that I was accused of by one of my, um, tenure review members was that during the
00:35:00.240
event, the compromise I came to with, to the students, they said, we're not going to do this
00:35:05.620
because it's fake and it's not real. I said, well, maybe we can ask the questions they're giving us.
00:35:11.780
And then as follow-up questions, you can kind of, you know, work your questions in. And so they agreed
00:35:17.840
to do that. And because that took place and the tenure review committee member was aware of that
00:35:23.240
taking place, I was accused of disrespecting Alicia Garza. Now, during the event, uh, there was no sign
00:35:30.660
of it unless you, you know, noticed when Alicia Garza, when, when it did get off script, when the
00:35:36.000
students weren't asking the questions she was asked, she became visibly uncomfortable. Um, if you were
00:35:41.040
looking from a back channel, but as the 400 plus participants that were there, they thought it was
00:35:46.100
a wonderful event and they didn't see any disrespect. And they said, wow, it was great. You know, that
00:35:50.960
she came here. Um, so I was accused of disrespect because of the back channel things that happened
00:35:56.000
and because I wanted to support the students in their freedom of speech and freedom of expression
00:36:00.740
to engage an author in a, in an authentic way. And they were very respectful about it. And so was I.
00:36:07.400
That's unbelievable. It's not like she was sitting down for an audience at Fox news.
00:36:11.040
You know, a focus group, this, this would presumably be an audience of fans who are
00:36:15.440
supporting her. And yet, no, she couldn't do it, but got the 10,000 bucks. Anyway, in the university
00:36:20.900
running cover for her, as you point out, because they were misleading you about what was required
00:36:25.740
and what wasn't by contract, just to tell the audience again, this is De Anza college located
00:36:30.680
just outside of San Jose, where Dr. Lee began working as a faculty director for the office of equity,
00:36:36.580
social justice, and multicultural education in August of 2021. Two years later, they denied her
00:36:41.300
tenure and ultimately let her go because she has some more heterodox views about some of these
00:36:46.880
sacred issues, which presumably they knew about Dr. Lee when they hired you. You you're not,
00:36:53.880
you're not keeping your views a secret and you weren't prior to this job.
00:36:57.340
Yes, that's exactly correct, Megan. I went through a very rigorous interview process. I did teaching
00:37:06.320
demonstrations, multiple panel interviews, and something that the panelists, not all of them,
00:37:12.280
but some of them did mention was that the office that I would be potentially serving in was a little
00:37:17.240
too woke and that they had alienated some of the faculty from the office because they would,
00:37:25.520
you know, call them out and accuse them of being racist and and so forth. And I assured the panel
00:37:32.120
that, you know, I did not identify as as woke and that what I do through my work is I try to create
00:37:39.480
spaces where people, whether they're woke or not or, you know, something else, whoever they are,
00:37:44.420
if they're in the space in the learning community, that their perspective is able to be heard
00:37:49.620
and that even amongst these diverse and like divergent viewpoints, we could identify points
00:37:56.500
of commonality in order to best serve our students. And so and they selected me, you know,
00:38:02.560
based on that very transparent, you know, understanding of my teaching approach and of
00:38:07.400
how I approach things. Yeah. Until they actually saw it and said, well, what are we doing? And of course,
00:38:12.780
if you get any complaints as an administrator in today's day and age, they bow almost immediately,
00:38:17.260
they bend and they break that one of the issues, as I understand it, was you were asking for
00:38:23.020
definitions of terms like anti-racism. What do we really mean by that? And your refusal to use terms
00:38:29.920
such as Latinx, and this was a new one to me, Philippinks, Latinx or Philippinex. You can pronounce
00:38:36.960
it either way from what I understand. You also wanted to know why the B in black was being capitalized,
00:38:41.640
but not the W in white. Now I see why they called you a white supremacist. This will do it in today's
00:38:47.240
day and age. Yes. And I, you know, Megan, I was not an administrator. My role is a faculty role.
00:38:55.720
And so and that's why I took this role as a faculty director. And so I thought I would be afforded,
00:39:02.420
you know, all of the academic freedom protections and freedom of speech and expression, you know,
00:39:08.960
protections that a tenure track faculty member would be afforded. What I found was that my tenure
00:39:15.520
review process was actually obstructed and subverted by ideological extremists. And they were very open
00:39:23.720
about it and very biased against me because they did not want me, you know, creating these spaces.
00:39:31.020
I did over 60 hours of needs assessment conversations when I first started. And a constant theme was people
00:39:38.740
identifying that, you know, this the space here isn't one where we really talk about differences
00:39:44.100
of opinion. You know, there's kind of just one view that that folks push and I didn't give much
00:39:50.260
credence to it, but I heard it more and more. And then as I started to experience it, I knew why I was
00:39:55.000
getting those warnings initially. And it's really unfortunate, you know, the things that have happened
00:40:00.420
around it. In terms of those, some people are calling them gender neutral terms, I call them
00:40:06.800
gender oppressive terms. And why I say that, Megan, is because those words like Latinx or Philpinks or,
00:40:15.560
you know, however folks want to pronounce it, they're inventions of the ivory tower. I worked for 10
00:40:21.160
years in East Los Angeles public middle schools. Not once did any student or community member in the
00:40:27.620
working class communities that I serve ever use those terms to describe themselves.
00:40:32.740
And then I was very experienced with the California Department of Education and other state system
00:40:37.880
data dashboards, and they do not use those terms. So when I came to De Anza and I saw those terms being
00:40:44.820
used and to report from our office of research, to report on students and perspectives, I was saying,
00:40:52.040
where is that coming from? Because it's not from the state of California. It's not from anywhere else.
00:40:56.800
Like, where are these terms coming from? They're not from communities. I grew up in the Central Valley
00:41:01.580
in Stockton and Lodi, which has one of the largest Filipino populations in America. And nobody had ever
00:41:09.720
told me, you know, address me as Philippines or Philippinex or this X ending thing. And really with my
00:41:16.940
background as a professor in helping teacher educators of speakers of other languages, you know,
00:41:24.880
I knew that the X at the end of Latin isn't something that originates from the culture
00:41:30.820
or the language of Spanish speakers. So it's definitely something different. And when I would
00:41:36.360
ask people, why do we rename the data from the data dashboard? And why are we renaming groups of
00:41:42.660
people and telling students they should identify themselves that way? We're really shaping identities,
00:41:47.260
unfortunately, by doing that. Nobody could give me an answer. Nobody could give me a cogent answer when
00:41:53.480
this started at De Anza. Why it started. I couldn't find an academic Senate resolution or a student
00:41:59.600
government resolution. It was just a shift, a cultural shift that took place.
00:42:04.300
So is it true that that they were calling you names? I read that you said I was called a bitch.
00:42:09.920
I was called dictatorial for. Well, for what? You tell me, why were they calling you those names?
00:42:15.780
And the right wing extremists. I was told that in a division meeting for one of the largest divisions
00:42:24.520
on campus, you know, a faculty member stood up and said that I was working with the Foundation
00:42:32.000
Against Intolerance and Racism, that I was a plant for them and a right wing extremist, and that I was
00:42:38.240
on their payroll. And that was just so strange to me, because it's absolutely, you know, not the truth.
00:42:45.460
But, you know, once things are said, you know, people kind of latch on to them, and they run with
00:42:50.580
them. And so this is a situation at De Anza, a very toxic environment, where there's a lot of
00:42:56.540
duplicitous people. And that's what happens in toxic, you know, organizations and environments.
00:43:02.480
You know, people who say one thing, and then the moment later, they're saying something different to
00:43:06.800
another person. And unfortunately, people who were seated on my tenure review committee, you know,
00:43:12.760
they openly stated that they were, they identified themselves as a third wave anti-racist. They said
00:43:20.060
that, you know, my activities that I designed, which didn't push any ideological perspective,
00:43:26.780
because that's not what I do, and not what my work's about. They said they were deeply offended by
00:43:30.960
them. One workshop in particular, I literally, Megan, all I did was I took direct quotes from
00:43:39.220
Ibram Kendi's book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. And I put them on the slide with the page numbers so
00:43:46.960
people could verify, you know, and I didn't alter them. I didn't comment about them. I didn't
00:43:52.220
editorialize. I didn't give my perspective. What I did was I just created space for people to take a
00:43:58.000
look at even Kendi's perspectives on various issues. And then I had discovered Foundation
00:44:03.800
Against Intolerance and Racism's pro-human approach. And so I had that on the other side,
00:44:08.700
it was a Venn diagram. And I created space for people to look at that and to look at the different
00:44:15.080
quotations and the different, you know, perspectives. And then I said, you know, we have people who are
00:44:20.920
potentially working in one or the other, or maybe sometimes in different contexts, even using pieces
00:44:27.280
from the other. And I said, you know, can we identify some points of commonality? And even
00:44:33.420
though these seem very divergent, like what are some common points that we could take away from both
00:44:38.060
to best serve our students? And that was deemed deeply offensive and got me marked as being unable to
00:44:45.720
accept criticism. And that rating stayed with me. It was unfounded. It was based on, you know,
00:44:53.100
one person's perspective. And that person didn't even talk to me in post-observation conversations.
00:45:02.180
I'm on the advisory board for FAIR, the group that you've been referring to,
00:45:06.040
and that's helping you in this litigation. And of course, that quote, that's a Daryl Davis quote
00:45:09.420
about being pro-human, pro the human race, not this race, not that race. And of course,
00:45:15.040
this is a man who's, he's been on the program. He's turned KKK members the other way. He's gotten
00:45:20.280
them out of the KKK. So, I mean, to suggest that affiliation with that group makes you a right
00:45:24.140
winger is wrong. To suggest that quotes from that group are somehow offensive to people who are pro
00:45:30.860
any race is a lie and just shows their ideological bias. And they were, they were bent on getting you.
00:45:38.240
So then, then the ultimate insult, right? Then they let you go. Now, understanding who you were,
00:45:43.100
and by the way, I do want to mention that I know you were one of the founding members and
00:45:45.940
board of directors of Free Black Thought. Just quickly, is that the Twitter? Is that,
00:45:49.560
is that your Twitter at Free Black Thought too? Is that your part of that?
00:45:53.200
So yes, I'm, I'm on the board of directors for Free Black Thought. And that's another group that
00:45:57.460
has been just amazing. Megan, I recently published. I've been following them on Twitter for a long
00:46:03.000
time. You learn a lot of great things. Yes, there's a lot of experts. And for folks who are
00:46:09.000
looking for solutions, that Free Black Thought is a great resource that I encourage folks to check out
00:46:15.080
because many of the board of director members and the people that we have speaking in the articles
00:46:21.800
and so forth in the journal of Free Black Thought are identifying solutions that, you know, can help
00:46:27.280
folks to move past, you know, the current moment where we find ourselves. You know, it's one thing,
00:46:32.720
Megan, to like, just say, oh, you know, these things are wrong. Like, what can we do? And what are some
00:46:38.580
positive things we can engage with? And I encourage people to check out both Free Black Thought and
00:46:43.920
Foundation Against Intolerant. I love Free Black Thought. I've gotten so many great thoughts and
00:46:48.160
been introduced to so many great people from it. Last question. We only have a short time left.
00:46:53.320
You are going to sue them, I assume. I haven't ruled it out. You know, I still have this hope
00:46:59.280
that folks are going to do the right thing, Megan, because I've made a lot of friends at De Anza.
00:47:03.420
Most of the people at De Anza are good people. They're just quelled into silence by authoritarian
00:47:09.540
extremists who counsel people if they don't agree with them.
00:47:15.040
We know so many people in academia. They need to scoop you up. This is the kind of diversity,
00:47:19.900
equity and inclusion approach everyone can get behind. And it's nonsense that you lost your job
00:47:25.380
because you really did want a free Black thought. You really are somebody who's lived it. Dr. Lee,
00:47:29.620
we're going to continue to follow your story. Please let us know how this works out and how we can help
00:47:33.860
amplify it. Thank you. All the best to you. Wow. Unbelievable and infuriating, isn't it? It's
00:47:40.240
infuriating. How does a woman like that wind up fired when she's trying to actually speak to young
00:47:45.100
college minds who want to hear from her because of biased administrators? That's the reason.
00:47:49.660
When we come back, we take a turn to China and there's a lot of news breaking out of there,
00:47:53.320
including on TikTok. Now we shift to China. Last week, Xi Jinping was handed an unprecedented
00:48:02.620
third term as president, becoming China's most powerful leader in generations. What does this
00:48:09.020
mean for the world and for us? We're talking now with Michael Cunningham. He's a research fellow at
00:48:14.460
the Heritage Foundation, and he's lived in China. He knows all about China. A true expert now to answer
00:48:20.120
all our questions about what all this means. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me,
00:48:25.200
Megan. Yeah, the pleasure is ours. All right. So let's just talk about what this means,
00:48:29.940
because it's basically Xi Jinping for life now. He's he's going to be the leader. He's the leader
00:48:34.040
of the Communist Party. This was just a formality making him for a third term president. Good thing,
00:48:40.840
bad thing concerning from the U.S. perspective. Well, you know, different people have different
00:48:46.060
opinions about that. I actually am of the opinion that it's not a bad thing for the United States to
00:48:51.360
have Xi as opposed to someone who's a little more likable. And the reason I say this is that for
00:48:59.220
decades, American presidencies, administrations, the government generally, and really civil society
00:49:07.260
as well, has viewed China as, you know, it is going to become like us as they develop. They are going
00:49:15.640
to and they actually desire to become like us. And and the Communist Party is going to democratize the
00:49:23.040
country eventually as it becomes richer. And that has has really been baloney. It hasn't been true.
00:49:28.980
But we still have many elements in the government and in business circles that still want to to bring
00:49:36.800
things back to where they were before Xi Jinping, to a China, a U.S.-China relationship that is
00:49:45.160
more cooperative. But what was happening is the U.S. was losing a lot of our advantages to China,
00:49:53.720
to a China that is increasingly assertive on the global stage. And so with someone like Xi in power,
00:50:00.720
I mean, our enemy is not, you know, it's not the Chinese people, certainly, but it's also not Xi.
00:50:07.200
Our adversary is the Chinese Communist Party. It has always been a Marxist revolutionary party.
00:50:13.360
And under Xi, the U.S. as a whole, and also the international community sees that a lot clearer
00:50:22.200
than they did previously. I do fear that if we had someone that, say, the establishment in Washington
00:50:28.400
and the business community really liked, that they thought, oh, this is this is our type of person,
00:50:34.960
that they would want to go back to sort of these softer, more dovish policies that would would only buy
00:50:42.640
China additional time to surpass the U.S. in military and technological capabilities.
00:50:51.700
So take us back for those of us who don't know their history about China. Take us back to when
00:50:56.980
when did it start that we started looking at them differently? We said, we'll open up trade to China.
00:51:01.600
We're going to democratize China. You know, it's a kinder, gentler, the United States trying to make
00:51:07.220
China in our mirror image. And it can be done. When did that happen? And what's happened since then?
00:51:13.820
Yeah, it essentially happened in the 1970s. I mean, we we wanted an ally to oppose the Soviet Union.
00:51:21.000
We finally realized that that China and the Soviet Union, despite both being communist countries,
00:51:28.160
they were not on the same page. They didn't even like each other.
00:51:32.580
And so our government played the China card, as it was called. And so we gradually we established
00:51:39.220
diplomatic relations with China by the end of the 1970s. And we we really at the same time,
00:51:46.560
China had a change in leadership. Mao Zedong ended up passing away. And Deng Xiaoping, he had this great
00:51:53.580
strategy of let's lay low, bide our time, not exert leadership, not threaten the international
00:52:04.240
community, but let's let's rise through the international system. And he implemented a lot
00:52:11.140
of reforms to China's economy to open it up just enough that it could benefit from the international
00:52:18.420
system. And so throughout the decades, there were many reasons to believe that that wasn't actually
00:52:25.020
going to happen. But we were told by thanks to academic theories, philosophies that, well,
00:52:35.580
a country cannot become wealthy without democratizing eventually. And also that, you know,
00:52:43.480
all democratic countries are, by definition, peaceful. And so if we if we have, we open up,
00:52:50.540
we engage China, they are going to democratize, and they are going to be peaceful. And really what
00:52:57.960
this meant to the the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, you know, we were telling them all we have
00:53:04.580
your best interests in mind. And I think the US was sincere about that. And we want you to become
00:53:10.100
democratic. But what that sounds like to a totalitarian party, like the CCP is, we want a
00:53:16.020
regime change, we want to kick you out of power in China. And that's what they heard. And so everything
00:53:21.940
that we did, you know, we welcomed them in the early 2000s, we welcomed them into the World Trade
00:53:29.860
Organization. And basically, what we did was we said here, you can have all of the benefits of the
00:53:38.020
international community, but you don't have to keep all of the same rules that everyone else has to.
00:53:44.020
And somehow, some brilliant people in Washington thought that this was going to that once China
00:53:50.680
became powerful and rich, they were going to somehow impose those rules that they weren't being required
00:53:57.840
to keep, they were going to impose them on themselves. Kind of a crazy idea, if you ask me,
00:54:04.640
but that was, that that was, was how the thinking went.
00:54:09.940
And so all along, China was implementing its big plan, its master plan, the Lilo period has ended.
00:54:18.640
And now this ascension to power, we're seeing it in so many different quarters. I mean, just yesterday,
00:54:25.400
I was talking about them creating all sorts of relationships in Latin America, their their trade
00:54:30.180
there has just exploded. Down there, we know that they've been buying up US farmland, we know that
00:54:35.000
they now control Hollywood, and what gets made and what doesn't get made. Now they're brokering peace
00:54:40.700
deals in the Middle East, and potentially even with with respect to Russia and Ukraine. I mean,
00:54:46.580
China never had this role before. But this is, I don't know what phase this is of the master plan. But
00:54:51.680
we're clearly beyond the, keep your head down as we grow and become economically powerful. And they
00:54:57.540
are expanding into a true, you tell me, could we use the term superpower?
00:55:02.960
Well, it would be premature to use the term superpower right now. But but that is their ambition,
00:55:08.700
they do want to develop into a superpower. And a lot of people are using that term already to describe
00:55:13.740
them. But I do want to confirm something you just said, actually, I have a quote here. So
00:55:21.140
Deng Xiaoping, his, his period, you know, that he had a, essentially, like an equation that he told
00:55:35.000
it was their, that the strategy, the strategic advice was, observe calmly, secure our position,
00:55:42.280
cope with affairs calmly, hide our capabilities, bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile,
00:55:48.780
never claim leadership. And she actually, in this last legislative session that ended on Monday,
00:55:56.880
he actually revealed a similar saying, similar length, similar significance, that actually had
00:56:05.180
half a million, the Chinese version of it had like half a million search results in, in Google the next
00:56:13.340
day, and no one is really paying attention to it here. But what he said was, this is this is China's
00:56:19.560
strategy under him, be calm and maintain determination, seek progress while maintaining
00:56:25.480
stability, actively accomplish things, unite, and my favorite one, dare to struggle. That is China under
00:56:32.720
Xi Jinping compared to the Deng Xiaoping, lay low, bide your time era.
00:56:36.960
Mm hmm. This to me feels like the moment where the Clark Kent is pulling the white shirt off,
00:56:42.940
and you're starting to see these S underneath, like the revealing of what they hope will be some
00:56:49.000
sort of superpower, a next super phase. And they've been paying the dividends toward that for decades
00:56:54.940
now. And so as you look at what they're doing, can you just give us a broad base before we get into
00:56:59.640
the specifics of what they've done recently? Give us a broad based view, akin to the one I just
00:57:04.920
ticked off of what they are doing globally, to grow and expand their influence.
00:57:11.380
Yeah, so China, actually, they, they view power different from, from the United States and most
00:57:18.980
of the world, they're obsessed with this concept of power. But they're, there's, they're not only
00:57:24.900
focused on military and economic power, they're focused on political leadership throughout the world.
00:57:30.700
So they see it very much as a numbers game. They see most countries are not liberal democratic
00:57:37.980
countries. Most countries are not necessarily even aligned with the United States. And what they're
00:57:47.820
hoping to do is really get the majority of countries slowly to sort of back, back them. And so I guess it's
00:57:56.300
one way you can look at it is, well, well, they're, you know, they're, they're rolling out tons of new
00:58:04.580
initiatives. Just yesterday, they rolled out what they call the global civilization initiative, they
00:58:11.840
have the global security initiative, the global development initiative, and all of these are very
00:58:16.660
vague initiatives, we don't really mean what, we don't necessarily know what they mean in practice,
00:58:22.580
they're not clear. But what they're doing is, they're, they're trying to appeal to three types
00:58:29.120
of countries. One are the rogue states that detest America's leadership just as much as they do. The
00:58:36.480
next type are authoritarian countries that may be aligned with the US, like you talk about Saudi Arabia
00:58:43.220
and countries like that. But they're not necessarily comfortable with the liberal norms, human rights
00:58:49.620
norms and whatnot that the US stands for. And with US exerting the and sort of promoting these norms
00:58:57.960
internationally. And then there's the third type, which is the global south or the developing countries
00:59:03.580
that haven't really benefited as much from the global order, led by the US as North America,
00:59:11.200
much of Northeast Asia, and of course, Western Europe. And so a lot of what China does,
00:59:16.580
to us sounds like, oh, there's no way anyone's going to align with that. There's no way anyone's going to see
00:59:21.960
them as a constructive party, with regards to Ukraine and Russia, for example. But we're not their target,
00:59:30.420
their target is actually much more susceptible to their overtures and their, their messages. And so you can
00:59:38.260
really think of them as almost, they're more interested in messaging than they are in substance. And, and I
00:59:45.240
would say just one last thing about that is, it's, it's also sort of related to how the Communist Party
00:59:50.580
took power in China, the first, in the first place. No, they, it was a prolonged struggle, they almost
00:59:57.460
were defeated several times. But in the end, they managed to take power. And they did that by appealing
01:00:04.240
to the masses, which were the workers and peasants against the, the, the minority landowners and
01:00:13.140
political elites and economic elites. And so what they're doing on the global stage is really going
01:00:18.480
after the majority of countries, trying to peel them away from the US led system little by little,
01:00:26.500
in a international community where one country gets one vote in, in most international organizations,
01:00:36.640
what they managed to do then is, is use political and economic leverage to get individual states to
01:00:44.600
vote according to, to their desires as well. Toward what end exactly? That last answer sort of got to it,
01:00:53.160
but then what, right? If they can align these America hating countries or people who are just
01:00:58.420
not that thrilled with, you know, the way we operate, what's the end goal? Yeah. Yeah, it's,
01:01:05.020
well, it's, it's, it's an alternative world order where China is the dominant power. And basically what
01:01:12.520
they say goes, I mean, you know, in substance, they don't really have anything that is different,
01:01:21.000
really. I mean, they talk about common values. They reject the, the idea of universal values that,
01:01:27.260
that, that we stand by, but they, they, they talk about common values, which are just different names
01:01:34.060
for the same values, except the difference is they define them. And if they're not obeying those rules,
01:01:41.980
well, we, we have the wrong, a misunderstanding of what those rules actually are because they define them.
01:01:54.000
It, it, it very well could. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not something that's going to happen
01:01:58.700
tomorrow, but, um, we need to, we need to, as the United States, the world is actually counting on us
01:02:08.440
to remain the leaders, um, the global leaders. And so, you know, we have China making incredible
01:02:15.620
inroads in the developing world. We should really be worried about that. We're not going to compete with
01:02:20.260
them, uh, when it comes to, uh, the, the rogue States that hate America. Those are basically on
01:02:26.780
China's side. There's not much we can do unless we can manage to drive a wedge between them.
01:02:31.080
But, um, what we should really be focusing on is the developing world. Uh, China has incredible
01:02:37.640
influence in Africa and they're, they're, they're making a lot of progress in Latin America in our
01:02:43.160
own backyard. Um, I know, you know, previously John Kerry, when he was secretary of state said
01:02:48.960
that, uh, the Monroe doctrine no longer exists. I think many of us in America would disagree with
01:02:55.660
that. We need to maintain American influence, uh, and superiority in the Western hemisphere for sure.
01:03:03.300
Hmm. Why are they buying up so much farmland in America?
01:03:07.540
Well, that's actually a pretty complex issue. Um, I mean, the, the, the simple answer is
01:03:14.000
who is buying the farmland and, and, and usually it's, it's, uh, Chinese companies or Chinese
01:03:21.200
individuals, but I think mostly companies and, you know, China has, um, uh, a food security problem.
01:03:28.920
They have lots of concerns with that. They have 1.4 billion people to feed. And so that's one of
01:03:33.500
the reasons what's really concerning though, is that some of this farmland happens to be in very
01:03:41.020
sensitive areas close to American military bases. And that strikes me as just, um, well, it strikes
01:03:49.600
most people in America, apparently as, as very dangerous, um, that, that they would, uh, buy land
01:03:57.400
close to a sensitive military base here. And, um, we don't really know what they're doing with that
01:04:04.760
land. Uh, we don't have the same processes in place. If I wanted to buy farmland in China, I'd
01:04:10.700
probably, it probably wouldn't be approved, but if it would, I would have to, um, fill out a very, uh,
01:04:19.540
in-depth application about every single thing I'm going to use that farmland for. And, and they would,
01:04:26.940
you know, review it for national security considerations, food security, um, uh, all
01:04:33.700
sorts of different policies. And if they approved it, they would hold me to it. But what happens
01:04:39.240
here is I think, you know, if they get approval to buy this land, I mean, they might be setting up,
01:04:43.920
um, technology to, to surveil our military sites. Uh, I don't think we have any oversight of what they
01:04:50.900
do once they buy that land. So it's extremely dangerous.
01:04:52.840
Yeah, we're going to get a whole lot more balloons if we continue to look the other way on this.
01:04:56.940
How strong or they might not even need balloons, right? Yeah. They just use their binoculars or
01:05:01.700
their eyes. Um, how strong are they militarily and economically? Because I've read some fierce
01:05:09.180
debates on whether we are overstating the threat that in both of those departments, they don't hold
01:05:15.220
a candle to us. Well, in both of those departments, they don't currently hold a candle
01:05:21.060
to us, but here's the problem. Uh, America's military is, is declining. We are, we no longer
01:05:29.400
have the Navy that we used to have. That's going to be the most important thing if we have a war with
01:05:35.120
China at some point. So we have to have, we have to maintain the strongest military, especially the
01:05:41.760
strongest Navy, uh, in the world. And right now China is pretty far behind us, but they're,
01:05:48.400
they're advancing very rapidly. Whereas in Washington, it seems like we're, we're sitting
01:05:53.260
on our hands and just, just waiting until they've reached parity with us before we panic and,
01:05:58.520
and try to do something about it. Uh, China is producing ships, uh, very fast. And we no longer
01:06:06.960
have the industrial capacity if we were, uh, in a worst case scenario, if we were in a war with China
01:06:13.520
that we are no, no longer able to, we used to have, you know, the, the, uh, workshop for democracy
01:06:19.680
or whatever it was called during a world war II, where we just mass produced ships. Well, China's
01:06:24.740
doing that now and it's definitely not for democracy, right? So, um, we need to be able to,
01:06:29.900
to sustain a war if we were to have one. And the concern is that we're not doing that.
01:06:36.300
Meanwhile, uh, our, our reckless spending, uh, is not making us safer. It's not, uh, giving
01:06:44.520
confidence to, uh, our allies either that we are going to be able to really sustain, uh, a, a conflict
01:06:51.600
if one should break out. And so, so that's, I think one of, one of the, um, main concerns here.
01:06:57.220
China is facing some pretty serious economic challenges. Um, but, uh, you know, it, it's,
01:07:05.920
it's coming from a pretty, a pretty low baseline right now. It's still catching up. Um, it's still,
01:07:12.640
you know, it, it just, um, released an economic target, uh, growth target for this year, which
01:07:17.720
is 5%. That would be massive in most countries, but that's the lowest target they've set in,
01:07:24.000
in forever. So, um, that's, uh, you know, they, uh, and they have, they're doing a lot to actually
01:07:31.500
suppress their economic growth because they're trying to restructure their economy. They're
01:07:37.440
cracking down on a lot of sectors. They're trying to eliminate risks. And if push comes to shove,
01:07:43.660
they can back off of some of that to stimulate growth. And if push really comes to shove,
01:07:49.760
um, the economy is just a political tool for China. Uh, it's a tool for political, for the CCP's
01:07:56.980
political power. And so if they have to divert economic resources to the military, it's much
01:08:02.660
easier for them to do that than it is for, for us in a democratic system. Hmm. Now you don't have to
01:08:08.880
be an expert like you are to understand that you cannot attain or maintain power without more people
01:08:16.300
coming up your ranks, children and teenagers and the next generation. And China's one child policy,
01:08:24.720
which was in place for most of those last 50 years we've been talking about has really come
01:08:30.460
back to haunt them. And especially given the preference for boys and how there was, I mean,
01:08:34.480
there was infanticide, there were abortions, there were all sorts of things when it came to
01:08:37.620
birthing baby girls, you've got this very weird, disproportionate situation of men outnumbering
01:08:44.400
women by, I don't know, you probably know the ratio, but it's something alarming. And even the
01:08:48.820
Chinese government now is recognizing that this was folly and that there are going to be real
01:08:55.020
penalties as a result of this, to their economy, to the ability to take care of the aging. How is
01:09:00.500
that one China policy or one China, one child policy, um, you know, rearing results for them now?
01:09:08.560
Well, um, I mean, basically what you just said, I mean, they're, they're struggling now. Um,
01:09:13.600
but well, I should say they're not struggling yet, but they do see the writing on the wall,
01:09:20.220
um, that their workforce is going to decline significantly. And at the same time, you know,
01:09:27.700
they're, um, you know, at the same time, their, their economy is going to, their, their growth is
01:09:33.640
declining as well. And so, yeah, they're going to have a lot fewer, uh, working, uh, age people to
01:09:40.420
support the elderly, which is, which is a challenge for their, their social stability as well. Uh,
01:09:47.640
they are very concerned about that. Now they weren't concerned when the rest of the world was
01:09:52.080
warning them saying, look, you're going to have to do something about this, this one China, one China,
01:09:57.520
this one child policy. Um, but, but now, you know, it is going to have implications for their ability
01:10:03.920
to, to fight a war in the future. Um, um, but, uh, more Chinese people. I mean, like, where are the
01:10:11.980
women? We are still at the point where you need a woman to make a baby. Yes. Yes. And, and, you know,
01:10:18.020
they're, they're trying to incentivize now women to have more babies, but you know, the women really
01:10:22.880
aren't buying it. They're saying, look, you, you didn't let us have babies before. Now you're trying
01:10:28.180
to incentivize to do this or do we just exist to, you know, reproduce at your whim. Um, and so that,
01:10:35.320
you know, it's, it's, that's one of the concerns you're going to face. Wow. That's so interesting.
01:10:40.620
What a bizarre social experiment there they've been in the midst of, and now, you know, as I said,
01:10:46.020
reaping not the rewards, but the punishments from it. Okay. So all of this is very interesting to me.
01:10:51.300
And it, it does help me see what's, what's in the news today in a different light. Like,
01:10:55.840
I don't know about you, but this news that they brokered this, I don't know, should we call it
01:11:02.300
peace with this deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia was big news. It went undercovered over
01:11:10.380
here, but it's, it's huge that they brokered it. It's huge that it happened. It's huge for our friends
01:11:15.620
in Israel who definitely were not rooting for that. Um, you know, Iran wants to wipe Israel off the face
01:11:22.700
of the mat, Iran and, and Israel does not want them to get closer to the Saudis who Israel was
01:11:28.360
hoping it would get closer to in, in the wake of the Abraham accords, which should not include
01:11:32.760
Saudis in any event. So Israel had sort of a hope thanks to the Trump presidency and the Abraham
01:11:37.100
accords that looks less good today than it did, um, a couple of months ago. And so can you speak
01:11:43.540
to that news that China brokered that deal? Yeah. I mean, that's the interesting thing,
01:11:48.700
right. China brokered that deal. Now, uh, the U S wouldn't have been able to broke broker a deal
01:11:53.920
like that. Um, because we don't have relations with Iran, but, um, I think the point here is the
01:11:59.600
U S wouldn't have either. Um, I, you know, I, I don't claim to be a, a, a middle East expert,
01:12:07.280
but I would say that, um, you know, part of me wonders if, if part of this was not Saudi Arabia,
01:12:14.900
uh, really sending a message, uh, to the Biden administration saying, look, um, there's, there's
01:12:22.380
another guy in town as well. We don't have to just do, you know, just, just align with the U S. Um,
01:12:30.340
we do know that, that the relationship has been struggling between the U S and Saudi Arabia,
01:12:35.380
especially under this administration. But, um, I would say, you know, this is really a sign of
01:12:42.080
things to come in China. China saw an opportunity to exert itself, um, in another region of the
01:12:48.680
world to show its leadership, um, and to present its image as, as a great, uh, responsible, uh,
01:12:57.340
leader of, of the international system. And it, it was able to declare a pretty major victory. Now,
01:13:05.160
how big of a difference will, will this deal make in the end? I guess it depends on Saudi Arabia and
01:13:11.900
Iran. But, um, right now what we see is China is very active and we're, we see them also, um,
01:13:19.220
inserting themselves in a little bit more in the, uh, Russia, Ukraine, uh, crisis where they're
01:13:25.520
trying to say, look, we're the responsible ones. We're not selling weapons to anyone.
01:13:30.060
We're calling for peace. And their peace deal is, is a joke to those of us who, who, who actually,
01:13:35.940
actually read it and actually understand, um, how, how international relations works and, and how,
01:13:42.920
how much that deal would really only benefit Russia. But to those countries that are more
01:13:49.560
susceptible to these types of narratives, it really bolsters China's image and they are going to be
01:13:54.960
relentless in, um, in Xi's third term, especially.
01:14:00.040
This, forgive this question because it's just so tired, but I am curious. Do you think this would
01:14:08.120
be happening if president Trump were in office?
01:14:13.040
Well, that's a really good question. Um, you know, I, I am, I'm not so sure that, that what happened,
01:14:23.660
uh, in the middle East would be happening if, if Trump were in office. I do have to say though,
01:14:28.540
that what Xi is doing in China, he would be doing that anyway. So he didn't have a good
01:14:35.960
second term in office as far as, um, I mean, he had a great second term as far as consolidating his
01:14:41.200
power goes, but, um, as far as the, his, uh, you know, what he wanted to do on the international
01:14:47.200
stage, he was locked down in China for most of that time. China, uh, China, uh, was dealing with
01:14:53.340
its own problems, um, and didn't do as much, uh, diplomatically as he would have liked. And so now
01:15:00.460
he's really, he's, he's coming out swinging from his, uh, you know, winning his third term over the
01:15:07.240
party last fall and now over the state winning the presidency again. And so that would be happening
01:15:13.500
no matter who's in power. Uh, China would be a challenge no matter who the president was, but,
01:15:19.480
but I am sure we would have, um, more coherent, uh, uh, policies if, if Trump were still in office.
01:15:27.580
And I think some of the huge blunders that, that Biden has made that have hurt the U S standing like
01:15:33.680
Afghanistan and whatnot, I, I'm pretty sure would not have gone down the way they did.
01:15:39.520
You're an expert on Xi and China and so on. We had somebody on yesterday who used to work at
01:15:44.700
treasury and worked on a George W Bush. Um, and who said the reason he thinks we need to stay
01:15:50.540
involved actively in Ukraine is if we are to cut and run there, if we're going to abandon
01:15:56.200
that conflict and just sort of say, Oh, well, you know, just live with the borders as they are and
01:15:59.880
buy, it will signal weakness to Xi and it will be provocative to him in a way we don't want.
01:16:06.580
Um, to, to an extent I do. Yes. Um, I, you know, China only understands, um, power. They don't really
01:16:17.440
understand this whole, you know, let's all get along. They, they talk the talk, but, but they,
01:16:22.260
they understand power. And, um, if the U S is showing weakness, uh, it, it, it does sort of open
01:16:31.160
the door for Xi to do more diplomatically, especially, uh, abroad. Now China has not been
01:16:38.200
reckless, um, in, in using its military like Russia does. Russia is the reckless partner in
01:16:44.820
that partnership, but, um, China, uh, is much more careful, but it's, uh, it's very active
01:16:53.700
diplomatically. And now to an extent that would be happening anyway, but there would probably be more
01:16:59.620
pushback, um, under, you know, a, a, a stronger administration.
01:17:06.540
We haven't talked about Taiwan, Tik TOK, or a number of other things. And we'll do that right
01:17:10.680
after this quick, quick break. This is so interesting, Michael. Thank you so much for
01:17:13.760
being here. Stand by, uh, more after this. Michael Cunningham of the heritage foundation is here. He is
01:17:21.560
an expert on all things China. Um, so let's go through a few of them, Russia and China getting closer and
01:17:26.720
closer. Pretty much everyone is concerned. The polls show that while Americans weren't that concerned
01:17:32.280
about Xi winning a third term, uh, the majority into the 60% are worried about this alliance getting
01:17:38.420
tighter and tighter. Are they right to be? Yeah, uh, absolutely. Um, I mean, China, China and Russia
01:17:45.020
are not allies. Um, that's for sure. They're, they're partners, they're strategic partners and their,
01:17:51.040
their partnership is to an end. They, uh, they are both very uncomfortable with us global leadership.
01:17:58.260
They both want to see a world order that is not dominated by, by America. Um, and so that's what
01:18:05.880
they're really working together on. And they're both very much dedicated to that. And whereas, you know,
01:18:12.560
there's question as to, to how coordinated they are, um, they, and probably not too coordinated,
01:18:20.460
except they have similar, um, uh, goals and objectives, but, uh, they do, they are sort of
01:18:26.700
complementary to each other. Russia tends to be more. How are we supposed to disrupt that, Michael?
01:18:30.560
Well, it's, it's, it's quite difficult. Um, we, I mean, partly, um, to an extent, there's really not
01:18:43.220
anything we can do because they are dedicated to the same, um, the same goal, but at the same time,
01:18:50.880
um, you know, if, if it's possible to somehow drive a wedge between them, but that's, that's quite
01:18:56.140
difficult. I, I, um, that would take, um, people with much more, uh, brilliant, uh, intel on the
01:19:03.860
ground in Russia and Russia's and China's, uh, political circles than, than most of us have
01:19:09.520
to, to decide whether and how that's possible. What, how does Taiwan play into all of this?
01:19:15.660
Because more and more people predicting with our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,
01:19:20.800
with what's happening in Ukraine, and we're focused over there, the odds are higher than ever.
01:19:25.560
That conflict will happen between China and Taiwan. And we've said already our president
01:19:29.960
explicitly that we would get involved in that if he were to do it. Yeah, I believe we would. Um,
01:19:35.400
and so, so Taiwan, uh, the, the likelihood of conflict is, uh, rising, uh, and it has risen
01:19:44.180
quite dramatically over the past several years, the past seven years, uh, especially. Um, but that's,
01:19:51.040
um, that's, that's, that's more because of, uh, China's sort of, um, that they're, well,
01:19:59.100
the militarization of the Taiwan Strait more than anything, China's activities, China's military,
01:20:05.080
uh, provocations there that, um, the, the, the possibility of escalation and miscalculation
01:20:14.040
on either side becomes much higher. As far as, uh, some plan to take Taiwan goes, uh, China fully
01:20:22.060
expects to take control of Taiwan at some point, but we have to remember they are much smarter
01:20:28.040
about this than a country like Russia is. They are very calculating. And the way they see it
01:20:33.780
is that the U S and the West are declining as powers and China is rising and the time is on China's side.
01:20:42.360
And that if they can just stay out of a fight right now, then they will be able to take Taiwan
01:20:48.020
without even firing a shot at some point in the future. They are playing a long game. Um, and I do
01:20:55.520
know that, you know, some in the U S are saying, well, their, their window of opportunity is going to
01:21:00.040
close at some point. Um, that may be true. I don't subscribe to that idea, but the most important
01:21:06.360
thing is Beijing doesn't subscribe to that idea. They believe that, that, um, that, you know, they
01:21:13.160
cannot afford to go after Taiwan and lose it. But if, if they have 100% certainty that they are going
01:21:21.920
to succeed, that is when they would make a move. Wow. I mean, this is just like, they're so smart and
01:21:28.300
strategic in everything they do. And we just don't feel that way. I don't mean to underestimate
01:21:32.900
the United States. I realize we have, we also have some smart people who are watching this and
01:21:37.380
calculating the risk, but it just feels that they are way more cunning than we are.
01:21:44.220
Yeah, absolutely. Cunning. I think is the perfect word to describe them.
01:21:48.940
Oh, so let's talk about Tik TOK. Cause that's something that a hundred million Americans use.
01:21:53.660
Uh, we do not have it in our house. We don't let our kids use any social media.
01:21:58.300
Um, and, and that's in part, you know, uh, the Tik TOK thing is in part because you don't know
01:22:03.240
who's going to be accessing the data. You know, they have these parental controls and so on that
01:22:07.600
they tried to push where you can try to limit who who's got access to what your kid is doing and so
01:22:12.420
on. But it's a much bigger problem than that. And today, uh, it's in the news that the, that we may
01:22:18.420
actually be insisting that bite dance, the Chinese owner of Tik TOK sell off the, the U S arm of it,
01:22:27.720
or there were going to ban it in the United States. I mean, to me, it seems impossible
01:22:31.540
that the Biden administration, I mean, it could be a bi, a bipartisan thing. Uh, there's now a bill
01:22:36.820
introduced by, uh, bipartisan senators to sever the relationship. And it, like, it just seems
01:22:42.420
impossible that they would say to the American people, a hundred million of whom want to follow
01:22:45.520
this account. It's gone. You can't anymore. Like, could that actually happen?
01:22:51.240
Well, it needs to happen. Hopefully it does. But I mean, there, you know, there, there are the two,
01:22:58.480
two risks here. One is just the content and, you know, that's a social media risk. Anyway,
01:23:03.340
you're very smart, Megan, not to have, not to let your kids use social media. I mean, we see what
01:23:08.120
happens with, um, with, uh, Tik TOK and, and these other really other social media that, that kids are
01:23:14.180
on. But, um, two is you mentioned the data issue. That's a huge risk. It's, it's a national
01:23:20.820
security risk. It's a data security risk. Um, but I, I think, you know, you're, you're right to
01:23:26.780
question it as well. You mentioned the, um, the, uh, uh, the bill, the bipartisan bill that's out
01:23:34.100
there right now. It, it essentially, it doesn't force the government to do anything with regards
01:23:40.260
to Tik TOK. It gives them power to, it gives the commerce secretary power, but the current commerce
01:23:46.000
secretary is on, on record saying the politician in me thinks you're going to literally lose every
01:23:52.700
voter under 35 forever if you, uh, ban Tik TOK. So, you know, when, when political expediency is,
01:24:00.720
is driving policy that really pulls into question whether, um, as such, such an act would actually,
01:24:08.400
would actually work. Right. Would we do it? And so you've got the bipartisan bill in the Senate
01:24:13.360
trying to give more power to the administration to make sweeping moves, which is with respect to
01:24:19.780
Tik TOK. And then you've got a report in the wall street journal yesterday, which now several news
01:24:24.360
outlets have confirmed that the Biden administration is threatening a potential ban on Tik TOK in the
01:24:29.540
United States right now. If the Chinese owners refuse to sell their stakes in the American arm of
01:24:35.180
it, um, they say that these talks have been going on for years, that it was not reportedly a final
01:24:40.940
order by Joe Biden to the Chinese. And that, um, the, the Chinese are denying that Tik TOK poses any
01:24:48.320
sort of a risk to the national security of the United States. How does it, how does it, if nothing
01:24:53.840
happens and, and, you know, bite dance continues its ownership in this Tik TOK that we're all using
01:24:58.800
over here, what's going to, what is happening to compromise national security?
01:25:02.940
Yeah. So, um, they are able to access, for example. Um, so I say they, I mean, bite dance people in China
01:25:13.580
are able to access, uh, American user data. Um, the news that has come out is really with the click of a
01:25:21.360
button. Um, and who is bite dance really? Okay. Bite dance is a privately owned Chinese company, but they
01:25:30.060
were so successful and they're in such a, a sensitive area in China. You know, they, they deal
01:25:35.160
with media, um, connecting people, information, uh, the, the Chinese communist party could not,
01:25:42.660
not take a piece of that. So what they did was they, they bought, they forced the company to sell
01:25:48.140
them a golden share. It's called a golden share. It's 1% ownership, but they, they get a board member.
01:25:55.460
Uh, they get to appoint someone to sit on the board. Um, and then that, that, uh, with that board seat,
01:26:02.820
they also get veto power. So they have the communist party through the government entity that, that has a
01:26:09.860
stake, they actually wield incredible influence. And given that they have, um, access to American user
01:26:16.500
data as well, um, they, you know, bite dance being a Chinese company, it is required by law to hand over
01:26:25.180
any data that the communist or that, sorry, that the government, uh, demands of them. Um, and so,
01:26:32.200
you know, any number of things could happen. We talk about Americans with security clearances now,
01:26:37.300
or in the future, uh, that, uh, China needs, uh, the ability, they, they need information so that they
01:26:44.760
can compromise them. We're talking, uh, uh, government officials, uh, in America who we know
01:26:51.660
several of them are, are on, uh, tick tock. So lots of risks. I do want to say though, um, would,
01:26:59.120
uh, a sale of, of, uh, tick tock from bite dance to, um, to an American owner, would that make any
01:27:08.060
difference? Well, according to tick tock, it wouldn't pick talk actually has come, has come out
01:27:13.980
and they said, um, uh, um, they said that, well, they just said it won't make any difference. Um,
01:27:22.040
it will not fix the national security issue. They have their own proposal, which seems like a half
01:27:26.960
measure. Hmm. It really makes, so what should we be rooting for? Because there isn't some clear
01:27:33.200
solution where we get to use tick tock, but we don't have to worry about Chinese infiltration of our
01:27:38.420
private data. Yeah. I mean, really we should be rooting for banning tick tock. I don't see another
01:27:44.380
way around it. And, you know, I know a lot of young people would be disappointed by that, but they
01:27:49.480
probably thank us at some point in the future. I mean, it's, it's rotting their brains. It's,
01:27:54.300
it's like, well, you know what else? As some American company would come up with the identical
01:27:58.480
version that doesn't, that's not owned and controlled by the Chinese. That's how capitalism works
01:28:03.480
for better or for worse. Um, let's talk about energy. Okay. Because, uh, there was this
01:28:08.620
bizarre, bizarre statement by Jennifer Granholm the other day who suggested that what we really
01:28:14.540
need to do is applaud China and, and take a look at, at China's example when it comes to cleaning up
01:28:20.000
our energy problem. I mean, China really, um, here's what she said, and then we can get into it.
01:28:27.860
The countries all are susceptible to pressure, to peer pressure. They don't want to be the outlier.
01:28:32.900
I mean, there's a couple of countries that we know are outliers and don't care, but, but I think
01:28:36.420
China has done, um, has been very sensitive and has actually invested a lot in their solutions, uh,
01:28:44.660
to achieve their goals. So we're, we're hopeful that, you know, we can all learn from what China
01:28:50.640
is doing, but the amount of money that they're investing in clean energy is actually, you know,
01:28:55.640
uh, encouraging. We can all learn from what China is doing when it comes to green energy.
01:29:02.700
China, you know what they're doing? They're building six times more new coal plants than
01:29:06.400
other countries. What, what is happening there? Well, um, I have to agree that we can learn from
01:29:14.420
what China is doing. What is China doing? They have an abundance of coal. That's, um, that
01:29:21.840
traditionally been how they got a lot of their energy and they started to move towards cleaner
01:29:28.380
energy, not necessarily so-called, you know, not necessarily renewable energy, but they started
01:29:34.760
to move towards cleaner solutions like natural gas and whatnot. And they found that they were having
01:29:40.480
problems with their energy security. Uh, kids in schools in Northern China were, were having to go
01:29:47.680
to school without heating because they just didn't have the energy resources for it. And so what we're
01:29:52.380
seeing is China is recognizing that they have, that the energy security is national security and that
01:30:00.760
they have to use the resources that they have. And so they're, they're, uh, really tapping into those coal
01:30:08.200
resources. Meanwhile, in the U S what we're doing is we could be energy independent. We have abundant
01:30:15.380
oil and gas resources. And instead of using those resources, what we're saying is, you know, uh, we
01:30:22.380
have to transition completely away from that. And we have to move over to these, uh, renewable resources
01:30:29.860
that, Oh, by the way, China, uh, controls the supply chains for these resources. So we're going from,
01:30:36.040
uh, being essentially having the capacity to be pretty independent as far as our energy resources go to being
01:30:45.020
dependent on China, which, which I think is, is not something that China would do if they were in
01:30:51.840
our place. They're showing us that they take their energy security seriously. So from, from that
01:30:57.080
perspective, yeah, we can learn from them. Yeah. You'd think the energy secretary would know better.
01:31:02.700
I'm not sure if that was a pander. Uh, Josh Rogan of the Washington post had a great piece on how the
01:31:07.160
state department more and more seems to be pandering to China, cleaning up its language. Instead of saying
01:31:11.940
China's doing this on human rights, they talk about East Asia, um, and saying it's a problem. Like we, we need
01:31:17.320
to stay tough on them and we need to be honest about who they are and what they're doing and not trying to prop
01:31:22.400
them up, whether it's when it comes to their not green energy plan, um, or what the state department is
01:31:28.300
doing. It's kind of interesting. Uh, I, I need to ask you about what's happening on the COVID
01:31:32.560
investigation because in a pretty extraordinary development, you've got the entire U S Congress voting
01:31:40.560
to declassify the, the investigation into the origins of COVID and to tell the American people
01:31:47.240
what we know about how this thing started, lab leak, natural origin, whatever it is.
01:31:53.000
Karine Jean-Pierre was asked whether Joe Biden is prepared to sign that legislation. It's almost not
01:31:57.860
even important other than politically because with these kinds of numbers, they'll override his veto if
01:32:03.260
he, if he vetoes it. Um, but it is interesting the position he's in and why they're not saying
01:32:09.700
explicitly, of course, he'll sign it raises questions too. If they do, if, if we get this,
01:32:16.020
if we get this declassification of all documents, uh, relating to the origins of COVID, do you think
01:32:23.140
it's going to get us anywhere given how secretive the Chinese have been, how hard they are for it to
01:32:27.540
infiltrate, how even the FBI's assessment that it was a lab leak was only moderate. The energy
01:32:32.920
department said, um, was it energy? I'm trying to remember, um, said low confidence. So do you think
01:32:40.380
it matters? Well, um, I will say it matters from the public health standpoint. It is very important
01:32:49.240
that we know how the, the, um, the, the virus started, but from the hold China accountable
01:32:56.120
standpoint, I think it's a distraction to be honest. Um, so, uh, by all means, you know, they, they should,
01:33:02.900
uh, pass this bill. It's very important. Our, our Biden should sign it. Um, but, uh, will it make a
01:33:10.180
difference as far as, uh, holding China accountable? No, because China is not going to be transparent
01:33:17.020
enough. Whatever we managed to get, whatever, um, evidence we managed to have, uh, that we don't get
01:33:23.380
directly from China. They're going to say, oh, that's falsified. That's not true. Whereas in
01:33:28.500
reality, who is responsible for, for the pandemic? Well, regardless of the origins, it's China. It
01:33:36.900
could have come from a bat. It could have come from Mars, but either way, China is the one that,
01:33:43.820
that clamped down on information that covered it up at the beginning that turned a localized
01:33:48.500
outbreak into a pandemic. You know, there have been lab leaks in China before stars escaped from
01:33:55.600
Chinese labs multiple times and never did it turn into a pandemic. The reason is they took it
01:34:03.120
seriously. They, they clamped down on it. They nipped it at, they nipped the infection at the bud.
01:34:10.060
And what we saw this time was whistleblowers that came out and they just said, Hey, everyone be careful.
01:34:15.940
You know, just doctors speaking among themselves, be careful. There's a, a new, uh, SARS like virus
01:34:23.600
out there. Um, they were silenced by the, the Chinese government. Um, that is, and, and then they
01:34:30.740
were not forthcoming to the international community. They knew it was trans transmitted from human to
01:34:35.780
human way before they admitted that. And so that's really how we ended up with the pandemic that we have
01:34:41.980
today. China is responsible regardless of origins. And so I do think we shouldn't be focusing only on
01:34:48.380
the origin of the virus, but the origin of the pandemic as well. All right, tough assignment,
01:34:53.720
but in the last 30, 40 seconds, we have sum it up. How should we be thinking about China in America?
01:35:00.220
Um, well, we, we, we need to demand that, um, uh, more, more action and less talk, less tough talk
01:35:10.820
and more effective bipartisan action from our lawmakers. Good luck with that. I do not feel
01:35:19.500
hopeful, but I am enlightened. Thanks to you, Michael. Thank you so much. Really appreciate the
01:35:24.180
discussion. Thanks a lot, Megan. Uh, all right. So tomorrow I want to tell you that
01:35:29.660
we are coming back with the guys from the fifth column and we have so much goodness to discuss
01:35:36.100
with them. There are so many topics, uh, that we've been sort of going over with, uh, over with each
01:35:40.940
other, uh, in reserve for them. So I think you're really going to enjoy tomorrow's show. Don't forget
01:35:45.300
to tune in. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.