Sam Cooper is the author of Willful Blindness and an investigative journalist who s gone to explain to us in no uncertain terms what s gone on in China infiltrating the West with its money, its power, and its chicanery.
00:16:36.340it's a super interesting question i would agree that trump's rhetoric
00:16:41.860moved the dial in some ways uh but really the the reality is that
00:16:46.900trump's rhetoric was only sort of publicizing what had already
00:16:51.700been the position of uh the national security
00:16:55.780community in the united states the political community
00:16:59.540uh maybe maybe more so uh well the military certainly but it really was a bipartisan issue
00:17:07.140in the united states that's not to say there's there's huge capture in in u.s politics the same
00:17:13.860way there is in canadian politics from chinese interference through business elites but it
00:17:19.700really there was a bipartisan understanding even before uh trump started banging the table on china
00:17:26.420in a more, and this makes sense, you know, in a more diplomatic and perhaps a bit more
00:17:33.140intelligent way, Obama was making the same points, but behind closed doors.
00:17:39.040Certainly, Obama didn't take the strong countermeasures and the banging of the table
00:17:45.220that Trump did. He was going in that direction, maybe too slowly. But yes, Trump did move the
00:17:50.080style. Some would argue that his rhetoric really for a while put the American society, at least
00:18:00.220half of it, on its back foot because they say this is coming from Trump. It can't be true.
00:18:05.380So now that we have President Biden clearly moving in the same direction, really, let's
00:18:11.240understand this. If you want to use the word deep state or simply institutional movement in the
00:18:17.560United States was already moving away from China and realizing that the strategy of the past 300.91
00:18:25.260years, that the West will engage China in trade and moderate China to be more like the West,
00:18:31.880open and free and living by the rule of law. The opposite happened, unfortunately. China has0.99
00:18:38.500moderated the West to a position where people look at the response to the pandemic and think
00:18:44.600maybe we need to be much more authoritarian because China has seemed to come out of this0.80
00:18:49.980disaster, you know, in some ways in a better shape. But in a Canadian context, I would say that
00:18:56.520certainly some people were listening to Trump, but I think more important in Canada was the
00:19:01.920hostage taking of the two Michaels in response to the Meng Wanzhou arrest. I believe that if you
00:19:08.360want to say that the common woman and man looked at that and suddenly it became very clear that
00:19:13.600Here's a state that has no compunction with any activity, really, if they don't get their way or if they think that Canada does something that they don't like.
00:19:27.860And, you know, once that happens, then people, perhaps it's very interesting.
00:19:32.460Now we have, you know, more reporting on the genocide in Xinjiang.
00:19:36.920What if people started to pay attention to the reality that organ harvesting of minorities and religious groups in China is real?0.93
00:19:45.860This is not, you know, some Falun Gong poster.
00:19:48.280uh so i do think that popular understanding of the nature the true nature of the chinese state
00:19:55.660has moved uh way beyond uh in canada to a political response that you might expect with
00:20:03.160that level of popular understanding and and to that end we have that popular understanding but
00:20:10.080if at least some of america's elites as much as many of them are still happy to make money
00:20:14.460in china and and through their dealings with china i mean the biden administration being
00:20:18.440no exception obviously uh his son uh very closely tied to certain elements of the of the chinese
00:20:24.520money system and how it moves around the world but nonetheless outside of that if at least the
00:20:29.680united states is is slumbering towards a kind of kind of reconciliation there and to finally kind
00:20:35.920of assert itself it seems like canada is nowhere near it economic nationalism in canada has just
00:20:41.040not been a a key plank of any party for a long time even the harper conservatives didn't do a
00:20:47.840good job of articulating it and again there doesn't seem to be this strong rhetoric in canada
00:20:52.840anywhere in any leadership about we must do something about china i i think there's been
00:20:58.040an allusion to it from erin o'toole once or twice before that uh again harper harper was strong
00:21:04.840against Putin, but he made several trips to China. Where is that ardor in the Canadian
00:21:11.060political sphere? Or are all of our politicians bullied or bought into basically the Beijing
00:21:16.940realm of influence? In the United States, the interesting fact here is that members of what
00:21:26.480we'll call the pro-Huawei or pro-Beijing political and business elite in Eastern Canada openly were
00:21:33.780saying and messaging that we're waiting for President Trump to lose. We're waiting for
00:21:39.260Biden to come in. And at that point, we hope or even believe that the U.S. will soften its stance
00:21:46.940on barring Huawei or Chinese tech companies, which anyone that's watching closely knows are
00:21:54.620military and intelligence linked. That's the Western intelligence. The opposite happened.
00:21:59.060Biden kept going in the same direction and just last week took further measures that any Chinese military-linked companies, U.S. investors will be barred from dealing with them.
00:22:11.280So the state in the United States has moved to, as you say, economic naturalism or national security has come to the forefront where there's a realization that supply chains need, you know, they need to be based in North America.
00:22:29.700Nothing has made that more clear than the pandemic and PPE drainage that went to China.
00:22:36.620And your point about where's that rhetoric or even that high-level strategic thinking
00:22:43.900in Canada, I do think you're right that Canadian leaders that have tried to put out that message
00:22:50.100so far have not seen it get any traction too easily.
00:22:55.760It's rejected as somehow populist or somehow discordant with political attitudes in Canada.
00:23:04.400And it's difficult to understand because maybe what you mentioned about the Canadian common
00:23:09.940voters starting to understand the nature of the Chinese state and its plans for Canada,
00:23:16.980it hasn't yet moved to that more strategic level of thinking where if you have those
00:23:22.400thoughts, you need to start to consider that Canada needs to start looking at the Arctic.
00:23:28.740Canada needs to secure its resources, rare earths.
00:23:32.880needs to produce its own ppe should there be another disaster and it'll be interesting with
00:23:39.120the coming federal election if that sort of strategic thinking and message makes it to the
00:23:44.800top or you know how these campaigns go it might get rolled out in week one and and then get consumed
00:23:50.960by um some distraction about culture wars and never come up again so i'll be interested to
00:23:56.160watch that i'll be interested to watch that as well again just for our listenership and our
00:24:01.760viewers we're speaking with sam cooper author of willful blindness how a network of narcos tycoons
00:24:08.400and ccp agents infiltrated the west uh for those who are viewing uh here it is and that's the cover0.57
00:24:14.160of the book i do purchase it where you can get it the the question becomes in my mind though if if
00:24:20.960canada can't articulate a non a non chinese orientation and think about itself hey we could0.93
00:24:29.360we could try and do something without the cpp you know basically or sorry ccp uh deciding deciding
00:24:36.720which way we're going to vote on this or influencing our elections or influencing uh our resources and
00:24:42.800trying to and causing sewing division inside of inside of our political sphere if that if that1.00
00:24:48.560rhetoric doesn't come to the fore sam it it does seem in many respects like canada well it would
00:24:54.640the complaint was always we were a vassal state of the americans that was the complaint to the 60s
00:24:59.28070s and 80s now ever since the cold war ended you know there's kind of a more even footing
00:25:05.360through the free trade system though i have my own complaints about that but now into the 21st century
00:25:09.600it's very clear canada is beholden to its to to the communist party in china and and what and what
00:25:17.440it can do to us economically very quickly if we don't do exactly what they say with our coal
00:25:22.400shipments and with are allowing them to buy into real estate what is there a path out what what
00:25:28.320would that look like if if our political leaders actually grew a backbone on this issue first of
00:25:34.720all i i totally agree with your historical analysis that if you want to call it the laurentian elite
00:25:40.400the you know this describes group of uh business leaders politicians and lawyers
00:25:47.120you know in ottawa and montreal and quebec city uh if they they're clearly there was
00:25:54.560you know an a movement around the trudeau senior that the united states is has has much to say in
00:26:02.560canadian affairs canada should start to start to grow a backbone and assert its own way in the
00:26:08.720world as naive as that may have been with the understanding that north america militarily
00:26:15.840can't be separated um they there was sort of a an intellectual or business movement that
00:26:22.560by trading with china we get some leverage i'm using we thinking uh you know their voice and
00:26:29.760and canada grows into a full-grown nation and and can ask for more at the table uh at these
00:26:36.240international meetings but as we've said or as i said that the opposite of what was hoped
00:26:43.280you know it was happening in washington too of course uh even with nixon and kissinger what was
00:26:49.200hoped the engagement of china would make them more democratic the opposite has happened and
00:26:54.320the west has had to has had to swing and and realize that our our principal foundations our
00:27:01.520freedoms are being used against us geopolitically by a state that won't budge because if you think
00:27:07.520about it, the Chinese Communist Party cannot budge at all because its survival depends on
00:27:14.400the most extreme form of authoritarianism. So it's not going to happen what was hoped
00:27:19.200with Trudeau Sr. And yes, what would it look like for Canada to realize that was wrong,
00:27:26.960it failed? I do think there's an understanding in Ottawa that a pivot, if not underway,
00:27:34.160has to occur and really the the only way that it could occur is first realizing that as much as
00:27:40.800you'd have to admit that united states is the leader of the free world australia has already
00:27:45.840recognized that their security and freedom and sovereignty depends on that that sort of compact
00:27:52.400and canada would have to move in the same direction and say if we rely if we have to rely
00:27:58.240less on trade with China. If this direction we've been going is the wrong one, simply it means
00:28:04.660building up more trade, increasing trade with people of a like mind in Europe and Australia,
00:28:11.040New Zealand that are going in the direction of forming even deeper and stronger trade and
00:28:17.700military alliances and just realizing it in some ways it is a zero-sum game because in China's0.97
00:28:25.660mind. It's a zero sum game. You're either with them or against them. And Canada would have to
00:28:30.600actively decide, well, it's going to have to be against. And that means building up and going
00:28:35.680the same direction that Australia has already started leading. Yes, yes. It's always kind of
00:28:41.760bizarre. It seems like we're always in Orwell's brain at some point during the day, depending on
00:28:46.760who's talking or what's being preached from various pulpits. But I guess it is Oceania for0.71
00:28:51.820the win hopefully here against the far east perhaps nonetheless uh i think i think in this
00:28:57.740in this moment it's something that we need to talk about then is the pandemic and what happened
00:29:02.380with the virus and everything that ensued um you know you come into 2019 end of 2019 beginning of
00:29:08.7802020 the american economy is soaring in ways it hasn't since basically the 1960s certainly the
00:29:15.180the Reagan revolution of the 80s. You have record low unemployment. You have people seriously
00:29:22.720wondering how President Trump could ever be knocked off his re-election bid. His poll numbers
00:29:29.460were strong. The Democratic contenders look completely disorganized. And finally, of course,
00:29:34.400the world in general, things finally look like they might be looking up since 2008, since the
00:29:39.760great crash and and uh and the great recession suddenly a virus appears and it and it infiltrates
00:29:47.840everything it it scares you know people to no end it shuts down economies it causes entire changes
00:29:56.200in lifestyle in a matter of seconds in a way that even the great even the great wars didn't
00:30:01.860what what happened here without without trying to impute even motive necessarily or to
00:30:07.480theorize in any kind of conspiratorial way, though I give you free reign to say there, Sam.
00:30:13.280What happened, and how did all of that strategy come together,
00:30:19.500and how did China benefit from what was either a very well-placed mistake,
00:30:25.180or whatever did happen, they definitely knew how to move faster than we did
00:30:29.200and take advantage of the situation better than we did.
00:30:33.080Right, without looking at any questions about origins,
00:30:36.600it is clear. What do we have here? It's undisputed based on the evidence now that
00:30:44.620the virus was moving in Wuhan in southern China much earlier than China admitted. We know that
00:30:54.800Western nations, Trump's nation included, were suckered. There were people in intelligence
00:31:03.600that were warning you need to be ready, something big is coming.
00:31:08.240And I'm sure it's not easy to move fast and move first,
00:31:12.260but the West was too trusting of what the party was saying in Beijing.
00:31:18.640And so we know that the virus was out and moving months earlier
00:36:29.100They're not interested in any kind of overt political activity.
00:36:32.280They just want to help increase knowledge on some subject.
00:36:36.820And when you find out that some of these people are actually actors and state apparatchiks,
00:36:43.920indeed deeply involved in intelligence operations,
00:36:47.500one has to sit there and wonder, where does it stop? Where does it end?
00:36:51.920We talked about a travel ban for lots of other things.
00:36:55.180Maybe we need to tell our own university professors to come home
00:36:58.280and not practice in other labs around the world
00:37:00.560and tell other people who are practicing in labs here,
00:37:02.980I'm sorry, but you're being sent home. Your visa is revoked.
00:37:05.940And this is what you've said raises the thought in my mind that if we look at it broadly, this question falls into, you know, the whole terms of engagement of the West with China was based on this idea that our concepts like democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, academic freedom would in some way be reciprocated all the while.
00:37:32.400And I say this not as my opinion, but direct quotes from people I've interviewed, such as former CSIS director Ward Elcock, China has a mass collection vacuum strategy and has for decades where that doesn't mean that every scientist that travels from China into Canada will be used or will be an actor in China's scheme.
00:37:57.500What it means with China's sort of military-civilian fusion concept is
00:38:03.640anyone could be directed from China or pressured in Canada,
00:38:12.480and it'll be up to that individual to sort of run from that system
00:38:16.520where they're asked to collect from China.
00:38:19.100So it's a position where Western academics will say,
00:38:25.200well I have academic freedom and this is about sharing for a vaccine to protect all of humankind
00:38:32.120you know this kind of research and I do think we're in the position where it's not what I think
00:38:39.220it's what my conversations with intelligence you know experts or people that are actually
00:38:44.980inside intelligence say they have to tell people in Canadian universities you can talk about
00:38:51.980academic freedom, but if you're on the other end of sharing something that comes back to harm
00:38:56.760your society, maybe even your family, how are you going to feel about that? Maybe you need to change
00:39:02.160or shift your understanding of what academic freedom means if the people you're working with
00:39:08.000are coming from a whole different mindset, which is collection to benefit the Chinese People's0.98
00:39:14.620Liberation Army. And that, you know, this comes from documents. This is not guessing at what
00:39:20.520China's up to. This is what they're up to. I think that something that needs to be1.00
00:39:26.260clarified here as well is that when it comes to this question of what happened out of Wuhan,
00:39:33.500and when it comes to the question of what happened through what we're calling the pandemic,
00:39:38.580one of the things that became very clear is that authoritarian measures could come into play in
00:39:44.620the West very quickly. And while we weren't prepared at the beginning, we eventually,
00:39:50.500whatever we caught up with in the end, we've seen people prosecuted, jailed. We've seen freedom of
00:39:57.880speech curtailed. We've seen liberties eliminated or drastically reduced. And kind of a total word
00:40:06.580salad come out of leadership everywhere, expert or not, whether we're talking about provincial
00:40:11.460health officers, premiers, prime ministers, national health officers. Of course, we know that
00:40:17.840out of the World Health Organization, they were shilling for the Communist Party of China
00:40:23.660at the beginning. They're shilling for them now. They're still covering for what happened and how
00:40:28.940much the Chinese government knew as the pandemic began. Again, it all creates a great amount of1.00
00:40:35.980doubt in the system, but there seems to be an irony there because whether you want to believe
00:40:40.420what the communist party was doing or not they got what they wanted in the end there couldn't be
00:40:46.180probably more division in the west and more mistrust between joe citizen and his his uh the
00:40:53.060experts that he has supposedly elected to rule him or have been selected by the elected to rule
00:40:58.100uh he there couldn't be more division do you think china gained uh out of this this situation
00:41:04.420whatever wherever the virus came from that they definitely made large gains here
00:41:10.420It's a fluid situation, geopolitics, but clearly what occurred, even if this is a
00:41:17.380natural accident, even if it was purely, you know, let's assume even at high levels in
00:41:26.240China's government, everything was accidental in the first few months.
00:41:31.760There was nothing intentional even in covering this up, which, let's be clear, that's not
00:46:06.080So what has changed is that, yes, the level of brazenness and the openness about China's0.74
00:46:13.340intentions are now clear for anyone to see and for Canadians to understand with the two
00:46:18.540michael's uh in jail and and essentially in sort of torture conditions but that was always the
00:46:25.440direction going back decades it's just a lot easier to see now and i i feel like we canadians
00:46:32.220you know we can be as outraged as we want to be but but the first step to any any kind of uh
00:46:37.020intelligent recovery on some of these counts is to admit when you've been wrong or admit when you
00:46:41.160missed something and it and it appears that we did so we missed we missed this we should have
00:46:46.260done better we should have known what was coming and in a way we have to do a mea culpa on our own
00:46:50.840first before throwing blame anywhere else because because we're still not admitting to ourselves and
00:46:56.740being honest even about our own leadership and their lack of leadership in this area so so if
00:47:02.620canadians wanted to have a kind of kind of you know come to reality moment and and a moment of
00:47:09.520clarity here and be honest with themselves and say you know what we've made mistakes we've gotten
00:47:14.480into bed you know we've gotten into bed with the devil you know we have we have we've shook hands
00:47:18.940with the devil and made and made a deal that we shouldn't have how do we get out of this what what
00:47:23.840do you think that would look like in a popular sense what would what would people on the ground
00:47:28.300floor be doing to try and eventually influence the people who make the decisions to make different
00:47:33.540decisions on a popular level it would take you know the the grain lobby in in saskatchewan or
00:47:42.200just being the average farmer and his family up in Prince George, or people that realize that
00:47:50.520their standard of living in some ways, due to the policy decisions in Ottawa
00:47:58.200of the past decade, does rely on trade with China. But they would have to say,
00:48:05.580first of all, that they would have to recognize that it hasn't gone the way that their leaders
00:48:11.800would have liked. And they would have to go to their leaders and say, you have to seek other
00:48:18.520trading relationships and realize that that will mean a straight up reduction like Australia has0.96
00:48:25.720experienced and maybe some pain. You might not even know how it turns out. The quality of life
00:48:32.460could perhaps even be better in terms of your local economies in some areas. But would there
00:48:39.760be a realization that China's plans for Canada mean that if you don't make that change and have
00:48:46.280that realization, literally in 10, 20 years, if China gets its way, they will have a lot of0.84
00:48:53.920politicians at high levels in any political body in Canada. That's their goal. They don't want
00:49:01.560parliamentarians in Ottawa to stand up and vote that there was a genocide in Xinjiang or to put
00:49:07.500the Olympics in doubt. They want politicians at all levels that are saying and singing China's0.94
00:49:15.340line. So it would take the realization, first, we've discussed that it seems that the common
00:49:20.360voter is not happy with Canada's direction and engagement with China. They want some sort of
00:49:26.460change. They might have to realize that there'll have to be some belt tightening and some hard0.92
00:49:31.280decisions. And they would have to tell their politicians, we realize that and we're ready for
00:49:36.440that. So that's sort of putting together, you know, what those family dinner table conversations
00:49:42.220and understandings with the geopolitics that is out of, you know, there's a misalignment we're
00:49:49.360talking about between what Canada's leaders are doing and how the average person feels about
00:49:54.680being bullied at really at all levels by China. And indeed, indeed, all levels by China. It's0.77
00:50:03.420interesting because of course there is uh there there are of course sister cities at the municipal
00:50:08.540level uh there are exchange students in our universities of course there are exchange
00:50:13.600scientists uh exchange uh faculty across the world uh there are endowments that suddenly come
00:50:19.980into some research departments there are uh provinces you know i mean we we the the western
00:50:26.340province western most province and on the coast have the most direct relationship with china via
00:50:31.560the pacific ocean but there are there are other ways that that happens and of course you mentioned
00:50:35.740grain shipment of course all the way to ottawa and then finally at the international level there are
00:50:40.540indeed relationships with china because either either you're getting your money from china or
00:50:44.920you're getting it from america and you have and so you have to kind of line up on one side of the
00:50:49.100aisle or the other and uh and castigating the united states whatever whatever their faults
00:50:53.840casking the united states is very uh very popular these days um one thing that's being mentioned i
00:51:00.000actually have a comment stream here uh sam so one of the things that's being mentioned here is the
00:51:04.440belts to roads program so kind of the point being of course that that there are with all that money
00:51:10.400that china is harvesting from the west they're using it to buy influence not just in the west0.97
00:51:15.040but also into the third world so classically of course we think of the way that sort of the western
00:51:21.000world was attempting to defeat communism and also keep keep its resource uh and logistical lines
00:51:26.940alive, it did investment in third world countries to try and make sure that whatever regime was
00:51:32.440there, usually not democratic, would be friendly to the West. And the exchange was that they would
00:51:38.960send various aid packages into that country and help keep that population better fed,
00:51:45.700better medicated. Obviously, China's following the same policy with more logistics, building roads
00:51:52.100in africa building i think even hydroelectric dams in various parts of the world what what
00:51:58.820does the west need to look out for there if china has all this money they can effectively0.94
00:52:04.100start to invest in in places around the world and and really indeed by their influence by pouring
00:52:09.780concrete yeah you know your your viewers are very astute the belton road is is obviously as you
00:52:17.860framed it. It's sort of, again, this ironic reversal of British imperialism. China learned
00:52:25.600where they failed, and they're trying to swing it back to the other foot. They're aiming for,
00:52:30.560they've already captured a lot of the soft spots. These would be sort of third world countries with1.00
00:52:35.620dictators that can so easily be corrupted with kickbacks and bribes on those major infrastructure
00:52:41.840projects. And I would swing it back to my book. One thing I talk about is how I had to make the
00:52:51.260mental leap. I eventually got to the place where I had evidence that the Chinese Communist Party
00:52:56.300was using its tycoons. It was using transnational gangs. It was using community leaders in foreign
00:53:04.720countries like canada all together in this big sort of business above ground and underground
00:53:13.280economy that involves money laundering and the belton road is right at the center of that plan
00:53:19.680the u.s state department sees the belton road as a massive vector of the highest level trade
00:53:25.360money laundering espionage activity that is you know when you're pitching belton road projects
00:53:31.680Of course, there's agents that are trying to corrupt the Western or already some of these third world dictators, gathering intelligence from them.0.65
00:53:42.780So China likes to have a lot of lines of strategy going in any activity they're involved in.
00:53:47.860And the Belt and Road makes a perfect hub of economic infiltration.
00:53:54.320My story got into this whole China economic sort of espionage angle through casino money laundering.
00:54:01.680And one of the best cases involves a Macau casino tycoon who was indicted by the FBI for using 20 million or odd casino wire transfers from the east into the United States, but really using some of that money for bribing United Nations officials in New York.
00:54:22.440That case had so many elements that taught me a lot, including that Belt and Road-type infrastructure projects and high-tech networks in Caribbean countries were all part of that scheme, where you have gangsters working with People's Liberation Army intelligence to sort of try to corrupt whatever the highest level is in the country that they're dealing with.
00:54:47.540And so let me finish by saying, what's the one Belt and Road, big Belt and Road project approved in North America?
00:54:57.020It's in the Surrey area just outside Vancouver, a massive project that really got its birth when former Premier Christy Clark and her ministers were traveling over to Guangdong and Hong Kong and bargaining with Chinese officials for a sort of Belt and Road trade deal.
00:55:16.700It eventually came to fruition under the NDP government to boot.
00:55:22.020So it just shows you that at a deep business level, BC is, you could look at it if you're a positive business person, a leader in trade with China and North America, or if you're a security intelligence person, BC is the weak spot of infiltration through things like Belt and Road, casino money laundering, opioid overdose tragedies.
00:55:46.700You know, this litany that you're making there, it's just mind-boggling.
00:55:54.040I'm going to use this moment again to plug your book for you.
00:55:56.860Again, I'm speaking with Sam Cooper, author of Willful Blindness,
00:56:00.060How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons, and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West.0.84
00:56:04.960That's the cover of it for those who are on viewership.
00:56:07.380For those who are listening, that was the title with a foreword by Charles Burton.
00:56:12.420I think that something that hits me here is that if this is so blatant,
00:56:17.880it's interesting because when I started asking you these questions, Sam, earlier,
00:56:21.280one of the first questions I asked you was,
00:56:23.420have you had to kind of look over your shoulder or whatever else?
00:56:26.040But the way that you're listing this, it kind of sounds like they're laughing at it.
00:56:28.900It's kind of like, oh, look, someone finally caught us, but it's too late now.
00:56:33.300And they can kind of twirl their mustache and laugh maniacally.
00:56:37.240Do you think China's concerned at all that the West might change direction on this?
00:56:42.640Do you think that any of the Chinese leadership of the CCP party thinks that for a moment that the West is capable of reversing course on this?
00:56:52.660Or do they think they already have it in hand?
00:56:57.620I can say that before my book came out and in the weeks after, it appears, and I'm not the only one that thinks so, that sort of the A-team of influencers or pro-Beijing academics or media personalities or even politicians has, it almost seems that there was some level of realization that this book had some popular reach
00:57:24.760and was not dumbing things down, but telling things in an engaging way, trying to show.
00:57:33.600As I say, I knew what our intelligence and criminal intelligence has known for years in Canada,
00:57:41.460and I wanted to try to translate that for the Canadian public and through my own journey of discovery,
00:57:47.920not being trained in intelligence or law enforcement, but being sort of a legally minded and curious history buff.
00:57:55.860I discovered this with my own eyes. I got the documents.
00:57:59.480And I do think I can say there are some people that believe that a sort of,
00:58:04.920I write about a counterattack to my stories in the book, and there does seem to be messaging countering the book now.
00:58:13.780Does China think they already have it, one, in Canada?
00:58:16.780I can say this, that the frightening message for people listening today is that there are people in very credible sources say that if Canada were not part of the, you know, if not for the five eyes, Canada would be fully compromised now by China.
00:58:38.360So we're talking about people that, very smart people, talking about concepts like state hollowing or state capture.
00:58:46.280And again, that might sound, you know, out of left field, but certainly China wants vassal states, and it wants to split up the five I's.
00:58:55.300Previously, their focus had been New Zealand.
01:04:46.360which is what's promised when you come to the new world
01:04:48.380and certainly what's promised when Canada puts its best foot forward.
01:04:52.720I want to say thank you so much for speaking to us today.
01:04:56.540If the printed copies are sold out, I guess people have to turn to the digital copy?
01:05:02.840Right now they can find the digital copies from Google, Amazon, Kindle, Kobo.
01:05:10.120I do know that there are still printed copies in retail locations,
01:05:14.820and I'm pretty sure you can get a copy if you wait long enough on services like Amazon.
01:05:22.620I've seen maybe a little bit of price inflation in some cases that I'm not happy about,
01:05:27.600but I do understand that the presses are going to be running soon.
01:05:32.080So if you can't get a handle on a print copy, I really hope you do for that summer read,
01:05:38.580but put a pre-order in and the publisher is Optimum International.
01:05:43.800send them an email or a note that you want to copy and I'm sure the press will
01:05:49.980be running and there'll be more coming out soon. Thank you so much for giving us
01:05:55.140some of your time today and again I just really appreciate you being on the
01:05:58.920program Sam. Thanks it's been a great conversation. Absolutely I hope to speak
01:06:03.800to you again soon hopefully before the summer's over we'll get an update from
01:06:07.200you on how things are going. Sure thanks. Thank you again I was speaking with Sam
01:06:13.780cooper the author of willful blindness how a network of narcos tycoons and ccp agents infiltrated0.79
01:06:21.060the west there is a picture of it right there if you're on our viewership if you are listening it
01:06:27.740is a red cover with a map of the world and what looks like little well opiate the percocet sort
01:06:34.500of single line through a pill sort of thing and of course the chinese five stars on there as well
01:06:41.180So that's why I believe he said Optimum Press. Just let me double check that one. Yep. Optimum Publishing International. And it's currently sold out. Currently sold out. So that's that's for you there, Sue. You wanted to know what the book's name was. And there we are.
01:06:57.860so that was a lot i think it was good it was really good i don't i'm not uh disagreeing with
01:07:05.340any of it it's uh it's an incredibly uh harrowing kind of discussion though because essentially what
01:07:10.860what you know i mean he's he's a reporter he's an investigative journalist and he's going to stick
01:07:14.900with the facts right and you got to be careful about interpreting motive i'm a pundit so that's
01:07:18.840all i do is interpret motive or impute motive that's what i do i mean there are moments where
01:07:23.020i can kind of try and give somebody the benefit though but i mean you know that's not nobody wants
01:07:27.240that i mean i guess it's it's it's good tv right for me to kind of impute motive on everybody and
01:07:32.000read into things in a ridiculous way but but let's be clear here i don't think it's a ridiculous
01:07:36.460thing to say that the chinese communist party uh is clearly hell-bent on world domination and and
01:07:44.900in a way that quite frankly is is brutally inhuman uh even by their standards uh even by the standards
01:07:52.240of tyranny that occurred in the 20th century it's it's incredible really because i mean what we went
01:07:58.480over uh through the course of that discussion was well was no less than let's see oh we talked about
01:08:06.400the slave camps a little bit we didn't talk about them all a ton but we did talk about what's going
01:08:10.720on in zhizhang and and the uyghur genocide and the slave camps and the organ harvesting that's
01:08:16.400happening because of course it's both the uyghur muslims and the falun gone in fact they really1.00
01:08:20.960like harvesting organs from Falun Gong0.61
01:09:04.940There's also, of course, the aspect of what's going on in Hong Kong.
01:09:08.040Hong Kong, a formerly democratic place, ruled by the British
01:09:11.760up until, I believe, the handover was in 95, 97, sometime in the 90s.
01:09:17.520And, of course, the promise was that Hong Kong would always remain basically in its kind of now cultural persuasion after being under British rule for a century, which was a semi-parliamentary system for Hong Kong, certainly a democratic system.
01:09:29.900And yes, it was just one little island, and it was just, it was a large population base, obviously, on that little island, but it was one little place.
01:09:37.460And it was supposed that, you know, even the Chinese Communist Party could endure Hong Kong, given how much money it made them to, because Hong Kong was still a hub of trade, and still is today, and is a very important part of the Chinese economic system.
01:09:53.600So you'd think that they would have paid their piper and called the tune, but no, that wasn't enough for China. And now, of course, subjugation of Hong Kong and turning it into just another part of the rest of China, extinguishing any of freedom's light in Hong Kong, that was their mission, the mainland Chinese Communist Party's mission.0.93
01:10:16.300and they and they did so they have it's as far as i know hong kong is essentially under an iron
01:10:21.020fist it hasn't changed since the beginning of the pandemic which is when suddenly uh the virus
01:10:26.400appeared and so i i think a lot of this is is all tied together and then finally of course we get
01:10:32.120into what sam was talking about specifically with reference to the actual money laundering and
01:10:39.240everything else that goes on so china again it i i want to take this from the top a little bit
01:10:44.080Actually, we have some comments here that's interesting.
01:11:00.700But let's go back over a kind of historical sort of analysis of what's going on here.
01:11:05.220So once upon a time, there was this thing called the Orient, right?
01:11:09.820And we need to remember that up until only 500 years ago or so, you couldn't get things from the Orient without walking there or having it being walked to you.
01:11:20.600And we have to remember that all the way back to the Crusades, right, that's when the Western world, that is to say, Europe and Christendom, some Eastern Orthodoxy as well through Russia and through Greece and through Constantinople, but a great deal of it into the West.
01:11:37.700When the Crusades happen, all of a sudden the Crusaders march all the way to the Holy Land.
01:11:43.340And when they get to the Holy Land, they're experiencing things they've never experienced before.
01:11:46.640And, of course, the way that we always round that up is to just say spices.
01:11:50.120But whether we're talking about the silks that were coming from the East
01:11:52.720and all the particular things that were happening in the Middle East that were different from the West,
01:11:58.120the diversity of food, the diversity of garments, and kind of the wealth.
01:12:03.620Because if you live in a naturally hot place, you get to kind of use your leisure a little bit easier.
01:12:09.620And so the leisure of the Middle East, or at least of their courtiers, were developing these things, made all the wealth of the West look rather paltry.0.97
01:12:19.320So the crusaders got a hunger for this.
01:12:21.720Obviously, they kept going back on crusade to kind of gather more treasures and whatever else they could get a hold of.
01:13:09.060And so, eventually, the Turks take over Asia Minor, which used to be Byzantium,0.82
01:13:13.040and then, of course, they take over Constantinople,
01:13:15.040because they build gigantic cannons that are able to actually puncture the wall,
01:13:19.300and they break through the wall, and they eventually take Constantinople,
01:13:22.280which, in 1453, is the last living part of the Old Roman Empire.
01:13:27.760So in one way or another, it's arguable that the Roman Empire in its various, well, the Roman legacy and the classical ancient world lived for almost 2,000 years on planet Earth, from somewhere around 500 BC all the way to about 15, just before 1500, well, 1450 CE, so in the Christian era.
01:13:50.720So the point is that that's what the world is up until basically, you know, Europe before 1500, right?
01:14:00.820You can't get to India or China by sea because nobody knows how to do it.
01:14:05.840Nobody builds ships that are big enough.
01:14:08.060And then the land route gets cut off after Constantinople is conquered.
01:14:13.340So now you get the age of exploration, right?
01:14:16.480And so science breaks off and modernity happens, the Reformation happens, and ethics and what you ought to do and what you can do are completely decoupled, thanks to Machiavelli, thanks to Francis Bacon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:14:29.140And finally, you have, of course, the Age of Exploration.
01:14:33.220So Holland, Portugal, Spain, and England, as well as France, of course, because we call Quebec New France for a reason, they all begin to send out ships and explorers and start to plant flags all over the New World, all over Africa, and eventually they get around Africa to India, and eventually they get around India and all the way to China.
01:14:52.180And so now you have sea routes to China and the Orient. You have sea routes into the West Indies, into the East Indies. You have sea routes all the way to Australia eventually. People discover where Australia is. I wonder what the person who discovered Australia thought later when he, well, I don't know if he figured it out, but you have to think, you know, it's, they didn't know they had stumbled into a continent.
01:15:11.940Everything else in Oceania isn't like that, right?
01:15:14.520It's just tiny little islands, and then you stumble across a continent-sized thing,
01:15:18.160and you're like, ah, well, I mean, I've got this island, I'm planting this flag here,
01:15:29.100But the point is that after the Age of Exploration,
01:15:33.360we have this moment where the British want to break into China.
01:15:36.720And as I said in my opening statement,
01:15:38.520we need to understand that china always took the cash and sold items and they never wanted to pay0.86
01:15:47.060back they never there was never any method of exchange they preferred to just store up cash
01:15:51.540they didn't want because and this was actually a problem for rome and and for other civilizations
01:15:56.060that ever traded with china because the problem was they could actually have to get into an
01:15:59.060inflationary state with their money because they didn't have enough gold because they would send
01:16:03.860china gold and then it'd be like well do you have anything that we have that we can exchange for our
01:16:07.400gold back like that's how the economy works right you sell an item for a medium of exchange which
01:16:14.000is money and the medium of exchange is always worth more than the item you paid for because
01:16:18.800the medium of exchange can be used for anything right i can use a thousand dollars to help pay
01:16:23.100for a sawmill i can use a thousand dollars to buy jubes but i can't use jubes to buy sawmills
01:16:27.540so the point is that or unless that person makes a very specific deal but money's worth more because
01:16:33.060they could use the money I gave them to go buy fuel or to go do go on a trip or to just throw it
01:16:37.920in their bank account you can't put jubes in a bank account the point is that the gold that was
01:16:43.040being exchanged for Rome eventually Rome was running out of gold as they kept shipping it
01:16:48.000to China and the same with every other empire that or and civilization that ever dealt with China and
01:16:53.240the Orient you kept sending them your money and they sent you the item the items you were paying
01:16:58.060for back but they never sent any money back to pay for items from you and so you got into this
01:17:02.400very asymmetrical situation where you're running out of gold you have to keep mining gold to pay
01:17:07.400for things that you want from china but you can't you can't ever get china to buy things from you
01:17:12.520for the most part so the problem is that the british uh come around the come around the bend
01:17:18.700here they've they've basically uh taking taken over india or or most of the way of india we have
01:17:23.920to remember actually the first people got into india were the portuguese that's why there's uh
01:17:27.640in southern india there's actually a huge catholic population but the point is that
01:17:31.360But they get around the subcontinent, they zip around Indochina, as it would later be called, French Indochina, now called Vietnam, Laos, and everything else.
01:19:04.140I think it's also called mercantilism.
01:19:06.000We all remember being told about mercantilism when we were in, we were in, I don't know,
01:19:12.700it's grade eight or nine that social studies lesson is in.
01:19:15.600But the point is this. China didn't want to play ball on this because they didn't need anything.
01:19:21.820They were a self-sufficient civilization that was happy to take people's cash and didn't need to worry about buying items from their countries.
01:19:29.740So Britain broke into China and essentially broke the will of the Chinese people to a point.0.91
01:19:36.240It certainly made a dent into their political machinations because they began to ship opium from what would have been, of course, parts of Afghanistan.
01:19:46.280Afghanistan still figures very largely into opium today, but especially India and the poppy fields of Pakistan.
01:19:52.760And so they would make the opium, and they would ship it, smuggle it into China, and then the Chinese population would become very addicted to opium, and there were a lot of problems.
01:20:07.760Opium dens were a crime in many respects.
01:20:12.280They were, well, I mean, they are a crime.
01:20:13.720It's terrible to enslave people to any kind of substance.
01:20:36.000eventually the colonial powers got their way and China had to open up for business not much
01:20:42.520different than the gunboat diplomacy that took place between America and Japan at the end of
01:20:48.160the 19th century where of course Americans showed up with their gunboats on the very insular shores
01:20:54.120of Japan and essentially said you're trading with us and that's final and the Japanese said0.77
01:20:59.700i guess so yes so we have to remember that it's not as if there isn't any historical context of
01:21:07.680this and it is not as if one day somebody sitting around at a brainstorming table in in the chinese
01:21:13.680communist party a bunch of you know a bunch of freshman students or a bunch of a bunch of sophomores
01:21:18.740who are interns of the communist party who are all sent into a room with a whiteboard uh and told to
01:21:24.660come up with like the 10 ways to defeat the west suddenly came up with this idea there's a
01:21:29.400historical background to the selling of drugs into a country in order to break its political
01:21:37.080solidarity and to create division so that that has a place to begin uh and what happened from there
01:21:44.420uh what happened from there of course is is all history now so the chinese have learned their1.00
01:21:50.960lesson which is that if you use uh narcotics and other other substances to infiltrate to to
01:21:58.320addict another person's population you you can get really far with that little trick
01:22:03.840and then the next thing that you can do is of course influence their political regime by buying
01:22:10.000them off which is another thing that the colonial powers did do to china and to other places right
01:22:14.640this is not new um we we have to be honest about colonialism and imperialism there was a time
01:22:21.360where you know every european nation developed european nation had its influence around the world
01:22:26.720And they did it through military might and through superior manufacturing, textiles, consumer goods, and of course finally money, buying influence, and of course cajoling people into their will.
01:22:40.760That's not news. That happened. That's an objective fact.
01:22:43.680And kind of to take a brief pause here for a second, that's something we have to be honest about when we get into this question of the whole cancellation of Canada Day or some of the complaints of the left around Canada's founding and everything else.
01:22:57.900I think that Canada is a fundamentally moral concept, and I think that it was a moral founding, and it's a moral idea of a country.
01:23:08.280It's had leaders in it that have been less than perfect.
01:23:10.660But the fundamental idea of Canada is a good one, and wherever we sit on the sovereignty question, we must be honest with ourselves that we're at least trying to rescue the good parts of Canada.
01:23:28.420We're not just trying to throw away the bad parts or the political parts that cause me pain and force me to, I don't know, deal with assessment authorities and federal agents crawling all over the place and fish cops and God knows what else.
01:26:03.600The news part is that it isn't just a bunch of people
01:26:08.120uncoordinate uh without coordination in uh in china or around the world with chinese uh loyalty
01:26:15.520making making decisions that simultaneously somehow accidentally all fit together it appears
01:26:21.600to be as far as sam is saying a a cooperative strategy and willful blindness on the part of
01:26:28.040our leaders here in the west again i was speaking to sam cooper earlier uh the author of willful
01:26:33.780blindness uh which discusses how a network of narcos tycoons and ccp agents infiltrated the
01:26:40.180west and began influencing us uh apparently the book has sold out i do do do look for it online
01:26:48.040though apparently it's going to be about as inflated as some of the housing prices we have
01:26:51.400in canada uh so wait for the next printing pre-order a copy and wait for the next printing
01:26:56.300because it's already sold out people were very excited to read an in-depth investigative hard
01:27:01.460hitting journalism piece on the question of Chinese influence throughout Canada, the West,
01:27:09.460and the United States, and probably even some parts there in the American election.
01:27:14.340That's all brilliant. And of course, the pandemic. So let's turn now to that question,
01:27:20.040the pandemic. So speaking with Mr. Cooper, just a few minutes ago, one of the things that got
01:27:25.520brought up was the issue of the pandemic. And the pandemic is no one's cup of tea.
01:27:33.300Some people prefer scamdemic, some people prefer plandemic. I will simply say that the crisis,
01:27:40.920the self-inflicted crisis that we've been in for 18 months, almost exactly, actually it'll be 18
01:27:47.640months, I guess, basically when me and my beloved get married, because that'll be the end of August.
01:27:54.200and really it was somewhere around February for most people that they felt that whatever, the lockdowns began.
01:28:03.140The point is that we're still in the middle of this thing,
01:28:07.060even as things begin to loosen up and free up and change and some sanity seems to be restored.
01:28:12.860The issue is that when we were talking with Sam,
01:28:17.320And he made the point that no, absolutely, absolutely he believed that regardless of motive around the virus itself, it was clear that the Chinese Communist Party was not telling the truth about what had happened in Wuhan.
01:28:33.180They had locked down Wuhan. They did not, they did not inform the world about what was really going on.
01:28:42.400They locked down Wuhan for their own travel within China, but they allowed Wuhan to continue to ship people all over the world.
01:28:50.120So people who were exposed to whatever happened in Wuhan were able to travel around the world without the Chinese,1.00
01:28:58.320with the Chinese government's knowledge, without any kind of filtration or warning.
01:29:03.180And the virus and, of course, the panic began to spread.
01:29:08.800So that was a geopolitical move as far as our resident expert, Sam Cooper, is concerned.
01:29:18.600His point of view is that while, again, we can't impute motive, we can look at facts.
01:29:26.720And the facts and the evidence declare in no uncertain terms that at some point it was understood that the virus was spreading
01:29:31.500and it was not stopped from spreading outside of China.
01:29:35.800It was only stopped from spreading within China.
01:29:38.860So we've lived through, Sheldon Jones again likes this way of saying that,
01:32:39.100And definitely, if some of that money laundering and everything else
01:32:43.020that sam was mentioning uh is so easy to do in in you know the rest of the world uh it makes sense
01:32:52.720that that a lot of that money was spent on trying to get uh mr biden elected uh and some of his
01:32:59.000friends and so that doesn't that doesn't surprise me at all and and wherever biden's tact is with
01:33:04.640china i think it isn't i think it is probably tougher than it would have been in the 90s
01:33:08.500But nonetheless, it's it's not China's it's not the China rhetoric that and the China the China blaming and and focus that was going on from former President Trump. And so I think they're happy that he's out of office. They're happy that he's at the Winter White House in Mar-a-Lago and he's not in charge anymore.
01:33:27.560so i think that was a really informative uh discussion with sam uh and we learned a lot
01:33:35.780uh and so ultimately we we look at we look at kind of the world around us and how it might
01:33:44.540be changed and what i think is actually here's here's a here's a hot take one of the things i
01:33:49.500think that's going to make a very interesting discussion at some point about the way china
01:33:54.600was treating people versus the tyrants of the 20th century is that the chinese culture is not0.97
01:34:01.560a western culture which i guess is me kind of dog whistling that it's not a christian culture either
01:34:06.360that being said of course you can counter with the fact that obviously stalin and hitler and0.71
01:34:12.360the gang throughout europe were all were were all pretty brutal and that was that was wrong and
01:34:17.880obviously that was a western culture and therefore by definition a christian culture so what's your
01:34:22.920point and that's a that's uh that's a fair question i guess i guess ultimately maybe there
01:34:30.580were at least two limiting factors when it came to tyranny in the 20th century one of the limiting
01:34:35.000factors is the was the sheer fact that there just wasn't the overproduction that we have today even
01:34:40.940even after the industrial revolution even right into the second world war we just didn't have the
01:34:46.200redundancy we have today and we didn't have the the advanced reaches of government we have today
01:34:50.900spy networks were still spy networks like a human being had to go observe something take some
01:34:56.660pictures and then die on his way to handing them to his handler or be killed shortly afterwards
01:35:02.600like you know there's a reason we had cold war movies like all these movies all these films about
01:35:09.460the second world war right after the second world war and all the moves that are being made and all
01:35:13.460the the chicanery going on that's that is that is all from from a human element so if you have
01:35:22.620drones that can do the observation and you have smart tvs that listen to you and you have never
01:35:27.120forget right if you're going to have a sensitive conversation always remember to put your phone
01:35:32.440into an rfid bag right and make sure that it that the bag is is sealed and it's you know basically
01:35:37.800tinfoil you can also put it inside of a microwave if you have to wrap it up in tinfoil put it inside
01:35:42.240of a microwave if you need to have a super sensitive conversation that you do not want
01:35:46.280anybody to be able to listen to. So that's always a good point.
01:35:50.540But the point that I'm trying to make here is that the 20th
01:35:54.480century, one of the limiting factors of it was just quite frankly, you really could still
01:40:05.980And so I've heard that from many different sources that quite frankly, our leaders need to be on the guard all the time. They should probably always bring their wives or their spouses. I mean, obviously, there's female leaders as well. They should always bring their spouses and and basically not leave the hotel. And even then the hotel's bugged.
01:40:26.360you know, it's, I personally, if I was a leader, I would never go to China. Just like if, just like,0.95
01:40:32.880you know, you don't go to, you don't go to certain, certain kind of burlesque shows and bars trying
01:40:37.580to be an upstanding part of your church community. The same thing happens when it comes to going to
01:40:42.920China. As far as I'm concerned with being a leader, I would just simply refuse to go.0.85
01:40:46.820we can meet in japan i don't i i wouldn't i wouldn't uh i wouldn't i wouldn't encourage
01:40:54.560anyone to go to go to uh to china uh in fact i think going to china is a really bad idea
01:41:00.500regardless of who you are and i'm really glad i'm i'm very sorry for the two michaels that
01:41:05.420are currently hostage there and i think that's a shame it's a deep mark of shame upon all of us
01:41:11.820in Canada, particularly our leaders, that are refusing to do anything to help that man.
01:44:29.000And a lot of those temples got torn down when Mao was in charge.
01:44:32.840So the Chinese Communist Party is very anti-religion.
01:44:36.720So the single greatest thing you can do to your enemy is at least annoy them to death.
01:44:40.340And by influencing more religious growth in China, you are forcing the Chinese Communist Party to come face to face with the most dangerous thing that they know on the planet,0.87
01:44:50.160which is the irreducibility of loyalty to God and to the spiritual realm.
01:44:58.380And so I think that's one way to influence China for the better for the long term would be to evangelize China,
01:45:04.580send as many missionaries in there as possible and to try and essentially Christianize China from the ground up,0.79
01:45:10.160which is no different than what happened to Rome and no different what happened to the pagan cultures that were missionized after
01:45:15.200and no different to even missionary journeys today.
01:45:18.940you can try and win over you know the president or the the el presidente for life of a country
01:45:25.580or the king of a country but it might be better to just go after his subjects uh and to try and
01:45:30.860make them uh you know understand that they're made in the image of god god loves them and if they're
01:45:36.780made in the image god and god loves them then why are they either acting in a way that's beneath
01:45:40.780their own dignity or living in a civilization that's beneath their dignity so they could work
01:45:44.620to change it so that would be that would be i think the first the and the most dependable method
01:45:49.660would be uh to evangelize china and so for all those people who are currently evangelizing china
01:45:53.980i've known a couple of them i met a couple of them uh over the years uh thank you for your service i
01:45:58.780do hope that you uh have the courage to go back and for those who are already in china do uh do
01:46:04.700try to to continue your work uh we'll be praying for you so the second method that i would use to
01:46:10.860to influence china though would be in the secular realm and in the secular realm what i would want
01:46:15.000to do is send people into one way or another uh kind of infiltrate their workforces and have their
01:46:23.900workforces agitate for better wages and a better better living uh and a better lifestyle and a
01:46:30.900cleaner cleaner world uh cleaner environment um not talking about environmentalism purely but
01:46:35.720talking about just the fact that like like cities in china can be quite dirty because they're still0.94
01:46:41.340running on coal and health problems in china can be quite severe um there's a lot of stratification
01:46:48.200in china there's there's a lot you know there's this there's this oligarchs at the top and there
01:46:53.040can still be very poor people on the bottom i would that's how i would uh change china is that
01:46:59.040i would send in people basically union representatives and that sort of thing to
01:47:03.160influence especially their their uh sweatshops and their slave labor uh to influence the places i0.63
01:47:09.560mean the only reason that you can afford this device right is because lots of its pieces were
01:47:13.560made in china and uh with labor that is that is underpaid and so that's another way to influence
01:47:20.760it so if we if we go in there and and we teach people basically that they have a transcendent value
01:47:27.000um uh it's funny rose west said uh death via unions yeah i mean i this is actually a funny
01:47:36.220i'll do this funny aside uh i have to get going pretty quick here because i mean the pipeline's
01:47:40.040coming soon but um i'm being contacted by various people i'm sorry we're all in the middle of these
01:47:48.800silly these silly silly uh wedding planning things every now and again i have to check them
01:47:53.280check in on them but let's let's pivot back to what's going on here so so it was funny i was in
01:47:57.620this bc political panel panel thing which actually unfortunately just got canceled uh a good friend
01:48:02.660stewart parker he's part of the show all the time you see him on thursdays he'll be here tomorrow
01:48:06.740but he unfortunately uh just couldn't do the political panel thing anymore that's too bad
01:48:10.900we'll talk to him about it tomorrow but but that was a great time while we were there and it was
01:48:14.620ironic because basically it was a bunch of progressives even the person who was from the
01:48:17.980right of center party the bc liberal party um and uh and and he he he and everybody else basically
01:48:27.140just a bunch of progressives liberals uh i wouldn't call them necessarily leftists but just
01:48:31.820progressives right they think that everything's going to get better and everything's going to be
01:48:34.780fine um the the but we were talking about trying to influence china or whatever and i brought up
01:48:43.240the whole point of trying to get their their labor organized to make them to make them pricier to
01:48:48.760make them expensive right so because that's the thing organized labor is expensive and that's why1.00
01:48:53.900people avoid it right unions make labor expensive but they also that same simultaneously when your
01:48:59.160labor is expensive you are and there's no other options you get paid a good wage and and you're
01:49:04.780actually able to raise your family and and provide for them so that's the thing we always have to
01:49:09.080remember about about labor markets but but the issue is it was funny because i'm sitting there
01:49:13.820in a room full of progressives debating the issues of china and essentially the the argument that i'm
01:49:18.860making is the old communist argument which is that if we just get the workers to be organized we can
01:49:25.340we can overthrow the tyrants and and have the revolution and it's just kind of i you know
01:49:30.460irony of ironies right like i i mean i'm about as reactionary as it gets on a lot of counts and i
01:49:35.520I mean, the other day we had Aaron on here and and he had the point that somebody called you somebody called you a socialist on the Western standard.
01:49:43.820So I had to come on to tell them what a real socialist was.
01:49:46.320I couldn't have people thinking you were a socialist and the whole socialist movement would be destroyed.
01:49:51.160So so I'm no one's idea of a socialist.
01:49:53.900But but the joke was I was the one making the old communist argument of we will we will organize the workers and the workers will overthrow the tyrants and the petty bourgeoisie and the oligarchs.
01:50:03.960and and everybody was just looking at me like i was insane and they're all like you know you can't
01:50:10.420do that you can't organize the workers the order workers will never organize so they're all descended1.00
01:50:14.420from marxian ideas for the most part and then one kind of classical liberal and then there's me over
01:50:19.100here who's a conservative who would rather have there be like all but no state and a bunch of
01:50:23.660you know night watchmen and church on sunday uh and and people just and and for some reason i'm
01:50:29.420the one making the the you know the the manifesto argument and everybody else is like that's insane0.62
01:50:35.380yeah sheldon thought that was really funny really funny yeah no i know it's hilarious um
01:50:40.800but i think i if i'm being perfectly honest i think that's actually the only way forward i
01:50:46.440think we have to christianize uh china and we have to uh organize its labor so that it's not0.97
01:50:52.900slavery anymore um that and probably somehow infiltrate their uh their slave camps and
01:50:59.020particularly their their prison camps uh especially where the organs are being harvested and that sort
01:51:04.380of thing and try and expose that even more and be clear about what's going on there um and that
01:51:10.500that might cost some of our lives i mean that that's that's not going to be easy uh i think
01:51:17.920i'll leave this example with you way back uh when the new world was first being colonized i believe
01:51:27.240there was a capuchin capuchin uh that or or uh or a carmelite can't remember but there was a
01:51:36.040religious order there was a religious order uh that wanted to minister to the slaves in the west
01:51:42.880indies and of course at this time there was slavery and that was run by the spanish empire
01:51:48.700And in order to minister to the slaves in the West Indies, they themselves had to sell themselves into slavery.
01:51:53.840And so I don't know if there is a greater act of solidarity than that.
01:51:57.580He who would lay down his life for his friends, right, is what it says in John.
01:52:02.060And I think that's kind of the attitude we have to take on this in a lot of accounts.