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Jan. 18, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:56
China Hijacks The American Elite | Ep. 1414
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An NBA owner admits he doesn't care about the Chinese Uyghurs, and he's not the only member of the American elite class who doesn't.
Plus, a new poll shows Republicans with a lead in voter identification for the first time in a very long time.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so yesterday there is a billionaire NBA executive.
He is a part owner of the of the Warriors, the Golden State Warriors in California, in San Francisco.
His name is Chamath Palihapitiya.
So forgive me if I screwed up the name.
And he was doing a podcast.
And I have to say, one of the most amazing things about people who are extraordinarily wealthy is that very often they really think they know things they do not know.
There's a famous line from Fiddler on the Roof.
When you're rich, they think you really know.
But the truth is, for some people, when they are very, very, very rich, like not just F you rich, but F the whole world rich, They start to think that they know all the things.
They know everything about politics.
They know everything about world affairs.
They don't have to have studied anything because, after all, the proof is in the pudding and they are worth a lot of money.
And they are not even bound by the strictures of basic morality and decency.
The reason that I bring this up with regard to this billionaire is because this billionaire NBA owner Who's the owner of one of the most virtue-signaling organizations in America.
The Warriors, whose coach is Steve Kerr, who is a very left-wing guy.
He's virtue-signaled on everything from Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump.
The team is a very left-leaning team on everything from gay rights to transgenderism.
The entire social sort of place of this team is to represent the far left.
The owner of this team, he came out on a podcast and he said he does not care about the Chinese Uyghurs.
He was asked specifically about the NBA's relationship with China.
And he says it just straight out.
Now what's amazing about this is that he has the gall to say this openly on a podcast.
Like this isn't leaked audio.
It's not as though he said this secretly on a phone call and then it leaked into the public eye.
He said this into a microphone on a podcast he knew was being taped.
And he apparently thought that this was a perfectly moral thing to do and say, which is pretty incredible.
It really is.
For somebody who lives on the left and I'm sure knows of the strictures of cancellation.
It's amazing that he felt comfortable enough to say this directly into a microphone, but it does show what the left actually believes about China and its predations on the world stage.
So here is what this billionaire NBA executive Chamath Palihapitiya had to say about the Chinese destruction of the Uyghur community in Xinjiang.
Lesbian, nobody cares about what's happening to the weakers, okay?
You bring it up because you really care, and I think it's nice that you care.
What do you mean nobody cares?
The rest of us don't care.
I'm just telling you a very hard... You really don't care?
Wait, you're saying you personally don't care?
I'm telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay?
Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line.
Okay?
Of all the things that I care about, it is below my line.
Okay, that's an amazing statement.
It's below his line.
Now what's amazing about that, too, is that he then continued along these lines.
What was above his line?
What he said was above his line was climate change.
So climate change was somehow above his line, but the imprisonment and concentration camps of a million people by the Chinese is below his line.
He said, I care about, yeah, I care about the fact that our economy could turn on a dime if China invades Taiwan.
I care about that.
I care about climate change.
You know, I care about a bunch.
I care about America's crippling and decrepit healthcare infrastructure.
But if you're asking me, do I care about a segment of a class of people in another country?
Not until we can take care of ourselves will I prioritize them over us.
And I think a lot of people believe that, and I'm sorry if that's a hard truth to hear, but every time I say I care about the Uyghurs, I'm really just lying if I don't really care.
And so I'd rather not lie to you and tell you the truth.
It's not a priority for me.
He said until America actually cleans up our own house, the idea that we step outside of our borders with, you know, a sort of morally virtue signaling about somebody else's human rights track record is deplorable.
It's deplorable.
This is, by the way, how the left thinks.
The left in the United States believes that the United States is the root of all evil, and so we must spend all of our time navel-gazing about the evils of the United States while simultaneously allowing him to do business in China, which is really what this is about.
See, when folks on the left talk about climate change, very often, they don't really mean they care very much about climate change.
They're happy to take their private jets.
They're more than happy to consume extraordinary amounts of carbon and create massive carbon emissions.
Climate change is just an excuse.
To show that you care about things that you don't actually care about.
It's an excuse to say you're a good person.
It is the ultimate virtue signal.
It's like Save the Whales in the 1970s.
The way that you demonstrated to the world that you cared about things, even if you were enjoying your highfalutin lifestyle, was to say that you wanted to save the whales.
Then it became Save Tibet, right?
For a little while it was Save Tibet.
Which actually is a pretty good cause.
I mean, listen, I like whales too.
But let's be real about this.
The vast majority of people who were slapping a Save the Whales bumper sticker on the back of their car were then consuming inordinate amounts of plastic and then dumping them into the ocean.
So this silly thing that you see people like Chamath Palihapitiya saying, I don't care about a million Uyghurs and slavery in China.
What I do care about is climate change.
Yeah, bullcrap.
I don't think you care about climate change either.
I don't think you care about any of these things.
I think what you care about is virtue signaling to your own left-wing base while being able to do business with the people who make you richer, which is what this is really about.
And the reason that he is saying he doesn't care about this is so that he can defend China and so that he can rip on the United States.
If your moral compass is so skewed, you spend all day long talking about the evils of the country that has made you rich and famous.
And allowed you ownership of a major sports franchise while simultaneously poo-pooing the human rights violations of the Chinese Communist Party.
Some of the worst human rights violations in human history.
This Chinese Communist Party is responsible for the death of 40 million people in the Great Leap Forward.
Responsible for the yearly forced abortion of hundreds of thousands, millions of children over the course of decades.
Responsible now for the subjection of the entire population of Hong Kong to sheer tyranny, the imprisonment of a million Uyghurs, and threats to Taiwan.
That doesn't bother you at all, but climate change is your problem?
I don't believe you.
I don't think you're being perfectly honest.
I think if you were perfectly honest, what you'd say is you don't care about the Uyghurs, and you also don't care about climate change, and you also don't care about this social justice warrior nonsense.
What you actually care about is getting very wealthy and demonstrating to your friends at the cocktail parties that you're really, really well-versed in the demands of woke culture.
Like he continued along these lines again.
He says, quote, Look at the number of black and brown men that are incarcerated for absolutely ridiculous crimes.
I don't know if you saw this past week.
There's a person released from jail because he couldn't even be protected in jail because in some of these cells they run these fight clubs inside of Rikers that are basically tacitly endorsed by the corrections officers that don't do anything.
So if you want to talk about the human rights of people, I think we have a responsibility to take care of our own backyard first, first, and then we can go and basically morally tell other people how they should be running their own countries.
No, I'm pretty sure that we don't actually have to fix the problems at Rikers Island to point out that taking a million people of a different religion and shoving them into a concentration camp and forcing them to live in slavery And forcibly sterilizing their women.
I'm pretty sure that no matter what happens at Rikers, we can say that's bad.
See, the thing is that this is something that the folks on the radical left, they love to do.
They love to claim that you are a hypocrite if you say that we should look at human rights in China, but you haven't taken care of all your own problems at home first.
No, what they are really doing is saying you shouldn't have any standards at all on the global stage.
Because no matter what the antecedent is, the consequent in the sentence is going to be, so he shouldn't pay attention to the leaguers.
And the reason for that is because he's making a lot of money off the Chinese.
It comes down to money.
I mean, this is a cynical take, but it's real.
For the NBA, for the LeBron Jameses, and for the Chamath Palipatiyas, it comes down to the cold, hard cash.
I'm not even sure that China is a dictatorship the way that you want to call it that.
Communist country that's in the name.
Listen, China's got its problems.
We've got our problems.
We should solve our problems first.
He then continued by actively downplaying the dictatorship of Xi Jinping in China.
I'm not even sure that China is a dictatorship the way that you want to call it that.
Again, I think that- Communist country that's in the name.
Look, you have to understand, Jason, there are a set of checks and balances here on China that at the end of the day, I don't think that I have the moral absolutism to judge China.
And I would say that when NATO is silent, the United Nations is silent, all of Western Europe is silent, and America is effectively silent, that this issue may be small data points being extrapolated in a way to create a narrative that may be not be true.
Did Xi Jinping write this guy?
Like in a lab?
This is unbelievable stuff.
By the way, the reason the United Nations is silent is because China is on the Security Council.
They can veto anything.
It's like saying, you know, the UN is really silent about Russian predations in Crimea.
Yeah, because Russia can veto anything on the Security Council.
You want to know why the EU is silent on China?
Because the EU will do whatever it can in order to keep China in its corner the same way this guy will.
The dirty little secret about the opening of China is that China used capitalism to worm its way into power in a wide variety of countries by making its market dependent on the rest of the world kowtowing to it.
And the rest of the world went, well, OK, well, I guess we can't care anymore about them doing evil things as long as we can sell cheap product in China and manufacture cheap product in China.
It really is an incredible thing.
The response from Chamath is pretty insane.
It really is.
The belief system that America is so evil that we have nothing to say about Chinese predations, I wouldn't believe it if he said it.
And I really don't believe it when he's making money off of China.
So the Warriors then put out a statement about Chamath Palihapitiya's statement.
Quote, as a limited investor who has no day-to-day operating functions with the Warriors, Mr. Palihapitiya does not speak on behalf of our franchise and his views certainly don't reflect those of our organization.
Okay, I noticed a few words that you didn't mention in that statement, Golden State Warriors.
You didn't use the word China and you didn't use the word Uyghur.
I noticed that.
By the way, he then put out a statement trying to walk this back.
And his statement trying to walk this back is egregiously vague.
quote, in re-listening to this week's podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy.
I acknowledge that entirely.
As a refugee, my family fled a country with its own set of human rights issues.
So this is something that is very much a part of my lived experience.
To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere.
Full stop.
Well, no, that's not your belief.
Now I think you're lying.
I also noticed that you didn't mention the Chinese Uyghurs anywhere in that statement.
And the problem here is not a lack of empathy.
The problem here is that you just Value your cash more than you value actual values.
And this is true for so many of these, it's amazing how many virtue signaling companies in the United States, all these companies that are using virtue signaling to market, because let's be, let's be frank about this.
During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, when the corporate world dumped 23 billion, with a B, dollars, into various causes promoted by Black Lives Matter, that was a payoff.
It was a pure corporate payoff.
It was an attempt to get all of the wokesters to leave them alone.
It was an attempt, not only that, to capitalize on the wokesters.
It was an attempt to say to the black community of the United States, which the media assured us was 100% behind defund the police, which of course is not true.
It was corporations attempting to appeal to a particular demographic by throwing money at the problem and pretending that they as a corporate culture had moved into woke territory.
So leave us alone and allow us to make our money.
And not only that, why don't you spend money with us?
Because if you spend money with us, then you're backing the cause.
When it comes to China, however, the problem is they're making more money off of China than they are losing money from people in the United States who refuse to do business with them.
This is a very simple business calculation for all these businesses, including the NBA, including Chamath Palihapitiya.
And the calculation is this.
If they rip China, China cuts off the market.
If they don't rip China, China leaves the market open, and the number of people in the United States who are upset enough to turn off an NBA game is Enos Cantor.
That is the total number of people in the United States who care enough.
And this is why he's going to get away with this.
He'll say it, and it won't be a problem.
LeBron James said it, and no one cared.
Because either they're right, and no one cares about the Uyghurs, or, as it turns out, most people just want to watch basketball, and they can get away with nearly anything.
But that should demonstrate full-scale how cynical they are when it comes to their other causes, too.
It's not that they care about Black Lives Matter and they don't care about the Uyghurs.
It's that they don't care about any of these things.
They don't care about any of these things.
They are pure money-making machines.
So the question becomes, if you're on the right, or if you're just an American who doesn't like Chinese predations, the question becomes, why are you falling for it?
Either you push back, or these folks are going to do whatever is most on their bottom line.
Whatever makes their bottom line the strongest is what they are going to do.
Which means virtue signaling to the woke, because the woke are willing to, number one, leave the profit margins of the NBA alone, so long as the NBA does its performative ritual malice struggle sessions on Raze.
So they can make money there and they can make money in China so long as they don't piss off the Chinese.
So, if you actually want the NBA to change its behavior, then you're going to have to push on the other side.
You're going to have to say to the NBA, no.
No, we are not going to patronize your games.
No, we are not going to spend money on the Warriors.
No, we are not going to buy your gear.
You have to become as militant on the pro-America side as so many on the left are on the anti-America side.
Because right now, You have a complete imbalance of power.
You have a complete imbalance of power when it comes to the right and the left when it comes to corporate America in this country.
The left can manipulate corporate America by trying to exert pressure.
Both market pressure and regulatory pressure.
And the right sits there and they're like, well, we'll buy whatever product is necessary.
This is why I've said there must be some sort of mutually assured destruction that is brought to bear on these massive companies.
That mutually assured destruction must say either you guys stay completely apolitical and you stay out of politics entirely, or you're going to get clocked.
Because if you move to the left, you'll get clocked by the right.
And if you move to the right, you'll get clocked by the left.
And then there'll be a neutrality that is put in place.
And so that has to happen from a popular level in the United States.
But there's something else that has to happen here, and that is that the West has to start seeing China as the threat that it is.
Because it's not just that China is a military threat.
It's not just that China has a huge military arsenal, and they're pointing it at places like Taiwan, and they're attempting to choke off the South China Sea, and they're attempting to affect shipping straits, and they're threatening Australia, right?
That's not just the problem with China.
The problem with China is that they are militarizing our own institutions against us.
Because China has realized the game.
They've been able to weaponize the power of capitalism in order to pervert all the businesses that want to do business in China.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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So again, it's not just the NBA.
Okay, it is also Apple.
So there's an article from a website called theinformation.com.
And this website discusses what exactly the Apple Corporation has done in order to please the insane diktats of the Chinese.
And here's what they say.
They say, if you've used an iPhone 13, an Apple Watch, or AirPods, chances are you've touched the handiwork of LuxShare, which assembles them.
Over the past decade, it became the biggest Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronics.
LuxShare got to this vaunted position because of Apple.
And this, of course, is true.
Okay, Apple made LuxShare a massive, massive thing.
Luxshare apparently has the potential to unseat Foxconn as Apple's top supplier.
The Chinese company already exceeds Foxconn's main publicity-listed unit in terms of market capitalization, though Foxconn generated roughly $105 billion from Apple in 2020, more than 10 times Luxshare's haul.
But in terms of valuation, Luxshare has also eclipsed major Apple contractors such as Quanta Computer, Pegatron, and Wistron, all of which are headquartered in Taiwan.
Foxconn has become increasingly concerned about Luxshare's meteoric rise, including its significantly higher net profit margin, going so far as to form a task force to study the company Reuters previously reported.
According to this website, the information.
In shifting more business to Chinese companies, Apple head Tim Cook, the architect of Apple's supply chain in China, is fulfilling his pledge to Beijing to expand its domestic tech industry, which will help the country reduce its reliance on companies based outside the mainland, including Taiwan, a country China considers a renegade region.
A year after Tim Cook signed the economic agreement with China, Luxshare became the first Chinese company to secure a final assembly contract for a major Apple product, the AirPods, ending the dominance of Taiwanese firms.
Apple's moves might win over more Chinese consumers, which at times have shunned Apple in favor of local brands like Huawei based on nationalism.
Apple generates nearly 20% of all global revenue from China.
That's the reason why Tim Cook pledged $275 billion in investment to the Chinese government.
A turning point for Luxaire, according to the information, came in 2017.
When Apple helped the company manufacture AirPods, Apple originally relied on a single source, Taiwan-based InvinTech, to produce the iconic earbuds, which were in short supply in their first year of release.
Apple embedded its engineers at Luxure to teach the company how to assemble the devices over the course of the year, according to former Apple employees.
The AirPods were Luxure's first major assembly contract for Apple, catapulting the company into the upper echelons of Apple suppliers that handle, pack, and ship finished goods.
So you want to know?
Why it is that there hasn't been a full-scale, hardcore investigation of the Chinese creation of the Wuhan virus in the lab.
You want to know why there has not been a full investigation into that?
Why China's been able to stonewall that?
Because everyone is dependent on China.
They've created manufacturing chains.
They have provided a two billion person market in China to all these major corporations.
All these major corporations don't want to be cut off at the knees.
China is gaining power over rare earth minerals that are necessary for the creation of the microchips that go in everything from your cars to your computers.
China has become a centralized economic powerhouse in terms of what it is capable of leveraging on the world stage.
So it is not that China is inordinately economically powerful, as we'll get to in just a moment.
Actually, China is sort of a hollow bear.
But the fact of the matter is that China can still leverage whatever power it has on the global stage in order to get everybody to do its bidding.
This is happening in Hollywood as well.
So it's not just Apple.
Apple kowtows to China because Apple is creating more and more of its products.
It provides 20% of Apple's entire market.
Apple is undercutting its competition by doing production in China, so you think that Tim Cook is going to speak out against Chinese predations?
Same thing in the NBA.
The NBA is making billions of dollars in China.
And they see China as their future market.
So they're not going to alienate the Chinese.
This is why you have LeBron James and Chamath Palihapitiya defending Chinese predations against Uighur Muslims, because they're making too much money over there.
They're manufacturing half their goods over there, right?
That NBA jersey you're wearing was probably made in China.
And the NBA isn't willing to undercut its own profit margins in order to make a statement about the Chinese treatment of Muslims in one region of China.
No way.
It's also affecting our culture, right?
Our cultural creators are in hock to China.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty.
So it is not just the NBA.
Our sports product, it is not just Apple, our technology products.
It's also, of course, Hollywood.
So Hollywood has been attempting to make nice with the Chinese market for a very long time because the Chinese movie market is enormous.
And China has been really flexing its muscles on this thing.
The Hollywood Reporter has an entire piece from late December titled, This Year, Hollywood's China Relationship Finally Unraveled.
It doesn't matter how accommodating the industry may be.
The next phase of Xi Jinping's era may be defined by less space for Western content.
And here is what The Hollywood Reporter says.
In 2014, when Warner Brothers drafted LeBron James to star in its Space Jam sequel, the film was tailored to appeal, above all else, to the mighty Chinese market.
After all, James is a huge commodity in the basketball-obsessed country where his signature Nike sneakers are made.
Along the way, the future Hall of Famer avoided poking the China bear, even if it meant drawing outrage when he criticized Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey in 2019 for tweeting his support for Hong Kong protesters.
Calling him misinformed, a notable move given James' vocal stance on police brutality issues and former President Trump's so-called Muslim travel ban.
At the time, videos of police crackdowns on Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement were circulating widely, while it was well reported that more than a million Uyghur Muslims were being held in internment camps.
Despite attempts to make it past China's censors, Space Jam A New Legacy never received a release in China this summer and scored just $162.8 million worldwide.
A so-so figure even given the coronavirus pandemic.
That is a nice way of putting it.
Space Jam A New Legacy was a bomb.
Still, Space Jam was not alone.
Disney received the same cold shoulder when it came to its Marvel tentpoles, Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings, and The Eternals, films that were built around Chinese talent in order to make a giant showing in the market, but to no avail.
Neither film was given a release in the country that continues to take heat for reported human rights abuses.
Hollywood's silence on those abuses has become deafening as other industries and entities have begun to confront China.
In fact, 2021 might mark the year that finally cooled the Hollywood China romance.
Warner Media Studios and Networks Group Chair and CEO Anne Sarnoff told THR, I think we're still feeling our way through that new paradigm.
Obviously, there's been a lot of geopolitical meta issues happening with changes of our government, trying to figure out what the new relationship is going to be with the Biden administration.
China is clearly building its own local theatrical business.
The numbers are very large, and we would like to believe we're going to be a big part of their future, but we're honestly taking it one movie at a time.
I'm not making any grand predictions because I don't know.
But it's something we're very, very aware of in Front Border, because when you do your ultimates and your green lights, China was a big chunk of it.
The theatrical film market is still limited, and there are a bunch of movies that have sat on the shelf because of perceived political slights or for no perceptible reason at all.
These include Black Widow, Venom Let There Be Carnage, and now, potentially, Spider-Man No Way Home.
And at the same time, says The Hollywood Reporter, Hollywood has lost any semblance of a moral high ground.
It has been lost on few that the industry remained mum when global superstar Fan Bingbing went missing in 2018.
Including her agency, CAA.
By contrast, the Women's Tennis Association this month pulled all of its tournaments in China following a similar disappearance of tennis star Peng Shui.
As Hollywood's risk-reward calculus for China starts to get muddier and muddier, there's a move for an entity, whether it's a celebrity, athlete, or company, to do what Muhammad Ali did, which is to take a direct hit short-term on revenue, but long-term create a brand that's bigger than what they were originally known for, said Blockers producer Chris Fenton, whose 2020 book, Feeding the Dragon, Inside the Trillion-Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business, explored the China minefield.
So Boston Celtic Center Enos Cancer Freedom, who is really doing heroic things on this.
He is seized on this.
Blasted LeBron James for looking the other way, of course.
Meanwhile, the planned U.S.
diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics will only escalate China's growing enmity toward United States culture.
And corporations are just going to keep surrendering on this.
And here's the thing, China has to use its leverage.
So just as the Soviet Union was a second-rate power masquerading as a first-rate power, China is a second-rate power masquerading as a first-rate power.
They are not an economic powerhouse.
China has an extraordinarily large population.
They've opened up their market to the extent that they have been able to take hundreds of millions of their own citizens out of abject poverty.
But the simple fact of the matter is that China is not a widely prosperous country.
China's GDP per capita is still about $10,500.
That is their GDP per capita.
The United States' GDP per capita is currently $63,500.
So our GDP per capita is about six times that of China.
Canada's is four times that of China.
The UK's is four times that of China.
So when we're talking about economic powerhouses, if you're going to rank countries by GDP per capita, Simple fact of the matter is that China is ranked on a global level in terms of GDP per capita, according to worldometers, below Libya, Montenegro, Mexico, Thailand, Azerbaijan, and Iraq.
Okay, so China is not a global economic powerhouse, except that they have tons and tons and tons of people, and they can use that leverage in order to force people to do what they want.
They can use the pressure points that are inherent in capitalism to get Particular corporations to bend to their will.
And this is what they have to do.
In the same way that Russia has to invade surrounding countries in order to demonstrate to their population that the country has a future and that they're a muscular player on the world stage, even though the fact is that Russia is indeed a second-rate power with a second-rate economy and a decrepit military structure.
Russia's GDP per capita is also quite terrible.
Russia's GDP per capita right now is on par with China.
It's about $10,000 per person.
Those are bad numbers.
But all these countries have to demonstrate their muscular on the world stage.
What China has figured out is that using its market, it can actually create the perception of widespread power and using its massive military can threaten surrounding countries.
Which would mean that the best way for the United States to fight China would be on the economic stage in the same way that we fought the Soviet Union.
We did not foster vast economic connections between ourselves and the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War.
That would have been incredibly stupid.
It would have made American companies dependent on the Soviet Union.
And yet the entire West fell prey to the belief that if we started to plant McDonald's in China, somehow this would overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.
That, of course, is untrue.
It turns out that dictators can take advantage of slightly open markets to enrich themselves and create a cadre of overlords who are able to suppress the rest of the population.
And this is exactly what China has to do because China has serious problem.
China is only a threat to the West insofar as the West allows China to be a threat to the West.
That's the reality of the situation, because China internally is extraordinarily weak.
According to the New York Times, China announced on Monday that its birth rate plummeted for the fifth straight year in 2021, moving the world's most populous country closer to the potentially seismic moment when its population will begin to shrink, hastening a demographic crisis that could undermine its economy and even its political stability.
The falling birth rate, coupled with an increasing life expectancy that has accompanied China's economic transformation over the last four decades, means the number of people of working age, relative to the growing number of people too old to work, has continued to decline.
In other words, they have a social welfare structure that is completely upside down.
It is no longer a pyramid.
It is now a top-heavy pyramid.
There are not enough people at the bottom of the pyramid to support all the people at the top of the pyramid.
This could result in labor shortages, which could hamper economic growth, reduce tax revenue needed to support an aging society.
The situation is creating a huge political problem for Beijing, which is already facing economic headwinds.
Along with the demographic data, the country reported on Monday that growth in the last quarter of the year slowed to 4%.
China's ruling Communist Party has been attempting to push people to have three kids after spending years forcibly murdering children.
And this is a thing that the Chinese government did do.
If you want to watch a great documentary on this, a really disturbing documentary, there's a great documentary called One Child Nation available on Amazon by a producer who actually is from China, a director who's from China, all about how China essentially led to widespread infanticide through its one-child policy.
But none of this has been able to reverse a stark fact.
An increasing number of Chinese women don't want children.
Yifu Zhan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says, China is facing a demographic crisis that is beyond the imagination of the Chinese authorities and the international community.
The number of births in China fell to 10.6 million in 2021, compared with 12 million the year before.
That was fewer even than the number in 1961, when the Great Leap Forward resulted in widespread famine and death.
For the first time since the Great Leap Forward, China's population could soon begin to contract.
The number of people who died in 2021, 10.1 million, approached the number of those who were born.
Some demographers say the peak may have already occurred.
Wang Feng, professor of sociology at University of California, Irvine, says the year 2021 will go down in Chinese history as the year China last saw population growth in its long history.
This is a disaster area for the Chinese economy.
And in fact, China's economy is slowing again.
I mean, China is a debt-based economy.
China has massive debt problems.
China has been taking out money to pay for basically building empty cities over the course of the last several decades at this point.
I mean, China has a massive public debt.
According to warontherocks.com, China is riddled with debts.
China is one of the most indebted large economies in the world.
Its state-owned banks are sitting on mountains of bad debts and non-performing loans, particularly in the real estate sector, and that's just on the surface.
Underneath lies a staggering quantity of murky debt, off-balance sheet lending, wealth management products, local government funding vehicles, all told, China's debt is considerably larger than it appears at first glance, and so high that some analysts feel as if it is at dangerous levels and could spill over, doing severe damage to the world economy.
That is not a huge shock.
I mean, China has been basically staving off the complete collapse of its second largest real estate developer, Evergrande.
They failed to pay a short-term debt in June of 2021, and the Chinese government had to freeze the company's bank accounts.
There were concerns the company might default on its $305 billion in liabilities.
And of course, in October, there was another Chinese developer, Fantasia Holdings Group, that missed its repayment of $206 million in five-year dollar bonds.
Later that same month, China's property group subsidiary, Shurgen Group, defaulted on $226 million worth of debt payments.
Another developer, Modern Land China, missed its payment of principal or interest on a $250 million bond.
It turns out that centralized economics is garbage.
It is really, really bad.
And when you decide that you're going to prop up your failing economic system by just borrowing money, Despite the fact that China was now reported as the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment?
Well, this means that you are in real trouble.
All this is being reported by Antonio Graceffo, a Ph.D.
China MBA who spent seven years in China and is the author of the books Beyond the Belt and Road and A Short Course on the Chinese Economy.
So China has real economic problems.
That means that their solutions to their economic problems is aggressiveness.
When you have a failing country, you get aggressive.
And China is getting aggressive on the world stage.
And they're particularly turning toward capitalism as a weak point for the West because you can manipulate all of these sucker capitalists into doing business with you and ignoring all of your predations on the world stage by offering them a little bit of cold hard cash.
You can essentially bribe them into ignoring what you're doing on the world, which is why you actually do need governments to stand up here.
The American government should be working with the Europeans in order to cut off China's economy at the knees.
See China for what it is, an aggressive world power.
This is not a partnership.
They're an enemy.
And the Chinese government has openly declared itself so.
If you read any of the minutes from their annual meetings, their annual meetings are all about how they are going to take on and defeat the West.
And yet we are allowing our own corporations to be hijacked by the Chinese government propaganda outfit.
It's insane.
So, in other words, don't believe any of these corporate heads when they pretend that they are woke beyond woke.
They're not woke beyond woke.
They're just seeking money.
This holds true in terms of foreign policy, and it holds true domestically as well.
We've got to push back on this because capitalism can be used by militant leftists in order to essentially turn all of these corporations into their own meat puppets.
And that's precisely what they've been doing.
Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to some good news on the polling front.
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Already in just one second, we'll get you some amazing, amazing polling data.
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I cannot wait to hang out with you and discuss Orwell this Thursday, January 20th, 8 p.m.
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Also, I am pumped to announce the release of the final trailer for our first original movie here at Daily Wire, Shudden.
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All righty, meanwhile, there's some astonishing news from the polling front.
On the polling front, Democrats are in such unbelievable trouble.
According to Gallup, on average, Americans' political preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S.
adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic than identified as Republicans or leaning Republican.
About 46% Democratic.
and 43% Republican.
However, the general stability for the full year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021 from a nine percentage point Democratic advantage in the first quarter of 2021 to a five point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.
47% identified as Republican or lean Republican compared to 42% who identified as lean Democrat.
And that is extraordinarily rare.
The nine-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for either party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party ID and leaning in 1991.
The GOP has held as much as a five-point advantage in a total of only four quarters since 1991.
The Republicans last held a five-point advantage in party identification and leaning in early 1995 after winning control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 50s.
So, basically, the last time there was a giant, enormous, unprecedented Republican wave.
That was 1994.
And that is when Republican numbers looked like this one.
The only other time the Republicans had a larger advantage is when George W. Bush was at, like, 90% in the approval ratings at the beginning of the Gulf War.
For Democrats, their lead in the first quarter was the largest for the party since the fourth quarter of 2012, which is of course when Barack Obama won re-election.
Shifting party preferences in 2021, according to Gallup, are likely tied to changes in popularity of the two men who served as president during the year.
Donald Trump finished out his single term in January after being defeated in 2020 with a 34% job approval rating, that's the lowest of his term.
His popularity fell more than 10 points from Election Day 2020, as the country's COVID-19 infections and deaths reached record highs, as well as the January 6th events.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden had relatively high ratings, and then those absolutely collapsed.
And so what we saw in the fourth quarter is this massive shift toward the Republicans.
According to Gallup, the shifts in party affiliation in each quarter of 2021 were apparent in both the percentage identifying with each party and the percentage of independents leaning to each party, but with more changes among leaners than identifiers.
Between the first and fourth quarters, the percentage of Democratic identifiers decreased by two points.
The percentage of Democratic-leaning independents dropped by five points.
Republican identification increased by three points.
Republican leaners increased by four points.
So that is a massive shift in favor of the Republicans.
It is extremely rare.
And Democrats are in real and serious trouble.
Not just that, according to Gallup, You can see what has happened within the parties, and this is the reason why there's been a shift against the Democrats.
So if you look at Americans' political ideology by year, across the country, about 36% of Americans identify as conservative.
Another 37% of Americans identify as moderate.
That means that 73% of Americans are either conservative or moderate.
How many identify as liberal?
25%. 25%.
So that is a not great number for the folks on the left, particularly because all of those liberals identify only with the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party used to be a lot more politically diverse.
But the simple fact of the matter is that right now, the Democratic Party has moved in a wildly left direction.
If you look at the Democrats' political ideology, according to Gallup, what it shows is that in 1994, only 25% of Democrats identified as liberal.
Right?
Same number identified as conservative.
So it was about 25% conservative, 25% liberal, and about 50% moderate.
Today, only 12% of Democrats identify as conservative.
37% identify as moderate.
50% identify as liberal.
So liberals, remember, only constitute about 25% of the entire American population, but they are 50% of the Democratic Party.
Moderates constitute only about 37% of the Democratic Party, down from 48% in 1994.
And there are no conservatives left in the Democratic Party.
12% of Democrats identify as conservatives.
Meanwhile, the numbers for independents have remained essentially the same.
In 1994, 46% identified as moderate.
Today, that's 48%.
31% identified as conservative.
Today, that's 30%.
18% identified as liberal.
Today, that's 20%.
So, in other words, the Democratic Party moved to the left, and now everybody else has moved to the right.
That's the story of American politics.
The Republican Party identifies more openly as conservative, but the moderates have been left behind by the Democratic Party.
Which is a disaster for the Democratic Party.
And you can see that these demographics are really bad for the Democratic Party.
If you look at Americans' political ideology by subgroup in 2021, what you see is that only people 18 to 29 predominantly identify as liberal.
The vast majority of people in the United States, first of all, the vast majority of people or plurality of people 18 to 29 identify as moderate.
But among people who identify as liberal, the plurality are young, 18 to 29.
Among people who identify as conservative, the plurality are older.
And moderates are sort of evenly spread across the board.
Well, here's the problem.
This is an older country, gang.
So the demographics actually do not run in favor of the Democratic Party at this point.
And here is what's particularly hilarious.
Okay, here is how racial groups identify.
You ready?
So this is totally contrary to what the left would like you to believe.
Here's how racial groups identify politically.
Non-Hispanic white adults.
42% identify as conservative.
34% identify as moderate.
23% identify as liberal.
Among non-Hispanic black adults, 20% identify as conservative, 26% identify as liberal, 51% identify as moderate among blacks, among black Americans.
Okay, so in other words, there are more liberals than conservers among blacks, about 6%.
But virtually all black people, like 51% of them, identify as moderate.
Hispanics, it's way worse for the Democratic Party here.
Among Hispanics, 31% of Hispanics identify as conservative.
28% identify as liberal.
More Hispanics now identify as conservative than liberal, and 38% identify as moderate.
So as the Democratic Party gets more and more liberal, they are leaving behind the entire American population.
And yet Joe Biden is held hostage by his own base because 50% of his party is progressive.
And most of his activist base.
So what the hell is he going to do?
He's left the entire center of American politics wide open.
This is what's so astonishing about Joe Biden's presidency.
All he had to do was have a little bit of guts.
Nate Silver, the poll analyst, he made a really good point.
People tend to think of Joe Biden as a moderate.
Joe Biden is not a moderate, says Nate Silver.
Joe Biden is a person who is wherever the center of the Democratic Party is.
So if the center of the Democratic Party moves to the left, so does Joe Biden.
So Joe Biden is a bellwether.
He's not a leader, he's a bellwether.
So if Joe Biden moved into Bernie Sanders' territory, it's because his base is in Bernie Sanders' territory.
The problem is the country ain't in Bernie Sanders' territory.
So the more Democrats reflect this, the more Democrats move to the left.
And by the way, Studies demonstrate that Republican platform has basically been stagnant since 2010.
Democratic platform has moved wildly to the left.
As they've done this, Joe Biden has moved along with them.
So it's not that Joe Biden is just a fool who moved to the left, although I think he is a fool for not standing up.
It's that this is who Joe Biden always was.
He was the cork bobbing on the eddies of Democratic Party politics.
And wherever the Democratic Party was, that is where he was.
Well, Democratic Party politics is now completely disconnected from the American population.
The only reason Joe Biden was elected is because he was not Donald Trump.
That was not a green light to all of the idiotic Democratic strategies.
It was not a green light to all of their garbage policies.
And it is hilarious that the Democrats keep trying to ram down policies the American people hate, and then they look around and think, why doesn't anybody follow us?
The answer is because your party is not reflective of the American population.
By the way, Roy Tushara, right?
Remember, he's the guy who suggested a new emerging Democratic majority.
He said that as more minorities were present in the demographics of American life, there would be a radical shift over to the left in American politics.
He came out with an article just a few weeks ago saying that the Hispanic vote was moving conservative and this broke his model.
He came out yesterday.
He said, guys, the Asian vote is moving conservative.
It's breaking my model.
Because it's not that they're moving conservative.
It's that everyone is now Ronald Reagan circa 1964.
Everybody else stayed the same.
The Democratic Party just moved wildly to the left.
And when the Democratic Party of today is too far left for the Democratic Party of 2010, that shows you how far left they've moved, because the Democratic Party of 2010 was not a moderate party.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Knowles Show today.
He discusses Joe Biden saying that George Floyd mattered more than Martin Luther King Jr.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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