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Nov. 29, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

43:59

Why China's Covid Tyranny Should Scare Us All | Ep. 1619

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	Mass protests continue in China over the regime's zero COVID policy.
	The stock market takes a hit as fallout continues from China's failures and Elon Musk goes to war with Apple.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Venture Bureau Show.
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	Well, the chaos continues in China as mass protests continue across China.
	The consequences for the regime are yet unknown, but there's some serious questions to be asked about zero COVID policy generally.
	And the West is letting itself off a little bit easy here.
	What I mean by this?
	Is that right now, the sort of resistance that you are seeing in China to China's zero COVID policy, which has been spurred by the fact that China was literally welding people into apartment buildings to prevent them from leaving because they may have had COVID.
	And this resulted in a fire in an apartment building that killed 10 people.
	And that has resulted in all of the chaotic demonstrations that you're seeing, the so-called white paper revolution over there.
	The West is letting itself off easy because for literally two years, China was held up as a quasi-model for this sort of behavior.
	China was lying to the world.
	They lied about the release of the virus.
	They knew, apparently, according to Scott Gottlieb of the FDA, as early as October or at the very latest, November of 2019, there was human-to-human transmission of the virus, and they allowed it to escape Wuhan and infect literally millions of people around the world.
	The virus ended up killing over 1.5 million Americans, according to the latest CDC statistics.
	And meanwhile, the media, members of the White House, including Anthony Fauci, sort of covered for the Chinese.
	They suggested that the Chinese were doing it right.
	And all over the world, there was talk about how there needed to be lockdowns.
	There needed to be.
	the sort of Chinese authoritarianism that would get this thing stopped in its tracks.
	Now the problem is twofold.
	One, it didn't stop things in its tracks in China.
	China lied about everything.
	They lied about their stats.
	They lied about illness.
	They lied about death.
	They lied about the virus itself.
	They kept the actual virus's DNA composition hidden for literally months so that people couldn't develop the vaccine earlier and therefore save many, many lives, particularly of the elderly.
	But all over the world, the press praised people who locked down hard.
	So if you're Andrew Cuomo and you were sort of a lockdown advocate, you were the greatest.
	And if you were Ron DeSantis, then you were Ron Deathsantis.
	If you were New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern and you were talking about locking down the entire country for months on end, you were a great heroine of the world, saving lives every day.
	If you were Australia and you were tracking down Teenagers were hanging out by themselves on the beach and you had dystopian images of drones that were following people on the beach, arresting people.
	Oh my God, somebody has COVID.
	We have to track them down using the hound from Fahrenheit 451.
	This was considered good policy by a lot of people on the left, a lot of people in the media.
	And China was seen as a model for all of this.
	And so now there's an attempt to walk back the sort of enthusiasm for lockdown, the enthusiasm for Chinese methodologies.
	There's an attempt to walk that back because obviously it, number one, didn't work.
	And number two, it actually is violative of human freedoms.
	But we should not forget that if given the opportunity, there are a lot of people in authority who use single factor analysis to determine what to do in times of crisis, who would go along with the kind of stuff that we have seen in China and are continuing to see in China.
	There are a lot of people go along with that.
	And this is Through the nature of a bureaucratic Western state, bureaucracies tend to operate along single factor analysis lines.
	So, politicians are elected to weigh and balance.
	There's a lot of talk at the very beginning of COVID about how we should figure out what public policy look like.
	Should this be up to the bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci over at the NIH?
	Or should it be up to the elected politicians, even the ones you don't like, like President Trump?
	Who should actually make the policy?
	And the best politicians were the ones who actually came out and said, I am making the call.
	I was elected to make this call because there are a lot of questions as to how we make this balance.
	Do kids get to go to school?
	There are serious costs to kids not going to school.
	Can you go and open your workplace?
	There are serious costs to you staying home.
	Should we just force everybody to stay home and blow trillions of dollars into the economy, creating an unprecedented inflation spiral that is going to result in some pretty serious global economic consequence?
	And these are all questions that politicians should have been asking themselves.
	But the easiest thing in a bureaucratic republic to do is kick it over to the bureaucrats.
	And if you are a bureaucrat, your chief goal is to focus in on the one thing that allows you to keep your job.
	The mission of your agency is something that James Q. Wilson talks about in his book, Bureaucracy, that agencies are typically designed in order to facilitate their quote-unquote mission.
	But if the mission is very specific, it becomes the only thing that they care about.
	So if the mission for the NIH is quote-unquote, save lives, then all the other factors go out the window.
	All of the costs of keeping people out of school, all the costs of shutting down your business, all the economic costs, all the costs and loneliness and deaths of despair, all that stuff goes out the window because you have one goal and one goal only, and that is zero COVID.
	And for a very long time, that was the policy of the United States.
	Dr. Anthony Fauci was preaching this.
	He was suggesting, without any sort of actual statistical evidence, that we were going to get to something approaching zero COVID.
	He would suggest that we get to less than 10,000 cases a day, and then he would set an arbitrary marker, maybe 40,000 cases a day, maybe zero cases a day.
	But he would say, the more cases there are, the worse it is.
	And the problem with that is that that facilitates a logic that leads to lockdowns.
	That is a problem.
	And we knew from the very beginning.
	Really, from like a couple of months in, it was fully obvious that lockdowns were not going to solve this problem.
	There were those of us in the media who were talking about the idea that if you actually wanted to protect and shield the population, you need to focus on protecting and shielding the most vulnerable.
	Because it was very clear from the evidence that the people who were chiefly affected by this were people with serious pre-existing conditions, serious obesity, diabetes, cancer, leukemia, and the very elderly.
	And the stats showed that.
	I mean, if you actually look at the CDC statistics today, what you will see is that as of today, 76.1% of all people in the United States who died of COVID were above the age of 65, which we knew from very early on, which would have suggested that if we actually wanted to pursue anything remotely like herd immunity, what we should have been doing is tranching out the population by age.
	What we should have been doing is saying, all the 20-year-olds go back to work.
	Okay, y'all got infected and you're all fine because you're 20.
	Now all the 30-year-olds go back to work.
	Okay, you're all fine.
	Now all the 40-year-olds get back to work.
	And what you're doing is you're cutting down the vectors of transmissibility.
	But not only are you cutting down the factors of transmissibility, you're also allowing people to go back to work in tranches and you are shielding the most vulnerable.
	That would have been the smartest approach throughout.
	And by the way, I should mention that right now in the United States, again, these are CDC statistics, 94% of all people who have died from COVID are above the age of 50.
	94%.
	So it is no surprise that we find that in the latest upsurge in COVID, COVID deaths are skewing older.
	Again, according to the Washington Post, President Biden may have declared the coronavirus pandemic over, but from John Felton's view as the Yellowstone County Health Officer in Billings, Montana, it's not over, just different.
	Now more than ever, it is a plague of the elderly, but it was always a plague of the elderly.
	I'm amused to see the Washington Post pretend that this is like a breaking news thing.
	It was not breaking news.
	We knew very early on that young people were disproportionately fine from this virus.
	In October, Felton's team logged six deaths due to the virus, many of them among vaccinated people.
	They're ages 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 90s.
	Yellowstone County made the decision early in the crisis to recognize each death individually.
	Felton said it is important as ever to acknowledge the unrelenting toll on a still vulnerable older generation while most everyone has moved on.
	But that is the thing about being old, is that older people tend to die.
	The death rates among people in their 90s are much higher than the death rates among people in their 20s.
	So, what you're talking about here is vulnerable people tend to be vulnerable, which is not any sort of breaking news.
	And by the way, this is the area in which the vaccines have had their most significantly positive effect.
	I mean, people above the age of 65 who got the vaccines, particularly, had significantly lower rates of death from COVID and lower rates of serious disease from COVID than people who did not get the vaccine if you're above the age of 65.
	But again, we knew from the beginning that this was true.
	We knew from the beginning that it was disproportionately older people who are going to die of COVID.
	And yet there was this push for broad lockdown and there was enthusiasm about that continues until this day.
	And so there are two things that are worth noting about China.
	One is obviously the geopolitical chaos that is ensuing because of the unrest in China.
	What does it mean for China's foreign policy?
	What does it mean for China cracking down on its own citizens?
	What should the West do?
	That's one issue.
	The second issue is we look at what China is doing right now with these lockdowns and has been doing for a couple of years with these lockdowns.
	And you wonder, Is that sort of authoritarianism totally foreign to the West?
	Is that something that could quote unquote never happen here?
	Or should we be looking at China and should be very wary about the kind of powers we give to government?
	Because again, our government was rather warm on this sort of stuff until very, very recently.
	And literally this week, Anthony Fauci, who is going to leave his job, we can only pray sooner rather than later.
	Anthony Fauci was asked about shutting schools down again going into the winter.
	And he kind of started weirdly giggling about it on Face the Nation.
	It was odd.
	Coming out of the holidays, should parents expect schools to shut down?
	I don't know, Margaret.
	I'm not sure.
	When you talk about shutting down schools, there's always the collateral effects.
	That's also radioactive.
	Exactly.
	There's always the collateral issues.
	That's a weird laugh.
	I mean, he says now that there are collateral issues, but very early on, he was very much pushing for these sorts of shutdowns.
	And he still sees circumstances in which lockdowns would be a net positive.
	Go back to April, and he was talking about Chinese policy, and he says, listen, China may be doing it too long, but is lockdown policy really the worst idea?
	I mean, if it gets people vaccinated, maybe it's something that you might have to do sometimes.
	Here's Anthony Fauci conditionally endorsing Chinese policy.
	Well, China has a number of problems, two of which are that their complete lockdown, which was their approach, a strictest lockdown that you'd never be able to implement in the United States.
	Although that prevents the spread of infection and remember early on they were saying and I think accurately that they were doing better than almost anybody else.
	But lockdown has its consequences.
	You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated so that when you open up you won't have a surge of infections because you're dealing with an immunologically naive population to the virus because they've not really been exposed because of the lockdown.
	Okay, but the problem is that Anthony Fauci considers the United States population largely immunologically naive.
	He was out there just a few days ago now talking about how if there was a wave of death this winter, it was going to come from those who are unvaccinated.
	So there are no standards there.
	So the question becomes, what level of crisis is going to necessitate the sorts of lockdowns that we've been seeing in China?
	By the way, it is worth noting here that Anthony Fauci has been bizarrely conciliatory toward the Chinese.
	I mean, it is very, very weird because the fact is, again, China is the world's worst actor when it comes to this virus.
	It is because of the Chinese government that literally millions of people are dead.
	They've killed millions of people.
	This virus did not have to escape Wuhan.
	Whether it was released from a lab, whether it was not released from a lab, it did not have to escape Wuhan.
	They knew early on what was going on.
	They facilitated, they encouraged travel, and it killed five, six million people across the world.
	And that is the fault of the Chinese government.
	And yet, Fauci is still weirdly conciliatory with them.
	He was asked actually this week about China not being forthcoming about the virus, and he actually blamed Trump.
	Which is strange because if you actually remember to the beginning of the Trump administration, Trump was very conciliatory toward China.
	In January of 2020, you remember that Donald Trump was actually talking about how the Chinese were doing a good job cracking down on it and they were being open about the virus and they were working with the WHO.
	It was only later that Trump turned on China when he got the information or was willing to reveal the information that China had basically hidden a bunch of information.
	But here's Fauci still kind of standing for China.
	Weird.
	Have you seen anything that Beijing has produced, at all, in terms of explanation or data?
	Well, their explanation is an explanation that they will not allow us to look at the primary information.
	We need a transparency and a collaboration to open things up so that we can discuss it in a non-accusatory way.
	What happens is that if you look at the anti-China approach that clearly the Trump administration had right from the very beginning, and the accusatory nature, the Chinese are going to flinch back and say, no, I'm sorry, we're not going to talk to you about it.
	OK, that's that's patently crazy.
	OK, the Chinese, again, were hiding this thing from October of the year before.
	And Anthony Fauci is out there standing for China.
	By the way, it is worth noting here that Anthony Fauci was asked about whether the United States and the NIH in particular under his auspices had helped to fund gain of function research in Wuhan that led to the arising of this virus.
	Well, we're almost certain, almost certain that it wasn't us.
	I can't tell you what's going on in all of China and in other things, but I can tell you for sure that if you look at the viruses that the NIH grant funded to study in a surveillance way, anybody who even has a peripheral understanding of evolutionary virology will tell you these viruses could not possibly turn into SARS-CoV-2.
	So when you talk about a leak, Maybe there's a lab leak, but it's not with the viruses that the NIH was funding.
	That's almost certain that that's the case.
	Almost certain is a pretty weird kind of hold back right there.
	Okay, so the reason that I bring all of this up is because China is now using extraordinarily modern methodologies in order to surveil its own citizens.
	And this is something that should scare people in the West.
	Because if you look again at people like Anthony Fauci, Even if you take Anthony Fauci at his word that all he wants are sometimes very harsh temporary lockdowns, the question always becomes how temporary?
	And the Biden administration is still declaring we're in the middle of a COVID emergency for purposes of relieving student loan debt.
	And it is now November of 2022.
	And this virus broke out in the United States in January of 2020.
	It's fully two years later at this point.
	And we're still doing this routine, which is insane.
	And yet you still have Anthony Fauci out there doing it.
	So the question becomes, should we be worried about a government that has the capacity to monitor all of its citizens the way that China does?
	They should raise questions about tech.
	They should raise questions about the sort of interfacing between big tech and big government.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, China's COVID protesters are the targets of Beijing's surveillance state.
	And the reality is that the KGB never could have dreamt of this level of surveillance.
	The ability that the Chinese government has to monitor literally everyone.
	I mean, they have a social credit system over there.
	They're monitoring everybody's online.
	They can monitor your phone.
	They can make sure that they know exactly where you are at any time, literally any time.
	There's never been a surveillance state like this in human history.
	And the Chinese have perfected this.
	Which means, by the way, that it's going to be very difficult for there to be an actual regime overthrow in a place like China, so long as the military retains its loyalty to Xi Jinping.
	But this has some pretty significant ramifications for those of us who live in the West as well.
	Because at any moment, you could have a government that declares an emergency over something like COVID and simply locks you in your home and then monitors you, cuts you off from the banking system.
	It doesn't take somebody paranoid to see the line of where things could go if the wrong people are in charge.
	Or if people take what they believe to be the most life-affirming decision in order to protect the most lives.
	They just have to lock everybody in their house.
	And if you violate the rules, then we follow you around.
	Or let's say that it's disconnected entirely from things like the virus.
	We have to foster and facilitate a set of social values that a huge percentage of the population doesn't like.
	And in order to do that, we're going to unleash the surveillance state on you.
	We're going to monitor exactly what you do.
	We're going to monitor your credit card purchases.
	We're going to cut you off from systems.
	Because this is what China does.
	And when these sorts of financial and surveillance weapons are out there, Usually an arms race begins by governments which are constantly seeking to centralize power.
	And better to be a little bit too paranoid and reduce government power than to be not paranoid enough and give them enough power to actually destroy your liberty.
	Because what we're watching in China is a tech surveillance state in service to an authoritarian regime.
	Quote, Chinese police have begun leveraging the powers of the country's surveillance state to go after demonstrators who participated in rare public displays of defiance over the government's stringent COVID-19 protocols.
	Wang Chengcheng, a lawyer providing legal support to more than 20 protesters from Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities, said at least 15 people, or their families and friends, reached out to her for help after being contacted by local police.
	She said she suspected police had used data from mobile phones, including apps used to monitor COVID exposure, to track the movements of people involved in protests.
	By the way, this is just another good reason why we should ban TikTok in the United States.
	TikTok is a Chinese op, and it is one of the most successful Chinese ops in human history.
	Police were also scanning social media accounts to investigate protesters.
	According to this lawyer, a university student in Beijing who participated in Sunday's protest in the city said his school had been contacted by police.
	The school told him police had used mobile phone data to track his movements to the vicinity of the protest.
	He said he'd been asked to write a declaration explaining why he was present in the area at the time.
	Under leader Xi Jinping, according to the Wall Street Journal, China has expanded its ability to track the movements and activities of its citizens.
	While this didn't stop the protests from breaking out, China's security apparatus has begun to lean on it to prevent them from spreading.
	Besides hundreds of millions of cameras, some equipped with facial recognition software that lines city streets, police can also access detailed mobile phone and social media data that shows locations of people at a given time.
	The government has enhanced these capabilities over the past two years as part of contact tracing efforts to control the spread of the virus.
	The efforts to track protesters came as Chinese health officials responded to the public anger over COVID-19 policies and appeared to recalibrate their message on the danger posed by the virus.
	On Tuesday, the National Health Commission urged local government officials to avoid unnecessary and lengthy lockdowns.
	Health officials said the Omicron variant led to less severe COVID cases than previous variants.
	The message echoed a similar shift from Chinese state media, which is good news.
	It seems like the Chinese government is beginning to realize that its lockdown policies are creating all sorts of chaos internally.
	But again, if China decides to repress its people, it just will.
	China's state media has continued to defend the country's zero-COVID policies, saying it has saved lives.
	On Tuesday, a commentary in the People's Daily blamed more than a half-dozen private COVID-tested businesses for unnecessary lockdowns, accusing them of producing false positive results.
	On Monday, the U.S.
	embassy issued a notice of warning of expanded COVID control measures in China as the outbreaks grow.
	It said, we encourage all U.S.
	citizens to keep a 14-day supply of medications, bottled water, and food for yourselves and any members of your household.
	All this should be enough to scare any person who loves liberty and who also seeks more than single-factor analysis in determining what public policy should look like.
	We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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	Now, there is something weird happening inside the Biden administration, which is that they are very reticent to condemn the Chinese government for its crackdown.
	They seem really, really nervous about saying anything about this.
	Now, there are two possible reasons for this.
	One is geopolitical.
	Joe Biden is not ready to go face-to-face, toe-to-toe with Xi Jinping over human rights violations in his own country, which, of course, would not be particularly surprising considering the West was completely silent over the complete repression of Hong Kong, the first communist takeover of a major country since the Vietnam War, essentially.
	It is an amazing thing that the West just didn't care that Hong Kong was turned into a complete Chinese subject state as opposed to what was essentially a free state inside of China that was economically free at the very least.
	And Chinese predations are going to grow.
	We'll talk about Taiwan in just one moment.
	So it's possible, number one, that Joe Biden just doesn't have either the means or the stones to go up against China, given what's happening right now.
	The other possibility is that there's a really uncomfortable parallel between what China is doing right now and the people on the left who are praising this sort of policy five minutes ago.
	Like you would imagine at the very least that the Biden administration would sympathize with the anti-lockdown politics of the people who are protesting in China.
	The Biden administration might give them some sort of vocal support, say, well, you know, authoritarian lockdowns are a bad thing, but they refuse to say that.
	And one of the reasons they refuse to say that is because again, until five minutes ago, a lot of the West, particularly left in the West, was very much pro the idea of locking people in their homes.
	There were people in the West who were praising it.
	So here is John Kirby.
	Who is a national security spokesperson for the Biden administration saying that Joe Biden is not going to speak for the protesters in China.
	They have a right to protest, but we're not going to say anything about what they're protesting.
	I'm wondering what is the president's reaction when he hears protesters in China chant freedom or Xi Jinping step down?
	The president is not going to speak for protesters around the world.
	They're speaking for themselves.
	So there's no reaction?
	These protesters are speaking for themselves.
	What we are doing is making it clear that we support the right of peaceful protest.
	I don't even know what that means.
	They're speaking for themselves?
	I mean, you don't have any message whatsoever on what exactly they're saying or why they are saying it?
	Isn't that a bit odd?
	We are a free country, supposedly.
	Shouldn't you be saying that other people have a right to go to their place of business?
	That we shouldn't be locking literally hundreds of millions of people in their home or welding shut apartment buildings?
	Why the reticence?
	It's bizarre and strange, unless you assume that there's a certain level of discomfort inside this administration for condemning full-scale lockdowns because you never know, maybe in the future we might have to do something kind of like that.
	As National Security Council Communications Coordinator Kirby, And then he was asked about whether the White House would condemn China for detaining protesters.
	And even here, he was real shy.
	The statement that was issued earlier today didn't include any explicit calls for China to stop detaining and harming protesters and journalists.
	Why not?
	We're watching this closely, as you might expect we would.
	And again, we continue to stand up and support the right of peaceful protest.
	And I think we're going to watch this closely and we'll see where things go.
	What does that even mean?
	We're going to watch this closely and see where things go?
	I could say that about literally anything on earth.
	And there's a mugging going on.
	We're going to watch this closely.
	We're going to see how that mugging down the street goes.
	We'll watch it closely.
	We'll see how it goes.
	What are you even talking about?
	I thought that you guys wanted to establish your moral leadership.
	So just to get this straight, moral leadership, according to the Biden administration, consists of a few things.
	It consists of putting trans flags in front of the Vatican.
	It apparently consists of making empty promises about paying third world countries to Facilitates their move away from carbon based fossil fuels.
	It means a global corporate income tax.
	And it apparently means watching closely as China locks its citizens into apartment buildings and then lets them burn to death.
	Great moral leadership happening here from the Biden administration.
	Really, really solid stuff.
	Now, meanwhile, the situation in China itself, geopolitically, is going to be pretty fraught here.
	As I suggested yesterday, if Xi Jinping feels that the walls are closing in around him, this usually gives dictators a couple of possibilities.
	One is significant internal repression plus external aggression.
	And the other is some sort of conciliatory measures directed toward the population.
	Xi has no history of conciliatory measures directed against the population or toward the population.
	So that means that you're probably likely to see aggression against the home population as well as aggression on the foreign front.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, President Xi faces a difficult choice between loosening China's zero-tolerance COVID-19 policy or doubling down on restrictions that have locked down neighborhoods and stifled the country's economy over the past three years.
	Neither option is a good one for a regime focused on stability.
	Stock markets around the globe declined Monday as protests in China fueled worries among investors about the outlook for the world's second-largest economy.
	Xi's leadership is in a bind, said Wen Wen'an, a political scientist focused on China at the University of Michigan.
	If they compromise and relax zero-COVID, they fear it'll encourage mass protests.
	If they repress more, it'll create wider and deeper grievances.
	Protesters across China have directly challenged the authority of the Chinese leader and the Communist Party in scenes unthinkable just a month ago, when Mr. Xi secured a third term in power.
	In Shanghai over the weekend, protesters used call-and-response chanting to demand political change.
	In Beijing, crowds shouted freedom.
	In other large cities, demonstrators marched holding blank sheets of paper, a swipe at government censorship.
	China experts say the protests are unlikely to translate into a leadership change in the near term at least.
	But Beijing's dilemma is a tough one.
	It could lift restrictions and risk a large and potentially deadly wave of COVID infections that could undermine its credibility.
	That's not really what they're worried about.
	Because again, what does China care if lots of people die?
	China's an authoritarian regime.
	They've killed literally tens of millions of their own citizens over the course of Mao's history.
	Or it could crack down on the demonstrators and stick with a strict pandemic strategy that large parts of the population are clearly fed up with.
	Widespread and public outpourings of political grievance have been extremely rare in a country where people have long consented to obey party authorities as long as they deliver prosperity and allow citizens relative freedom in their personal lives.
	But of course, China is now reversing all of that.
	There's a good piece by Zhang Lijian, a former Tiananmen Square protester and political prisoner of China over at the Washington Post saying, don't let China stage another Tiananmen massacre.
	This person says what has happened over the past week has exceeded all my expectations.
	First came the uprising by workers at a Foxconn factory complex, protesting dismal working conditions.
	Then came nationwide protests after a fire in Xiangjiang that killed a number of people who were reportedly unable to escape the burning building because of harsh lockdown conditions.
	The demonstrations began by expressing rage over harsh zero-COVID policies, but the protesters' demands quickly evolved into a movement demanding broader freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from the diktats of the Communist Party.
	We want to eat, not do coronavirus tests.
	Reform, not cultural revolution.
	Read one recent banner.
	We want freedom, not lockdowns.
	Elections, not rulers.
	We want dignity, not lies.
	Be citizens, not enslaved people.
	This protester says, as someone who participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989, I can't help feeling echoes of that moment in the events taking place in China right now. I was there when the Chinese Communist Party sent in troops to gun down protesters. I fear history can repeat itself today. The world should not underestimate the determination of Xi and the CCP to remain in power. The regime will make full use of all the resources at its disposal, including surveillance technology, the police and the intelligence services. For that reason, the international community should make use of all the tools available to it to support pro-democracy forces and to deter the Beijing
	regime from resorting to force. Now again, this would require actual economic sacrifice by the United States, but that's economic sacrifice that probably we should be willing to make given the fact that we're willing to make pretty significant economic sacrifices on behalf of Ukraine.
	And China is way more aggressive and way more powerful and way more threatening than Russia in terms of geopolitics.
	Like the fact is that the United States should be seeking to reshore pretty much everything from China right now.
	It's going to be super expensive.
	It's going to be very costly and very difficult.
	But it's something that needs to happen because China is a geopolitical foe with aggressive action on its mind.
	As this protester says, above all, Western governments should not repeat their mistakes of 1989 when the United States and other democracies made little effort to deter then Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping from massacring student protesters because they did not believe he would do it.
	Today's Western leaders can openly show moral support for the protesters and encourage the Chinese authorities to engage in peaceful dialogue with them.
	Western governments should also see this opportunity to collaborate more closely with human rights organizations and the Chinese diaspora to advance a greater understanding of human rights abuses within China.
	I mean, this seems eminently correct.
	And again, a lot of this seems to be tied into the Western unwillingness to face up to the threat that China poses because there are a lot of people making a lot of money from China.
	The attempt to open up China, the belief that broader economic rights would eventually lead to broader political rights inside China has been completely thwarted by Xi.
	The basic theory was you build a burgeoning middle class by opening up China to effectively state mercantilism.
	A burgeoning middle class will want to hold on to its privileges and therefore will oppose government action that cracks down on those privileges in the name of the collective.
	The problem is so long as you have a giant army willing to kill lots of people, You can have the best of both worlds if you are Xi.
	Or, you can pick and choose.
	You can say, it is more important for me to pursue my collective ambitions than it is to allow the middle class to continue to flourish in China.
	I can just shoot people after all.
	And so, what that's meant is that Western countries seem more dependent on China than China is on the West, as long as what you believe is that China doesn't care that much about its economy, it cares a lot more about its internal stability.
	This has always been the case with, for example, North Korea.
	You can use whatever economic measures you want with North Korea.
	The fact is that they are living in abject poverty in North Korea.
	There's basically one light on and it's in Kim Jong-un's palace.
	And they will continue to maintain power because they will just shoot anybody who gets in their way.
	China, under Xi, could do exactly the same thing, which means that in terms of sort of capitalistic dependency, all of these major companies that have put iPhone production in China, for example, if you're Apple, That's going to have severe cost.
	But that is a cost that the West is going to have to be willing to bear because the bottom line is this.
	China is not a friend.
	China is a foe.
	And China is not just a foe.
	China is a wildly aggressive foreign power that is seeking to subvert the world order and particularly U.S.
	power abroad.
	Apple right now is in serious trouble, by the way.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple's short-term problems depend on the patience of its most lucrative iPhone buyers.
	Its long-term problems will require the patience of a much larger constituency.
	Growing unrest in China has affected production of Apple's devices there.
	The company warned on November 6th that COVID restrictions at an assembly plant in Zhengzhou were resulting in significantly reduced capacity for producing the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max models.
	The situation has only grown worse since, as lockdowns have helped spark more protests across the country to a level unseen in decades.
	That threatens the sales mix that investors were counting on to help prop up iPhone revenue in the December quarter.
	If we're entering a recession and then we are also attenuating trade ties with China, the recession is going to get a lot worse.
	But again, these are measures that the U.S.
	government should have been moving toward over the course of the past couple of decades once it became clear That Chimerica, as historian Neil Ferguson says, was a failure on the geopolitical front.
	And it was effectively offshoring jobs to China, which made the economy globally more efficient and created lower prices, but also enmeshed American companies in doing the business of China.
	Right now, Apple is apparently shutting down airdrops in China.
	Like they're preventing airdrops to prevent communications from going on at the behest of the Chinese government because they do so much business in China.
	Once these companies are dependent on the Chinese government, they're obviously going to cater to the Chinese government.
	Which brings us to the clash between Elon Musk and Apple.
	Because again, if you're talking about Musk, who is a pro-free speech advocate, you're talking about Apple, which has been willing to do the actual bidding of the Chinese authoritarian government.
	That is a conflict that is not going to be solved between Apple and Elon Musk in a clash of ideas.
	Because that is a clash of interests, not just a clash of ideas.
	And that clash of interests can really only be solved by collectivized governmental action by the West in defense of its own interests.
	And that means actual restrictions on doing business in China.
	That's something that is going to have to happen in short order.
	We'll get into that in a second.
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	Okay, so there are a lot of people when we talk about trade with China who use the word globalization or global or globalists.
	So I think that there are two definitions that we need to separate out.
	One is the idea that trade generally benefits the partners in trade.
	That is true economically speaking.
	The problem is what if your partner in trade also hates you security wise and is trying to undermine your position on a lot of other issues?
	And so globalization generally is good for the trading partners in terms of both of their economies.
	We've gotten a lot of cheap products here in the United States.
	The jobs that we've lost in manufacturing were made up in the services sector.
	It's had significant downstream effects for people in particular areas of the United States, but pretending that trade with China was overall sort of a bad economic deal for the United States is not true.
	However, it was a bad security deal for sure.
	And the fact is that now that we've had all of our corporations basically turned inside out because they want access to the 1.5 billion person Chinese market and they manufacture all their products super cheap over in China, this means that a lot of those corporations can now be weaponized against American interests.
	And this is precisely what's happening with Apple.
	You have a lot of globalized corporations who do not have America's security interests at heart are trying to cut deals with China in order to facilitate their own profits.
	And that's what economics does.
	I mean, you try to facilitate your own profits no matter how you do it.
	Nobody ever said that Apple was going to have American security first and foremost in mind, but you know who should?
	The United States government.
	And the same thing is true of the UK government.
	By the way, Rishi Sunak, the new Prime Minister of Britain, he just declared the golden relationship, the era of golden sort of relations between the UK and China over.
	He did that actually today.
	So it seems like the West is starting to get active on this.
	But this sets up a real debate over within corporate America.
	That latest debate is broken out into the open over a couple of issues.
	One is TikTok and the other is Apple.
	So with regard to TikTok, there are a lot of people in the United States who are stumping for not closing down TikTok in the United States.
	It's massively popular.
	It's incredibly viral.
	Their algorithms are incredibly sophisticated.
	Usually algorithms on social media sites are based on spending a certain amount of money in order to promote videos and then maybe it goes a little bit viral and the algorithm picks up on that and facilitates.
	TikTok picks up on what it believes are the things most likely to go viral and starts magnifying those even if it's just some weirdo in his basement filming something.
	It's a very sophisticated algorithm, so sophisticated and so viral and so dangerous that China does not allow the US version of TikTok in China.
	China actually uses TikTok as an educational tool in China.
	It uses it as a mind virus in the United States and the rest of the West.
	But there are a lot of politicians who aren't willing to shut down TikTok because, again, the idea is that we have to facilitate good relations and trade with the Chinese.
	Apple is doing the same thing.
	Apple stumps for open relations with China because they make a lot of money over in China.
	Meanwhile, Apple is, well, while they crack down on the protesters in China at the behest of the Chinese government, they're also apparently now cracking down on Twitter.
	According to the New York Times, Elon Musk tweeted on Monday to Tim Cook.
	What's going on here, Tim Cook?
	Tim Cook, of course, is the chief executive of Apple.
	In a series of tweets over 15 minutes, Musk, the new owner of Twitter, accused Apple of threatening to withhold Twitter from its App Store, a move that would limit some new users from downloading the app.
	The action would amount to censorship, Musk said, with no explanation from Apple for why Twitter would be blocked.
	He added that Apple had also reduced its advertising spending on Twitter.
	He says, Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter.
	Do they hate free speech in America?
	Well, I mean, this is a serious question.
	Seriously.
	Why is Apple minimizing its advertising suddenly on Twitter?
	But it's doing the work of the Chinese government in China.
	With his tweets, Musk set the stage for a powerful struggle with Cook, who holds immense influence over other tech companies through Apple's dominance.
	Musk has a vested interest now in Apple's cloud because of his ownership of Twitter, which he bought last month for $44 billion.
	Twitter is distributed through Apple's App Store and is used by iPhone and iPad owners around the world.
	In one tweet, Musk implied he was ready for war with Apple.
	Musk has been poised to confront Apple since taking over Twitter.
	His business plan is predicated on shifting its revenue from a dependence on advertising to a greater reliance on subscription sales.
	But any new subscription revenue will be subject to Apple's practice of taking as much as a 30% cut.
	Musk's complaints also come at a pivotal time for Apple.
	There's a push in Congress during the final months of the year to advance a series of antitrust laws.
	Among the bills under consideration is the Open App Markets Act, which seeks to give developers more control over their apps and allow them to skirt the fees that Apple and Google charge.
	Gene Munster, the managing partner of Loop Ventures, a technology research firm, says Elon is the latest chapter in a push to make app store fees lower.
	This will resurrect a topic that's been fairly quiet over the past six months.
	Musk has actually threatened that maybe he will release a Twitter phone, essentially, and he'll build his own phone company if it is not possible for Apple to force Apple to open up the app store.
	Apple has increasingly faced a backlash from app developers, as well as pressure from regulators and politicians around the world over its App Store policies.
	The App Store has become a prime gateway where billions of iPhone users download Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, games, all sorts of other programs, making it an arbiter of software distribution.
	Apple then uses those fees to pay a staff of several hundred people who review each app that it distributes.
	The company has said its app reviewers protect customer privacy and security, as well as preventing them from being subjected to fraud.
	So all of this is, yes, market driven.
	And yes, Musk would prefer to pay less money to Apple for subscriptions that are bought to Twitter from Apple.
	But there are serious questions about how Apple does its business globally speaking.
	And the only way to solve that is not to quote unquote punish Apple for doing business in China.
	The way to solve that is for the entire West to unify in opposition to China's policy to encourage reshoring of businesses away from China, including Apple.
	And again, there are companies that have refused to do business in China specifically because of this.
	I mean, all credit to Mark Zuckerberg, a phrase that I don't say very often, over at Facebook.
	I mean, Zuckerberg has said he is not going to follow the Chinese protocols with regard to free speech, which is why Facebook is not available in China.
	So, you know, the sort of battle over free speech, which right now is happening in the private sphere, is likely to extend into the public sphere as well as Chinese policy is implicated.
	Meanwhile, I got to say, this is amazing.
	So Corinne Jean-Pierre was asked yesterday about Twitter and about quote-unquote misinformation appearing on Twitter.
	And she had much harsher words to say here about Elon Musk and Twitter than the administration has to say about the Chinese government that is currently locking people up and or maybe killing them if they protest the regime.
	Here she was saying, we're going to be looking into Twitter.
	Not TikTok, a Chinese government propaganda outlet.
	We'll be looking into Twitter.
	Are you concerned about, you know, Elon Musk says there's more and more subscribers coming online.
	Are you concerned about that?
	And what tools do you have?
	Who is it at the White House that is really keeping track of this?
	So look, this is something that we're certainly keeping an eye on.
	And look, we have always been very clear that when it comes to social media platforms, it is their responsibility to make sure that when it comes to misinformation, when it comes to the hate that we're seeing, that they take action, that they continue to take action.
	Amazing stuff from the White House.
	The White House very upset with Elon Musk and the ability for people to use that app to distribute information they don't like.
	Not so interested in China cracking down on its own citizenry after all those protesters are speaking for themselves.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be getting into a Biden administration employee most famous for puppy play, getting caught stealing women's luggage, and plenty more.

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