March 15, 2021 - Bannon's War Room
48:41
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This has now killed more than 100 people in China and new cases have been confirmed around the world. | |
| So you don't want to frighten the American public. | ||
| France and South Korea have also got evacuation plans. | ||
| But you need to prepare for and assume. | ||
| Broadly warning Americans to avoid all non-essential travel to China. | ||
| This is going to be a real serious problem. | ||
| France, Australia, Canada, the US, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, the list goes on. | ||
| Health officials are investigating more than 100 possible cases in the US. | ||
| Germany, a man has contracted the virus. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| Japan, where a bus driver contracted the virus. | ||
| Coronavirus has killed more than 100 people there and infected more than 4,500. | ||
| We have to prepare for the worst, always. | ||
| Because if you don't, then the worst happens. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| And finally, new rule, you're not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people. | ||
| And Americans are a silly people. | ||
| That's the classic phrase from Lawrence of Arabia when Lawrence tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling tribes, they will remain a silly people. | ||
| Well, we're the silly people now. | ||
| Do you know who doesn't care that there's a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? | ||
| China. | ||
| All 1.4 billion of them could give a crouching tiger flying. | ||
| Because they're not a silly people. | ||
| If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight. | ||
| Look, we all know China does bad stuff. | ||
| They break promises about Hong Kong autonomy, they put Uyghurs in camps and punish dissent, and we don't want to be that. | ||
| But it's got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can't do anything at all. | ||
| In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. | ||
| Oh, and they bought Africa. | ||
| Their new Silk Road initiative is the biggest infrastructure project in history, indebting not just that continent, but large parts of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to the people who built their roads, bridges, and ports. | ||
| If you want to go anywhere in the world these days, you better have a yen for travel. | ||
| A yen for travel. | ||
| Oh, stop it. | ||
| In China alone, they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. | ||
| America has none. | ||
| Our fastest train is the tram that goes around the zoo. | ||
| California wanted to build high-speed rail connecting the entire state, but alas, could not. | ||
| We're six billion in the hole just trying to finish the track connecting the vital hubs of Bakersfield and Merced. | ||
| One small step for nobody, one giant leap if you're a raisin. | ||
| LAUGHTER APPLAUSE On a national level, we've been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009. | ||
| But we never do anything. | ||
| Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick. | ||
| And the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they're eating babies. | ||
| We are a silly people. | ||
| Even when we all agree on something, like getting rid of the penny. | ||
| No. | ||
| The inertia. | ||
| The graft. | ||
| The lawyers. | ||
| The cowardice. | ||
| Nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. | ||
| We see a problem and we ignore it. | ||
| Lie about it. | ||
| Fight about it. | ||
| Endlessly litigate it. | ||
| Sunset closet. | ||
| Kick it down the road. | ||
| and then write a bill where a half-a-million-dollar revolution doesn't kick in for ten years. | ||
| China's... | ||
| Okay, we're here live from Capitol Hill. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| It's Monday, the 15th of March, the year of our Lord 2021. | ||
| It is the 200th, I think, Rahim, and 65th anniversary of the Ides of March, the assassination of the populist leader of Republican Rome that met his end today, 2000, 65 years ago, Julius Caesar. | ||
| Sure is how the elites think about when populist leaders get out of their lane. | ||
| We're here for an entire hour. | ||
| We want to start with Bill Maher's really kind of historic rant on Friday night. | ||
| We're gonna play the second part of that later in the show. | ||
| We've got the new definitive book on China for the year 2021. | ||
| It is now out. | ||
| It is by the reported columnist for the Washington Post, Josh Rogin. | ||
| Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, She and the Battle for the 21st Century. | ||
| Raheem Kassam, Stephen K. Bannon here with Josh Rogin, the author. | ||
| This is a book that all MAGA world should buy. | ||
| You're going to love a lot of it. | ||
| You're going to love less a lot of it. | ||
| But I think you will see what President Trump was up against in the reality of the ruling class in this country. | ||
| I'll say one thing, Josh, and I think this is undisputed. | ||
| You're the best sourced reporter on China in working in American media, and I include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial, the US team of the Financial Times on that. | ||
| It's quite amazing and there are revelations literally on every, virtually on every page or every other page that blow the heads of China hands, of people who do this basically for a living. | ||
| I want to start off, I know Rahim's got some stuff we're going to get to later in this block and in the B block, but the book starts off Before Election Day in 2016, the Thursday and Friday, the elections on Tuesday, the 8th, I think the previous weekend, I think on Thursday and Friday, in New York, you report a meeting of the Obama administration. | ||
| I think it's Kerry and Rice and others. | ||
| Meeting with senior Chinese official, laying out kind of what the deal's going to be going forward as far as stability and sustained relationships. | ||
| Put us in the room of that November 1st meeting. | ||
| I think it took place in New York City? | ||
| Yeah, that's right, Steve. | ||
| Before I get to that, first of all, thanks for having me on. | ||
| This is not a left book. | ||
| This is not a right book. | ||
| This is a book about the challenge we face with the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| It's not a pro-Trump book. | ||
| It's not an anti-Trump book. | ||
| It is the raw and dirty. | ||
| Facts of what happened over these four years as the United States shifted to a more competitive and more confrontational China policy. | ||
| There's a ton of Trump stories that you've heard that were wrong. | ||
| I tried to fix as many as I could. | ||
| Steve, you were there for a bunch of it. | ||
| A lot of it you didn't even know. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You asked me how I got sourced on this issue. | ||
| Well, you know, I'm not a Democrat. | ||
| I'm not a Republican. | ||
| I'm not a left-right guy. | ||
| I'm a foreign policy guy. | ||
| When everyone was going Russia, Russia, Russia, I said to my bosses, I want to go China, China, China, and I ignored that story and focused on this one. | ||
| Why was that? | ||
| When the whole town, when you had newsrooms with 40 and 50 people all over Russia, why did you go against the tide and say China? | ||
| You just said it. | ||
| I know you were right, but don't be scared of the mic. | ||
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OK, got it. | |
| Well, it's what you just said. | ||
| We had 40 to 50 people working on the Russia story and nobody really working on the China story. | ||
| That's not to say there aren't great journalists working on the China story. | ||
| There are a lot of them, but a lot less. | ||
| So there was a gap there. | ||
| And when you look at Russia as the declining power and China as the rising power, you have to look at that and say, well, we need to put a lot more resources into the China story. | ||
| That's not for the media. | ||
| That's for everybody, for Congress, for the administration, for the think tanks, for the businesses. | ||
| One of the themes of the book is that this is the most important issue in the world. | ||
| The US-China relationship is the most important relationship in the world. | ||
| And this is the project that, in foreign policy, that we'll be dealing with for the rest of our professional careers. | ||
| How to deal with a rising China that's internally repressive, externally aggressive, and interfering in free and open societies across the board. | ||
| Now, when I went to report on the beginning of this administration's China policy, it took me back to the week before the election. | ||
| And, you know, I was surprised that Trump got elected. | ||
| You were probably surprised that Trump got elected. | ||
| No, you were the one guy who wasn't surprised. | ||
| But everybody else in that hotel was surprised. | ||
| And you know who else was surprised? | ||
| The Chinese leadership. | ||
| because they had come to New York one week before the election, met with Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan Rice in the Palace Hotel with a bunch of senior officials, and they had a very happy meeting, trying to set the tone for the incoming Clinton administration. | ||
| And what the Obama administration officials told the Chinese leadership was, we're gonna get closer, the cooperation's gonna increase, you may have heard this crazy China hawk stuff going on in Washington, don't worry, we're gonna have cooperative, fruitful relations based on common interest and mutual respect and, you know. | ||
| It was a soothing meeting, and they were talking about things that they could do together. | ||
| And of course, the Chinese senior official there was this guy named Yang Jiechi. | ||
| And who is he? | ||
| He's the state counselor that's like above the foreign minister. | ||
| He's the man. | ||
| He's the number one guy. | ||
| He used to be the ambassador. | ||
| He used to be the translator for Deng Xiaoping back in the day. | ||
| And he's been courted by people like Vice President Biden and John Kerry for all of these years. | ||
| Decades. | ||
| And, you know, Vice President Biden had 25 hours of dinner with Xi Jinping, and John Kerry invited Yang Jiechi to his Boston home to have frank discussions, right? | ||
| For a weekend. | ||
| they thought they could charm these guys into a better US-China relationship. | ||
| And they didn't understand the fundamental problem, which is that the party state in China is determined to pursue their strategy, whether or not you invite them to dinner, whether or not you set up a beautiful table in the Palace Hotel and tell them everything's going to be fine. | ||
| And what they definitely didn't expect was the election of Donald Trump. | ||
| And all of a sudden, everything they thought they knew about how the US-China relations was totally blown up. | ||
| The book is Chaos Under Heaven. | ||
| The author is Josh Rogin. | ||
| He's our guest for the entire hour in the world. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| It's not surprised. | ||
| You get surprised by a lot of stuff. | ||
| These guys think, made in China 2025, you're converging 10 technologies. | ||
| One belt, one road all over the world. | ||
| As Bill Maher just walks through 500 cities on and on. | ||
| They were stunned. | ||
| They had not paid attention to the campaign of what Trump was pushing, particularly in the last three or four months, right? | ||
| They didn't get it. | ||
| But I want to go to the Alaska meeting this week. | ||
| Let me say something about that, Bill Maher. | ||
| Because, you know, listen, I think Bill Maher is exactly right about the dysfunction in our country and in our political system, and it's out of control, and that's a huge disadvantage with China. | ||
| Where he's wrong is that we haven't lost yet. | ||
| We could lose, right? | ||
| Sometimes the bad guys win, sometimes the good guys lose, but it doesn't have to be that way. | ||
| It's not over yet. | ||
| So that's where I think. | ||
| And he also sort of ignores a lot of what really contributed to China's rise. | ||
| And we're talking about the massive theft of American wealth and intellectual property over 40 years, the greatest transfer of wealth and knowledge in human history. | ||
| They built that economy. | ||
| On our hard work. | ||
| Now, they also had a lot of people who did a lot of hard work and had a lot of determination. | ||
| The point I take away from Marr is they're serious. | ||
| Their leadership is serious and they're focused on serious things. | ||
| They're as serious as a prison fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they're not ten feet tall. | ||
| Those dams that Marr was talking about are cracking, okay? | ||
| Well, also, we hold the high ground. | ||
| We hold the high ground on intellectual property, innovation, we hold capital, Wall Street, all of it. | ||
| We hold, and that's what I'm going to get into, that we actually hold, but the elites don't believe that. | ||
| The reason that applies to what we're just talking about is because, you know, when they thought the Hillary Clinton administration was coming in, we don't know what they would have done, but they thought they were going to get a lot of the same, which was basically, you know, taking this bet that looking past all these bad behaviors to a large degree, | ||
| Would allow for us to have great relations and everything would be wonderful and China would eventually liberalize economically and would eventually liberalize politically and that would solve all of our other problems and it would be hunky-dory and with the Trump team the biggest thing I think they did was come in and say no we have to see if China for what it is and we have to understand that they're not going to liberalize and we have to understand that their interests are not the same as ours and they're using this engagement against us. | ||
| They're abusing all of it. | ||
| Uh, in order to attack us, and we have to respond to that, to put them to a choice to stop doing it, or pay a higher cost, and that didn't always go perfectly, as you know. | ||
| No, as the book shows, but, but... Mistakes were made. | ||
| In, in, in, in the, in the, yes, in the first part of the book though, you lay out the different layers. | ||
| You have the super hawks who are looking to actually destroy and take down the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| That's you. | ||
| And other crazies, right? | ||
| Then you have the hardliners, then you have the realists, you have the Wall Street faction, you have the adults, you lay it all out of what they are, and then the rest of the book is at each other's throats, right? | ||
| Because people have different visions of how to deal with it, right? | ||
| Some people are saying, and I keep saying, hey, we're on the right side of history as they show all the time. | ||
| However, this week, In Alaska, it's interesting, the same group that essentially met in the Palace Hotel a couple of days before the 16th election, essentially the same group headed by the same guy that came to read us the Riot Act after President-Elect Trump took the call from Taiwan, are the exact same people that are showing up in Alaska. | ||
| Right, which just shows you that when they appoint somebody, they really do appoint them for life, and we're constantly changing leaders, so our strategy is all A mess that way, but Yang Jiechi, the same guy who met with Kerry and Rice, met with you and Navarro and Flynn and Jared in the transition and lectured you. | ||
| It's in the book on, you know, you better shut up about territorial integrity and territorial integrity of China will not be questioned. | ||
| And immediately what happened was... Hang on a second. | ||
| Hold that because we got to take a short commercial break. | ||
| Josh Rogin from the Washington Post. | ||
| The book is Chaos Under Heaven. | ||
| It's explosive. | ||
| There are revelations on every page. | ||
| Every Trump supporter should buy this book, read it, and think about it, particularly with the news that's going to be coming up in the next couple of months. | ||
| It's a short break back with Rahim and Steve, Josh Rogin in the war room. | ||
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War Room Pandemic with Stephen K. | |
| Bannon. The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. | ||
| Bannon. | ||
| China sees a problem and they fix it. | ||
| They build a dam. | ||
| We debate what to rename it. | ||
| That's why their airports look like this, and ours look like this. | ||
| In San Francisco, it took 10 years just to get two bus lines through environmental review. | ||
| The Big Dig, a tunnel in Boston, took 16 years. | ||
| and don't get me started on my solar hookup. | ||
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Oh! | |
| Oh! | ||
| I'm... I'm okay. | ||
| I'm okay. | ||
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China once put up a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. | |
| China once put up a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. | ||
| They demolished and rebuilt the Sanyuan Bridge in Beijing in 43 hours. | ||
| We binge watch, they binge build. | ||
| When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days, and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the spread of the disease. | ||
| They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools. | ||
| Well, we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market charmin. | ||
| We're not losing to China. | ||
| We lost. | ||
| The returns just haven't all come in yet. | ||
| They made robots that check a kid's temperature and got their asses back in school. | ||
| Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells slowly commit ritual suicide. | ||
| As George Bush once said, is our children learning? | ||
| Laughter Applause There is a progressive trend now to sacrifice merit for equity Colleges are chucking the SAT and ACT tests, and in New York, Mayor de Blasio announced merit would no longer decide who gets into the schools for advanced learners, but rather a lottery system. | ||
| You think China's doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest? | ||
| You think Chinese colleges are offering courses in the philosophy of Star Trek? | ||
| The sociology of Seinfeld, and surviving the coming zombie apocalypse. | ||
| Those are real. | ||
| And so is China, and they are eating our lunch. | ||
| And believe me, in an hour, they'll be hungry again. | ||
| Okay, I don't agree with everything that Bill Maher has to say there, but I gotta tell you, you're seeing it now transition into the general culture of what the issue is. | ||
| I want to thank the team at MyPillow.com for sponsoring us. | ||
| Go to promo code WARROOM today, 120 products, up to 66% discounts on many, but discounts on all. | ||
| I want to thank Josh Rogan, the author of Chaos Under Heaven. | ||
| Shows a great deal of respect to come here in the warm, taking time away from a busy day. | ||
| That's because of the audience, not because of Rahim and Steve. | ||
| It's because of the audience, the respect of the book buying. | ||
| You need to buy this book. | ||
| You need to read this book deeply. | ||
| You need to think about this book. | ||
| OK? | ||
| I don't agree with David Ignatius a lot from the Washington Post. | ||
| Great reporter. | ||
| I just don't agree with a lot that he comes up with. | ||
| But I do agree with this. | ||
| There are scoops on nearly every page. | ||
| And the reporting of this book is deep. | ||
| For people there, I gotta tell you, I spent time with people that fought these fights. | ||
| They've read this book and go, I didn't know that happened. | ||
| It's pretty stunning. | ||
| How... I want to... yeah, go ahead, jump in. | ||
| By means of an endorsement, I've actually written more books than I've read, and this one's very, very good. | ||
| And I actually listened to the audiobook on this one. | ||
| It is a scoop a minute in the audiobook format. | ||
| How did you come? | ||
| Give us your journey how you got here and then how you put this book together. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Well, you know, like most people in Washington, I wanted to become a lawyer, and I was working at a law firm, and I was applying to law school, and I was bored to tears, and I was poring through a set of documents, Secret State Department documents, about what China was doing in Sudan. | ||
| We were suing the government of Sudan. | ||
| This is a true story. | ||
| And the documents were so shocking that I actually published an article based on them. | ||
| And based on that, I lost my chance to be a lawyer because I almost got fired from the law firm and I got hired to be a journalist. | ||
| So the China story and China's abuses were an integral part of my path to becoming a journalist. | ||
| And then I just started working in the Japanese newspaper, started following the China story, met everyone in town I could who was working on China, and over 15 years watched sort of this whole town of Washington that we're sitting in just asleep and not really rising to the rising threat that was becoming more and more obvious. | ||
| And when the Trump administration came in, basically what I saw is that it was everyone in the system who had been calling for more attention to the China challenge saw an opportunity, okay? | ||
| And that doesn't mean that they were pro-Trump or that they were anti-Trump. | ||
| They just knew it was gonna be disruptive. | ||
| And they had heard Trump on the campaign trail, much because of the words that Ewan Navarro and Stephen Miller put in those speeches, and they were expecting a tougher approach. | ||
| And they were gearing up for that. | ||
| But little did they know that the other side was about to mount its offensive. | ||
| And once the administration actually took forward, Before we get to that, because I don't want to give up too much in the book, because I want people to buy the book. | ||
| I want you to buy the book, I want you to read it, I want you to think about it, and we're going to debate this book and the issues around this book for many days and weeks ahead. | ||
| I want to go, you said, this city was asleep. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I want to challenge that for a second, and this concept of the Thucydides Trap. | ||
| The Thucydides Trap goes back to the Peloponnesian War. | ||
| You have a rising power and a declining power. | ||
| The thesis of the 16 campaign was that Hillary Clinton was the personification of the managed decline of our country by an elite. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why you have the meeting in the Palace Hotel on November 1st of 2016 and the meeting in Alaska this week. | ||
| Was our elite, and Rahim I know you got some specific questions about our elite and some of the revelations, bombshell revelations in this book, Was the elite asleep or have they bought into this concept of Henry Kissinger and Graham Allison that we are declining power and what we have to do is manage our decline and channel their rise into becoming a liberal democracy? | ||
| Is that not the intellectual architecture of what our elites, of both parties, this is not a Republican and Democratic issue, of both parties. | ||
| So you said a mouthful. | ||
| So, you know, the Thucydides trap, to my mind, doesn't apply to the US-China relationship. | ||
| For a whole host of reasons. | ||
| You know, first of all, if you just read the book, it's clear that this is a very selective take on history. | ||
| There's a lot of reasons countries go to war with each other. | ||
| Rising and falling and... | ||
| Upward mobility and downward mobility. | ||
| That's just one of the things, okay? | ||
| And it's a very sort of Western-centric view. | ||
| You don't agree with it, but do you think the elites agree with it? | ||
| I don't agree with it either. | ||
| I don't think we're declining power. | ||
| I think it was used, and maybe this wasn't Graham Allison's intention, to lull us into the belief that there's nothing we could do about it, so that we have to just make way for the rise of China as the leader of the world and try to manage it the best we can. | ||
| And when I talked to Ben Rhodes for the book about that meeting, that November 1st meeting, he said, on the record, it's in the book, We wanted to find out where their spheres of influence would be and what we can do about lines of control, and we had to acknowledge that they were rising, so it just made sense to, you know, set new lines. | ||
| And to people in the China community, that means something. | ||
| That means we're abandoning the lines that we already had. | ||
| And so what I argue in the book is simply that this is a very simple and therefore wrong way to look at the U.S.-China relationship. | ||
| It's a complex thing. | ||
| Don't worry about Thucydides Trap. | ||
| Don't worry about Cold War. | ||
| That's a bumper sticker. | ||
| That's what they tell you to tell you there's nothing we can do. | ||
| And they'll tell you there's nothing we can do until they tell you it's too late. | ||
| Okay, and we should have done something. | ||
| That's the pattern. | ||
| Oh, well, China's going to rise. | ||
| There's nothing we can or should do about it. | ||
| What, do you want a Cold War? | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| You know, and of course, that's exactly what the Beijing line is. | ||
| It's like, those mean Americans want a Cold War. | ||
| Well, it's really not about that. | ||
| Forget the term Cold War. | ||
| The China Challenge is going to have to have its own name. | ||
| It's going to be its own thing. | ||
| It's not going to follow the CityD's trap or any other simple construction. | ||
| It's just simply a very complex, very serious problem that we have to deal with. | ||
| Josh, a lot of the audience are familiar with Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden's activities as it pertains to the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| Fewer, I think, will be aware of the Hunter Biden of the right, I suppose, which appears to be by the comments in your book and the scoop in your book about Neil Bush. | ||
| Neil Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, can you tell us a little bit more about what I think is one of the stranger and more interesting parts of this book? | ||
| Right, which is interesting because when the Hunter Biden story came out, everyone was like, oh, well, why did they try to bribe him when his parents weren't even in office? | ||
| You know, what they were doing, the other administration and the what the Neil Bush story reveals is that actually the attempts to co-opt American elites are long term and there are both sides of the aisle. | ||
| And the Chinese Communist Party has an extensive influence operation called the United Front. | ||
| And what the United Front does is they try to attack the enemies by using the friends of the party. | ||
| And it's not in China's interest. It's not in the Chinese people's interest. | ||
| It's in the party's interest. And this dates back to now. | ||
| And this is a very huge organization funded by billions and billions of dollars. | ||
| And what they do in America is that they find front organizations and sometimes they're Hong. | ||
| Hong Kong billionaires, sometimes they're Chinese billionaires, sometimes they're American billionaires and they give them a bunch of money and they tell them to pay somebody and the person that one of the people they fund is Neil Bush. | ||
| Let me quote from the book, page 121, but his son Neil Bush was a totally different Since becoming the chairman of the Bush China Foundation, he had become a reliable mouthpiece for Beijing and worked directly with United Front figures, including Tung Chee-hwa. | ||
| In July 2019, he traveled to Hong Kong in the middle of the protests and gave a keynote speech at a conference hosted by Tung, where he said, quote, China is not an economic enemy or existential national security threat to the United States. | ||
| The demonization of China is being fooled by rising nationalism in the U.S. | ||
| that has manifested in anti-immigrant, anti-Chinese, pro-American first rhetoric. | ||
| That is the type of spin that they're putting when you're trying to confront China. | ||
| All of a sudden you're racist, all of a sudden you're nationalist, which is nothing but the truth. | ||
| Well, that's the allegation. | ||
| He admitted that several women in his business trips in China showed up at his hotel room to have sex with him for no reason. | ||
| In a deposition! | ||
| is the elite capture that they do but and how he was captured by being honeypot well that's the allegation he admitted that several women in his business trips in china showed up at his help hotel room to have sex with him in a deposition of that position a deposition on a divorce proceeding and so this is a part of what they do It's to capture elites and put their messages in American voice. | ||
| Did he not think it was strange that people were turning up to his hotel room to have sex with him? | ||
| They asked him the deposition. | ||
| They said, didn't you find it unusual, Mr. Bush, that these women would show up at your hotel room to have sex with you for no reason? | ||
| And he said, actually, I found it quite unusual. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| Wait, the sex or the turning up? | ||
| We're going to return with the author of Chaos Under Heaven. | ||
| It's Josh Rogin from the Washington Post. | ||
| We'll be back in the War Room in just a second. | ||
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To rejoice when there's no more, let's take down the CCP! | |
| War Room. Pandemic. With Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. Pandemic. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, whether you think it's a bioweapon that leaked out of the Wuhan lab, or you think it's a total hoax. | ||
| We try to cover everything, the whole ground, and for Madeleine Peltz and Team Over Media Matters today, hey, it's the scientists that say it's an experimental, you know, gene therapy. | ||
| It's not me. | ||
| I'm not a doctor, right? | ||
| So it's a vaccine, or maybe it's not, or maybe it's something in between a vaccine. | ||
| That's for scientists and people to debate and argue, etc. | ||
| But what we do know, Because we're going to talk about Wuhan Lab later. | ||
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| Obviously with your doctor, but you've got to boost your immune system. | ||
| That's urgent today, warroomdefense.com. | ||
| Okay, we've got the author of the book is Chaos Under Heaven. | ||
| Here's the thing in the book, people that have fought these fights, people that are engaged and professionals that have dedicated their lives to what I call the China hands. | ||
| Like David Ignatius says, he sums it up best, there's a scoop on every other page. | ||
| People are like going, I didn't know that, right? | ||
| One of the scoops, you talk about the facilities trap, the author of it is in Beijing a couple of days after the election, Henry Kissinger. | ||
| He's The most ambitious 90-year-old, 92-year-old, 94, however old he is, he's 92, he's in Beijing in the room with Xi and Wang Qishan, these guys, a couple of days after the election, selling his version of what's going to happen. | ||
| Mr. Josh Rogin. | ||
| Yeah, so, you know, one of the things the Chinese government loves to do is to find its favorite billionaires and throw them at the White House and see what happens. | ||
| And that's... Kerry Kissinger's been doing that since the 70s. | ||
| And, you know, he actually had clearance to go meet with them. | ||
| As you know, he met with Jared Kushner, he met with President Trump, he got the sign-off, he got a message that he thought was the incoming president's message to the Chinese leadership. | ||
| So he gets to Beijing, and he, you know, as the emissary of the new incoming president, Donald Trump, who we didn't really even know, And we're here, everything's going to be great, it's going to be fine, it's going to be wonderful. | ||
| The same exact day, Trump takes the call from the Taiwanese president, upending 40 years of precedent. | ||
| And if you're the Chinese leadership, what are you to believe? | ||
| Are you to believe that Henry Kissinger, who's sitting in front of you? | ||
| Or are you to believe Donald Trump, who just made this phone call? | ||
| Who's running anything? | ||
| And this just, I mean the book is called Chaos Under Heaven because it was chaos, that was a chaotic day, you know it well, Steve, don't you? | ||
| If you don't believe that that's an important moment, Kissinger's in the room with Xi and Wang Qishan and Trump's sitting there, should I take it? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| The thing's blown up. | ||
| The National Pulse dug up over the weekend about Taiwan and Xi, to show you important, pre the Alaska meeting that they've planned and negotiated. | ||
| What does Xi say over this weekend's on the National Pulse? | ||
| Well, Josh, you and I know that the beat isn't actually very well covered, right? | ||
| So it makes it quite easy for us, people like you and I, to get scoops on this subject, right? | ||
| And one of the things that was just extraordinarily glossed over was this announcement last week that Xi is saying to the PLA, hey, we need to be on a front footing, a combat war footing, and they're specifically talking about the annexation of Taiwan here. | ||
| you would expect, you would hope, you would dream that it might get some coverage in the press and elicit a reaction from politicians most importantly who are said to have been concerned about this for so long but it's been five days so far since that claim has been made, since that assertion has been made and we've heard nothing. | ||
| Josh I want to understand, you know, is there even a semblance, I think the audience is concerned about this too, is there even a semblance of hawkishness from people in this town who can actually do something about things like that? Oh well listen I think the awakening to the reality of internally aggressive, externally repressed, internally repressive, externally aggressive CCP is growing every day on all sectors of the Washington and in US society. Is it growing fast enough? Well no because we, | ||
| the Chinese government has had a 15-20 year head start so we're climbing up the hill and we've got a lot of road to make up but what the polling shows consistently is that Democrats and Republicans alike want a more assertive, more aggressive, more competitive, more confrontational approach to China because Chinese government's behavior is now affecting everyone's life. If you're sitting in your house right now, you haven't seen your grandmother for a year, they're part of that reason. It doesn't excuse our bad response. | ||
| We had a bad response, but part of that reason is because the Chinese government Lied about the virus lied to the president United States about the virus lied to the world about the virus blackmailed the world with its masks and PPE and And, you know, and that pattern continues to hide information and to mangle the science and hide the scientists and hide everyone else who would know anything about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Can I just draw you on that for a second? | |
| Because, you know, the WHO investigators and the investigative team that we've heard from in the last couple of weeks are out there now saying it's Steve Bannon's fault. | ||
| It's the war room pandemic. | ||
| I didn't know you had that power! | ||
| Peter Daszak, he's on a Zoom call, and he's saying the rhetoric is so heated from the hawks that the Chinese government can't come forward. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can't fault China for not releasing the data now. | |
| I encourage everyone out there to go and Google who this guy is. | ||
| The best friend of the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists. | ||
| He funded their projects. | ||
| They knew each other for 15 years. | ||
| They were running a 200 million dollar PREDICT program that was in the business of trying to prevent the next pandemic. | ||
| And so that if the lab in that program was linked to the outbreak, and we don't know what it was, I'm not claiming here that we know how it originated, I'm saying that we need an investigation of all the possible theories, including the lab accident theory, And this guy can't do it because he has a conflict of interest. | ||
| As clear as day, the most blatant conflict of interest I have read. | ||
| It would be like if you were accused, Steve, of starting a pandemic and they sent Peter Navarro to investigate. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Somebody would be like, wait a second, doesn't mean Peter Navarro is not a nice guy, but there's a conflict because you guys are good friends. | ||
| How can people today... So the WHO investigation cannot be the end-all be-all. | ||
| The Biden administration has said as much. | ||
| They said they have deep concerns about it because they're not getting the data. | ||
| They have conflicts of interest. | ||
| I mean, Jake Sullivan, when he comes out and says, hey, I've got a problem, if they haven't looked at the raw data. | ||
| You know, to their credit, and I pressed the Biden administration to confirm facts about the Wuhan lab that the Trump people put out. | ||
| And they confirmed the facts. | ||
| They didn't go as far as Pompeo. | ||
| They didn't go as far as Trump to say that we think the lab did it. | ||
| They said the suspicious activity of the lab, the sick researchers of November 2019, That's true. | ||
| Intelligence shows that's true. | ||
| They were doing secret projects with the Chinese military. | ||
| They were doing secret coronavirus research that they didn't disclose. | ||
| And that's not me and crazy Steve Bannon. | ||
| That's the Biden administration on the record. | ||
| So all of a sudden, if Peter Daszak wants to attack that theory, he's going to have to attack the Biden administration. | ||
| So put us in the room. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| No, this is my reporting. | ||
| I've talked to several senior officials about this trip. | ||
| And here's basically what's going to happen. | ||
| They knew they had to meet with the Chinese at some point, the Chinese leadership. | ||
| This is Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State, and Jake Sullivan. | ||
| They're setting the expectations extremely low because they know there's nothing that can really be done at this point. | ||
| They're trying to give the Beijing the cold shoulder. | ||
| They're meeting with the Allies first. | ||
| They're having the Japanese Prime Minister's visit that's coming up. | ||
| All of that stuff is meant to send a clear signal to Beijing that we're not going to deal with you right now unless you change your behavior in some way that shows us that you're even willing to deal in good faith. | ||
| And so the Chinese side is going to come out of this meeting and they're going to say – this is according to the officials in the Biden administration I've talked to – they're going to say, oh, it's back to normal, everything's lovely, that crazy Trump era is over, and now we're going to go back to a new model of great power relations based on win-win cooperation, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| The term they use is sustained. | ||
| But it's not the case. | ||
| They say sustained in what? | ||
| They have a buzzword that's in your book. | ||
| sustained and ordered or... | ||
| They have a bunch of them. | ||
| Win-win cooperation, a new model of great power relations. | ||
| That essentially was the thing that Xi Jinping pitched to President Obama that meant we're going to treat each other as equals. | ||
| You're not going to tell us what to do. | ||
| We're not going to tell you what to do. | ||
| You're going to stay out of everything we tell you to stay out of. | ||
| And that's going to be how the world's going to be divided. | ||
| And the Obama administration didn't explicitly endorse it, but in their actions, they moved us closer towards it. | ||
| Just to back to that, Obama deputized Biden for the pivot to Asia. | ||
| This was Biden's... I don't know... You're not buying that? | ||
| I think it's, I mean, listen, we could, there's a lot of criticisms we could make about the Obama administration's approach to China, but to my mind, at the end, it was run by John Kerry and Susan Rice, as evidenced by that meeting. | ||
| They were the ones meeting with the senior leaders a week before the election, and they're back, right? | ||
| John Kerry's got a suite of offices in the State Department, right? | ||
| And with a staff, and, you know, he built a machine, and he's gonna use it. | ||
| John Kerry's had more interaction with Chinese officials than his former staffer, his new boss, Wow. | ||
| Antony Blinken at this point. Think about that for a second. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| You know, so I think the real fights inside the Biden administration are yet to come. | ||
| I think we'll have to see how the President of the United States, Joe Biden, deals with that when it's, you know, John Kerry versus Tony Blinken or something like that. And I don't think we know what's going to happen. | ||
| The fights being... | ||
| Who would you deem as close to... | ||
| You don't have those. | ||
| I've identified three camps inside the Biden administration. | ||
| You've got the optimists, the engagers. | ||
| This is Kerry. | ||
| Keep in mind, these people have also evolved over the last five years. | ||
| They won't say the same things now that they say back then, but inside that system, Kerry and Rice are still seen largely as the people who are more amenable to the old way of doing business. | ||
| Then you've got Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and Kirk Campbell at the NSC. | ||
| They're the competitors. They're more hawkish. They seem to have the ball right now. | ||
| It's pretty clear they're in charge of the policy. | ||
| With this concept, we're going to out-compete them. | ||
| Yes, exactly, but not in the Trumpian way, in a more nice, friendly, happy way with more allies, etc. | ||
| And then the third team are the political people, right? | ||
| And then the political people around Biden are about protecting the Biden presidency, and they can read the polls, and they're not stupid, and they know Americans want a tougher China policy. | ||
| That's why you're seeing it for now, okay? | ||
| For now, the two out of three wins the day, and the political people and the... Because the American people are ahead where Washington is. | ||
| Yes, because we live in a democracy and at some point our leaders have to respond to the people. | ||
| That's because the upper Midwest know about the manufacturing jobs and people are saying, we see what's going on here. | ||
| I think everyone, you know, again, the pandemic brought it home for a lot of people. | ||
| You know, what happens in Beijing doesn't stay in Beijing. | ||
| And all of a sudden, you know, a lot of people woke up to this idea that maybe the China challenge is something that affects them. | ||
| It's also a debate that's going on in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, on our college campuses. | ||
| Real quickly, I want to get in, Raheem, jump in here. | ||
| You noticed the quad the other day was Japan, Australia, India, and the United States. | ||
| Where is our oldest allies in Europe, and particularly the United Kingdom? | ||
| You know, Europe is a complicated situation. | ||
| Again, the pandemic turned a lot of those countries. | ||
| Where's NATO? | ||
| All this talk about NATO. | ||
| Where's NATO in this? | ||
| You know, I'm not sure that just because we have a hammer, the problem is a nail. | ||
| You know, is NATO going to be the one that's up? | ||
| They have a role to play, sure. | ||
| You know, will Germany, you know, be soft on China because they need the Car manufacturing jobs. | ||
| You know, it's complicated. | ||
| I think Britain took a hard turn against the Chinese government during the pandemic and banned Huawei from a lot of their networks. | ||
| That didn't have to happen that way. | ||
| So Europe split. | ||
| And as usually, Europe is sclerotic, right? | ||
| they're not going to take the lead on any of this stuff. | ||
| The countries that are facing the China challenge first are the countries that are closest to China. | ||
| And that's the first line. | ||
| And that's where the initial push has to be. | ||
| And then if America leads, and that's a big if, Europe may or may not follow. | ||
| Rahim, observations on the Tories, Europe, and how big an issue this is right now? | ||
| I think that's correct. | ||
| They try and avoid the issue as much as possible just because they're not sure where they want to stand. | ||
| They're not sure where this, you say administration, I say regime, is going. | ||
| They're not sure where it's going to lead the world and of course they'd much rather, I mean Britain would much rather have Australia and India deal with something like this than have to deal with it themselves. | ||
| I mean, you know, I like to crack whys a lot and I'll do that again now. | ||
| You look at what's concerning Boris Johnson right now. | ||
| They've unveiled a four million dollar refurbishment to the Downing Street press operation which is so badly designed that it doesn't say Downing Street, You acknowledge, you thank a guy in this book, Clive Hamilton. | ||
| He put a book out, and this is why I want people to read these kind of seminal books. | ||
| government now is in no position to lead on this because Boris Johnson is just not a leader. | ||
| You acknowledge, you thank a guy in this book, Clive Hamilton. | ||
| He put a book, and this is why I want people to read these kind of seminal books. | ||
| Clive Hamilton came out of the book about a year ago in the summer. | ||
| He came out of a book that outed, he'd already outed Australian elites. | ||
| He outed really the European, the British, and the American elite. | ||
| The book did not get the pick up it should have. | ||
| It's a brilliant book. | ||
| You actually acknowledge Clive Hamilton's work in this book and you see you've got to get to the corruption of the elites that are in this city of London and Wall Street's in business. | ||
| The book is Chaos Under Heaven. | ||
| The author is Josh Rogan. | ||
| We're gonna take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're gonna be back with how do you actually put together a report and write a book of this scale next in the war room. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pandemic with. | |
| They build a dam. | ||
| We debate what to rename it. | ||
| let this demon hide. War Room, Pandemic. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it. | ||
| That's why their airports look like this and ours look like this. | ||
| In San Francisco, it took 10 years just to get two bus lines through environmental review. | ||
| The Big Dig, a tunnel in Boston, took 16 years. | ||
| and don't get me started on my solar hookup. | ||
|
unidentified
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LAUGHTER APPLAUSE I love you. I love you. | |
| APPLAUSE Thank you. | ||
| China once put up a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. | ||
| They demolished and rebuilt the Sanyuan Bridge in Beijing in 43 hours. | ||
| We binge watch, they binge build. | ||
| When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days, and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the spread of the disease. | ||
| They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools. | ||
| Well, we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market charmin. | ||
| We're not losing to China. | ||
| We lost. | ||
| The returns just haven't all come in yet. | ||
| They made robots that check a kid's temperature and got their asses back in school. | ||
| Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells slowly commit ritual suicide. | ||
| As George Bush once said, is our children learning? | ||
| Laughter Applause There is a progressive trend now to sacrifice merit for equity Colleges are chucking the SAT and ACT tests, and in New York, Mayor de Blasio announced merit would no longer decide who gets into the schools for advanced learners, but rather a lottery system. | ||
| You think China's doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest? | ||
| You think Chinese colleges are offering courses in the philosophy of Star Trek? | ||
| The sociology of Seinfeld and surviving the coming zombie apocalypse. | ||
| Those are real. | ||
| And so is China. | ||
| And they are eating our lunch. | ||
| And believe me, in an hour, they'll be hungry again. | ||
| Okay, I don't agree with everything that Bill Maher has to say there, but I gotta tell you, you're seeing it now transition into the general culture of what the issue is. | ||
| I want to thank the team at MyPillow.com for sponsoring us. | ||
| Go to promo code WARROOM today, 120 products, up to 66% discounts on many, but discounts on all. | ||
| I want to thank Josh Rogan, the author of Chaos Under Heaven. | ||
| Shows a great deal of respect to come here in the warm, taking time away from a busy day. | ||
| That's because of the audience, not because of Rahim and Steve. | ||
| It's because of the audience, the respect of the book buying. | ||
| You need to buy this book. | ||
| You need to read this book deeply. | ||
| You need to think about this book. | ||
| OK? | ||
| I don't agree with David Ignatius a lot from the Washington Post. | ||
| Great reporter. | ||
| I just don't agree with a lot that he comes up with. | ||
| But I do agree with this. | ||
| There are scoops on nearly every page. | ||
| And the reporting on this book is deep. | ||
| For people there, I gotta tell you, I spent time with people that fought these fights. | ||
| They've read this book. | ||
| I didn't know that happened. | ||
| It's pretty stunning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Go ahead, jump in. | |
| By means of an endorsement, I've actually written more books than I've read, and this one's very, very good. | ||
| And I actually listened to the audiobook on this one. | ||
| It is a scoop a minute in the audiobook format. | ||
| How did you come... give us your journey how you got here and then how you put this book together. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, you know, like most people in Washington, I wanted to become a lawyer and I was working at a law firm and I was applying to law school and I was bored to tears and I was poring through a set of documents, Secret State Department documents, about what China was doing in Sudan. | ||
| We were suing the government of Sudan. | ||
| This is a true story. | ||
| And the documents were so shocking that I actually published an article based on them. | ||
| And based on that, I lost my chance to be a lawyer because I almost got fired from the law firm and I got hired to be a journalist. | ||
| So the China story and China's abuses were an integral part of my path to becoming a journalist. | ||
| And then I just started working in the Japanese newspaper, started following the China story, met everyone in town I could who was working on China, and over 15 years watched sort of this whole town of Washington that we're sitting in just asleep and not really rising to the rising threat that was becoming more and more obvious. | ||
| And when the Trump administration came in, basically what I saw is that it was everyone in the system who had been calling for more attention to the China challenge saw an opportunity, okay? | ||
| And that doesn't mean that they were pro-Trump or that they were anti-Trump. | ||
| They just knew it was gonna be disruptive. | ||
| And they had heard Trump on the campaign trail, much because of the words that Ewan Navarro and Stephen Miller put in those speeches, and they were expecting a tougher approach. | ||
| And they were gearing up for that. | ||
| But little did they know that the other side was about to mount its offensive. | ||
| And once the administration actually took forward, Before we get to that, because I don't want to give up too much in the book, because I want people to buy the book. | ||
| I want you to buy the book, I want you to read it, I want you to think about it, and we're going to debate this book and the issues around this book for many days and weeks ahead. | ||
| I want to go, you said, this city was asleep. | ||
| I want to challenge that for a second, and this concept of the Thucydides Trap. | ||
| The Thucydides Trap goes back to the Peloponnesian War. | ||
| You have a rising power and a declining power. | ||
| The thesis of the 16 campaign was that Hillary Clinton was the personification of the managed decline of our country by an elite. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why you have the meeting in the Palace Hotel on November 1st of 2016 and the meeting in Alaska this week. | ||
| Was our elite, and Rahim I know you got some specific questions about our elite and some of the revelations, bombshell revelations in this book, Was the elite asleep or have they bought into this concept of Henry Kissinger and Graham Allison that we are declining power and what we have to do is manage our decline and channel their rise into becoming a liberal democracy? | ||
| Is that not the intellectual architecture of what our elites, of both parties, this is not a Republican and Democratic issue, of both parties. | ||
| So you said a mouthful. | ||
| Thucydides trap it, to my mind, doesn't apply to the US-China relationship. | ||
| For a whole host of reasons. | ||
| You know, first of all, if you just read the book, it's clear that this is a very selective take on history. | ||
| There's a lot of reasons countries go to war with each other. | ||
| Rising and falling and upward mobility and downward mobility. | ||
| That's just one of the things, okay? | ||
| And it's a very sort of Western-centric view. | ||
| You don't agree with it, but do you think the elites agree with it? | ||
| I don't agree with it either. | ||
| I don't think we're declining power. | ||
| I think it was used, and maybe this wasn't Graham Ellis' intention, to lull us into the belief that there's nothing we could do about it, so that we have to just make way for the rise of China as the leader of the world, and try to manage it the best we can. | ||
| And when I talked to Ben Rhodes for the book about that meeting, that November 1st meeting, he said, on the record, it's in the book, |
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