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May 4, 2021 - Bannon's War Room
47:02
Episode 921 – China Hands … How American Elites Sold Us Out to the Chinese Communist PartyEpisode 921 – China Hands … How American Elites Sold Us Out to the Chinese Communist Party
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steve bannon
24:56
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anthony fauci
00:04
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Well, the virus has now killed more than a hundred people in China and new cases have been confirmed around the world.
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.
That 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 a hundred 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.
anthony fauci ▲ ● ▼
Because if you don't and the worst happens, War Room.
unidentified
Pandemic.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
It is the one country in the world that has the military, economic, diplomatic capacity to undermine or challenge the rules-based order that we care so much about and are determined to defend.
But I want to be very clear about something, and this is important.
Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down.
It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.
Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we're going to stand up and defend it.
What's China's goal?
I think that over time, China believes that it can be and should be and will be the dominant country in the world.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, it's Tuesday, the 4th of May, the year of our Lord 2021.
Welcome back for the second hour of the morning edition of War Room.
Now with over 50 million, we cleared that this morning, 50 million downloads on the podcast.
Of course, we're live across the nation on the John Fretters Radio Network.
I want to thank our station, our new affiliate in Atlanta, WMLB, AM 1690.
Of course, on Dish Channel 219, on Comcast on cable, on Channel 113, Real America's Voice streaming.
Roku, Pluto, all the different distribution apparatuses, and live in Mandarin on GNews and GTV, and blown through the firewall to the Lao-Beijing, those brave subjects, I guess we call them, of China that yearn to be free, along with the diaspora of the Chinese people, 250 million Which make up a big part of our audience.
We're very honored today with Kevin McCarthy under siege, Liz Cheney under siege, victories all over the place over the weekend from the Rio Grande Valley to Georgia all over.
Very honored to have in the room with us today, in the house, Clyde Prestowitz, the author from Yale University Press, The World Turned Upside Down.
This book, and as you know, we had Josh Rogan in here a couple times for Chaos Under Heaven, which really talked about the back and forth and the great fight inside the Trump administration with the Chinese Communist Party, chaos under heaven.
This book takes a very different, very different look at things and it is, I think, absolutely essential because you're going to understand two things.
Number one, how we got here, how we got here pre-Trump administration, how we got here, how we got in this jam with good intentions and smart people, you know, the road to perdition, right?
And also an amazing analysis of American economic history and what made America the greatest industrial power in the history of the Earth.
Both of them covered by a individual.
Clyde, you have dedicated your life to this for what, the last 40 years?
unidentified
50 years, yeah.
I've been at this now for 50 years.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
For 50 years you've been at this, I should say.
But I'm young.
And I just want to say, I know this audience, the beloved Dr. Peter Navarro, On many occasions, try to get Clyde, I guess, to join into the administration with Bob Lighthizer.
You were looked at as a key component that could have helped put this through.
I've got to go.
Tony Blinken sits there.
Tony Blinken, and you know, this is not Steve Bannon saying, Tony Blinken, The number one priority is to maintain the post-war international rules-based order.
And that interview goes back and back and they talk about it all the time, Foreign Affairs, the Council of Foreign Relations.
This is the fetish.
The post-war international rules-based order.
And if you read this book you'll see that the gaming of that system by an incredibly smart Intelligence and lethal operation, which is the Chinese Communist Party, where it's gotten us today.
I want to quote from the book.
Because particularly the War Room Posse, and remember the strength of this show is the audience.
I want to go to this book, and I just, I'm going to take a second, because I've got to read from this book, it's that powerful.
And I think for this audience, you will have heard this before, maybe with a little more heat.
And I quote from page 133.
The key thing to understand is that China poses a variety of economic, political, and military challenges to the liberal world order that has prevailed since World War II.
A world dominated by China would be authoritarian, without rule of law, pursuing state-guided economic policies, and with complete surveillance of individuals at virtually all times, and without freedom of speech or free press.
The fundamental threat, to be clear, is not the people of China.
Taiwan and Hong Kong demonstrate that not only the Chinese people can operate democratic governments, but that when able to speak freely, they prefer them.
The threat is the Communist Party of China and its ambitions and ability to create a global authoritarian order.
We must recognize that China is dedicated to achieving this order and that it is using every tool at its disposal to obtain it.
Most of China's 1.4 billion people understand that their country is essentially at war with America and liberal democracy.
Every member of the 90 million member Chinese Communist Party is constantly and insistently being indoctrinated with the need of the CCP to displace the United States in any system of law with the authoritarian hegemony of a resurrected Chinese Empire.
And I quote from page 133 of the book, The World Turned Upside Down.
So Clyde, in this first segment, how, with all the good intentions and all the smart people, Basically from the 80s and 90s, when China was a devastated third world country that had come through famines, most of these self-inflicted famines, the Cultural Revolution.
How did it go from the late 90s to a power that threatens us on a global basis today?
unidentified
Well, of course, Nixon began it with the opening, he and Kissinger, with the opening to China in 1972, and then in 1979 we so-called normalized our relationship with China.
And so, I actually led the first U.S.
trade mission to China in 1982, fall of 1982.
At that time, the perspective of the U.S.
government, remember this is the Reagan administration, the perspective of the U.S.
government was that China had decided to move away from the total government management of its economy, it was going to move to a market economy.
and our policy was to encourage that and to encourage it by encouraging American businessmen to go to China, do business in China, invest in China and so forth.
And so that's what we did and it's important to understand that in 1978, so that's four years before I was in Beijing with the trade mission, there was a debate among the top Chinese leaders.
Mao was dead, Deng was in charge, there was a debate, and the debate was just how far should we open up and allow these Western devils into our system, and some of... The foreign devils.
The foreign devils, and some of Deng's comrades weren't too anxious about it.
You may remember a name like Li Pen.
He was not at all anxious about it, but Deng said, no, no, no, he said, a few flies will come in, but we can always shut the windows.
So, you have to put those two attitudes side by side.
Here's the US, Reagan administration, and we're saying, wow, China's going to open its economy, it's going to become capitalist, let's help it.
And here's Deng saying, well, we'll let a few flies in, but we're not going to lose control.
Well, in the 80s, China grew rapidly, both because they loosened up government control, they allowed free ownership of land, allowed the farmers to sell their own produce, and they welcomed foreign investment, and foreign investment kind of flooded in.
Then there came a crucial moment, June 24, 1989.
And you may recall students have been demonstrating in Tenement Square for two or three weeks.
There was a liberty statue that the kids had built in Tenement Square.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
The Goddess of Liberty.
unidentified
The Goddess of Liberty.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Which was kind of a facsimile or kind of a nod to the Statue of Liberty.
unidentified
Statue of Liberty, exactly.
And it was getting kind of, for the Communist Party, was getting out of hand.
They didn't know what to do.
And actually the Prime Minister, Jiang Zemin, Prime Minister of China at the time wanted to make concessions to the students, and Deng sent in a text.
Estimates vary between 700 and 7,000 as to how many people were killed, but the point is that at that moment it was kind of the blinder should have been off.
The West, we in the US, we should have seen.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Just in historical perspective, this was during the time when there was enough contention in the Soviet Union that the Berlin Wall was ultimately going to fall.
It had fallen.
And now you saw the freedom, and here in the June of 89, they're clamping down at the exact opposite.
unidentified
Exactly right.
And they were scared to death of another Berlin Wall invasion.
Now, at that moment, The President was George H.W.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Bush.
unidentified
At that moment, George H.W.
Bush had enormous potential leverage power in his hands.
He sent Brett Scowcroft, his National Security Advisor, immediately, the next day, to Beijing to meet with Dung.
And the message was, George H.W.
Bush is your best friend in the world.
And Bush's personal comment was, I'll keep the boats from rocking too much.
That was a fateful moment, because had the U.S.
and the free world at that time used their power to clamp down on China, China would have been in a very weak position.
But they didn't do it.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
The CCP would have collapsed.
unidentified
They would have collapsed.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Exactly.
People have to understand, and this is the, you know, what, 10 years later or 15 years later, you've got the situation in Iraq all from one family.
But I want to go back.
Bush 41.
He had been ambassador to China, and he had been the director of the CIA, and he had been the Vice President of the United States under Reagan at the takedown of the evil empire.
This was not a neophyte.
This guy had as much information about the Chinese Communist Party and how they ran things as possible.
What possibly, given the fact that the Soviet Union was imploding at times, why And this is the moment that you could basically destroy global communism, right?
What was it in your mind that had Scowcroft and Bush think that we got to prop up this regime?
unidentified
Scowcroft I'm not sure about, but Bush had a... I worked for him briefly on his staff around that time, and he had a kind of a romantic view uh... what i would call the american missionary view of china uh... empathy with the china downshot in chinese people uh... the housekeeper that he had his ambassador uh... i guess had been very kind and they have a very friendly but that would lead you to the store that would lead you decide with the students that they
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
just you just yes i have a romantic no You have a deep love and fondness for Lao Bai Jing.
That's my point.
If you support Lao Bai Jing, how can you look at... Many of my Chinese colleagues tell me more than 7,000.
They say 10,000 or higher, and that's not counting the other cities where they went and did a simultaneous crackdown.
I mean, this was showing the steeled fist, because Deng realized that if he didn't do it, that if you don't have tight control, this democracy thing, you know, starts to get out of control, the regime would be over.
I just want to make sure people understand.
It is your belief, as it is others, but it is your belief that if the United States had backed democracy and the freedom movement at that time, the Chinese Communist Party, you think, would have imploded, just like the Soviet Union?
unidentified
I do believe so, yeah.
I do believe so.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
And that original sin, have we ever recovered, or has the business class and the permanent political class... I tell you what, let's take a short commercial break.
This book is incredible, The World Turned Upside Down, America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership.
As we've talked about all the time, this is the overall overarching issue of our time.
That time being the freedom of the Chinese people.
It's the Chinese people's freedom that's going to trigger everything else.
Okay, we're gonna take a short commercial break.
We're going to turn with Clyde Prestowitz back in a moment.
unidentified
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.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We're going to have Commander Eric Greitens is going to be in studio as my co-host this afternoon at the 5 o'clock show.
Mike Lindell's got breaking news.
I think he'll be joining us.
If not, it'll be tomorrow morning.
Remember, we're proud to be part of the MyPillow extended family.
Go to MyPillow.com right now, type in promo code War Room, support Mike Lindell, the great manufacturing company up in Minnesota, which is MyPillow, and obviously the War Room posse.
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Okay, returning now to the world turned upside down from Yale University Press.
America, China, and the struggle for global leadership.
This is the single biggest thing that controls your overall life.
The geopolitics, the finance of it, the capital markets of it.
We're going to turn now.
Clyde, I want to go back in time to how this started.
The one thing, and then we're going to talk about your analysis of American economic growth and how America got to be such an industrial power.
The one thing that I find that's so shocking when you finish this book, the almost naivete of the American business, academic, and political leadership You talk about Bush having this romantic notion of the missionary, and remember, America, since the Boston Club, has had a relationship with China for hundreds of years, right?
1794. 1794. In the missionary movement there, a great ally in World War II took huge casualties from the Japanese Imperial Army that we tied up so so many Japanese divisions of mainland China, although the discussion is did they really fight or is it just total corruption between the communists and the nationalists?
unidentified
1794.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
1794.
The one thing that's evident to me, as I look today, we're going to have Josh Hawley in tomorrow.
Josh Hawley's going to be here tomorrow on Tyranny of Big Tech, Josh Hawley's new book about the oligarchs of Silicon Valley.
When you look at the social credit scores from the big tech oligarchs, when you look at what's happening in cancel culture, when you look at what's happening to American business really like the NBA and things, kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party and not thinking about the Uyghurs, not thinking about the Falun Gong, not thinking about the Tibetan Buddhists or the underground house Christians, what is pretty obvious when you read your book and you're not telling people but you show them.
Bye.
China... America did not transform China.
China transformed the West.
China has transformed the West, and we hear Tom Friedman and these guys going, you know what?
If we could just be China for a day, we could solve climate change.
If we just had, you know, more... it's a combination of state capitalism and authoritarian rule, and that combination There are many people on the left, and in corporate America, and in the permanent political class, regardless, this is not about political party, that look to China, what I call China light.
As a model, China, if you read your book, at the end of it, you come away with, wow, we didn't change them.
All these great ideas about the end of history, and about, you know, Fukuyama, and the end of history, and the last man, and free market economics, and all that, that didn't take place.
They changed us.
What say you, sir?
unidentified
No, in fact, the Economist magazine, which has been the high priest of liberal globalization free trade on March the 1st 2018 their cover story was the West made the wrong bet Now the interesting thing to me is that I was there when the bet was being made And I can tell you that nobody in the United States thought that there was a bet Everybody that I was involved with at the time was thinking it was a sure thing.
Free trade and open markets, that's inevitably going to lead to a demand for freedom and rights and democracy.
George W. Bush made the comment that free trade inevitably plants the seeds of democracy, and other comments of that time.
And there was this total belief that if we just engage with China and trade with China, invest in China, they're going to become just like us.
And what they didn't understand was nobody took the time to go back and look at Deng Xiaoping who said, well we might let a little flies in.
Or, in 1993, when China decided to build its own GPS guidance system.
It could have used the US system.
It could have used Galileo, the European system.
No, no, no, no.
It built its own.
Then, 1997, China builds the Great Firewall.
And Bill Clinton, when told China was building this Great Firewall to separate its internet from the worldwide net, Clinton says, ha, ha, ha, ha, it'll be like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.
They'll never be able to do it.
Well, of course they have done.
So for a long time, the West, particularly the United States, was just kidding itself about what China was up to.
And I blame it partly on our businessmen who were just so greedy and anxious to get into the Chinese market.
I blame it heavily on our China experts who... The China hands.
Yeah, the China hands.
These are the guys who read China and go to China.
They totally missed it.
And I blame it on both political parties who just were superficial in their analysis of China.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, this is what, you know, Bill Maher said this about the COVID virus.
He played the scene from he played the scene from Lawrence of Arabia, You're Silly People.
Great powers Don't have the luxury or the options of making these type of catastrophic.
When you read this book, this is not about political party.
This is about a mindset of the elites.
Donald Trump is president 2016.
I say this over and over again.
Hillary Clinton represented The elites of the managed decline of this country as personified by the concept of the Thucydides Trap.
We're the declining power.
They're the rising power.
But in our decline, we can push them enough in our direction that it won't lead to a kinetic war.
It won't lead to a cataclysmic war.
It's unrestricted warfare.
We talk about the information cyber war.
We talk about economic war.
We talk about kinetic.
And the Chinese Communist Party has always wanted to avoid Based upon the theories of Sun Tzu, they'll defeat the enemy without fighting a kinetic war.
Not that they don't fight information war, not that they don't fight, and you go through chapter and verse of all of our allies and how they do it.
I want to turn though, quickly, in this section, while we still have it, to a fundamental Misunderstanding.
You know, Joe Scarborough and these guys light us up every day about, there's no ideas, this populist movement, this nationalist movement, there's no ideas, it's just all these awful people, and it's just terrible.
I've got to go to the chapter, because you do both how China did it, and then how the United States did it.
How America Got Rich.
There's an entire section of the book, I just want to read the introduction.
To properly understand ourselves, we must clearly know how America became the richest and most powerful country the world has ever seen.
The tale is encrusted in the mists of rugged individualism, free markets, entrepreneurs, small government, immigrants fleeing tyranny to seek opportunity in the new world, and plain hard work done with a can-do spirit.
It's a nice story, but the truth is otherwise.
The United States got rich by imitating Great Britain and thereby marking a trail followed by Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, and South Korea, all of which eventually became rich.
The model was not one of free trade, open markets, and global investment.
Rather, it was one of mercantilism and protectionism.
That is a bombshell for a conservative.
Explain to people how America got rich and how the Chinese basically used it as a model.
unidentified
Well, there was a big debate at the beginning of our country.
Jefferson was a farmer, a plantation owner.
He wanted a country of farmers, and he thought the country would export agricultural products.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Yeoman farmers.
unidentified
Yeoman farmers.
Alexander Hamilton had been around the world a little bit, and he understood the industrial revolution that was happening in Great Britain, and he figured, and the Brits were getting rich faster than anybody else at the time, Hamilton figured that we should be as rich as they are.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Hamilton wrote one called the Report on Manufacturers.
unidentified
1793.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
And what did that say, sir?
unidentified
It said that what the United States should do is to have high tariffs, domestically produced steel, textiles, manufactured goods, because we had a growing population.
We would have the biggest economies of scale.
We would become the low-cost producers.
They're by the richest country.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
The most brilliant visionary aspect of not just a continental empire or continental country, but also with Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, economic nationalists, it became embodied in what was called the American system.
unidentified
The American plan.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
The American plan, the American system.
Walk through that plan and how it made us the greatest industrial power on earth.
unidentified
Well, it did two things.
First of all, it took advantage of the fact that the U.S.
population was growing rapidly, so we could get economies of scale.
Economies of scale is something that economists deny.
You won't find it in the models, but it is critically important.
And Hamilton understood that, our leaders in the 19th century understood that.
Second point was, they put the government actively into funding research and experimentation.
So Alexander Graham Bell does the telegram, well with government money.
We did the Homestead Act, the railroads were built with government money, so the government wasn't running the economy, it wasn't socialism, but it was investing in places where an individual investor would not be able to invest or would be too risky, and so the government worked hand in hand with entrepreneurs Entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs, exactly.
And Silicon Valley is the present manifestation of that.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Exactly.
And Silicon Valley then was up in Connecticut Valley.
Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break.
I want to remind people that during the Civil War, while he was Commander-in-Chief and fought a Civil War, Abraham Lincoln passed the Homestead Act, eventually passed the Transcontinental Railroad, got it all financed, which for two decades had been the toughest fight up here.
And started land-grant universities to make sure that the yeoman farmer's kids could actually have a technical training.
That's a vision, and that vision came from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, passed down to Abraham Lincoln.
And Lincoln, when Lincoln was, that was the American system.
That system grew the greatest industrial power.
That is what the Chinese focused on taking on in the 80s and 90s.
We're going to turn with Clyde Prestowitz, the book is The World Turned Upside Down.
We'll be back in the War Room in just a moment.
unidentified
War Room.
Pandemic.
With Stephen K. Banham.
The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide.
War Room.
Pandemic.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Banham.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
OK, the reason we're taking an hour to do this, because this is an important book, an important individual.
Peter Navarro, who's beloved by this audience, thinks so highly of Clyde Prestowitz in this book.
As importantly, Clyde is a close friend of Lou Dobbs, and for those of you that miss Lou Dobbs every day, this is really Dobbsian, and this is a, I don't want to say more sophisticated, but let's say this, it's a Yale University press book.
This is not written as some sort of page-turner thriller, although you will not be able to put it down.
I will tell you, I read a lot of books as you guys know.
I very rarely can get time to read.
I read this in one sitting.
I stayed up and I said, this thing is too good to put down because it actually lays out very fine.
If you want to understand how we got here over decades and decades and decades, if you also want to understand how very sophisticated people, Business people and government people misread a situation.
You've got to read this book.
And this book is, to me, if you want to see about America in decline and how you must turn that around.
There is, you know, in Josh Rogan, in Chaos Under Heaven, he says, hey, you've got a group of super hawks, realist confrontation, and Navarro and I are in the super hawk camps.
It's not the Chinese people.
It's not the nation of China.
It is the Chinese Communist Party.
And look, I'm sanctioned.
We got sanctioned four minutes into, as you know, Pompeo, Pottinger, Navarro, myself, sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party.
I think I'm the first civilian ever.
I wear it as a badge of honor.
We are all for, and every day of the show, the complete and total destruction of the Chinese Communist Party.
We make no bones about that.
But even if you're not a fire-breathing nationalist like that, you read this book and you come to a conclusion that we're an inflection point.
And we cannot manage this relationship as it's been managed.
So I want to turn now to Clyde Presowitz.
One thing I want to talk about is China hands.
Were they willfully blind?
There's so many good people that are in this book and that you think about that love the Chinese people, love the culture, understand what the CCP's been doing.
How did the old China hands get swept up in for many decades Being cheerleaders, and now really in 16 and 17, I think a lot of them came to the conclusion, hey, this thing is now going in a direction that if we don't reverse it now, confront it, it's only going to get worse.
How did the China hands, the most learned people we had about this area of the world, get swept up in this?
unidentified
Well, I think there are three main factors.
One is that Chinese is not an easy language, and the Chinese culture is a complex one.
So, you take a lot of time, I mean, to learn, to become fluent in Chinese, you're looking at four or five years of study.
And then, of course, you have to understand the culture on top of that.
And as you do that study, you become empathetic with the people that you're dealing with.
You get to like them.
You see them in their best light.
They're trying to educate you, and keep in mind that U.S.
China scholars, typically they've been educated in Taiwan, they've learned Chinese in Taiwan, and these are nice people, and they enjoy it.
I think a second element of it is that there is this romanticism, it goes back to the late 18th century in America, in which, you know, you're back to the 1780s, and the U.S.
is battling with Great Britain, the biggest country in the world, power in the world.
We're looking to trade.
We want to sell.
We can't sell to the Brits and here's the Chinese.
And so we start trying to sell to the Chinese.
And there's this long history in the United States of Americans being empathetic with and seeing China as people being oppressed by colonialists like the Brits.
And so there's a kind of an empathy grows up.
I think a second major, major factor is that Our intellectuals, China hands and other intellectuals in America today, most of them are not religious.
They don't understand religion.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
What do you mean by that?
unidentified
Well, the Chinese Communist Party is a religion, an anti-religion.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
You're so good.
unidentified
It's like the anti-Catholic Church.
And if you listen to Xi Jinping, he's always talking about struggle, struggle.
Well, I grew up in a fundamentalist Methodist environment, and what do we talk about?
Struggle!
Struggle to avoid evil!
And this is what Xi Jinping is talking about.
But if you haven't any concept of evil, if you haven't any concept, Of a greater goal than you can't understand.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
And I just think a lot of the party and what they put at their doctrine is a religion.
unidentified
It's a religion.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Why does so many China hands and why does so many people in the political class media in the business community refuse to focus on that?
unidentified
Our elite despise, look down upon religion.
Our elite pride themselves on not being religious and they don't get it.
They just don't understand it.
So I think that's a major factor.
Then I think another major factor is that the Chinese cultivate these people and that China is so good at whining and dining and flattering.
Oh, Mr. Bannon, you are the smartest American I've ever seen!
Right.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
You understand us, you understand China.
unidentified
Right!
Only you!
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Right.
One thing I want to bring up about this book, about economic power and about everything, and this is something that we could not convince the Goldman Sachs guys, the minutians of the world, Gary Cohen's This is something that people have to understand.
people like Lou Dobbs, etc. is right here in the introduction.
And this is something that people have to understand.
I want to quote from this book again. It's that powerful.
China's One Belt, One Road project aims to use the $3 trillion of foreign currency reserves accumulated by China's trade surplus, mainly with the United States, to fund a gigantic global infrastructure project that will link China to all major parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa, even Central and South America.
Why, on this one line here, the foreign currency reserves, which are a geopolitical weapon for the Chinese Communist Party, has come off the back of this audience, of the old Hundred Names of America, the deplorables.
Why is it so hard For Wall Street and corporate America to understand this simple sentence that the trade deficits led directly to those reserve, the currency, the current accounts and the three trillion dollars of reserve currency that they use geopolitically and that just continues on while you have a five hundred billion dollar a year.
We're a tributary state.
They see us as someone that will provide them with raw materials, right?
In agriculture products, raw materials.
Every now and again, some finished products will basically be a market.
We're a tributary state in the way that they look at the universe and that we have financed them.
Those currency reserves, what they buy our debt with and the interest pays for the Chinese military.
We're into a system, the rules-based international order that has set this up.
This is a way that we are going to implode.
This system, based upon the shoulders of the deplorables in this country, cannot go on.
You lay out some basic facts, and I will tell you, in the Oval Office, in the administration, and by today, not just Trump's, the Wall Street faction, the corporatist faction, were fused.
They'll sit there and go, no, it's just an accounting function.
This is what Lou Dobbs beat the drum on for 20 years.
Why is that statement right there so important about the continual trade deficits we run and how it fuels their capital account that they can then use against us?
unidentified
Well, the thing is that Wall Street and the heads of the big global corporations are making gazillions of dollars out of this.
They're getting rich, and so they don't see any problem.
The problem, as you said, is that we're funding China to take us down.
Do you believe that?
I do.
Why do you believe that?
I've looked at this issue for a very long time.
Well, document number nine of the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress states, it's about, on the ideological sphere, and it states what the Chinese Communist Party is for and against.
And what it says is, the Chinese Communist Party is against Western constitutional democracy.
The Chinese Communist Party does not accept any speech that is not conditioned by the Party's oversight.
The Chinese Communist Party does not believe in universal human values.
There's no such thing as universal human values.
The Chinese Communist Party does not believe in freedom of speech, nor does it believe in rule of law.
So the Chinese Communist Party has announced to the world, to all of us, in this document That it fundamentally opposes everything we stand for.
And if I look at the activity, what's going on, if I look at how China uses its state-owned enterprises to invest politically in order to tie or make countries like Serbia or Portugal dependent upon it, if I look at how China is bullying in the South China Sea, Everything I see is aimed at uprooting American influence and pushing aside American power.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Their economic power, you've been around the world, part of the book, and we've got a couple of minutes in this segment, you've been around the world and you know people in this book that you meet, whether it's in Singapore or Australia, say, we love America.
unidentified
Yes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
And we want to be an ally.
unidentified
Yes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
But let me give you some basic facts.
The basic facts is that the gravitational pull of this behemoth were so inextricably linked.
unidentified
Take Australia as an example.
So Australia is 24, 25 million people and its biggest, it lives on exports, it exports iron ore, coal, wine, other materials to China.
The Australian Prime Minister recently called for an open investigation of the origins of the COVID virus.
The Chinese really didn't like that.
Immediately they stopped all their imports of wine, of coal, and allowing tourists to go to Australia.
So, China is punishing Australia because Australia complained about the origins of the COVID virus.
China wants to make every country, as many countries as possible, dependent in such a way.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Tributary states.
unidentified
Tributary states, essentially.
Right, exactly.
In order to be able to bring... And tributary means not like a river.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Tributary means you pay tribute.
You essentially pay tribute.
unidentified
And think about this, even here in the United States, you remember the manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted in favor of the demonstrators in Hong Kong.
They told the Houston Rocks to fire the guy.
They didn't, but you know what?
He doesn't tweet anymore.
The Dalai Lama used to be invited to America to speak at university commencement exercises.
He hadn't been here for a long time.
You know why?
Because if a Dalai Lama shows up on campus, the Chinese will keep students from going to that campus.
The students pay full fare, the universities are hostage to the Chinese Communist Party because they need the money.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We'll take a short commercial break.
We've got about 60 seconds of this segment.
How infiltrated are institutions, the Wall Street, the corporations, by the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on a scale from 1 to 10?
10 being total, 1 being nothing.
On a scale from 1 to 10, where are we?
unidentified
I'd put it at 5 or 6.
Let me just mention one example.
I see you have the Financial Times here in front of you.
I get the Financial Times in my home every morning.
Last week on Wednesday it came with the China Daily folded in.
Now, why is the China Daily... I didn't ask for the China Daily, why is it folded into my SD?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
The China Daily being the propaganda arm, the state paper of the Chinese Communist Party.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
As Clyde knows in last week's Financial Times, Xi calls for a new world order, an attack on US global leadership.
That's not the War Room saying that, it's the Financial Times of London.
New world order.
We're going to talk about what that's going to be like in our next segment of the War Room.
unidentified
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.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Clyde Pressowitz is a realist.
This book is about realism.
The World Turned Upside Down is what they said about the American Revolution when it upended the British Empire.
This book is a very important book.
If you like Lou Dobbs, if you like Peter Navarro, this in one book puts it all the way through there about what's going on.
Real quickly, the COVID-19 virus, did it come from a bat cave in the Laotian border and travel a thousand miles to a wet market, or do you believe it came from the Wuhan lab?
unidentified
Well, I don't know exactly.
I myself believe the odds are on the Wuhan lab, but I don't know exactly.
What I do know is that the Chinese government delayed letting the world know about it, and thereby essentially triggered the global pandemic.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
If they had dealt with it earlier, we could have kept it as an epidemic.
unidentified
They knew about it in December.
Had they told everybody in December, we wouldn't be running around with masks.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Taiwan, we argue here in the War Room that Taiwan, forget the moral and ethical and the freedom of the Chinese people, all that, but that from a practical point of view, Taiwan represents Silicon Valley West, must be defended at all costs now because of its essential nature of the advanced chip design to the United States economy.
What say you, sir?
unidentified
Well, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, founded by Morris Chang, an old friend of mine, is the number one semiconductor producer in the world.
TSMC can produce chips that no one else can produce and they are critical to the United States. There are other similar companies in Taiwan. So if we can't keep them out of... if Taiwan cannot be defended, we'd have to destroy those companies. If they can't be defended, we'd have to They cannot fall into the hands of China.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
If Xi, do you believe that the way things are driving right now, that if Xi, for domestic reasons, Well, I don't think, I'm not as worried about Xi making a real military move on Taiwan.
unidentified
The reason I'm not is because it's an all or nothing bet for Xi.
If it stumbles, he's done, and probably the CCP is done in China.
So I think he's, I mean, again, go back to Sun Tzu.
You don't fight wars, you win the war by not fighting.
That's what she wants to do.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
You wrote a book, to talk about the seriousness of our elites, and this is for everybody in the audience, this is for the Des Moines Joe crowd that just mocked about ideas.
You wrote a book called Trading Places back in the 80s about Japan, New York Times number one bestseller.
This book is not a New York Times bestseller, but it should be.
What is it about the lack of seriousness now of the American educated elite Media, corporations, that this book is not something that's talked about all the time.
Your book about Japan in the 80s was?
unidentified
Steve, America is not the same country.
We don't have the cohesion.
We don't have the unity.
We're in serious social trouble.
Our business leaders don't think that they're Americans.
They think that they're globalists.
You take heads of major companies who Take a company like Apple.
Everything that Apple sells came out of a US government funded R&D program.
Everything that Apple makes is made in China.
Apple will fight the FBI not to cooperate with the FBI to open phones to help the FBI.
In Hong Kong last year, there was an app in the Apple App Store called Hong Kong Map Live.
Protesters were using it to watch where the police were so they could go where the police weren't.
China Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, began complaining about it.
Instantly, it was pulled out of the App Store by Apple.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We've got a couple minutes left.
People should go and get this book.
If you're missing Lou Dobbs every night, if you don't get enough Peter Navarro, the world turned upside down.
We'll walk you through the whole thing in a very serious read.
This is a book you're going to have to engage in.
Clyde, you've been at this for 50 years.
What is to become of us?
unidentified
Well, it's really up in the air.
Xi Jinping talks about the rejuvenation of the Chinese people, we need a rejuvenation of the American people, and we need a reinforcement of the fundamentals.
What's America about?
It's about human rights.
America's about liberty and freedom, freedom of speech, rule of law.
And caring about people and having a sense of whether we're Republicans or Democrats, we're citizens.
I don't think kids are taught citizenship anymore in schools.
I don't think kids are taught very much about American history.
We get a lot of woke history, but we don't get real history.
I think it's just so critically important I hear so much about, we're all divided into little identity groups and I've lived around the world.
We talk so much here in the United States about systemic racism.
I've lived around the world, I can tell you.
The United States is the least racist country around the world.
I've lived in Asia, I've lived in Europe, I've lived in Latin America.
It's so crazy how we're tearing ourselves apart over these issues that we're actually much in the lead on.
Okay.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We want to have you back in.
We've got to bounce.
How do people get the book, and how do they follow you during the day?
What's your social media handles, and how do they get to these books?
unidentified
Well, my Twitter account is at Clyde Prestowitz.
My email is presto at econstrat.org.
Telephone is 240-729-8541.
Okay, and they go to Amazon to get the book?
Absolutely.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
And it's up on your website also?
unidentified
Yes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, I want to thank you very much for coming in.
Thank you.
Okay, this book.
If you're missing Lou Dobbs every night, if you're not getting enough Peter Navarro in the War Room, get this book.
And share this book.
Read this book about the Chinese Communist Party, the rise of China, the mistakes we made, where we go from here, but also about what it took to make America the greatest industrial power on earth.
It is a fantastic lesson in the American system of Hamilton and Clay and Abraham Lincoln.
It's a fantastic read.
I want to thank you for taking the time to come in.
You're a fantastic guy.
I understand now why Peter Navarro wanted you in the White House to work with President Trump and really to start to take on the Chinese Communist Party.
Okay, at 5 o'clock today, Rahim's out.
He's going to be doing, I believe, working on a podcast.
We're going to be back at 5 o'clock.
Commander Eric Greitens is going to join us.
He's now running for the Senate in Missouri.
He's going to join us.
Captain Mo Bannon is going to be here.
He's also a co-host.
We've got a lot going on.
Big updates in Arizona.
Updates in Georgia.
A lot going on today.
Hopefully get Mike Lindell.
If not, we'll have him tomorrow.
I want to thank you, Clyde, once again.
Thank you.
The book is The World Turned Upside Down.
We'll see you back here in the War Room at 5 o'clock.
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