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Jan. 25, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:22
THE END OF UKRAINE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep256
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So what's Russia's real objective in the Ukraine and what should the United States do, if anything, to thwart it?
Danielle D'Souza Gill is going to join me to talk about her experience and her participation in the March for Life.
I'm going to lay out the momentous implications of the Supreme Court taking the Harvard affirmative action case.
This is good news.
China specialist Steve Moser will join me.
We're going to talk about the CCP's plans to remake not just Asia, but the global balance of power.
And finally, I'm going to talk about Abraham Lincoln's secrets of persuasion, which he used as a lawyer.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Biden administration seems to be getting ready to participate in a war over the Ukraine.
Now, the Biden people have already sent over to Ukraine close to 200,000 pounds of lethal aid, ammunition, all kinds of stuff.
This is for the kind of frontline Ukrainian troops to be able to block any Russian, well, incursion, to use the word that Biden himself used.
Now the Ukrainians are saying, look, war is not imminent.
We're not saying that.
But there's no question that there is a big Russian buildup on the Ukraine border, 100,000 troops.
In fact, that's almost the exact number that the Russians used decades ago to invade Afghanistan.
But what is Russia's objective here?
What are they trying to achieve?
According to the intelligence agencies from Britain, and Britain generally has better intelligence than the United States.
That's partly because, I guess, they maybe aren't as woke as we are in the CIA. But another reason is that, of course, Britain is closer to the scene of the action.
And by and large, And this goes back decades.
French intelligence, British intelligence tends to be a little bit more on the money than US intelligence.
Anyway, the Brits think that Russia is not trying to occupy Ukraine in a kind of conventional military style, but rather to replace the Ukrainian government with a party, with a government that is entirely pro-Russian, pro-Putin.
The party they have in mind is a small party called Nashy, which is so small it has no seats in the Ukrainian parliament.
But those are the guys that the Russians want to install.
I mean, think of the way that the Soviets installed, for example, Jaruzelski.
He was kind of a puppet in Poland.
This is evidently Putin's playbook in a new situation.
The problem with Ukraine, I think, is that we should have not gotten ourselves in a situation where our enemies have become so emboldened.
We just haven't. We here, meaning in this case, the Biden administration hasn't taken the steps that would have said to Russia, don't even think about this.
Here's China taunting us at the same time.
China flies dozens of warplanes near Taiwan.
And I think the Chinese are almost saying, listen, we're going to kind of watch this Ukrainian situation.
If Biden proves to be weak over there, well, we know what's coming next.
Because if he doesn't have the appetite to block Ukraine, he's certainly not going to have the appetite to block Taiwan.
And Biden, let's remember, could have had sanctions against Russia, sanctions that were in place under Trump.
I mean, here's the irony. Trump is supposed to be this great pawn of Russia, Putin's man in the White House, yet he imposes...
Sanctions on Russia.
He blocks the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Biden comes in.
And Biden here is compromised every which way.
I mean, let's remember he's been taking money from Russia.
He got a big check from a woman in Moscow.
Biden has been getting money from the Ukraine.
Let's remember his son was sitting on the Burisma board, the board of a Ukrainian energy company, and collecting $50,000 a month for him and the same amount for his partner.
Biden also got a prosecutor fired who was looking into Biden's dealings in the Ukraine and boasted about it.
So all of this is the essential backdrop to realize that I think from the point of view of the Russians and the Chinese, not only is Biden weak.
That would be bad enough. That would be Biden is another Jimmy Carter.
He's an income poop. He doesn't have the backbone.
It's also that Biden is compromised.
Biden is corrupt. Biden is a guy that we can buy off.
And let's remember, it's been part of the strategy of great powers.
The Chinese are like masters at this.
They go to countries where you have tyrants.
And these are tyrants who are having trouble getting loans from the International Monetary Fund because they're so corrupt and half the money ends up with the tyrant.
And the Chinese go, listen, no problem.
Don't worry about the International Monetary Fund.
We'll give you loans. But in exchange, we want access to your minerals.
So the Chinese are very used to using the leverage of money.
And I think they feel like we used it with Biden and it was successful.
Biden is bought and paid for by the CCP. So I think all of this makes it difficult to have a rational debate about what to do about the Ukraine.
Now, my view on all this is actually neither the kind of aggressively interventionist tone that you hear from someone, the kind of never Trump and the neoconservative people.
Wing, but it's not the isolationist view either that we should sort of do nothing.
Hey, listen, let's just put up some fences on our southern border.
We're going to be okay. No, we're actually not going to be okay.
And there are things that we need to do in the world.
And Trump understood this, by the way.
Trump adopted the Teddy Roosevelt philosophy, which is to be careful when you get involved, but to speak softly, carry a big stick, use it only when necessary, but don't hesitate to use it when it is in fact necessary.
When it is, in fact, needed.
We shouldn't get involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not involved.
At the same time, we have tools.
We have diplomatic tools.
We have sanctions. We have other ways in which we can, not only alone, but with our allies, impose severe penalties on countries that they care about.
Russia cares about economic sanctions.
China cares about its economy.
In fact, its economy is the driving force of its ambitions.
If the Chinese economy was in danger of being wrecked, the Chinese would think twice, not just about invading Taiwan.
They would think twice about a lot of things that they're doing in the world.
So there are opportunities for the Biden administration to do reasonable things.
But of course, this being Biden, we cannot count on the Biden administration doing any of them.
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Guys, I'm back with Danielle D'Souza-Gill.
And you know Danielle. She's the author of the book The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
And she's also the host of a weekly show on Epoch TV. It's called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza-Gill.
Daniel, you were this weekend in Washington, D.C., and you were the emcee of the religious ceremonies at the March for Life.
So, how did that come about?
Well, it was a lot of fun.
We actually started doing it, I think, well, I think Frank Pavone.
He's one of my really dear friends.
He's very active in the pro-life movement.
He has been for many years.
He's been doing it for years, and so he and I kind of started working on more things together the last few years.
He wrote a blurb for my book, and so he wanted me to emcee this for him, so I was glad to do it.
And you go down to D.C. Now, on the same day that these events are going on, you wrote an article in Newsweek, and you made a striking statement.
So before we come to what happened in D.C., you made the point that this might be the last March for Life in which Roe v.
Wade is still intact.
Talk about the significance of that statement, and then I want to ask you whether that was the mood of the people who were in D.C.? Well, I think one of my main messages was that even though this could be the last March for Life under Roe v.
Wade, we are not going to pull back at all as pro-life activists because...
I think the left thinks that, oh, you know, after Roe v.
Wade is overturned, we're going to kind of disappear and then we will have gotten our win or something and so it's over or we won't have this opposition anymore.
But in fact, we will because this will all go back to the states.
So we'll still have states that have very radical abortion laws like New York and California.
And so we will have to work really hard to pass that.
Pro-life legislation in a lot of other states, but states like Ohio will be able to have their heartbeat bill.
Mississippi will be able to have their 15-week ban.
And so we will have to keep organizing at the state level.
So you're saying that the effect that if the court overturns, as we hope it will, Roe, this decentralizes the abortion debate.
In a sense, it makes it political, right?
And it makes it in each state there's now a fight.
And you're saying pro-life energy has to be redirected from going to the front of the Supreme Court to now going to your state legislature as an activism at the local level.
Yes, I think that's the next step is working towards that.
And then also hopefully towards a federal amendment, but we'll need to get more of a majority until then.
So that might take another 50 years, hopefully much sooner than that.
But that's our next step. So we will have those federal goals also.
But I think in the meantime, we will definitely have to focus on the local politics of it.
Now, you went to D.C., and this was after the Supreme Court has heard the Dobbs case, the decision presumably coming this spring.
What was the mood in D.C.? Well, who was there?
What was going on?
I saw a little bit on social media about a kind of a pro-choice counter-protest, but what did you see and what did you observe?
I saw that it wasn't as large as it usually is.
It was a lot of people, but usually the March for Life is massive.
And I think because of the vaccine mandates that were put in place in DC literally a few days before, and obviously a lot of other things going on, it was a little bit smaller crowd.
But it was still quite a lot of people.
And I think there were, you know, all of the main kind of groups that you would expect pro-life groups were there.
People traveled from all across the country.
I had some good friends from Ohio who drove in for this.
So yeah, it was quite a lot of people.
But I personally got to talk to the people who crafted the laws in Mississippi, who crafted the laws in Texas, who really have been working on This pro-life legislation.
So I spoke with them.
And I also got to talk to Alveda King, who is Martin Luther King's niece.
And I got to talk to this guy who sings in this band called 10th Avenue North.
He's very pro-life.
So yeah, just a whole array of characters.
When you were singing, it was kind of cool about the singer because you had listened to him when you were in high school.
And sometimes you have, even if a guy is pro-life, they're a little reluctant to be publicly identified with the issue.
So you were saying culturally you thought it was important that he was there.
Yeah, I mean, some Christian singers today, they think like, oh, I just want to be cool and I just want everyone to like me.
So I'm going to be kind of getting, you know, away from politics.
I don't want liberals or conservatives to think anything of me.
And even on the pro-life issue, they're not really sometimes speaking about those kinds of things.
So I thought that was really cool.
He had said he grew up going to these.
His parents had worked in this movement for a long time.
So that was really cool to see him there.
Talk about the religious ceremony you said was interesting because it had a variety of...
You had the Catholics there.
You had... Talk about the woman who was the Baptist because a lot of it was quite liturgical and ceremonial.
And then she jumps up and she goes, what did she say?
Well, yeah, it was a Christian ceremony.
So we had everything from Catholics to Baptists who were a part of it.
And I guess as emceeing it, I wanted to make it as...
You know, as great as possible between everybody.
And everyone got along so well.
I think people act like there's this big divide and, you know, debate between them.
But I think when it comes to issues like pro-life, we're very united on everything and our stance on it and how to, you know, really go against this evil.
So I think everyone was definitely on the same page.
But yeah, there was this woman who made a few jokes.
Yeah. Well, I mean, that is actually historically a little new, because if I think back to when I was younger, came to D.C., the evangelicals were anti-abortion, but they did it on their own.
And then the Catholics did it on their own.
And there was a kind of a rift between those two groups.
And it seems like over the years it's been healed, so that even though there might be some theological differences, That on the moral and cultural issues, there's a united front.
So that's actually, I think, a very positive development in unifying the pro-life side.
And I think it's good, too, because in a way we have this much larger enemy, you know, Biden, larger enemy abortion, larger enemy Satan.
So there's really so much that we have in common that we can focus on to fight back against.
And if we're not on the same page when it comes to these important issues, then what happens is You know, the babies suffer.
We don't get as far as we can and all these things.
So I think everyone having their own, you know, goal in it.
There are people who set up the crisis pregnancy centers and there are people who work on the laws themselves.
So everybody has kind of a different focus.
Guys, if you go just to, is it Epic TV? How did they get your show?
I just want to let people know. Oh, well, you can download the Epic Times app.
That's probably the easiest thing to do.
And then when you click on videos, you'll see Counter Culture with Danielle D'Souza Gill, as well as many other shows.
So you can watch a lot on there and also follow me on social media.
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Feel the difference. There's some very good news on affirmative action.
The Supreme Court has decided to take a huge case.
This is the Harvard and University of North Carolina, two companion cases that deal with the same issue.
And what is the issue? The issue is this.
Should universities, this is particularly selective and elite universities, but it applies to a large number of universities, should universities be able to admit black and Hispanic students Who have vastly weaker academic preparation, vastly lower grades, vastly lower standardized test scores, vastly lower extracurricular skills, and should universities be, nevertheless, and we're talking here not just about private, but state universities.
Should they be able to actively discriminate on the basis of race and admit weaker black and Hispanic students while turning away stronger white and Asian-American students?
This has been going on for 40 years.
And we're not talking about—some people, when they think about affirmative action, they spout the kind of conventional nonsense about, well, we're talking about equally matched candidates, and we're talking about someone giving someone—no, we're actually not talking about that.
We're talking about people who are completely different in terms of their academic preparation, sometimes a cognitive gap of one, two, even three years.
And I can say this as someone who has sort of witnessed this affirmative action in action.
I saw it all around me at Dartmouth.
And affirmative action was upheld in the Bakke case, and then it was sort of reaffirmed in a case called Grutter v.
Bollinger, which was 2003.
So for decades now, universities have been allowed to do this, and universities do it under the pretext of diversity.
We need a diverse student body.
Now, this diversity business is a complete sham.
Because, in fact, universities have become much less diverse, at least much less diverse than the one kind of diversity that matters in academia, namely diversity of interests and ideas and philosophies and thoughts.
The kind of diversity that should matter in a college, that diversity has gone down.
And so what universities are after now is campuses that, quote, look like America.
This is their justification that they want a campus in which each ethnic group is proportionally represented to sort of reflect, as if to say that campuses are nothing more than photo ops, where you basically get to take pictures and go, wait a minute, blacks are 12% of the population.
I was very happy to see that there were 12% of blacks in the Harvard freshman class.
I mean, this is such a subversion of academic ideals, I don't even really know what to say.
And the Supreme Court has looked the other way.
Years ago, Sandra Day O'Connor said something to the effect of, well, we might need affirmative action for another 25 years, and then maybe not after that.
And this is the kind of utterly vacuous statement that, I'm sorry to say, comes out of the mouth of a Reagan nominee.
Now, all that being said, I think the Supreme Court has had enough of this, and I'm delighted to say that they're going to be considering it.
It doesn't obviously mean that there's going to be a foregone conclusion, but it's really hard for me to believe.
In fact, this is a situation where even Justice Roberts is kind of hardcore.
If you look at what Justice Roberts has been saying over the years, he has been emphatically saying that this kind of racial meddling, this kind of racial balancing, these sorts of systematic, I mean, these systematic racial preferences are the closest thing to systematic racism we now have in this country.
And here I'm now quoting Roberts from a 2006 voting rights case.
He goes, quote, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
I mean, a beautiful statement mirrors actually something I wrote years ago in a liberal education, and that is that the way to eliminate race as a factor in decision making is to eliminate race as a on the basis of race.
I mean, a beautiful statement mirrors actually something I wrote years ago in a liberal education, and that is that the way to eliminate race as a factor in decision making is to eliminate race as a factor in decision making.
The court case is going to be heard this coming October, so nothing is gonna happen overnight.
The case will be heard in October.
The decision will probably come early next year, but I'm delighted to say that after not just years, but decades of putting up with this literally intellectual and moral barbarism of affirmative action, The court is finally looking at it, and I hope that having looked at it, the court will say, enough.
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The ACLU continues to give ongoing proof that it is no longer a civil rights or a civil liberties organization.
It's a misnomer.
The American Civil Liberties Union, is this some kind of a joke?
Well, in the past, it really wasn't a joke.
I remember thinking back to my Dartmouth days, there were times when the college administration would do things to us, and we would go running to the ACLU. Now, we did not have a high degree of confidence that the ACLU would come and back us, and we knew that if they did back us, they would say things like, oh, well, these are right-wing extremists, but you know what?
Even right-wing extremists have the right to free speech.
But despite the hemming and hawing, we had this belief that the ACLU, being a civil liberties organization, would feel some moral pressure to take our side because we were being, what?
Well, deprived of our civil liberties.
And the ACLU on these issues, on civil liberties issues, was by and large pretty sound.
In fact, the ACLU took a quite extreme position defending free speech when they defended the Nazis marching in Skokie, famous case.
And the ACLU has now flipped.
They've gone from being pro-free speech to being anti-free speech.
They've gone from being pro-free assembly to being anti-free assembly.
Essentially, one by one, they're giving up on all of our civil liberties.
And they're emerging as nothing more than a sort of left-wing organization that will go with the left-wing orthodoxy of the day.
Now, the latest proof of this comes in the issue of Curricular transparency.
When you're dealing with public schools, let's remember these are instruments of the state, the ACLU has long had the position that schools should be transparent.
They should disclose what they are doing and that bureaucrats and school boards do not get to hide what they are doing from parents or from the public.
If you're a little surprised that this has been the ACLU's position, that's because you're so familiar with the current ACLU, which no longer holds to any principle at all.
So, right now what's going on is about a dozen state legislatures are considering laws that basically demand that curriculums be posted online.
This is part of the transparency movement.
Parents have a right to know.
But the ACLU wants to protect race and gender indoctrination.
They want to protect transgender indoctrination.
And so they have, well, the recent tweet says it all.
Curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools.
Now, the idea here that there's some kind of open conversation going on in schools is laughable.
First of all, students have no say in the public school classroom.
They are completely at the mercy of teachers and administrators and bureaucrats.
So the idea that students have free speech is...
Is absurd. But why don't parents, who after all are through their taxes paying for the public school system and public schools are accountable to the public, why shouldn't parents know what's going on?
Well, the ACLU says that they shouldn't, and they are disguising their opposition to transparency by saying that they're going to protect the free speech of the teachers.
Now, interestingly, the ACLU in the past, here's the ACLU of Kentucky.
Kentucky, several years ago, was establishing a program for Bible literacy.
The idea was that school districts, you should know about the Bible.
We're not teaching the Bible, but we're teaching about the Bible.
And the ACLU was, you can't do this.
We need transparency.
We need to know what each of these districts are doing.
Parents need to know. The community needs to know.
So the ACLU, this is the kind of classic ACLU. And I suppose part of the reason it was easy for the ACLU to do that is because they were opposing Bible literacy.
It's harder for the ACLU to stand on principle when we're talking about race and gender indoctrination.
And sure enough, the ACLU has decided not to stand on principle, essentially to surrender the civil liberties position and to become nothing more than a kind of left-wing hatchet organization.
If you give money to the ACLU, I hope there's no one who listens to this podcast who does, but if you do, stop.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a China expert and a China watcher, Steve Mosher.
He's president of the Population Research Institute.
He's an advocate for human rights in China.
And he's the author of the book, Bully of Asia, a book that really looks at the Steve, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate having you.
You say in your book, and this may be kind of its...
That China's goal is to bring America to its knees without firing a shot.
Talk about how the Chinese hope to achieve that goal.
Well, way back in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping called together the other senior leaders.
Deng, of course, Vice Premier Deng, was in effective charge of the country at that time.
And he said, the old Cold War is over.
America has won. The Soviet Union has been defeated.
The new Cold War is now going to begin between China and the United States, and China will win this one.
And of course, by China, he means the Chinese Communist Party.
And so China has effectively been at war with us across all domains, except the kinetic.
We're not firing bullets at each other for the last 31 years.
Americans are just waking up to that fact.
So, I think the reason for the American slumber, and I'd like to know if you agree with this, is because America thought that the Chinese were moving away from communism in a kind of reformist direction.
And replacing complete centralized state control with a kind of state-enabled capitalism.
So all of these were seen as positive developments, and I think there was some expectation, I mean, ridiculous and naive in retrospect, that the Chinese would somehow evolve toward liberal democracy.
But why were these predictions so flatly wrong?
Was it never the intention of the Chinese to go in this direction?
Well, it certainly wasn't the intention of the Chinese Communist Party to go in this direction.
Back in 1958, a long time ago, Chairman Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao being one of the great mass murderers of human history, far eclipsing Stalin and Hitler in that regard, set up in 1958, he set up an Earth Control Committee, believe it or not.
He had a... An economy smaller than Argentina's.
And he was setting up an Earth Control Committee because his ultimate plan, of course, was to expand the Communist Party's writ outside of the borders of China.
So this has been the goal for a long time.
We deluded ourselves back in the late 1970s when I first went to China in 1979, 1980.
I was the first American on the ground in China, allowed to do research there.
We deluded ourselves into thinking that It would bring China around, that we would draw China along in our powerful wake and they would become like us.
Economic modernization would lead to political modernization.
And guess what? It didn't happen.
That dream ended on Tiananmen Square on June 4th of 1989 in a massacre when the Chinese Communist Party mowed down unarmed students in the streets of Beijing, the capital city.
Unarmed students who wanted what?
Well, they wanted democratization.
They wanted an end to one-party dictatorship.
They were killed. So that was, you know, it should have been a wake-up call for us in 1989, but we lived with our illusions for 20 years beyond that.
Is it because, and I remember thinking back now to the early Reagan years in which Deng Xiaoping was seen as, well, you could almost call him the Gorbachev of China.
And by that I mean he was seen as somebody who was of a different stripe than, say, Mao Zedong.
And that he was moving China.
And he did move China in some respects in a new direction.
But I think what you're saying is that with regard to centralization, with regard to political totalitarianism, with regard to establishing an unchallenged tyranny, he was no different than Mao.
No, I mean, he was a practical man.
He said it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.
He was happy to accept Western capital, help from Wall Street, Western technology, Western investment.
And of course, we didn't realize at the time that if an American company goes into China, they squeeze the company dry of technology and then squeeze it back out of China.
That's how it works. So we did this enormous transfer of capital and technology.
We gave them access to our enormous market.
We enabled the rise of the country, Dinesh, that wants to destroy us, which is probably the greatest strategic blunder made by any country throughout all of human history.
Steve, talk a little bit about So China is pursuing military initiatives on the one hand, and you discuss those in the book.
You say, in fact, I thought this was a striking statement, you say that the Chinese believe that in a world of insecurity, the real security comes from being sort of the biggest badass on the planet.
And I assume that...
And applying that to our current situation, if the Chinese were to successfully overrun and overwhelm Taiwan, they would, in fact, wouldn't they have that reputation?
At a time when America has a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, people falling out of planes, Americans left behind, if the Chinese could successfully subdue Taiwan, the world would take notice and the world would say, listen, the people to be scared of is not the woke military of the United States, but the Chinese. Absolutely.
The debacle in Afghanistan was something that I never thought I would see in my lifetime.
I was an officer in the US Navy a long time ago when Saigon fell.
And this was clearly, the fall of Kabul was worse than the fall of Saigon, in my view.
And it certainly has emboldened the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, who declared several years ago that he was going to take back Taiwan by the year 2020.
Now, 2020 has come and gone, of course.
That was the beginning of our COVID nightmare.
But he has not abandoned his plans.
There are Amphibious landing ships being built now by the People's Liberation Army Navy.
There are frequent, in fact, daily incursions into Taiwan airspace by People's Liberation Army Air Force planes and bombers and fighters.
Ships transgressing into Taiwan waters.
So the aggressive actions have never stopped.
And certainly, you know, you're right.
China would not stop at Taiwan.
It would continue.
China is an empire that has survived into the modern age.
And empires have no natural borders.
China doesn't recognize the existence of the current world order.
It wants to replace it with a new world order.
And those boundaries in that new world order will be set by force, Dinesh, not by existing treaties, and certainly not by something called the Treaty of Westphalia, signed by Western nations hundreds of years ago.
China was never a signatory.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, let's pursue this idea of what a Chinese world order would look like and how the Chinese hope to get there.
We'll be right back with Stephen Mosier.
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I'm back with scholar and author Stephen Mosher.
He's the author of the important book, Bully of Asia.
Steve, we're talking about how China wants to create its own new world order, if you will.
And one of the central ways they're going about that is through this sort of New Silk Road initiative.
Now, the Silk Road, of course, a reference to the ancient Silk Roads by which China was able to establish travel and trade routes with largely the rest of Asia.
But now, you say and you document, they have in mind a global Silk Road.
What are the Chinese plotting here?
Well, what the Chinese Communist Party wants to do, and this is their vision of the future, they envision a world where the factory floor of the world is located in China.
China makes all manufacturers.
The industrial base of the world is located there.
The rest of the world has three functions under that new world order set up by China.
They have to consume the products that flow off the Chinese factory floors.
They have to provide the raw materials to feed the industrial machine of China.
And of course they have to feed China's workforce because China is a food-poor country which must import massive amounts of grain each year and other foodstuffs in order to feed its own people.
So that's the world of the future they envision.
The rest of the world is de-industrialized, is a source of food and raw materials, and then sheepish, passive consumers of Chinese-made products.
That's not a world that I want to live in, that I want my children and grandchildren to live in.
Let's go about how they do this.
You give two examples I want to highlight.
In Angola, you say, where there's, by the way, lots of oil deposits, the International Monetary Fund took the position that, look, the politicians are corrupt.
There's a lot of graft and corruption.
We can't give you loans. So the Chinese go, listen, guys, we'll give you loans.
We don't care about your corruption.
Take as much of it as you want.
But we want access to your raw materials.
We want access to your oil.
And so the Chinese kind of buy their way in by giving a sweet deal to these corrupt bureaucrats.
And then pretty soon they're calling the shots in Angola, right?
Absolutely. One way to look at the Chinese Communist Party is as a criminal enterprise.
This is an international criminal organization that does not abide by international law, that has utter disrespect for the standards of the countries that they're operating in.
And always proceeds to advance its cause by using money, drugs, sex, whatever it takes to compromise officials on the receiving end.
And there's no concern on the part of the party for the well-being of either the Chinese people themselves or the people of the countries that are being exploited.
That's how it works.
And the Chinese Communist Party also wants this.
It wants to control resources at the wellhead, at the source.
It wants to control oil at the wellhead.
It wants to own farmland itself.
It wants to own food processing plants.
That's why it's buying farmland throughout the United States, Canada and Australia, because it wants to own everything in the supply chain pipeline from the farmland itself.
Those are things we should be very, very leery of.
We should put, I think, a couple of states have a restriction on Chinese companies buying farmland.
The United States should pass such a restriction.
We need to keep farmland, which is a natural security resource, in our own hands and not sell it off to China.
Let me ask, in some ways, a sensitive question.
You're saying the Chinese are trying to buy Angola, they're trying to buy Cambodia, they're trying to buy farmland.
Do you think that they have been trying to buy the Biden family?
And by that I mean to offer sweet enough deals to Joe Biden and his bag men, Hunter Biden and the other brothers, so that they will be compromised in their dealing with China.
They'll be, in a sense, predictably friendly toward China.
and at a bargain basement price because it's much easier to buy off one guy or even one family, what's the cost of that compared to the kind of deals that China could get in return?
Yes, that's exactly what they do, and they've been doing it for a long, long time.
Now, think back to the Clinton years when the People's Liberation Army poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Clinton campaign in 1996 in order to do what?
To buy influence with the Clinton administration.
Now they've gotten a lot more sophisticated in that over the years, but the money has continued to flow.
Literally tens of billions of dollars are being used to subvert democracies and establish dictatorships around the world.
The Chinese Communist Party, which is a corrupt enterprise, Propagates itself by creating other corrupt enterprises and by corrupting democracies.
And there's a well-known Chinese scholar who said a few months ago, we give American politicians one bag of money, and if that's not enough, we give them two bags of money, and eventually they do what we want.
And I think the Biden family has gotten lots and lots of bags of money.
Wow. Let's close out by me asking you about this business about so-called patriotic education in China, because at a time when it seems like American schools are sort of teaching students to hate their country, the Chinese are sort of going in the opposite direction, and they have this sort of philosophy of the superiority of the Han Chinese.
People may not be familiar with this almost...
Xenophobic and racial doctrine that is at the heart of Chinese education.
Just say a word about what the Chinese are doing.
What are the kind of ideas that they are inculcating through their schools in young Chinese students?
Well, after the Tiananmen massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party put in place a patriotic education program.
So, beginning in kindergarten and going through college, every year you learn about the supposed history and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.
And it's all sweetness and light.
There's no mention of the 42.5 million people who died in the famine in the early 1960s, the millions of victims of the The cultural revolution, the 400 million little victims of the one-child policy that I was an eyewitness to when I was back in China.
So they teach the Chinese young people a false history of China.
And in fact, one final point.
Xi Jinping has actually said...
That there are two weaknesses that the Chinese Communist Party must avoid.
They are any accurate accounting of the history and the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party itself.
Because an accurate accounting of that history, an accurate accounting of that ideology, reveals that everything the Chinese are taught about their own recent history and the ideology of the people who control them is quite frankly a fabrication, a lie.
Thank you, Stephen Moja.
I really appreciate having you.
This is a fascinating book, Bully of Asia.
Thank you. A legal website called Advocate Magazine, a fascinating article on Abraham Lincoln as a lawyer.
Now, this is not Lincoln the congressman.
This is not Lincoln the president.
This is not about the Civil War.
This is about the many years, in fact, a quarter of a century, that Lincoln practiced law with his partner, a guy named Billy Herndon.
And that was the law firm, Lincoln& Herndon.
And they took hundreds of cases between Lincoln& Herndon and some of the other associates that worked with them.
Lincoln, by the way, never went to law school.
There were actually very few law schools in America at the time.
The idea is the way you became a lawyer is you kind of apprenticed yourself to a practicing attorney.
Then you began to read law books and learn some legal principles and rules.
Then you were examined typically by a magistrate or by another practicing attorney, and they would sort of certify you to practice law.
And that's what happened with Lincoln. He worked with the Justice of the Peace.
He helped him draft some legal documents.
He borrowed his law books.
He began to study them.
And pretty soon, there he was arguing cases and practicing law.
Now, the reason I'm talking about all this is because I think Lincoln's strategy in making his arguments in court, his strategy in approaching legal cases, is very instructive, not just for those of us who want to be lawyers or who are arguing in a formal sense, but even for those of us who are trying to persuade other people to adopt our point of view.
Lincoln was very shrewd about how you get a jury, a judge, to come over to your side.
And his principles, I think, are very worth noting.
Now, one principle of Lincoln I should mention at the outset was Lincoln was actually not an ambulance chaser at all.
His principle in law was, less litigation, the better.
In fact, he wrote, I'm now quoting him, discourage litigation.
He goes, persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.
Point out to them how the nominal winner...
is often a real loser in fees, expenses, and a waste of time.
I mean, talk about the relevance of this advice for a litigious America today.
Lincoln says as a peacemaker, the lawyer has the superior opportunity of being a good man.
In other words, he's not just trying to get business for himself.
And then Lincoln concludes, there will still be business enough.
Now, what struck me about Lincoln's mode of argument, the thing that really caught my attention, is Lincoln's sort of style.
Sometimes Lincoln would be defending somebody.
Let's say, for example, he's defending somebody who's accused of murder.
And the opposing counsel would call a witness and the witness would say, yeah, you know, I was at the scene of the crime and, you know, I saw this guy right there.
And then after giving this damning testimony, they'd go to, well, it's time for cross-examination, Mr.
Lincoln. And Lincoln would say, no questions.
And the next witness would come up and say, well, you know, I want to talk about the motive of the defendant.
He had every motive to commit this crime and goes on into how he was short of money and this and that.
And then the prosecution says, no, I'm done with this witness.
And then the judge turns to Mr.
Lincoln, no questions.
And the prosecutors, when this first happened, would think, man, this Lincoln is kind of like a, he's a third-rate attorney.
He doesn't even know how to do his job.
He's letting all this damning evidence go in.
But the point of Lincoln was actually very shrewd.
Lincoln's strategy was never fight where you can't win.
A lot of times defense counsels, and this is a general point in people making arguments, they feel like, I need to fight on every front.
If they bring in a police guy talking about ballistics, I've got to show he doesn't know what he's doing.
If they bring in somebody, I need to throw the kitchen sink in.
In a sense, at the case and hope that some of it sticks.
That's actually the legal style.
It's even the political style of argument we see very often.
Everything about the other side is bad.
All their arguments are wrong.
And Lincoln's point was, and you'd see this when he would sum it up before a jury, is he would say something like this.
He'd say, listen... In this case, there are seven different things.
And I'm going to concede, Lincoln would concede, on like six of them.
He'd say, well, listen, there are many people who have said my client is a complete jerk, he's a bad man, he's a scumbag, and I would have to agree based on his actions.
And the prosecution has also said that my client had every opportunity to commit this crime, and I would have to concede that's true.
The prosecution further contends that my client had every motive to do it, and that is also true.
And so what Lincoln would do is he'd give in on A, and he'd give in on B, he'd give in on C, and just when it would seem that he's giving in on everything, Lincoln would say, well, but this whole case hinges on one point.
And then what Lincoln would do, like a dog with a bone, is zoom into that one critical point.
And of course, the genius of what Lincoln was doing is essentially what he was buying credibility with the jury.
He was saying to the jury, listen, I'm not going to try to obfuscate.
I'm not just going to put out a kind of cloud of rhetoric to confuse and befuddle you.
I'm going to help us get to the heart of this case, the truth of the matter.
And the way to get the truth of the matter is to ask not only, you know, did my client have every motive to do it?
Did he have the opportunity to do it?
Was he there on the scene of the crime?
Was he in possession of a weapon?
The real question is simply and solely, did he do it after all?
What is the evidence that my client actually did it?
And the jury, of course, would see Lincoln as sort of clearing the field and helping them to get a much clearer perception of the issue.
In some cases, of course, you can't win them all.
Apparently, there was a case in which Lincoln was representing a woman named Melinda Goings.
She was an elderly woman who had killed her husband in self-defense, or at least that was Lincoln's defense, but the case wasn't going very well.
And then, as it turned out, in the middle of the trial, this woman climbed out of a window and fled!
And the prosecution accused Lincoln of having helped her to get away because he didn't want her to be incarcerated.
And this was Lincoln's reply, quote, I didn't run her off.
She wanted to know where she could get a good drink of water.
And I told her there might be good water in Tennessee.
So this was a case where Lincoln had a lot of sympathy for his client.
He realized that she had done something and was not going to get away with it.
And so he told her, go find some good water in Tennessee.
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