Coming up, I'll give my reaction to the GOP candidate's debate in Milwaukee and also Trump's counter-programming.
I'll show why the walls may finally be closing in on Joe Biden.
I'll report on the ongoing Durban conference that is talking about alternative currencies.
And Scott Walter of Capital Research Center joins me.
We're going to talk about new forms of tyranny in the 21st century.
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Very interesting and even entertaining evening last evening.
Did you watch the debate?
Well, I sort of did.
I was watching pieces of the debate.
And then I started doing what some of the people were doing at the debate itself.
And that is, if you span the room with the camera, you could see a lot of them had their phones on and they were listening to Trump doing his counter-programming.
This is the release of the Trump interview with Tucker Carlson.
Look, it's not that the debate itself wasn't interesting.
It was. And there were some fireworks and some key moments, which I'll highlight in a second.
But the Trump interview was consistently engaging.
Now, it was, of course, Trump in his usual métier, in his usual style.
You know, Trump is not a guy who offers...
He's corroborating evidence.
He relies on the kind of common sense of things.
He speaks in a colloquial language.
He uses a lot of repetition.
Like, this was ridiculous. And I'll say it three or four times.
But we got some interesting windows into Trump's approach, what he's learned.
These are questions that Trump has never formally answered.
Like, what did I learn for my first term?
What am I going to do in the second term that's going to be different today?
And also Trump engaging in his trademark comedy.
I mean, the scene that he did, the little piece he did on Kamala Harris, where he goes, you know, yeah, she's a bit of a weirdo.
I mean, she speaks in this kind of incomprehensible, mysterious rhyme.
The bus went here, the bus went there.
That's what buses do.
They go places. I mean, this could be a piece in stand-up comedy.
And Trump is the only guy capable of doing that kind of stuff.
You also see in Trump a kind of a generosity and spirit that is very interesting because it's for a guy who's under the gun, you would expect him to be consistently bitter, gnarled, perhaps a little bit with a siege mentality.
And you don't get that.
Even when Tucker asked him about Mike Pence, I thought his remarks were pretty generous.
Well, you know, he's a good guy.
I've always worked with him pretty well.
I don't We're good to go.
I think that this interview with Tucker, by the way, a huge number of views, something like 150 million or plus already.
And think about that. Fox News, by and large in prime time, gets 3 to 5 million views.
Now, they probably got some more for the GOP debate, but how much more?
And compare that to, so the The point here is that we are seeing a real shift away from traditional television media toward new media.
And I think at the forefront is Elon Musk's X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
I think Tucker is very smart to have jumped on it and used Twitter now as a way to reach more people than, say, all the networks could do combined.
I turned on to MSNBC. They were analyzing the GOP debate.
And it was basically, former Biden officials are questioning current Biden officials, and they all agree that Biden was the real winner in the debate.
So this is for the MSNBC audience that wants nothing more than a kind of reinforcement of their own prejudices.
No real analysis, nothing of that kind at all.
Now, of the debate itself, You know, you see, in a way, the old versus the new GOP. And the old GOP is represented really by Nikki Haley, by Mike Pence.
I don't think you can consider Chris Christie a candidate at all.
He's a spoiler. And the sustained booing that he got when he got into that little tiff with Ramaswamy really shows that the heart of the GOP is not with this guy.
This guy is running to be the president of a left-wing university.
Maybe he's hoping for some accolades on the left.
He's going the road of, say, a Bill Kristol or Liz Cheney, but no future on the right side of the aisle.
But the GOP has to decide.
Is it going to be the party of Ukraine, the party of a kind of warmed-over Reaganism?
Now, no one's more enthusiastic about Reagan than I am, but Reagan had an agenda for his time.
Even Reagan never said, you know what, 25 years from now, you just take my agenda and apply it to what's happening then.
So, for example, even though the Soviet Union is gone, nevertheless, use the same rhetoric against Russia that you used against the Soviet.
This is basically what's going on with Pence and these guys.
And they cannot even comprehend how anyone would think differently.
They think if someone thinks differently like Vivek, it must be as Nikki Haley said today in her tweet this morning, he lacks foreign policy experience.
Well, he does lack foreign policy experience, but in some ways, the people who have all this experience seem so marinated in it that they can't get beyond it.
I think Vivek was clearly the most dynamic, the most unpredictable, and in a way the most exciting guy to listen to.
Ron DeSantis was competent.
I see Ron DeSantis as solid on a lot of issues.
But on the other hand, he seems to be in this kind of no man's land where he's wavering between, I think he believes, I kind of want to rope in the establishment.
I don't want to depart too far from the establishment.
On the other hand, I want to have a solidly conservative agenda.
I feel a little bit bad for the guy because I think that it may be that this just wasn't his time, and yet he got talked into it, he jumped into the ring, and so somebody who has this amazing record in Florida, high popularity rating, an excellent candidate for president in the future, but maybe he got a little bit ahead of himself.
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I was listening to the interview that Larry Kudlow conducted with Kevin McCarthy, and Kevin McCarthy, I think, is getting impatient.
Now, this is a guy who has been moving tortoise-like, not quite as bad as Durham, but nevertheless moving with circumspection, reluctant to open an impeachment inquiry without having everything in front of him.
And yet now he's facing a potential obstacle.
And the obstacle is that Merrick Garland, really to block the house inquiry, decided to take this fellow, David Weiss, and to name him special counsel.
Now, the point of this is not to up the ante, not to move the investigation forward, but kind of to close it down.
David Weiss is really in Merrick Garland's back pocket, at least for the most part.
This is a guy with a long history in Delaware.
True, Trump appointed him, but as Trump himself said, I appointed him because basically the two senators in Delaware wanted him.
So this is a kind of convention in politics that doesn't make David Weiss a Trumpster to any degree.
And so the point of appointing David Weiss is now when the House demands documents, they could just go, we can't give them to you because it's an ongoing investigation.
This is kind of the favorite chant of the Biden DOJ, ongoing investigation, can't give you any information.
Until the investigation is complete, the investigation drags out and basically statutes of limitations expire, the whole thing becomes moot, and then they dust their hands, they kind of dust off and take off smiling and grinning and saying, you know what, it worked.
So Kevin McCarthy knows this.
The people around him have told him he is not a dumb guy himself.
And so he said, look, I'm asking for these documents.
I need these documents and I need them now.
And if I don't get them, we're going to open an impeachment inquiry because that means that we cannot be stopped in getting them.
So I think this is a good development on the part of McCarthy.
Now, Looking to Joe Biden's defense in this whole situation, and by the way, the left is doing all kinds of contortions to come up with a defense that sort of works.
Their old defenses have collapsed.
Essentially, Joe Biden knew nothing about his son's dealings.
Joe Biden was never present at meetings involving Hunter Biden's business partners.
All of this is exposed as nonsense, and now you just have the money trail.
I mean, when you have money that is going into shell accounts, We're good to go.
Maybe the problem here is that Joe Biden did know, but he didn't really clearly convey to Hunter Biden that he needs to stop all this.
So this is not illegal, but it is morally questionable.
So now the left has moved to it's morally questionable.
Trust me, as this thing blows wide open, the left is going to be reduced to the position of, hey, listen, Joe Biden did sell out the country, but selling out the country isn't all that bad.
Everybody sort of does it in their own way.
I mean, this will be the reductio Add absurdum of where they could go with this.
Now, when it comes to what Joe Biden did for all this money, we know what he did.
At least we know what he did in the case of Ukraine.
And that is he got the prosecutor, Shokin, who was looking into the corrupt dealings of Burisma, fired.
Now, the real question is, Joe Biden has said, and I think, again, preparing for the defense that he might ultimately have to make, he said, well, you know, it was US policy to get this guy fired.
And it was the policy of our allies.
None of them liked this guy Shokin.
They all thought we needed to clean up corruption in the Ukraine and getting the prosecutor.
So, let's pause. Firing a prosecutor looking into corruption at Burisma is fighting corruption?
In the inverted world of Joe Biden, yes.
He was doing nothing more than the bidding of U.S. policy.
This, of course, raises the interesting question.
Was it the bidding of U.S. policy?
And there's information coming out on that.
And as it turns out, the U.S. policy is not, was not, what Joe Biden says it was.
So, Interagency Policy Committee memos are now coming out, and they show that the government had come to the conclusion that Ukraine had made progress in its reform agenda.
It was fighting against corruption.
There was no instruction or directive to Joe Biden to get this prosecutor fired.
That's something he did on his own volition and of his own will.
Biden was actually told to go ahead and deliver U.S. federal aid to Ukraine, but he didn't do it.
He's like, listen, I'm sitting on a billion dollars.
If this prosecutor isn't fired, I'm going to get on a plane, and then you're not going to get the money.
And they were like, oh, okay, we'll fire the guy.
And they did. So that was a payoff.
That was basically Biden delivering on the Biden family's end of the bargain.
Think of all this money that Burisma is paying to Hunter Biden and his partners, $83,000 a month to each.
And so, they're going to want something for that money.
And they wanted this corruption inquiry shut down, and guess what?
It was shut down, and the prosecutor was fired.
So, I think that there's a gathering storm here.
And even though I have been more impatient than McCarthy, and if it were up to me, this would long be underway, McCarthy proceeding with his kind of Usual deliberation, going slowly and first getting documents and then waiting for the Biden administration to cooperate.
And then when they fail to cooperate, saying, hey, listen, I have no recourse.
It's a last resort, but I have to go to an impeachment inquiry.
All right, Kevin, let's go.
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There is an important meeting going on right now in Durban, South Africa.
It's a meeting of the so-called BRICS Group, Brazil, Russia, India, China.
And the heads of state in those countries are there, with one exception.
So Xi Jinping is there, the Brazilian President Lula da Silva is there, Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister is there, Cyril Ramaphosa from South Africa, of course.
Now, Vladimir Putin is not there.
He's apparently been kind of zooming or dialing in.
But this is a meeting that's behind closed doors.
Not everything that is happening in the meeting is being publicly disclosed, although probably at the end of it they will have some kind of an announcement.
But I wanted to talk about what seems to be going on behind closed doors.
First... They're talking about announcing some sort of a new currency.
It could be a gold-backed currency.
It could be backed by commodities.
It will almost certainly be backed by something because there's no way that this new currency can go up against the dollar.
There's no way that people are going to trust it or say, let's hold reserves in this currency if it's not backed by anything.
So that's the first thing we're looking to find out about.
The second thing is that these discussions that the BRICS group is having go far beyond the issue of just a currency.
The currency by itself is significant enough because they are talking about an historic displacement of the dollar as the centerpiece, as the cornerstone of the global financial system.
Now, people have been talking about this before.
In fact, going back to the 1960s and 70s, There was some talk about the French, you know, being French.
They're like, no, the French franc needs to be independent of the dollar.
We don't want to hold currency in dollars per se.
And so there was some talk under Charles de Gaulle and then subsequently, but that didn't really go anywhere and it was limited to France.
By contrast, now we have a lot of countries basically saying, listen, in fact, Lula de Silva once said, he says, you know, I wake up in the morning, I ask myself, if I'm trading, Brazil is trading, let's say, with Russia in oil, why do we have to get dollars involved?
We have our currency, we have their currency, maybe we can have a common currency, but why are we paying commissions or why are we holding this opportunity?
Other currency, as if that's the only trustworthy currency in the world.
So there is an appetite here to create something new.
Also, BRICS has the kind of power that France never had in the 60s or 70s, or really any time.
The BRICS countries are home to over 3 billion people, about 40% of the population.
They have about 30% of the world's GDP. They're also countries with a big financial surplus.
They have a trade surplus and they also hold a lot of reserves.
And so it's relevant as to what reserves these countries are going to hold.
By contrast, we have huge debt.
We have huge deficits. Europe has huge debt.
Europe has huge deficits.
So, you know, we get a little bit misled because we talk about we're the developed world.
These countries are developing nations.
In some cases, we call them third world nations.
So that's one way to look at it.
We are further ahead than they are.
But on the other hand, here's another way to look at it.
If you describe the world in terms of ascending versus descending nations.
Nations that are coming up versus nations that are going down.
Well, you'd have to say that India and China are two of the most ascending nations in the world.
And the United States and Europe, in many respects, are descending nations.
In fact, why would you need a politics of making America great again if America was great right now?
So make America great again is a way of acknowledging that the country has gone downhill to a considerable degree, I would say to a fairly advanced degree.
And so all of this is giving the BRICS group a certain degree of confidence and of momentum.
A whole bunch of countries are on the list.
They want to join BRICS, and the first announcements coming out of Durban have to do with that issue, which is to say, who are they going to let in?
Who's going to be admitted?
And the very fact that they're choosy, they're sort of like a selective university.
What kind of students are we going to take?
This means that there are more people who want to get in than there are spots that BRICS is willing to open up right now.
The other thing I think that's really important It's that the BRICS group is talking about a bunch of stuff that goes way beyond currency.
They're talking about trade.
They're talking about military forms of cooperation.
So think about it. You have Russia.
You have India, which has traditionally been friendly to the Western orbit, at least since the fall of communism.
You've got China.
So these countries are talking about working together, military cooperation, infrastructure cooperation, cooperation on rail lines and bridges and shipping.
Cooperation on microchips and oil and artificial intelligence.
And of all these things, the last one, the AI, may end up being the most important.
China has already made a public pledge.
We want to be the world leader in AI by the year 2030.
And they're directing the centralized operations of the state to achieve that goal.
Now, you may think that the United States is aggressively competing with China, but you turn to the United States, you see no sense that we are even competing with anyone.
We're sort of acting like there's no issue.
There's no race going on, even though the Chinese don't see it that way.
And even the Durban conference itself is very muted coverage.
I almost had to like search it out to find out what people are saying about it.
But it's very important and it has huge consequences.
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Get 35% off Your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm really thrilled to welcome to the podcast my friend Scott Walter.
In fact, you might have seen him in 2000 Mules.
Scott is the president of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. He was a domestic policy special assistant to the president in the George W. Bush administration.
And the website for Capital Research Center is capital, C-A-P-I-T-A-L, capitalresearch.org.
Scott, welcome.
Great to have you. Always fun to talk.
And whenever I see you, my mind kind of flashes back to our old days at the American Enterprise Institute.
And also, we collaborated, as you know, on the magazine called Crisis.
And this was really the era of the Cold War and then the aftermath of the Cold War.
And there was a clear distinction, wasn't there, between the free world and the unfree world.
In fact, we almost automatically thought of ourselves, we're part of the free world.
But on the other hand, you have the Soviet Union, you have Cuba.
At that time, we'd talk about Nicaragua.
So there was this bright line Would you agree that this bright line has now, at least to a degree, dissolved and some of the forms of unfreedom that we would point to in other countries can now be found right here in the United States?
Yes, it's a very sad thing that largely because we're not teaching our own people about the nature of freedom and constitutional government, they are easily susceptible to the winds of other things.
Plus, conservatives always knew that power corrupts, right?
The great Catholic Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
So you think, Scott, that these days when somebody says to an American or to a young person, hey, listen, we need to have this regime of censorship because guess what?
There's just a lot of misinformation on the Internet.
Misinformation, of course, defined here as information that we in the Biden regime don't like.
They even have come up with the phrase mal-information.
And mal-information is information that's true.
But nevertheless leads to a conclusion that they don't want.
So for example, if you say something like, you know, vaccines don't prevent you from getting COVID and they don't prevent you from transmitting COVID to others.
Those are true statements, but they could be classified as mal-information because they may produce, quote, vaccine hesitancy.
And since the government wants you to be willing to take the next booster, the next shot, they classify this as worthy of censorship.
I I mean, I think if we flashback 20 years, even if somebody was left of center, they would look at this like, you've got to be joking.
This is nuts. Because there was a general consensus, wasn't there, that our basic liberties of free speech, equal rights under the law, these were inviolable and not even democratic majorities had the right to override them.
Yes, and of course the left would wrap itself in free speech, the mantle of free speech.
You know, the free speech movement, quote-unquote, begins in Berkeley with left-wing students.
No, that's absolutely right.
And I use the term totalitarianism in the sense that Gene Kirkpatrick did.
Totalitarian as compared to, say, an authoritarian regime.
An authoritarian regime would be like Franco.
He's one guy, he's running the country, he doesn't like opposition, but he doesn't care how you live your life.
But the Chinese do care.
They care how you live your life and they want to manage your life through the centrally directed instruments of the state.
So do you think that China is the greatest expression today of tyranny in the 21st century?
It's easily the most powerful tyranny and almost certainly the most dangerous as well.
I mean, North Korea is obviously a worse place to live in, but nobody's worried that North Korea is going to take over, you know, the electronics sector.
Yeah, no, I mean, the thing about China is that you're talking about, first of all, you've just got over a billion people under its sway.
So right there, you've got like 12 or 13% of the planet under tyrannical control.
Then you have China's massive influence over the region and extending influence.
Talk a little bit about the ways in which the Chinese are trying to extend their influence in the United States.
Yeah. Sure.
It's, you know, I would say there's sort of two paths that they're looking at.
One is the simpler to understand, which is just they want to steal our intellectual property, right?
So they're infiltrating labs, whether it's at big corporations or at universities, just to steal stuff.
Because, you know, that's useful and you can make money off that and the rest.
And it's shocking how much of that there is.
You know, every year there's more people discovered doing this, usually just for money, monetary reasons, not philosophy, political philosophy reasons.
But the other one is the infiltration of things like, first of all, controlling all Chinese people around the world, just as they're slowly smothering Hong Kong, which had been under British protection.
Similarly, we now discover that in places like Manhattan, there are secret Chinese police departments There's one in Manhattan to keep an eye on and deal with any Chinese folks who may not be doing what the regime wants.
When we come back, Scott, let's pursue this because I want you to also address, aren't the Chinese also putting a lot of money into education centers and setting up Chinese almost infiltrations in key American universities, research centers, and so on?
When we come back more with Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, the website, capitalresearch.org.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with my friend Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center.
We're talking about China and tyranny in the 21st century.
Scott, it seems like the Chinese are pulling out all the stops, and it also seems like there is a kind of vulnerability that they recognize on the part of the Biden administration.
In other words, that the Biden administration is not going to take the same kind of tough stance that Trump attempted to take against China, and so they can get away with it.
Yes. We spoke about things like the Chinese having a secret police department in Manhattan to watch over Chinese people to make sure they're not doing anything that the regime considers harmful.
But another way, which is much broader, I believe, and more insidious and dangerous, You know, they started dozens and dozens of Confucius Institutes, they were called, on college campuses.
Now, some of those have been thrown out.
Some of those have just been renamed because that's a classic way.
If you're caught, you just sort of rebrand.
But, you know, some of the motivation to be on college campuses is, again, stealing intellectual property from college labs.
But there's also the deeper thing of that the Chinese, you know, is spreading the notion that the Chinese way of life is really better.
And by the way, let's not forget our friends at the New York Times, you know, Thomas Friedman and others, Andy Stern, one of the biggest labor leaders in America, people like that for years now have been saying, you know, China's really sort of better than us in some ways, because, you know, when the regime decides it wants something, it can make that happen.
And it's, you know, we have this messy process and it doesn't always work so easily for us to work our will on the American people the way the Chinese government can work its will on its people.
I mean, Scott, there's an interview.
I think this goes back to 2013.
Obama was interviewed by the New York Times, and at the very end of the article, a very telling passage where Obama says that.
He goes, listen, I kind of envy the Chinese because they just say the word and it gets done.
I think what Obama was saying is, gee, here it's much more difficult.
I need to get Congress. There are all kinds of systems of block and tackle that make it difficult for us to get things done in the United States, obviously by the constitutional design implanted by the founders.
Now, a lot of people looking at China are a little puzzled because it appears to be a kind of weird hybrid.
On the one hand, it clearly is communism of a sort.
You still have the centralized authority.
That hasn't gone away.
It's very different in this respect than Russia, where the old Soviet system, whatever you call what's going on in Russia, it's not the old Soviet system anymore.
But in China, you've got that communist hierarchy.
At the same time, you seem to have at least a quasi-free market system that's delivering unprecedented, undeniable economic growth.
What do you think is a way we can wrap our heads around understanding what the Chinese are all about?
Well, I think our old friend from AEI, Michael Ledeen, is the most penetrating view of this whole issue.
He makes the argument that it would seem that the China of today ought to be understood as a mature fascist state more than a communist state.
And I'll give you a couple of the, you know, there are two or three reasons for this.
And the classic communism of Mao or Lenin and Stalin, for one thing, it was international, right?
Now, the fascists and the Nazis, on the other hand, had a national focus, right?
So for Lenin, the Communist Party is going to take over the world and nations will dissolve.
For Hitler, the German nation will take over the world.
Right, so that now they're both totalitarian and horrific, but that is a significant difference.
And what do you see in China today?
Now the Chinese leaders don't talk like Lenin with the Communist Party taking the world over.
Instead, they hearken back to Confucius, as we just even mentioned.
So they want the ancient Confucius ethic of hard work and honesty.
And they also talk about the greatness of China's history.
And they work on resentments, right?
I mean, obviously, Hitler worked on resentments that the German nation wasn't getting respect.
And now the Chinese tyrants work on the great Chinese nation isn't getting respect.
Because you want resentment in your populace to help support the government.
There's another thing, too, that's obvious, and you sort of already begun to raise it.
And that is... Under classic communism of Mao or Stalin, well, the party is going to run businesses.
We don't really need anything like markets or a normal economy the way the West would think of it.
But under fascism, Nazism, well, you have companies like Krupp's, some of the biggest companies around, collude with the regime.
Now, it's not true, free markets.
It's not what Milton Friedman would want.
But it's not that...
Exactly the same as the centrally planned Communist Party running everything.
So you very much have that in communism today.
The other thing that Ledeen made a point of that's really scary, he was scared by it and I'm scared by it, That is that, you know, we tend to think that all these totalitarian regimes are completely unstable and are going to collapse because they did collapse, thank God, in the 20th century, mostly.
Now, the problem is that they seem to actually have been pretty popular at the time.
You know, Mussolini, Hitler, they had to be defeated by force of arms.
They did not collapse because their own people said, hey, we don't want this tyranny anymore.
And especially the young found them appealing.
Now, you know, Ledeen fears that, in fact, the existing regime in China may be relatively popular with its people.
Obviously, there are dissidents, but it's not clear how big a proportion they are.
And certainly it's not clear that there's enough of them with enough strength to bring down the tyranny, which is a very scary thought.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center.
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I'm back with Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, the website capitalresearch.org.
dot org.
Scott, you discussing the work of our colleague, Mike Ledeen, and it's important to note that Mike Ledeen wasn't just sort of sitting around at AEI.
This is a guy who spent much of his adult life studying fascism, if I'm not mistaken.
He was one of the leading experts on Italian fascism and the Italian fascist theoreticians, Giovanni Gentile and others.
Now, Ledeen seems to be making a very subtle and in a way, very interesting point.
And that is that fascism in a weird way has never fully been tried.
That's why he's using the phrase mature fascism, because, let's think about it, Hitler came to power in 1933, but he started a war in 1939, so six years later, basically, he puts the fate of fascism on the battlefield.
This can be contrasted, let's say, with the Bolsheviks who came to power right around 1919 or 1920.
They had a chance for almost 60 years to try out their system and show that it doesn't really work.
So, Ledeen seems to be saying that mature fascism is a fascism that really has...
A chance to prove itself and the Chinese may be producing.
If it seems like different than what Mussolini did or Hitler did, that's because it is fascism in a much more advanced or mature state.
Isn't that what Ladin is saying?
Yes. And of course, we want to reiterate that, you know, he considers it horrific tyranny and a terrible threat.
But things that are terrible are sometimes successful, at least for extended periods of time.
And you're exactly right.
One of the differences that he makes is, you know, through...
Mao was the leader of China for many years, and he was in the classic communist mode of this is an international movement and the party is just going to run everything and we don't need businesses at all.
But then that, of course, did not work because socialism always fails.
And so by the time you have Mao's successor, Premier Deng, you have him sort of tacitly admitting, well, you know, things haven't gone as wonderfully as we'd hoped.
And so we're going to have to make some adjustments and we're going to have some room for business and the rest.
And part of that, of course, was also we want Western businesses that are rich and flourishing to come in and invest and help us grow economically so that our people won't overthrow us because starving people will overthrow eventually.
Now, when we talk about ways in which the Chinese today are controlling their population, you notice that some of those ways, not all, are beginning to make their presence felt in the United States.
For example, you talked about how fascism is a combination between the state and the private sector, the state and business.
Well, let's look at censorship in America.
Is it not a collaboration between the state, the Biden administration, and, I wouldn't just say digital platforms, but as you know, nonprofits, academia is involved.
And so, there is a certain...
You could almost call it fascist strain that's here also, maybe not as developed as there is in China.
You told me a very interesting anecdote about how some years ago, the late Alan Bloom and his colleague Walter Burns at Cornell tried out an experiment with the students Talk about that experiment because I think it's revealing of how even in this country we've developed a mindset that can see nascent fascism and not really recognize it.
Sure. Bloom and his colleague, our old AEI colleague, Walter Burns, are at Cornell as the 60s radicals are there and protesting and the rest.
And Bloom, in his closing of the American Mind book, It talks about how a professor, and I'm betting it was Walter Burns, wanted to try to teach these radicals something about what they really were.
So he said, let me read you this speech about what must be done, right?
And he read paragraph after paragraph.
To the students and they loved it and they reacted with passion.
And it was exactly the same kind of rhetoric that they and their leaders around the country were spouting.
And then the professor said, congratulations, you've just applauded Mussolini.
Those are his speeches.
Now, that shows you the intertwining of this.
And there's another great, powerful thing like that.
The British eccentric Patrick Furmore was tramping across Europe in the 30s.
He's in Germany, a young man.
He's poor, he doesn't have any place to sleep.
Young man says, oh, you can crash at my place.
And he gets to the guy's place, and in the attic, he sees the guy's brown shirt uniform.
He was in the street thugs of the Nazis.
He has Hitler posters, Nazi artifacts everywhere.
And Furmor is a little shocked by this.
And what does the young man say?
He said, ah, you should have been here a year ago.
It was all Lenin, right?
The same kid had been a communist gung-ho guy, I'm sure, in street gangs in Germany, fighting on the communist side.
And we have to understand that these are just different flavors of a religion of total politics.
That's what totalitarianism is.
Very insightful stuff, Scott.
And wow, what an interesting anecdote.
Thanks for joining me. We'll have you back.
Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, the website capitalresearch.org.
So we're getting closer to the 2024 presidential election, and no surprise, COVID is making a comeback.
Convenient, isn't it?
Well, I don't know if COVID is making a comeback or if the idea of COVID is making a comeback.
And there's a distinction between the two.
COVID, of course, never left.
But COVID is obviously a lot less virulent.
In fact, Joe Biden, as you know, announced the pandemic is over.
But now we hear about a new strain happening.
And the new strain is known as Eris, E-R-I-S. It's a subvariant.
I thought to myself, well, let's try to find out, is this variant more lethal than the Delta variant?
Is it going to produce a spike in cases or a spike in deaths?
And the answer is, it doesn't seem like any of the above, or we don't know.
The variant has been seen in a bunch of countries.
In fact, Denmark, Israel, apparently some 50 countries have shown some indication of it.
But of course, the later variants of COVID have been quite mild.
In that sense, similar, not identical, but similar to the flu.
And yet, I'm beginning to see in various places around the United States, and this is not yet adopted in a kind of coordinated way yet, the return of masks.
Masks, you might say?
Yeah, indeed masks.
So some colleges, some workplaces are now instituting mask requirements, and apparently the Biden administration jumping on this, and you can see why they would want to jump on this, they would love to have a replay of 2020, because that's when they get to say...
Gee, people can't be expected to show up in person to vote.
Gee, you know, we don't really want to have long lines where people are like breathing on each other.
So we want mask mandates.
They're talking about a new type of COVID shot, which I guess is vaccine booster number, what, seven or six.
And some health officials are now saying, well, you know, this is going to be sort of like an annual thing now.
Now, to some degree, I go, yeah, okay, fine.
We have an annual flu shot.
And some people take it and some people don't.
And Debbie and I, we take a flu shot.
But for many years, I never took a flu shot.
I haven't noticed it making any noticeable difference one way or the other.
I'm assuming it's keeping me from getting at least a certain variant of the flu.
And we don't know that we can say that about the COVID vaccine.
In other words, if the flu shot keeps you from getting at least that variant of the flu, now it can't protect you from all variants.
Nevertheless, no one is claiming any more.
There was some early propaganda the way they said it was, but no one is claiming any more that the COVID vaccine as we have it now will prevent you for sure from getting COVID. Nevertheless...
Two hospitals in Syracuse, New York.
Apparently, the Hollywood studio Lionsgate has restored mask requirements.
There's a college in Atlanta, Georgia Morris Brown College.
Apparently, the LA County Public Health Agency is talking about restoring masks.
And all of this in the wake of now a bunch of evidence that masks don't really work.
And they don't really work for obvious reasons.
Their masks are porous.
In other words, there's air going in and there's air going out.
So there's no way in which a mask...
Now, no one is denying that if there's a disease in the air, the mask can help a little bit.
But is the mask effective?
That's really the question. Is it effective in preventing you from real exposure?
So there have apparently been now...
Dozens and dozens of studies and studies that have looked at, does masks reduce COVID cases in schools?
Answer, not really.
Do masks, can they be shown to correlate with reduced mortality?
Fewer people contracting dangerous forms of COVID, or at least fewer people with pre-existing conditions who then end up in intensive care or end up dying?
No clear relation.
Apparently, a review of 78 studies from the Cochrane Library in January of 2023 found no clear evidence that masks work.
Look, I mean, Debbie and I in this whole situation, Debbie being a bit of a germaphobe, we took a pretty cautious approach to COVID right from the beginning.
In fact, Debbie, I would say, took a super cautious approach.
And at one point, she even liked Fauci.
She's like, yeah, this guy seems on the up and up.
He's been around since Reagan.
Over time, Debbie began to realize, no...
You know, this guy is a little bit of a publicity seeker.
He's appearing on the cover of fashion magazines.
He seems like a megalomaniac.
And then later, he seems like a guy who manipulates things.
So for example, in one case, Fauci talks about a study.
There's a study here that says that COVID has a natural origin.
Little does he reveal, he doesn't say, you know what, he was part of the group that commissioned the study, he saw the study in advance before it was published, so he was, in a sense, involved with the study, but he treated it like a completely independent study, and it was like, oh gee, there's a study just out, man, I just, you know, had a chance, I just looked at it, and it supports...
The idea, so here you've got a guy who's pretty cunning, pretty duplicitous, has got his own agenda.
And the agenda is complex because, of course, the U.S. government has funded gain-of-function research in this country in places that have collaborations with China.
So all of this has made me, and I think by and large has made you, and probably most people on our side, Very skeptical of the kind of COVID-established narrative.
And I think this skepticism is fully warranted.
And we should view with great, with a very dubious raised eyebrow, this issue COVID's back.
Now get your mask on.
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