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Jan. 24, 2021 - Epoch Times
47:48
China Committing Genocide in Xinjiang; Building Authoritarian Bloc—USCIRF’s Gary Bauer, James Carr | American Thought Leaders
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What the Chinese Communists are doing is trying to eliminate a whole people.
The US government in the last full day of the Trump presidency determined that the People's Republic of China, under control of the Chinese Communist Party, is committing genocide against the Uyghur people.
And for forced abortions to be done on the basis Of trying to eliminate a particular ethnic group or racial group is so beyond the pale.
The Chinese regime is persecuting religious believers in Xinjiang and other parts of China, from Tibetan Buddhists to Falun Gong practitioners to Christians.
So churches are being told to take down artistic renderings of Jesus, for example.
And to replace them with photos of President Xi.
And the Chinese Communist Party is seeking to expand its repressive model abroad.
They're in danger of being able to create an authoritarian bloc around the world.
In this episode, we sit down with Commissioners Gary Bauer and James Carr on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, USURF. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Commissioner Gary Bauer, so great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Always great to be with you.
Commissioner Bauer, it's been almost two years since we spoke last.
We're kind of at a historic moment, at least to my eye right now.
The U.S. government, the State Department has designated the treatment of Uyghurs in China as a genocide.
I, frankly, didn't expect the U.S. government to ever designate any activity by the Chinese Communist Party that way.
It's a very welcome moment from my perspective, but I would love it if you could tell us, what is the real significance of this?
Let me just say first, from the standpoint of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Liberty, That news from Secretary Pompeo was greeted with great glee.
We've been working with the State Department and the White House for some time now to try to get that designation.
And I think it's very significant.
Of course, Secretary Pompeo didn't do this by himself.
He made the announcement, but he wouldn't have done this without consultation with now former President Donald Trump.
And to their credit, the Trump-Pence-Pompeo administration made religious liberty and specifically made pressuring China to open up on religious liberty and to stop violating human rights a big part of the relationship between our two countries the last four years.
So this really was a breakthrough.
We were very excited that it happened.
And it sends a message, I think, around the world to international organizations about how serious what's going on in China is with the Uyghurs, and not only with the Uyghurs, but with every other religious group in Communist China.
I hope it also sends a signal, if I may say so, to those here in the United States that continue to deceive themselves who continue to believe that you can do business with China and it can be to your benefit that doing business with China may end up changing China when I think as we've seen time and time again doing business with China changes us and and I'm talking
here not only about American business which is the obvious thing corporations that want to fatten their bottom lines by You know, setting up factories in China and not looking too closely about whether the employees in those factories are actually real employees or whether they're people that we would call in this country slave labor.
But I would also point to American universities, you know, to continue to form partnerships with communist China.
And I think what they end up doing is ultimately losing any credibility those universities have As being places that respect human rights and human dignity.
So what Secretary Pompeo did in these closing days of this administration that just ended was incredibly important.
And I think they'll go down in history for being that one of the things they did in the last few days they had in office.
So this is, you know, super interesting, a little bit more into the weeds here.
Of course, the Genocide Convention came about as a result of the Holocaust with the idea, you know, never again, this should never happen again.
Unfortunately, we've seen genocides By that definition, multiple times since 1948 in all sorts of contexts.
Why is the genocide, say, versus the crimes against humanity, which I guess is the next level underneath that designation, so significant?
Essentially, the genocide designation means that the facts to our government indicates that What the Chinese communists are doing is trying to eliminate a whole people, in this case, Chinese Uyghur Muslims, to literally wipe them off the face of the earth.
Now, the Chinese are being a little bit more nuanced about it than the first example that we had in the horrible event of the Holocaust, which led to a world war and even millions more people being destroyed.
But I don't think there can be any doubt by any reasonable observer that what the Chinese Communists are doing is so restricting the Uyghur people and intentionally setting out to take their birth rate down to zero,
using all sorts of tactics that I think in a good bit of America, we still have a hard time believing that, you know, in 2021, a country would still be capable of.
But what the Secretary of State and the President have done here is say, yes, that is exactly what they're doing.
It makes it very hard for any decent person, any real organization in the world that wants respect, any country, In the world, it claims to stand for human dignity.
It makes it very hard for them to look the other way and to go into denial about what's happening once a country like the United States has made this sort of designation.
So it's really a very important moment in exposing Communist China, I believe.
You're just reminding me one of these methods of reducing the birth rate, which of course means negative population growth and so forth, was through this forced sterilization.
And then there was this bizarre tweet from no less than the Chinese embassy in the USA. Talking about basically kind of celebrating that in the name of some kind of women's rights.
It was one of the most bizarre things.
I had to check three times basically to believe that they would actually publish this from their official government mission account.
I think it stayed on Twitter for like three days before someone thought, okay, advocating genocide, maybe that crosses the line.
Well, Twitter's too busy censoring American political figures, I guess, than to be on top of censoring the things that go out from people like this ambassador that you're talking about.
That was a bizarre moment because it appeared that he actually thought this would be an argument that he could make.
That would appeal to some sort of sensibility in the West and in the United States and Western Europe and so forth.
And I don't know what exactly he was appealing to Other than, I suppose, this growing view over the years that women have been liberated from being constantly held down by having to raise children.
But to make that kind of an argument when you're sterilizing women against their wills in prison camps, either the Chinese communists think, we are really stupid.
Or they are a lot more stupid than we think they are.
That doesn't pass the straight face test.
Fortunately, it fell flat on its face.
I couldn't help but smile a little, because generally, in the world of diplomacy, you pick people that have a little nuance, that are able to make arguments in a way that draws people to your cause.
This gentleman, and I use the word sarcastically, this ambassador ought to lose his job if he thought that you can make a case for the forcible sterilization of women.
Yes.
It's still baffling to me, but in a sense, knowing what we know about the Chinese Communist Party, perhaps not as baffling as it might be good for it to be.
Gary, tell me what are the elements in this specific case of the Uyghur people that bring together this argument for genocide?
Well, there's been the mass movement of Uyghur Muslims out of their homes.
Before that even happened, there was a level of surveillance, down to the kind of detail that, again, I think most Americans would be astonished by.
The Chinese Communists have organized a surveillance state That really is—and it's a worn-out phrase, but there's no better way to describe it than Orwellian.
In many Chinese communist cities, it's organized down to the block level, so your neighbor may be spying on you.
But even when your neighbor's not spying on you, there are now hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras employing artificial intelligence all over communist China.
And they can pick up things as simple as, are you talking to your neighbors as much as you used to?
Because if you're not talking to them as much as you used to, maybe you're up to no good.
If you used to leave your house by the front door, are you now more frequently leaving your house by the back door?
Which could be evidence that you're trying to hide your movements.
So there's all this surveillance going on.
And then there's monitoring of the Uyghur children in school where you have communist Chinese teachers asking those children probing questions about what their parents or grandparents may be up to in the house.
What are they teaching you?
Are they telling you that your religion is more important than the nation of China or more important than Chinese communism?
Then we began to see the forcible relocation of whole Uyghur families or the taking of Uyghur men, particularly, out of the household.
We even have reports that members of the Chinese Communist Party have been put into Uyghur households to spy on the families.
Again, unimaginable in the 21st century.
And then we have this euphemism, which quite frankly is right out of the Nazi playbook of setting up what essentially are concentration camps, but calling them work centers or educational centers where the Chinese Uyghurs will be taught skills to help them have a better chance of succeeding in Chinese Communist society.
Well, that better hope of succeeding is forget your religion and adopt the Chinese Communist way, or you won't be able to have a life to live at all.
So it's all of those things, things that I would hope any American community would bristle against, but it's happening on a scale that's unimaginable.
It really is the modern-day equivalent of what we saw happen in Germany in the 1930s and then spread with Nazism as it conquered a good bit of Europe.
Well, it's very interesting.
I've always avoided having a Holocaust survivor in my family on my wife's side.
I've always avoided that connection because it was such an extreme case.
But lately, I've just been thinking, this regime in so many ways mirrors things that even I learned about in a film I produced, learning deeper about what happened during the Holocaust about my father-in-law.
It's an amazing connection.
And even Jewish leaders in the UK, I've learned, have taken the step of basically saying it's reasonable, like you said, to make this comparison to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
And hence burning.
So a couple of things I think we covered.
There's this forced sterilization to reduce the population.
There were some other methods they're using to basically prevent Uyghur births.
Right.
I'm not sure I know all the details, but I know they are regularly checking whether Uyghur women are pregnant or not.
And there are reports, and there have been in the past, of Of forced abortions.
Look, you know, in America we have a big debate about pro-life, pro-choice, and so forth.
I don't think anybody in the United States, no matter where they are on that debate, would ever be in favor of forced abortions.
That's something that one can only imagine in what increasingly is a totalitarian society.
And for forced abortions to be done on the basis of trying to eliminate a particular ethnic group or racial group is so beyond the pale, so much into the realm of pure evil that I think,
again, it's very hard for Americans, even in a country right now that has, as we do, our own challenges, to imagine that a rising power Like Communist China, a country whose military is getting stronger every day,
who is projecting that power around the world, who is selling their surveillance cameras now to several hundred countries around the world.
That ought to be disturbing to, again, anybody that believes in the innate human dignity, value and worth It's truly remarkable.
The part that also connects this whole thing to me to Germany in the 30s and 40s is the business that's being done by companies all over the world Multinationals and so forth in China, and you even have the EU ready to sign a trade deal amidst all of these realities.
I actually just saw a compilation by one of our journalists of how much money is simply invested directly into Chinese companies, some of which have serious national security implications even for the U.S. and so forth.
It's staggering upteen billions of dollars.
It is.
And look, over the years, one of the issues I've spent a great deal of time on is anti-Semitism.
And I've tried to be a very good friend to the American Jewish community and be an advocate against anti-Semitism, whether it's here in the United States or it's anyplace else.
So I don't likely, just like you, I don't likely throw around words like genocide But it fits in this case.
You mentioned the phrase, never again.
That phrase meant that never again will a country be allowed to do that to a whole group of people.
But never again, I think, also meant never again will free men and women look the other way when it's being done or cooperate with a nation.
That is engaged in this.
And I have to say, you know, I'm a big sports fan, probably because I was never good enough to play sports myself.
I love watching people succeed in athletics.
And we've seen a lot of American athletes, you know, become voices for social justice here in the United States.
But I'm still reeling.
From a couple of years ago when a coach or an owner of one of the NBA teams sided with Hong Kong against Mainland Communist China.
Communist China, of course, went berserk and threatened the NBA. It was astonishing to me to see these multi-million dollar American basketball players dreaming of becoming even more wealthy by having an MBA equivalence be established in Communist China.
And to this day, I don't see American corporations that are eager to signal their far social justice here in the United States.
And then they turn around and they're building more factories in communist China.
They're doing work in the very province where the Uyghur Muslim camps are set up.
I watch a company like Walt Disney.
That does one of their very popular movies, and at the end of the movie, in which they did some of the filming in Communist China, they not only thanked the Chinese government, they thanked the police force in the province that has the responsibility of persecuting, among other things, the Uyghur Muslims.
So the phrase never again is looking more and more as if it's a phrase of mockery to significant, powerful portions of American society.
Your viewers may know that I'm a conservative and my background is Republican.
I was appointed by President Trump.
I've been a defender of American business over the years.
I believe in free enterprise.
But I condemn American business to the extent that they are willing to do business in a country like Communist China.
And by doing business in a country like Communist China, not only contribute to the persecution of the Chinese people of all faiths, to the violation of human rights in China, At a scale almost unmatched around the world.
But they are also helping to make Communist China more economically powerful, more militarily powerful, in a way that will jeopardize the national security of the people of the United States and the people of the other Western democracies.
Yeah.
My own little commentary here.
We had 30, 40 plus years to learn the fact that we're not going to change communist China into a free democratic state, which I think was the vision through all this corporate engagement.
It's almost like it's gone in the other direction.
No question about it.
Many years ago, I was heading up an organization, was the founder of a group called the Family Research Council.
And that was right after I had left the Reagan administration.
And I made opposition to giving Communist China, most favored nation status, trade status, one of our main issues.
I'm even now sad to report that I lost a number of very wealthy donors to the Family Research Council, who agreed with me on a whole host of issues about family values and the sanctity of life and other things like that, but were themselves involved with companies they had started that were hoping to break into the Communist Chinese market.
And they made it very clear to me they wanted me to drop that issue and I would not drop it.
And so they ceased to be donors to the Family Research Council.
I'm still proud that I took on that position.
I remember a presidential debate I was in.
In 2000, with then George W. Bush, before he was elected president, we were in a Republican presidential debate, and one of the things we got into a heated exchange about was most favored nation status for China.
George W. Bush turned to me and he said, Gary, we must do business with the entrepreneurial class in communist China, although I think he just said in China.
And he said, if we will do that, if we will do business with that entrepreneurial class, you'll be shocked at how quickly freedom will come to China.
And I found that clip the other day and I decided to write a letter to George W. Bush and I said, You know, President Bush, I came across this clip when you and I debated this.
You may remember it.
You said I would be shocked about how fast freedom would come to Communist China.
And I was just wondering if you had an estimated time of arrival, because it's been 21 years.
And quite the contrary, not only is freedom not arriving in China, Oppression under President Xi is greater now in many, many ways than it was when we thought 20-some years ago that trade with China would change them, when in fact it's changed us.
It was very good to see in the Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken that he agrees with the previous State Department leadership's designation of genocide here in this case.
Yes, I was very encouraged by that too.
Now, having been up for confirmation in the United States Senate a couple of times myself, let me just say that when you're having your confirmation hearings and you're worried about a narrowly divided committee, you may say things that then when you actually are confirmed, you don't follow through on.
But I found it hopeful and I hope he was being honest about that.
And the proof will be in the pudding if he is confirmed as Secretary of State.
Well, so let's broaden this.
We've been talking about the impact of Communist China, I suppose, on America and the business relationships.
Almost two years ago, when we spoke last, you described the idea that Communist China has actually declared war on all faith, all religion.
I want to see how has that changed or how has that come along over the last two years since we spoke?
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom was set up by an act of Congress.
In that law, there's an outline for the kind of words we use, what we're supposed to call a country that Is violating basic human rights and specifically violating the most basic human right of all, which is to seek God and worship God as your heart and soul tells you to.
We're supposed to call those countries that violate that basic right, CCP's or CPC's, countries of particular concern.
And every time we call a country A country of particular concern, I will confess to you, I want to scream.
It's such a bureaucratic term.
I mean, when you're concerned about something, it's like, you know, I'm concerned about how heavy the traffic is getting.
We're talking about countries that are murdering people, that are putting people in prison, that are breaking up families, that are raiding churches and mosques and temples.
So I've always said, when I've been talking particularly about Communist China, that they, in fact, are more than a country of particular concern.
They're a country that has indeed declared war on religious faith.
The Chinese Communists cannot tolerate anyone in Communist China having a loyalty to something that they see as higher than the Chinese Communists.
It's a competition to them and it's a threat.
It's something that keeps the Chinese communists awake at night.
We've actually got now things that I didn't think I would ever see in a country that has the sort of great history that China has, history that goes back thousands of years.
They're actually taking President Xi and they're trying to To have him replace the most revered religious figures of various faiths in Communist China.
So churches are being told to take down artistic renderings of Jesus, for example, and to replace them with photos of President Xi.
There's an effort underway in China to I don't know if it's sinicize or sinicize the Bible by rewriting the Bible so that it's more consistent with Chinese communism than it is with the Christian gospel.
Well, that's sacrilege to a Christian.
I'm a Christian.
That's a sacrilege.
No Christian can allow that to happen.
And they're doing the same thing with the Chinese versions of the Koran.
They're doing the same thing with Tibetan Buddhists, where temples have been torn down, damaged, sacred symbols taken out of those places of worship.
And then we know that in many of these places of worship, if you're a religious believer in China and your faith gives you the courage, in spite of all that's likely to happen to you, to continue to go to your religious services,
You know that when you walk into that temple or into that church or into your place of worship, that when you walk into the religious sanctuary there, there's a camera in the church that is filming your face and using artificial intelligence facial recognition.
Your presence in that place of worship has been sent To computers controlled by the Chinese communists and it's gone into the risk assessment of who you are and how much you will be trusted in Chinese society.
We get down to not only you may not get a promotion you deserve or you may not get the job you applied for, your children may not get into the university they wanted to go, but Literally, this has been taken down to the level of you could get on a bus in a particular province and show your ID card to the computer that's on the bus,
and the bus driver could look at the readout and say to you, I'm sorry, get off the bus.
You're not allowed to travel outside this neighborhood, or you're not allowed to travel outside this province.
So...
This is a level of persecution of religious believers that other tyrants around the world can only dream of having.
That's why I'm so worried, and many others are worried, that Communist China is not only violating human rights and suppressing religious liberty, but they're in danger of being able to create an authoritarian bloc around the world.
A group of countries depending on Chinese technology, Chinese financial assistance, perhaps Chinese military help, and that block, that authoritarian block of dictators, despots,
and countries like Communist China, I think very much could become a major rival to the Western democracies, setting themselves up as an example To other dictators of how you can have economic growth, perhaps.
You might be able to improve the lot of your people into bringing them into the modern world, but you can do it while still denying them the basic human rights and human dignity that every human being deserves.
I think it's very much an open question.
of what the next 50 years will show, whether the vision of the Western free democracies based on the human dignity of every person, or whether this authoritarian bloc, the Communist China, seems to be establishing will become the model for the emerging world to follow in the decades ahead.
You know, and this is, frankly, particularly disturbing.
I hadn't made the connection before because now we're talking about genocide, official designation of genocide.
The persecution of the Tibetan people has also been described as a genocide, potentially, certainly a crimes against humanity, certainly cultural genocide.
Similarly, the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners has been described as a slow genocide, the murder for organs industry focusing on these people because of their numbers, presumably, and health.
So what struck me as you're describing this, and of course, all of these surveillance technologies were built to some extent on the persecution of these groups, to this sort of more twisted, perfected That's exactly right.
It's already underway.
I don't think we fully understand the extent of it.
There have been a couple of articles I've seen in surprising places worried about this possibility.
We've also seen how the Chinese Communist government is becoming more and more active in international bodies that are involved with human rights and religious liberty issues.
They're trying to use their power and influence and their money to change the definition of what human rights and religious liberty is in those international bodies.
This is a many-front war that we're in, and in order to win it, it's not going to happen with one administration.
I think the Trump-Pence administration made tremendous progress in moving the country away from thinking about Communist China only as a trading partner, And seeing it for what it is, more than a competitor,
but I would argue an adversary of the United States, I'm hoping that the Biden-Harris administration will continue on the path that President Trump and Vice President Pence laid out.
But even if they do, it's going to take the administration after them and the administration after them.
This is a hole that we've gotten ourselves in over the last 30 or 40 years, and it's going to take several decades to get out of it.
In the meantime, with every passing day, Communist China, with all of its oppression, is more of a threat to its neighbors, more of a threat to our interests around the world, and it's becoming more and more open about its intentions To write what they see wrongs as wrongs that were done to the Chinese people in the past.
It's difficult to seem terribly hopeful here, especially looking at how quickly this reality in Xinjiang for the Uyghur people has expanded into its current genocidal state, to see how quickly the freedoms in Hong Kong were crushed, where the rule of law went from existing to not existing in less than a year, as far as I can tell.
So, Commissioner Bauer, we're going to finish up in a little bit, but we also have a quick moment to speak with a relatively newer commissioner compared to you, Commissioner Jim Carr.
And I'm wondering, and I understand your friends, perhaps you could just kind of introduce them for us.
Yes, well, Commissioner Carr is a He's really a wonderful colleague and a great guy.
When you get a new commissioner, no matter who appoints them, you're always looking to see whether that commissioner is going to be an ally on some of the things that you as a commissioner care about.
I knew very soon that Commissioner Carr cares deeply about what's going on in Communist China and the challenge that that presents to the United States.
And what's happening to Christians in Communist China, as well as members of other religious faiths.
USURF tends to be—in fact, we are a bipartisan group.
I think five of our commissioners have been appointed by Republicans, four by Democrats.
Over the next four years, that balance will change.
But we have seldom been divided about anything on the basis of ideology or Republican commissioners versus Democrat commissioners.
And both Commissioner Carr and then another relatively new commissioner, Nourri Tarkal, Who himself is a Uyghur Muslim and appointed by Democrats in the Congress.
We have formed a very strong block on USURF, trying to make sure that we keep focus on what all of us believe is the greatest threat to religious liberty the world is facing, and that's Communist China.
Commissioner James Carr, really good to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you, Jan.
Good to be with you.
So, Commissioner Carr, you are one of the three newest commissioners on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Tell me a bit about why you are doing this role.
What does it mean to you?
Well, listen, I'm a person of deep faith, and I have thought, not just because of my Christian faith, but people of all faiths should have The freedom to worship around the world.
And I became familiar with this organization about a year and a half or two years ago.
And I was honored when I was nominated for this position by Kevin McCarthy of California.
And upon nomination, I accepted immediately.
I just thought it would be a wonderful assignment.
And I must tell you, I have a full-time job running a small company, but this is my second job.
It's a big work.
Well, and so tell me a little bit about what you've been able to do, and that'll give us a bit of a picture of what USURF does.
Yeah.
Well, the commission is made up of nine individuals, as you know, three appointed by the president, three by the Senate, and three by the House.
And the president's party has five of the members, and the other party has four.
We serve as a team.
And it's incredible.
You could go to one of these meetings, John, and you would not be able to tell who appointed who.
These people work so well together, and it's just a delight to work with them.
We monitor the countries of the world, and there are about, I think, exactly 29 countries where there's a problem with religious freedom.
And our organization monitors those 29 countries right now.
So you yourself adopted a prisoner of conscience this last year, which actually met with a positive result.
Tell me about that system and tell me about what happened.
Each of the commissioners adopts three or four people, prisoners around the world, who are in prison because of their faith.
And one of the gentlemen that I adopted was a gentleman named Pastor A. Dao from Vietnam.
Very sad story.
Pastor Adal had been to a conference on his faith out of the country, and as soon as he arrived back in Vietnam, he was arrested and imprisoned for several years.
His prison term was several years, and I adopted him.
I got to know his family and got to know many of his fellow citizens in Vietnam.
As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, I spoke to several thousand people put together by Boat People SOS in Vietnam.
And shortly after that, we were thrilled that he was released and is now free to be involved in his ministry.
He's from the northern region of Vietnam, kind of the mountain area.
And in that country, Jan, there are many people in the rural part of the country who are picked up and imprisoned.
And we're thrilled that he's the first person that I've had, at least, released of my prisoners of conscience.
How is USURF perceived internationally?
Why does the work of this organization impact, for example, the government of Vietnam to make a decision like this?
How does that work?
Well, in my short tenure on the commission, I would say this to you.
As I mentioned a moment ago, there are 29 countries which we monitor, 15, the worst of the worst, and then 14 others that are bad but not the worst.
These countries do not want to be on USURF's list.
Even during my time with the organization, we have met with several ambassadors to the US, and it's very clear they do not want to be on the list.
Many of them want to find out how they can get off.
And of course, I think our work is successful when a country moves off the list and becomes a country that treats religious people with freedom.
That's super interesting.
This is probably the best way I can put it.
In the United States itself, religious freedom, of course, is a central tenet in the First Amendment and so forth.
Why is it so important to have a structure that is promoting religious freedom internationally?
This is from your perspective, obviously.
Well, it goes back to 1948 when the United Nations voted to give basically a bill of rights, if you will, to every citizen of the world.
And one of those rights was the right to worship freely.
And then in 1998, the International Religious Freedom Act, our IRFA, was put into practice in our country and USURF was founded.
And I just think it's critical that people around the world, and I don't know if you saw the release just in the last day or two from Open Doors International out of, I believe it's the Netherlands, 340 million Christians were persecuted last year.
An amazing number.
And I think the report said 15 Christians are killed every day because of their faith.
Fourteen churches are damaged, and people are kidnapped and raped.
It's a horrible situation.
Not just with Christians.
There have been more Muslims killed by other Muslims than any other group.
Muslims are killing Muslims, and you have the divisions in Islam that's causing terrific problems in countries around the world.
And as a Christian yourself, why is the, I guess, the guarantee of religious freedoms for other faiths so important to you?
Well, how can I ask for that freedom for my people if we don't give it to everybody?
And so I am a deeply committed Christian, and I want people of all faiths to have that freedom.
And then I can require people then give my Fellow Christian believers that freedom.
And so it's very important to me that, you know, treat others as you would have them treat you.
Kind of the golden rule.
So, Commissioner Carr gave us some ideas just now about what USURF is actually all about and what he hopes to accomplish in his tenure.
Yours is coming to a close, I believe, in May.
What are you hoping to see happen or working to see happen before then?
And what are your hopes for the future for this group?
Well, I'm sad that I'll be leaving at the end of May, but a new administration has the opportunity to make their appointments.
We'll be having another annual report, which is the main thing that USURF does every year, and that'll be coming out in the spring or late spring.
And I want to be sure in that report that we emphasize as strongly as we can what's going on in Communist China.
I've urged my fellow commissioners, and they've agreed to do this, that we not only do the regular country report on Communist China, but that we do an addendum, an additional report on this subject that we talked about before you talked to Commissioner Carr.
This question or this potential or possibility of Communist China becoming a leader of an authoritarian bloc That's dedicated with destroying religious liberty everywhere its reach grows.
And the commission has agreed to do that.
It really wasn't much of an argument.
I don't want to go into a lot of detail because we haven't come out with that annual report yet.
But all the commissioners see this point and they want to address it.
I think it's another sign of the seriousness with which we take this issue.
In addition to that, even though my tenure on the commission ends at the end of May, I was working on these issues long before I was a commissioner.
I've been a critic of communist China probably for four decades.
And in some ways, I'll be even more liberated after my time on the commission, because being a commissioner, you've got to be a little careful about what phrases you use and so forth.
I've actually been thinking about sometime in the early summer, maybe doing a major speech here in Washington at the National Press Club or someplace else, in which I make the case that the greatest threat that the Western democracies face in the years ahead Well,
Commissioner Gary Bauer, such a pleasure to have you on and wishing you Godspeed.
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