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March 30, 2021 - Epoch Times
34:54
How Communist China Is Exploiting Perceived U.S. Weakness and Becoming More Aggressive—KT McFarland
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Time Text
The Chinese Communist Party has skillfully exploited critical race theory narratives to try to discredit the American system.
They're very clever in choosing the weapons that they're using.
The retailer H&M vanished from Chinese e-commerce stores, ratings apps, and even Apple Maps in China because it questioned forced labor practices in Xinjiang.
China plans to remake the world in its own image.
At recent U.S.-China talks in Alaska, the U.S. addressed many aspects of Chinese communist aggression and abuse.
But one topic was noticeably missing.
The consequences are probably in a lot of ways more devastating than a world war.
Today I sit down with former Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland, author of Revolution, Trump, Washington, and, quote, We the People.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Katie McFarland, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
It's always an honor.
And I've got to tell you, Jan, what you're doing is what almost nobody in the media is doing.
You're having in-depth, intelligent conversations with a range of people on a lot of different topics.
And you're doing a great service, not only to the American electorate, but really to...
People all around the world.
So thank you for doing it.
I'm honored to be with you.
I appreciate that very much.
But we're going to actually be talking about some pretty sobering issues.
You know, we're in a situation where the State Department has, you know, designated what's happening in Xinjiang in China as a genocide.
At the same time, we're having these meetings in Alaska where, I guess it's called wolf warrior diplomacy.
Chinese wolf warrior diplomacy is playing out What is your take on what happened in Alaska?
And then we'll kind of build out from there.
A couple of things happened.
One, the United States took a knife to a gunfight.
The Chinese came ready with a prepared statement that they wanted to criticize the United States and humiliate us on our own soil.
And in doing so, they wanted to use the words of the American media and the sort of woke media and the cancel culture and the people who say that America is a racist nation, it was conceived in evil, et cetera, yada, yada, yada.
And so they quoted those people back to the American leadership.
It was meant to be humiliating.
And so when then the response time came, when the American Secretary of State had an opportunity to respond, Instead of saying, this is outrageous, and walk out, which is what I would have done.
He said, well, you know, we're trying.
We're not perfect.
We're going to get there someday.
And it was not only the fact that the Chinese did it in such a brazen, in-your-face way on American soil, quoting Americans back to our leaders, but then our leaders, instead of You know, acting strong and tough in response, it just sort of rolled over and I thought it was humiliating on all sides.
But the second part of it that struck me was that the Chinese, they really laid down the gauntlet.
This is the Cold War.
This is the new Cold War, Cold War 2.0.
And it's going to be different this time.
It's not going to be like the first Cold War with the Soviet Union, which was nuclear arms race, proxy wars around the world.
This one's going to be fought in a different sphere.
It's going to be economic competition.
It's going to be technology leadership and competition.
It's going to be cyber.
It's going to be all, you know, no holes barred.
There's no international law that's going to prevent theft and acquisition and a lot of the things that the Chinese have already been doing, but they're now doing it in a very blatant and open way.
So to me, this represented a real shift In the Chinese approach.
I think they've always done it this way, with this, as you call, wolf warrior diplomacy, but now it's out in the open.
The Chinese, to my mind, have now concluded that their rise is inevitable, and America's decline is inevitable.
And they think that they are, or at least soon will be, in a more dominant position in the world than the United States, economically, technologically, diplomatically, militarily, and all the way.
So they plan to replace the United States as the global world leader and then rewrite the liberal world order, the rules of order.
And they make it very open and plain.
They're not hiding this.
They're talking about rewriting the rules of order and to have quote, Chinese characteristics.
And in fact, the Chinese leaders in Alaska were talking about this and this liberal world order, there's really nothing to it.
So I thought that it was a significant meeting, even though nothing was accomplished.
It was significant because it showed the Chinese intentions.
And I think it showed the United States, at least the Biden administration, in a position of great weakness, which will reverberate around the world to our disadvantage.
Well, Katie, to be fair, Secretary Blinken did articulate the U.S. position on a number of issues that certainly weren't things that the Chinese representatives wanted to hear.
He did.
And to a large extent, the Biden administration has kept in place a number of the sort of tough-on-China moves that the Trump administration has made, the sanctions, various investment, co-investment issues.
I won't get too much in the weeds with that, but they've kept a lot of it in place.
The problem I have, though, is the Biden administration, their deeds don't always match their words.
I mean, they talk about, okay, we're going to bring up these issues that the Chinese, that are neuralgic for the Chinese.
The Chinese say, these are our red lines, you don't dare discuss them, you can't cross them.
And then those are Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the concentration camps in Xinjiang province, the Uyghur camps.
And Chinese say you can't even bring them up.
Biden brought them up, and he should have brought them up, and that was a good thing to do.
But what did he bring up?
I mean, why did they not bring up COVID? Why did they not bring up The Chinese involvement in the coronavirus.
I think that we should have brought that up.
The whole world is suffering from a pandemic that the Chinese knew they were unleashing on the world.
And the consequences are probably in a lot of ways more devastating than a world war would have been.
And so why not call on?
And then I guess the next thing is that even President Biden in his press conference a few days ago He mentioned the new China policy, and it all sounded great.
I mean, I was, you know, applauding.
These were all the things that I think are really important in a way of standing up to China.
One is that you work with our allies, and in this case in Asia, Japan, Australia, particularly India and the United States, and you form a relationship with these countries to stand up to China.
Number two, you use American technological superiority and you really double down on American investment, STEM education, things that we've let lag in the last 20 years.
And then three, Joe Biden talked about, well, reinforcing American values.
All this stuff is terrific.
The problem is where are the deeds matching the words?
I don't see that the deeds yet, maybe they will, but yet I don't see that the deeds have matched the words.
For example, they talk about they're going to invest more in research and development, but they haven't done it.
They talk about working with these countries, the Quad, our allies.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's great, and they've had a couple of meetings, but they're not to the point yet where we're having these four countries in Asia stand up and maybe do military operations together, maybe do intelligence sharing, maybe do co-investment.
I mean, the United States has an opportunity right now with India.
Where we could invest in India the same way we invested in China 20 years ago.
India is soon going to have a larger population than China.
And India is a democracy.
So why, you know, I guess I would like to see a lot more muscle behind those words, although the words were right.
Let's talk about COVID a little bit because that's been recently up in the news again with Robert Redfield, former CDC director, basically having expressed again the position of the previous administration basically that the most likely scenario was that it had escaped from the lab.
What new information does this bring or does it bring any?
I don't think it brings new as much as it brings together old into one place.
Now, the former director of the CDC, he's a very well-respected doctor and scientist and virologist.
So his expertise is actually in viruses.
He spent his whole career.
So when he says, look, I don't have the proof, it's my opinion, but my belief is that it's the most likely thing that happened in a Chinese lab.
I'm paying attention to this guy.
I don't care if he's a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent or whatever.
He's got a lot of credibility in the field.
And then secondly, let's look at the pieces of this puzzle.
Let's sort of bring them all together.
And what picture does it show us?
Well, number one, we now know that the Chinese knew the lethality And the contagion of COVID was pretty significant.
And they knew it well enough and soon enough so that they closed down Wuhan, the city where it came from, from people traveling around other parts of China into Wuhan and people from Wuhan into other parts of China.
So they were concerned enough about it to shut down travel internally.
However, at the same time, they opened up travel, kept open travel from Wuhan to the rest of the world.
And when countries, like the United States and others, tried to close that travel down, the Chinese accused them of racism.
So in other words, the Chinese, it was so bad they didn't want it to happen in their own country, but they were perfectly happy to have it travel around the world.
Another piece of evidence that I think is significant is that when it was first discovered, it was WHO, World Health Organization scientists and doctors in Wuhan, who raised the alarm.
They talked about it, but early on, those same scientists and doctors, they were disappeared.
They were told to be quiet and they were never heard from again.
And at that point, early on, before this became a pandemic internationally, the Chinese government took it out of the hands of the scientists and the World Health Organization in China, and they turned it into the hands of the Chinese military.
Now, since then, they've passed a national security law saying that anybody who's going to talk about this virus, any Chinese who's going to talk about this virus, has to get permission from the central government, from the military, before they talk about it.
You know, I mean, I could go on and on and on of these points of, to me, what are they trying to hide?
I mean, they wouldn't even let, and they still haven't let American scientists in.
It's been a year, and now they're finally letting scientists come in and have a look.
But, you know, here is a long time to cover up the evidence.
And If the Chinese have nothing to hide, why did they not let people in?
Why did they not help the world prevent this pandemic?
And, you know, bottom line is I look at this and say, okay, Chinese, they caused this.
One way or another, they caused it.
And then America cured it.
And even if you say, let's even go back another step and say, well, maybe it didn't happen in a lab.
Maybe it was just bats, right?
Bats and human transition.
It almost doesn't matter.
Because it's what the Chinese did once they realized the lethality and contagion of it.
They employed that virus as a biological weapon and let it spread around the world.
And here we are today.
I'm just remembering, you know, months, months ago, I've had people on, one gentleman who's running a class action lawsuit, one of many, to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
I don't know where that's at, actually.
I'm very curious.
I haven't heard much.
There was legislation.
I remember Congressman Mark Green had Introduce legislation in a similar vein to create some kind of accountability around this because I think the information that you're describing, I think it's a matter of factual record, not something of huge debate, yet it just isn't something that's talked about very much.
Yeah, it's almost like the attitude is, well, we don't want to embarrass them, so let's just move along here.
No, I need to be held accountable because what they're doing now in the after effects of this is they are using what they call wolf warrior diplomacy.
They're using all the elements of Chinese national power to punish countries which are disagreeing with them or calling them out.
Australia, for example.
Australia, early on, joined 100 other countries to ask the World Health Organization, let's get to the bottom of this, let's find out the origins of the coronavirus.
And the Chinese government said to Australia, don't, you know, back down.
Australia wouldn't, so the Chinese have now set out to destroy Some of the agricultural exports from Australia into China, they just stopped buying them.
And that has already wreaked havoc on the Australian economy, a large part of which is their agricultural economy.
So the Chinese, you know, if you cross them, they remember and they're using strong-arm tactics, including really eviscerating the economic relationship with a lot of countries that dare cross their red line.
And a big element of this, this is something I was just reading about recently, is their extensive disinformation and misinformation operations.
I was just reading recently about how U.S. Special Operations Command is creating a task force, basically, to specifically deal with Chinese information operations in the Pacific region.
I'm hoping that this is something that's been active for a while, and they're only now letting us be aware of it.
But it seems to be a key area of this warfare that you described.
It's not the nuclear, mutual assured destruction doctrine anymore.
It's all these other ways which aren't typically thought of as warfare.
It's easy to be an authoritarian country because you just say something and then everybody has to follow suit.
In a democracy, we debate it, we thrash it around, we have winners, we have losers.
And the Chinese understand that while it may be a great strength of America, we think it's a great strength.
The Chinese understand that it can be a vulnerability and it can be a weakness.
And that's why their disinformation campaigns are so pernicious and frankly so effective, is because they can get us sort of going after each other.
And the other part of their disinformation campaign, let's be nice and call it diplomacy on the Chinese diplomatic offensive, is that they are looking at the rest of the world and saying, Okay, America, you're where you are, but we want to lead the next world order.
We want to be the leaders of the non-white world, of the Asians and Central America and Latin America and the subcontinent and Africa.
And that's one of the reasons that they, I think, continue to sort of parrot the woke media mob in the United States of talking about America as racist.
I don't think they care about whether America is racist or not, but they want to portray America as morally flawed as they try to ascend to diplomatic dominance around the world.
Let's talk about that.
Of course, there's been all this discussion recently of anti-Asian hate, actually some real issues that America needs to deal with.
At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party has been fanning the flames of this very actively.
Yeah, of course they are, because it suits their advantage.
You know, I spent my graduate years at Oxford University and I studied communism and revolutions and I read Marx and Engels and Lenin.
And Lenin had a phrase, he called them useful idiots.
And those are the people in free societies or in other countries who kind of buy into, they were buying into the Soviet disinformation and propaganda campaign.
And then from within those countries, then tried to tear down the leadership.
So I look at America and say there are a lot of useful idiots here.
I mean, the useful idiots are the people in the cancel culture and the Twitter mobs who go after political leaders or anybody in the conservative movement to try to destroy them.
Well, you know, if the Chinese are going to be running the world I hope they won't.
I don't think they will.
But if they do, the first people they get rid of are the useful idiots, the people who talked about all these freedoms who, in fact, are not going to have the right of free expression or any of the rights that we enjoy in the United States, any more than the people of China enjoy any of those rights.
Well, you know, let's just actually jump to Taiwan for a sec.
We're talking about all this saber-rattling that the Chinese Communist Party is involved in right now.
Taiwan is actually reporting some of the most aggressive incursions into its airspace.
I think the most From what I saw, again, at the same time, we have the U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander, Admiral John Aquilino.
He was testifying that he believes that a Chinese attack on Taiwan is the most threatening flashpoint at the moment in that whole theater.
What do you make of all this?
What do you think China or the Chinese Communist Party has in terms of its ambitions with respect to Taiwan?
The Chinese leaders, I can't remember if it was Henry Kissinger, who was one of my old bosses, but the Chinese leaders basically said, you know, the Korean War in the 1950s, that cost us Taiwan.
The real country we cared about was Taiwan and bringing Taiwan back into what they thought the greater China.
And by the Korean War, it got the whole world turned against China.
So China couldn't make its move on to Taiwan.
China has made it very clear.
They said it to us in the beginning of the Trump administration.
I sat down with the same leaders that the Biden people sat down with a week or so ago.
We sat down with them at the beginning of the Trump administration.
And they point out they have these meetings and then they go through their list of what they call their core interests or red lines or non-negotiable demands.
And they basically say hands off.
And that's what they told Biden, and that's what they told us.
And so hands off Hong Kong, hands off Taiwan.
At that point, there were no Uyghur concentration camps.
But those were their two things.
They consider Taiwan and Hong Kong to be part of China.
And as part of China, it's a domestic Chinese issue what happens in those countries.
Whether those people have rights or don't have rights, it's nobody's business but China.
And so they look at Taiwan not as an independent country with an independent economy, an independent government, an independent tradition, They look at it as merely yet another part of China, which they own.
Now, I think that at the end of the day, nobody wants to go to war over Taiwan.
Probably not even Taiwan wants to go to war over Taiwan, and certainly the Chinese don't, and we don't.
But what the Chinese want to do is use this moment of perceived weakness on the part of the United States, for all the reasons I've just said, and make their moves.
I mean, they are moving out now.
They are claiming what they think is their rightful What is rightfully theirs, world leadership, economic superiority, and certainly to Taiwan.
So I don't think that these are all precursors to some kind of an invasion or a war, but they are China putting down the marker of, think twice, everybody in the world, if you want to criticize us over Taiwan, because this is what's possible.
And I think they assume that most countries will back down, and probably even Taiwan will back down.
So, KT, another thing that you mentioned earlier was the issue of sanctions.
You know, the U.S. has issued a series of sanctions against Chinese officials and companies, for example, in Xinjiang and so forth.
And the Chinese Communist Party has responded with reciprocal sanctions.
This has happened, actually, with the EU recently.
Four-to-one sanctions the Chinese issued against individuals in the EU recently.
In response to the EU basically putting out sanctions against individuals in China.
So are we going into this sort of war of sanctions?
How is this actually working?
How is this going to play out?
Well, I credit the Biden administration that they did assemble the European Union and a number of other countries to altogether we put sanctions on Chinese companies that were using slave labor.
At these concentration camps that you're referring to.
And the Chinese response was to come back and, you know, double down and slam even harder and issue economic sanctions of their own against international corporations.
And in addition to that, they're doing kind of a PR campaign internally so that all leading Chinese celebrities, TV stars, personalities are all coming out and proudly wearing cotton We're good to go.
And therefore, any concessions to be made are not going to be made on their part.
They're going to be made other countries making to them.
And to show how powerful they are, they use this economic weapon.
And it's a very powerful weapon, especially in a democracy.
What country is going to have an economic disadvantage to their own people in order to make a point?
The Chinese can do this, right?
Because they have an autocracy, an authoritarian government.
They can just say, okay, we're not going to buy Nike products now.
Because Nike is bad for China.
You can't do the same thing in the West just because we're a democracy.
So they're very clever in choosing the weapons that they're using.
And investment and trade is one of the most potent.
That's why I think it's just critical.
And the Biden administration has talked about it.
I sure hope they follow through.
I'll be their biggest cheerleader if they do.
But to get the democracies of the world to band together.
Because the Chinese plan, long-range plan, is to pick us off one at a time.
Pick off Japan, pick off South Korea and use the Chinese leverage and the trade weapon and investment weapon and the economic weapon to get these countries to do China's bidding.
However, if all of these countries are banded together and say, you know, united we stand, divided we fall, then I think we do have an opportunity and a very strong position to go back to China and say, well, you know, you may want this, but we're not going to let you get away with it.
In other words, not so fast.
That's all placed by some very different rules.
So in terms of these internal PR campaigns that you just described with the actresses and so forth wearing the Xinjiang cotton, for example, there's also these types of campaigns kind of in the other direction.
For example, against Nike, against H&M, who have made these statements basically saying we're concerned about what's happening over there.
And I was just reading this morning that H&M locations are now missing from Apple Maps, for example.
And various ride-hailing and e-commerce applications and so forth, because there's a Chinese mapping company that's basically involved in delivering this data, or at least that's what people surmise.
So on one hand, you have...
Essentially, what it looks like these people in China being stirred up around these issues, right?
Saying, hey, look, look at how unfairly we're being treated here.
And, you know, people are going up and, you know, going to these stores or boycotting these stores.
That's the information we're getting.
At the same time, there's this sort of, you know, blackout of even the locations of some of these stores.
And it's not, from what I'm hearing, again, it's not just H&M, but that was one of the cases that was highlighted.
Yeah.
Look, the Chinese, they have an all-of-government approach and an authoritarian government can do this.
They even have a national security law they passed a couple of years ago saying that any company, private or otherwise, in China If the government or the Chinese military or the Chinese intelligence services asks you for information or asks you to cooperate with them on something, you have to do it.
It's against the law if you don't.
You can put them in jail for life.
I mean, you're accused of treason if you don't do the bidding of your government.
And so, yes, of course, they're able to mobilize that.
The other thing, though, and I guess I've worried about this for a long time in a different direction, is that China is a population That has been nurtured on this notion that they were treated unjustly for 200 years.
That China was always the dominant, most successful, most powerful, most just country in the world through the history of the world.
But they had a lousy 200 years after the Industrial Revolution.
And they blame the West.
They blame the United States.
They blame Europe.
They have a chip on their shoulder about this.
So to a certain extent, what they're trying to do is payback time.
They feel that they're just resuming their rightful place in the world.
And all of these countries and companies who want to criticize them for forced labor camps or Hong Kong democracy, well, you know, you're just little pipsqueaks.
I mean, you're over.
You're the ash bin of history, if you will.
And so the Chinese, they've stirred up their own nationalist sentiment internally to say that this is the great Chinese history.
It's patriotic to do these things to other countries.
And at the same time, they've got this all of government approach where they're using every aspect of government, not just the Chinese businessman or not just the Chinese military.
But they're now using, as you just point out, I mean, disappearing H&M stores on Apple or Google Maps because China has an application that somehow in the middle of your when you try to find a location of Google Maps.
I mean, they are really playing hardball and they're going to an enormous effort to have even the most what we would think kind of an insignificant thing.
I mean, they're not letting anything pass.
That's why they're such a formidable adversary.
We've never had a country that could pose such a strategic threat to the peace and prosperity to the United States and to the world.
I mean, this is much more serious than the Soviet Union or even Nazism.
China plans to remake the world in its own image, and it is at our expense.
Make no mistake, it will be at our expense.
With respect to the sanctions, actually, I wanted to follow up on that a little bit.
There's this quite thoughtful quote that Professor Donald Clark offered.
He said, it's important to remember that the Chinese sanctions are not exactly mirror images of the EU-UK, and then by extension I'm adding this, US sanctions.
The EU-UK sanctions are for crimes against humanity.
The Chinese sanctions are literally for saying stuff.
Well, that's a very insightful point, right?
That the Western democracies and Western and Eastern democracies are united against the sort of international norms of appropriate behavior and, as you point out, crimes against humanity.
But for China, it's all about, you can't say bad stuff about China.
You can't even criticize China.
You can't criticize China internally.
We know that.
They are the first world's total surveillance state.
But they're not even allowing people outside of China to criticize China.
And again, I think this means that it's going to be a very difficult decade because China, they used to think they could replace the United States as the dominant world power by mid-century.
But with the pandemic, and I think with the dysfunction in Washington, they feel that they're going to get there within the decade.
This is going to be a very difficult decade that tries men's souls in the United States and in democracies all around the world.
As we finish up here, let's pull in everything we've been talking about.
You mentioned the realities of coronavirus or CCP virus here, as we call it at the Epoch Times.
We're talking about the wolf warrior diplomacy in various forms, including with the sanctions and The internal information and external information campaigns.
What is the response that's required at this point to not just be subjugated to this onslaught of the Chinese Communist Party?
Let me take an even bigger picture.
I mean, you're great at big pictures, Jan.
You're famous for always having the big picture.
I want to take an even bigger picture.
You know, in the United States, we go through these periods where we become dysfunctional.
I mean, and part of it is because Washington likes to preserve power.
It's the nature of every government, whether it's in China and Beijing or in Washington, to preserve power to itself.
But in the United States, we have the right, unlike other countries, unlike China, for example, We have the right to a political revolution.
And we go through this.
We go through with great regularity every 40 years.
And the reason we do is because American society is dynamic.
It's always changing technologically, sociologically, religiously, ethnically, all of the above.
And government never keeps track.
So we go through these periodic political revolutions where we kick the old party and ideas out, old leaders of both parties, and we have a new set of leaders.
And then That's when America recreates itself.
We reinvent ourselves.
And we do it time and time again.
And that, I think, is the definition of American exceptionalism.
So how do you combat what I see as a growing threat?
To the peace and prosperity, not just to the United States and the world, but to Western democracy coming from China.
I think America reinvents ourselves.
I think we're in the process of doing that now.
And the technologies that we can't even dream of are probably just around the corner.
And we're going to create them.
We're going to invent them.
They're not going to come from Beijing.
And again, look at the example of the coronavirus or CCP virus or whatever you want to call it.
It started in China.
Has China cured it?
No.
They've used their The way they control their population, to control the population that way, to quarantine people, to lock them up.
What did we do in the West?
We created not one vaccine, but two, three, four vaccines.
We've created cures.
So if I look at it, there's nothing that explains to me the difference between our two societies and our approaches towards life and governance than the Chinese approach in dealing with the virus, using it as a pandemic, And then spreading it around the world, but locking themselves down.
And the Western idea of it is we're going to just cure this thing.
And what we've done.
So I look at that and the best way you confront and deal with an authoritarian China is the way we've dealt with the virus.
We're going to maintain our technological superiority.
I hope Biden does it.
If he doesn't do it, the Republican president who follows him in 2024 will.
And that's when America continues to reinvent ourselves.
So in some senses, I think we're going to go through a really rocky couple of years.
But in the other sense, America has always reinvented itself.
And I think that that's what we're going through now.
It's a process of sort of rebirthing and reinvention.
It's a very thoughtful commentary that you're making here, but I've heard some very, very compelling arguments to me, and actually I've been mulling this over, about the idea that through its information operations, the Chinese Communist Party managed to convince some of the West, or big swaths of the West, that the lockdown authoritarian model is actually the one that we should be employing.
So in the U.S., for example, it's very interesting because we've got a mix.
For example, where you are in Florida, there was an initial lockdown, but then that changed very quickly.
In other places, lockdowns or something basically in that direction have been more part of the course, more the rule, right?
I feel like some folks in America kind of admire the Chinese Communist Party's approach and have been replicating it to some extent.
Sure, but look where it's gotten them.
I mean, the lockdowns, and I think time will show even more so, that the lockdowns have not been effective, that the lockdowns aren't having any better numbers in the United States, in California, for example, or in New York, which are very locked down.
I mean, their economies are struggling, but their rates of infection and reinfection, certainly their rates of vaccination, have fallen far behind the free states.
And if you look at states like Florida and others, which have remained open, or as you point out, briefly shut down and locked down, but then immediately came back, schools have been operating, businesses are operating, wear a face mask when you go to a grocery store.
But other than that, these are open societies, and the economies are humming.
So if you're saying, the people who think, oh, the lockdown, that was the right way to go, look at how China did it.
Look at how it's worked in America, because the second wave of this virus is not going to be a physical viral disease.
It's going to be the economy and the destruction this is making on the economy.
And the United States becoming not only a debtor nation, but a debtor nation that's just borrowing all around the world, including from China, to recover from this.
I look at sort of, not where we are today, where are we going to be in six months, where are we going to be in nine months?
And the United States is going to look at the Chinese model and say, no, it doesn't work here.
What works here is let's find a cure and to keep our societies open.
From the Chinese perspective, they're thrilled at the thought that the West is locked down.
Why?
Because every day that we're locked down, our educational system falls further and further behind.
We are raising a generation of kids who aren't going to be socialized and they're not going to be educated.
And we're indebted, we're borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, trillions and trillions and trillions And our economies are not growing.
So for disinformation, this is a pretty effective way of disinformation from the Chinese and from others, is to say, America, you've just got to be locked down forever.
You're going to be wearing those darn masks forever.
You're going to be locked down.
Your kids aren't going to go to school.
You're not going to manufacture stuff anymore.
You're just going to be in sort of suspended animation.
I think the American people aren't nuts.
And at a certain point, People just are going to look around and say, hey, I'm in California.
It's not working.
I'm going to Idaho.
Or you're in New York and you're saying, I'm in Manhattan.
This isn't working for me.
I'm going to Florida.
And it's already started happening.
Is that the free states have succeeded in battling the coronavirus.
They've succeeded in vaccinating their populations.
And they've succeeded in having their economies remain open.
I'd take that any day of the week over the lockdowns and certainly over the system that China has.
So, KT, any final thoughts?
You know, people have worried about America for, what, two or three centuries?
We're always just about to lose it.
Some other country is going to replace us and take over, and some other system is better than ours.
You know, at the end of the day, I really believe in democracy, and I really believe in free market capitalism.
And even though we're going to have a rocky couple of years ahead, I think ultimately, the American people and the American system and the American way of life and democracy and free market capitalism will survive and will indeed thrive.
Well, Katie McFarland, such a pleasure to have you on again.
Yeah, and you're the best.
Thank you for having me so much.
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