Dave DeCamp critiques U.S. foreign policy, arguing that escalating military aid to Taiwan and alliances with the Philippines and Australia recklessly provokes China rather than deterring it. He disputes narratives of Chinese aggression, citing the spy balloon as a weather event and challenging genocide claims against Uyghurs while attributing perpetual emergency powers under the Patriot Act to Washington's internal failures. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that true threats stem from domestic debt and war propaganda, advocating for a realist approach that recognizes the catastrophic risks of nuclear escalation and the futility of current imperial strategies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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New Listeners and War Propaganda00:03:02
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What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
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First, before we get into it, just want to say, if you haven't already checked it out, my stand-up special, brand new special is up on YouTube for free.
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And welcome to all the new listeners that we have here.
This show has been blowing up in the wake of my latest Joe Rogan appearance.
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You can watch the video version on YouTube and it's all over wherever you get podcasts.
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But Spotify, if you're listening, that'd be cool.
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All right.
Anyway, today's guest we have on the show is Dave DeCamp.
He is an editor over at antiwar.com, one of the best sites on the planet, if not the best site.
If you really want to know what's going on with foreign policy, that's the place to go.
People ask me a lot how I know of the stuff that's going on with the wars, and it's really largely because I go to antiwar.com.
I try to go there every day.
So Dave, thank you so much for joining.
How are you?
I'm good, Dave.
Thanks for having me.
I'm really happy to be here.
I just want to say I'm a big fan and congrats on the special and everything.
Oh, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, dude, I'm a big fan of your work.
And this episode has been long overdue.
We want to talk about China, China.
And I think this is, it's good timing, especially with all the new listeners who have come over, because I think we can give kind of a different perspective than some people seem to have on this issue.
It's become kind of like a lot of the kind of populist right-winger types, the like nationalist types have gotten much better on a lot of other issues than say like the neoconservative George W. Bush type Republicans.
They're sounding much better on Ukraine and war with Russia.
They're sounding much better on the CIA and the FBI.
China Relations and Supply Chains00:16:01
But then there's this area of China where it's constantly coming up.
We're constantly like kind of beating the drums of so much talk about this hypothetical war in Taiwan, which has not happened and yet we still have to kind of be prepared for this.
It's interesting.
I'll start with this and then you can kind of, we can start wherever you want to, but it is interesting how war propaganda works.
It's really fascinating.
I mean, there's nobody, nobody talks about radical Islamic jihad anymore.
That's just gone.
Like it's just not a thing anymore.
It's nobody in the corporate press, no politician is even mentioning it anymore.
Now it's all Russia, Russia, Russia.
That's what we have to be afraid of.
And you see them already starting to move toward China as being the next one.
And it's really, it's just something unbelievable about this country where we seem to constantly have to create this boogeyman that can then justify all of these military engagements that are just always disastrous one after the other.
So we can start wherever you want to.
Maybe let's kind of maybe give your overall thought on what's happening here and then we can go through more specifics.
Yeah.
So a lot of, you know, what I do at antiwar.com.
I'm the news editor.
So I write kind of short news stories every day just to keep up, you know, on all the wars and, you know, the empire and all the military buildups that are going on.
And one area where the U.S. is really building things up is over near China in the Asia Pacific, in the Philippines, in Australia, Taiwan.
There's a lot going on.
And this really started under the Obama administration with his pivot to Asia.
He got himself bogged down in some more wars, you know, in the Middle East and in North Africa there.
Then Trump came in and ramped it up.
And then Biden came in and really has ramped things up, you know, when it comes to building alliances.
That's kind of the name of the game for the U.S. in the region.
They're trying to build this new kind of, you know, Asian NATO is really the idea.
And what is happening over Taiwan is really, you know, unprecedented in this era that we live in, which is the post, you know, U.S.-China normalization.
You know, when Nixon went to China in 1972 and then the U.S. and China normalized relations, you know, that whole agreement was based on the status of Taiwan.
Before that, the U.S. recognized Taiwan as the Republic of China and they said, this is China.
You know, forget that huge, you know, landmass over there.
This is the rightful government of China led by, at the time, Shang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces.
And then when we opened up with China, we severed relations with them.
And that was the agreement.
And, you know, we started what they call this status quo across the Taiwan Strait.
The U.S. doesn't have formal relations with Taiwan.
Another part of the deal is that the U.S. pulled its military out of Taiwan and severed its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan.
And the U.S. did agree in one of the joint communiques with China when they were normalizing relations to scale down arms sales to Taiwan with, you know, and eventually end them.
At the same time, you know, that was during the Reagan administration and Reagan was telling his administration, basically, this is going to be up to our own interpretation.
You know, don't worry about it.
So, you know, it's not an official agreement or anything.
It was kind of just like an informal communique.
But what's happened, and so I say the military buildup in the Asia Pacific started under Obama.
Under Trump, they really started to change things when it comes to Taiwan.
You know, they loosened restrictions to allow more diplomatic contact, which, you know, arguably angers China more so than the arms sales.
But what we've seen under Biden just yesterday, the U.S. is starting to give Taiwan military aid, and they haven't done that.
They've sold them weapons since 1979.
But yesterday they just announced this foreign military financing aid for Taiwan.
And that's a program where they give foreign governments money to buy U.S. weapons that, you know, and they also gave them some weapons directly from U.S. military stockpiles a few months ago.
And this is all new and China is really not happy about it.
And kind of my big argument here is that you have, like you said, you know, there's some people that are really good on the wars in the Middle East, even people that are opposed to the war in Ukraine, you know, are bad on this situation with China and Taiwan.
We could get, you know, more into that later, but I think the point I want to make with this opening thing is like this new military aid, you know, we had Nancy Pelosi go over there last year and China responded with these huge military drills.
And we're just seeing more of this diplomatic contact.
And it might not seem like much, you know, to the ordinary American, but again, this is the foundation of U.S.-China relations.
And it's a huge red line for China.
You know, this is their big thing is Taiwan.
So that's really the big flashpoint.
And then there's other areas in the South China Sea is really hairy right now.
The U.S. is adding military bases to the Philippines.
And the Philippines and China have these overlapping claims to rocks and reefs.
And they.
have kind of tense encounters between their coast guards.
And whenever that happens, the U.S. calls up the Philippines and they say, hey, we have this mutual defense treaty.
If your boats come under attack, we're going to intervene.
We'll go to war with China over this maritime dispute in the South China Sea.
So that's another flash point.
And again, China's reacting to these buildups.
China's not just going to be like, oh, okay, the Americans are here.
You know, we'll back down.
No, this is all very sensitive for China.
You know, they call the century, you know, from the opium wars to the time Mao won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the century of humiliation when they were humiliated by Western powers and Japan.
And, you know, that is just, that's their dogma.
That's their nationalistic fervor.
And, you know, to think that this isn't going to lead to war, what we're doing is just, you know, and that's the talking point is that we need deterrence.
We need to deter this war by sending all these weapons to Taiwan, by building up all these military bases.
But it's really just going to make war, you know, more likely.
Yeah, that's, that seems to be a recurring theme that it was always, you know, like that was the justification for sending the weapons into Ukraine, that this is going to deter Vladimir Putin from invading.
And so that at least a few years later, you can go, well, if it was meant to deter, it certainly didn't work.
And if it, and, and then possibly maybe it was even a provocation and part of the reason why the war ends up happening.
There's also this weird disconnect that I think a lot of right-wingers are falling into.
And they used to fall into this on the Middle East wars, where like, I remember the kind of establishment, the conservatism inc critique of Barack Obama was that he was too soft on terrorism.
That was like always their thing.
They're like, oh, he didn't go far enough or he won't, you know, take the gloves off or whatever it is.
And you look at it and you're like, but what are you talking about?
I mean, he added like four more wars to the list of wars, surged in Afghanistan, continued the war in Iraq.
You know, like it just doesn't line up with the facts on the ground.
And I feel like they've gotten better about that.
The talking point is not that Donald Trump really, you know, took the gloves off and took the fight to the terrorists.
What they brag about now is that like there were no new wars, which, okay, there's a little bit of a gap from reality to what actually happened there because Donald Trump did escalate many of those conflicts and civilian casualties did go up.
But at least the talking point is that he didn't start a new war.
It's like I kind of, I prefer that to it being like, yeah, it was great that he really killed so many people.
But with China, there's still that same like Obama is soft disconnect.
The critique I hear from right-wingers is that Biden is like bought off by China, that the Democrats are soft on China, that Donald Trump would actually take the gloves off and confront them when the reality is that the Democrats under Obama and now much more outrageously under Biden are really taking the most aggressive posture toward China at a time where we're in a proxy war with Russia already.
We've driven them to be much more closely united.
And this just seems to be the most insane foreign policy I've ever seen.
Maybe not the most evil.
It may not be as evil as what we did back in the Saudis in Yemen or something.
But in terms of just reckless insanity, we're flirting with conflicts with the two biggest nuclear superpowers after us, Russia, then us, then China, I guess.
But it's like, this just makes no sense.
It's madness.
Yeah, I mean, it really does seem like the death throes of an empire, like what they're trying to do.
You know, it's so obvious to anybody that, you know, the sanctions and all this economic warfare that the U.S. wages is, you know, is obviously going to draw these countries that they're targeting closer together.
And now we're seeing that big bricks expansion and everything.
It's just so obvious.
Like to me, it was very obvious.
So they should know as well.
I guess they just have kind of this imperial hubris still.
And so that's one thing about some of the China hawks is that they do have a point that, you know, the ones that want to scale down support for Ukraine, you know, I remember reading reports at the time before Russia invaded that even within the Biden administration, there was debate.
Some people said we should kind of settle things with Russia and, you know, maybe use them, try to ally with them against China, even though, you know, that's not going to happen anytime soon, you know, to rebuild the trust between the U.S. and Russia.
That would take probably decades.
And China's their neighbor.
So, but anyway, you know, at least people, it's more logical.
Now, what's not logical is committing to defending Taiwan.
It's really insanity when you think about it, because this is kind of the really scary thing.
And I know you talked about this with Chris Christie basically said this.
They're not talking about a proxy war with China.
They're planning and openly planning and openly discussing, you know, U.S. military leaders.
And even President Biden said he would send troops to defend Taiwan.
A direct war with a nuclear power, you know, they don't have nearly as many nukes as the U.S. and Russia, but they have a few hundred and they have a ton of missiles.
And this is a direct war with a nuclear power on their home turf, you know, 90, 100 miles from their coast.
It would be like if, you know, China was planning to defend, say we decided to invade Cuba and China was planning to defend it.
I mean, how would they be able to do that?
And of course, we have the bases and everything over there, but still the U.S., the ships and stuff are going to have to go a long way and they're basically going to be sitting ducks.
And this is kind of a really important point because when you see these guys say they would defend Taiwan, you know, that means lots of American sailors dying.
Scott Horton recently interviewed Lyle Goldstein, who was, he's with Defense Priorities now, which is a good, pretty good think tank.
And he was at the Naval War College for 20 years.
So he knows what he's talking about and he speaks Chinese.
He's an expert.
And they were talking about these war games that these think tanks have been doing over Taiwan.
And well, none of them actually take into account nuclear escalation, which is interesting.
It just doesn't seem to be a factor for them.
And that's, I think, more scary than, I don't know, just completely ignoring that risk.
It's just crazy to me.
But all these war games show in just the first few weeks, the U.S. loses at least two aircraft carriers, dozens of destroyers and other types of Navy vessels, hundreds of planes.
And these are going to be casualties to the scale that we haven't seen since World War II in a big, you know, one big battle.
And that's just the first few weeks.
So people really need to understand what defending Taiwan would mean.
It would mean lots of Americans dying.
It would probably mean a draft.
And, you know, these are the things we really have to think about and talk about.
So, you know, when you see this rhetoric, that's what they're talking about.
Yeah, it's we're talking about going halfway around the world to fight a war on China's doorstep that we will then lose.
I mean, like, even if nukes didn't end up flying, we're losing that war.
Like, there's just no way if China was really committed enough to taking Taiwan that they don't take Taiwan, which is a sad reality.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, well, let's kind of counter some of this because there seems to be the semiconductor thing seems to be the argument that a lot of these guys fall back on.
This was the argument that Vivek Ramaswamy was making when he was on my podcast, which, you know, I just, whatever, we can kind of take this apart piece by piece.
But the argument is that like, well, Taiwan produces these things that basically we are completely dependent on for our modern economy.
And if China takes over, then we have to go, we must defend the semiconductors or something like that.
So I don't know.
What's your response to that?
Yeah.
I mean, so there's kind of a lot to that.
And, you know, the first thing is that, you know, if China took control of, you know, something that we needed, I mean, they're one of our biggest trading partners, you know, but I guess in that situation, if there is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and they take over, then that trade relationship would probably not be what it is now.
So, but, you know, what I would say, my big argument, again, is that, you know, if the U.S. kind of backs down and fosters diplomacy between Taiwan and China, it makes the invasion, you know, much less likely.
So then we wouldn't really have to worry about China taking control of the semiconductors.
And of course, you know, the big thing here is that the Biden administration, they signed this Chips Act into law, which is $50 billion in corporate welfare in subsidies.
So we're relying on kind of China's, you know, economic tactics to try to diversify our supply chains when it comes to semiconductors.
You know, I think, and I know you've discussed this, you know, the answer is to have faith in the free market and to deregulation.
And if we do lose access to them, you know, there's kind of a big rush right now to produce semiconductors and these advanced microchips all over the world.
And, you know, I think we should rely on our system.
And actually, Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, he gave a speech back in April basically saying, you know, the free market's not the way to go.
You know, we need protectionism.
And, you know, that's part of these, these subsidies that they're giving companies.
And, you know, it's really we are, you know, it's like we're using turning more into China to fight China in this new cold war when we can just rely on our own system and free markets and capitalism.
So, I mean, I think that's kind of the big argument, especially from a libertarian perspective.
So again, I think we could get more into like the ways to prevent China from taking control of those chips.
Trade Wars and Protectionism00:12:26
But what's interesting too is that some of these China hawks are saying, if China does take over Taiwan, let's blow up the chip factories.
So, I mean, they can't be that important if they're planning on blowing them up, you know?
Yeah.
Well, it seems, it just seems to me that like the obvious move there, if you were like really concerned about this, and it seems to be a question that I never hear any of these China hawks ask, is they just go, well, why can't we make these chips?
Like, why can't that be like, do we not know how to make them?
Do we not have the technology?
Do we not have the capability?
And pretty soon you'll find out that it's like, oh, because there's like a million pieces of government red tape in the way to let people produce this.
And if you know anything about free markets, the idea of let's say like, okay, let's go out on the hypothetical here that China invades Taiwan.
China also then takes control of these semiconductor chips and refuses to sell them to America, which is already quite a stretch, all of these things happening.
But let's say all of that happens.
I mean, there would be such a demand, such an opening to create something that will like make sure that the U.S. economy does not grind to a halt.
It would be enormously profitable.
There would be no, and the only thing that would be standing in the way of producing that would be some type of government regulation.
So just how about get rid of all that, if that's what you're concerned with, seems like a lot better than going to war with a, with a nuclear power.
So I just find that whole line to be goofy.
I also think it's there is this in terms of like the protectionist argument, this is still an area where Trump was just so bad on this.
And so many of kind of like the right-wing figures, even who I really, very much like, like I'm a big fan of Tucker Carlson.
And I think he's doing a lot of great stuff.
And he's great on a lot of important issues.
But they all kind of fall into this idea that kind of we're in an economic war with China, that China is on the rise and we're on the decline and that China is really screwing us over by, as they would say, dumping cheap goods into our country so that we can't produce these things for ourselves because we can't compete with China, who's using essentially slave labor or something like that is what they'd say, who they pay very little.
You have to pay Americans higher wages, on and on.
And so they're really screwing us by getting us all of this cheap side.
I know that's a little bit more of like an economics question, but do you have like a take on that?
Yeah.
So, well, one thing, just back to semiconductors, that's an important point is that to make these semiconductors on Taiwan, they need to import a lot of stuff.
So, you know, you could take that ability away from China, you know, if you, you know, sanction them and stuff.
Although at the same time, the U.S. is actually doing that right now.
Biden has ramped up Trump's trade war to a pretty crazy degree with these sanctions that he's put on China to prevent China from importing things that they need to make these more advanced semiconductors.
And he also pressured the Netherlands and Japan to do the same thing because they export a lot of this stuff.
So we are kind of giving China a reason to want to deprive us of these things, you know, with this hostile sanctions policy.
Biden just recently signed an executive order limiting investment, U.S. investment in China in certain technologies.
So it now needs to be screened.
So, you know, that's one area where Biden and Trump align very well is the trade war.
And this was something I remember when the Biden administration was coming in, they were, you know, in the Senate, they were grilling all his nominees.
And the one thing they said Trump got right was China and the trade stuff and all of it.
It's really the only thing I could think of that they were saying, yeah, Trump got this right.
And there was actually some officials saying he was too soft on China.
I don't know if you remember in 20, I think it was 2020.
It must have been because that's when the election was.
There was a Biden campaign ad saying that President Trump rolled over for the Chinese.
You know, he's soft on China.
So it's interesting.
But yeah, when it comes to the economic stuff, I mean, I think, again, this is a good opportunity for us to be libertarians about it.
And, you know, the big thing, this whole trade war is predicated on IP.
Oh, China's stealing all our intellectual property.
And I know it's kind of a debate amongst libertarians, you know, the issue of IP, but for the most part, it's not something that we, you know, really believe in and copyrights and things that stop people from making things.
And that's the whole argument really boils down to, oh, China's stealing IP.
So then the trade, that shows the trade war is not to protect us and our jobs.
The trade war is to protect these corporations that want to do business in China.
And it's their decision if they want to do it or not, you know?
So, you know, this is something David Stockman has written a lot about really well and has put it really well.
You know, basically turning the U.S. government into patent attorneys for corporations.
That's essentially what the trade war is.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like, look, even if you don't like, I don't believe in intellectual property, but that's a whole nother topic.
But even if you don't buy into that, you're like, oh my God, no, you have to have, you know, patents and all of these things.
If you just look like if you just walk through it, like imagine, you know, there's an Apple store in China, which there is, that is like, has the exact same logo, logo as Apple, has like they're selling the products.
It's all that, but it's not owned by Apple.
They're just taking that and using it.
They do stuff like this in China.
But it's like, so what would you have?
Would you have the force of government, which is like funded by all of our taxes, go and what, like get them to give money to Apple for this?
So you're literally just saying, let's take money from everybody, every working person, and then give it to a giant corporation, Apple.
Like however you feel about intellectual property, in effect, what you're arguing for is a redistribution of wealth from working people to giant corporations.
I don't see why any person outside of say like large stock holders of giant corporations would be on board with that.
And I also think just in general, the whole the whole idea that like producing cheap things is somehow is somehow hurting us is goofy.
And I mean, if taken, taken to its logical conclusion, you would have to be, you would have to argue, as Bob Murphy put it, that it would really hurt us to give us stuff for free.
Because that's like kind of what you're reduced to once you start making this argument, that if someone can sell you something cheaper, they're undercutting you or they're dumping, you know, cheap goods on you.
And the truth is that cheap consumer goods are how people get wealthier.
That's what pulls people up out of poverty.
And for anybody who's advocating, you know, like serious trade restrictions on China or some type of like, you know, boycott of China or something like that, it's like, okay, but just understand what you're advocating is a drastic increase in prices on consumer goods for Americans.
And you would think over the last couple years, having seen, you know, very significant rise in prices and think about what that does to people.
Rising prices destroys families.
I mean, it's like, it's brutal.
And I think almost everybody listening to this knows has personally felt inflation over the last over the last few years.
I mean, like all of us have.
And so just keep in mind, like that's the type, that's what you're advocating for.
If you think that like, oh, it's such a horrible thing that China produces cheap goods.
Now, in terms of the overall narrative that kind of like China is on the rise and America's on the decline, what do you, what do you, because I do actually think there's some truth to that.
Not so much the China on the rise part, but certainly America in decline.
But what do you, what would your response to that be?
Well, yeah, I mean, so again, if you look at what the China Hawks are saying, you know, the big argument actually isn't semiconductors, the influential China hawks, the ones that are really kind of shaping this policy.
And one of the guys is named Elbridge Colby.
I don't know if you heard of him, but he was in the Trump administration.
He helped create the 2018 national defense strategy that basically outlined the shift away from counterterrorism in the Middle East towards what they call great power competition with China and Russia.
And it was really 2019, 2018, 2019 that it really started to shift.
And he's outside of the administration now, but he's influential.
I've read something.
He's advising DeSantis' campaign.
There was an article about him in Politico calling him a non-interventionist or something because he thinks we should be less involved in Ukraine so we can prepare for war with China.
Because apparently in DC, that's enough to be considered a non-interventionist to have your preferred war with a nuclear power.
You don't want a war with both nuclear powers.
That's a little too much for you.
But his argument is basically, you know, they need to form an anti-hegemonic coalition.
That's what he calls it, anti-hegemonic, because he's referring to China's hegemony in Southeast Asia.
So that's the big threat to these people.
It's not that China is going to, you know, be able to control the world.
It's that they're going to be able to have a lot more control and influence in Southeast Asia than they have before.
So, I mean, that's kind of my big argument is that, you know, that that's really what they're concerned about.
It's not global domination.
I know a lot of people will say, oh, they're investing in South America, this economic stuff.
And, you know, it's certainly not, you know, a threat compared to putting, you know, say they were putting missiles in, you know, South America, like we're putting missiles in, you know, Okinawa.
And I mean, we've had missiles there for a long time, but, you know, building these new bases in the Philippines and stuff.
And, you know, the idea that the U.S. is on the decline, I think is, you know, true to, you know, anybody that can really see what's been going on.
And I think that's an argument for why we should not try to uphold this world empire.
We need to focus on our internal issues.
And a way to really improve things would be to, you know, give up this empire.
And, you know, I try to be like, I don't like to call it realism because, you know, people like that guy, Colby, considers himself a realist and they, you know, realists think we should go to war for Taiwan.
Justin Raimondo kind of put it as he coined the term libertarian realism when it comes to foreign policy.
Like, and it's essentially the way I think of it is that, you know, we're libertarians.
We're American libertarians and we have our libertarian principles, but we have to kind of apply, you know, realistic logic to things that are going on around the world.
We can't.
And this is important with Taiwan because I know I understand why a lot of libertarians aren't that, you know, get sensitive about this issue because you see Taiwan as this little island that's more free, you know, free market oriented than the big Chinese, you know, communist behemoth.
And, you know, so, but anyway, I'm kind of ranting here, but I think we have to look at these things in a realistic way.
And when it comes to right now, you know, of course, as libertarians, we would say, end the empire, you know, pull all the bases out.
Let's end, you know, bring all the troops home, close every base in South Korea, Germany.
Realistically, you know, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
But I think we could argue for, if you look at Southeast Asia, you got the Philippines, you got more so East Asia, Japan, South Korea, more so Japan and South Korea.
These countries have a lot of money and they can really build up their militaries.
And you have India on China's border.
They have their border dispute.
If these countries are really so concerned about China's rise and China expanding, you know, China has a lot of problems right around it.
Like they can handle it themselves.
I think that's kind of the realist argument that we should be, you know, as libertarians putting forward when people kind of challenge us on this.
I mean, India is now the most populous nation on earth.
And, you know, the U.S. is looking at them as a big counter to China.
You know, why do we have to be the ones that give a war guarantee to all these countries when they're certainly capable of it themselves?
Uyghurs, Genocide, and Social Credit00:15:24
Yeah, 100%.
And I think that, you know, I mean, I think the core of the argument is really that, look, like the enemy of the American people is not Russia or China.
It's DC.
And you could like, anyone who wants to argue that you list all the worst things China's done to the American people and I'll come in with my list of all the worst things DC's done to the American people.
And let's see which one, you know, like stacks up.
Like who destroyed our currency?
Who spent us $30 trillion into debt?
Who locked us down?
Who enforced all these mandates?
All of this stuff.
It's all our own government.
And so I'm not interested in ramping up DC to go take on some war to, you know, free the people of Taiwan.
Look, I hope I root for freedom everywhere.
I hope everyone's free.
I hope Taiwan stays as free as possible.
I hope there's an increase in freedom there.
I hope there's an increase in freedom for the people in China and all of this.
But every time American, the American military goes to help, you know, make a people freer, they end up just killing a whole lot of them and making the thing a disaster.
So like, no, it's something we should vehemently oppose, of course.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I want to also kind of talk about, so, you know, because there's a lot of propaganda around the Chinese Communist Party.
I'm sure we would both agree.
They are pretty goddamn authoritarian, certainly do not practice, you know, do not have the same conception of freedom that me and you do.
But there was so, what was it?
It was Pompeo, I think, who said on the way out in 2016 was the first that they formally recognized that they're committing a genocide against the Uyghurs.
There was always kind of talk of this social credit system.
And I, you know, I know if I correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Pompeo, I believe the only source he cited was that Adrian Zen's guy whose numbers turned out to be complete BS.
I believe he even admitted it.
Like, and this isn't even, there's nothing debatable about this.
It's like, you know, like didn't carry the one when he was supposed to type numbers that greatly exaggerated what the actual claim here was.
For people who don't know, because I think kind of intentionally use this, the claim has never been that they're like gassing Uyghurs in camps.
The claim was that they're giving them these like forced sterilization procedures.
Turns out that China does that with like a lot of people.
It's not just targeted at the Uyghurs.
Anyway, the evidence that there's actually a genocide going on there seems to be very flimsy or non-existent.
I don't know.
I know I've heard from people who lived in China that said they have no idea what we're talking about with the social credit system and have never heard of that.
You know what I mean?
So I just like, I don't know.
What's your take on this of like, what, where is the like propaganda versus what's the reality?
Obviously, the Chinese government are not good people, but like what's really going on there from your perspective?
Yeah, so there certainly is a ton of propaganda when it comes to this.
And the thing about the Uyghurs, so you mentioned the numbers.
So that determination of genocide was based on this report from Adrian Zenz.
And he said something like 80% of all IUD insertions are happening in Xinjiang.
But it turned out it was 8%, which is a pretty big mistake.
And Anthony Blinken came in and reaffirmed, yeah, they're committing genocide.
You've kind of seen them lately kind of tone back the rhetoric against China.
They're still pursuing very hostile policies, but when they first came in, they were saying crazy things.
Biden said that we're in a competition with China to win the 21st century, which, you know, whatever that means.
But anyway, with the Uyghur thing, so, you know, there's definitely, you know, they took very, you know, kind of authoritarian, dystopian means to crack down on the terrorism in Xinjiang.
And, you know, I don't really know what's going on there.
It's not an issue I focus on too much.
My friend Pat McFarlane at the Libertarian Institute has done a lot of good work on this.
But I think it's fair to say that, you know, it's not genocide as we think of it.
Like you said, they're not putting them in camps and killing them.
There were these, you know, vocational camps, which, of course, to us sounds very dystopian.
But, you know, as far as I understand it, those, they're mostly empty.
And it's, you know, it's a super surveillance state in Xinjiang.
Again, this is not, I'm not trying to justify anything, but we just have to understand what it is.
It's China's response to this terrorism that was happening in Xinjiang.
You know, look at what was the U.S. response to terrorism that happened in the United States.
They killed millions of people that didn't have anything to do with it.
So the idea that our government cares about the Uyghurs, I think, is just nonsense.
And I think that should be clear to most people and that they are using them as a propaganda aim.
And then same thing, social credit system.
I mean, from I've heard that it's not anything like we are led to believe it is.
I think there was different forms of it.
Some of it was very similar to our credit score system.
Again, it's not really something I focus on too much, but I saw a good video on it kind of debunking the whole thing.
And it was from like a pretty mainstream outlet.
Like it wasn't any kind of fringe thing.
I wish I could remember the name of that.
Maybe I'll send it to you at some point.
But yeah, there's just, we're getting pummeled with this propaganda.
And I think it's important for people, you know, I went to China in 2020, actually.
It was January 2020.
I went to Shanghai for a week just because I always wanted to go and I just wanted to see.
And I knew that China is the thing I kind of need to focus on.
So why don't I go there and check it out?
And I was just in Shanghai, which is a very modern city.
But I mean, I didn't notice any like heavy police presence, you know, and it was just a bunch of people hanging out in malls, just having a good time.
People were very nice.
Like there's this idea among, I've seen libertarians say this, like China is a communist hellscape, but there's actually a lot of people that live, you know, that are middle class now that live really good.
And their parents, you know, lived through, you know, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, which was just, you know, millions upon millions of people were dying.
And, you know, that's not too distant of a memory.
So the idea that, you know, the people of China are just yearning to be free from the grips of the Chinese Communist Party is just not the case.
They're, they're nationalists.
In response to a foreign power, they're going to, you know, rally around their government.
And that's a big thing why Taiwan, you know, because they are very nationalistic, you know, they're never going to give up Taiwan.
And just another point about the people, how they feel about things.
A lot of the China hawks focus on the polling in Taiwan shows that there's no, you know, nobody wants unification, essentially.
It's a very low percentage of people that want to join China.
But what's a really high percentage is it's usually like 85 or 90% of the people say that they want to maintain the status quo, which is the current situation now.
They don't want to change anything because they know if they declare formal independence, that probably means war with China.
And they also don't want to join China.
So, you know, I think we should listen to them because the U.S. is really changing the status quo and the ruling government in Taiwan is going along with it.
And it looks like they're probably going to win the 2024 election because the opposition is kind of split unless they decide to unify.
But so that's kind of the politics of Taiwan.
But I think it's just an important point that they favor the status quo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a ridiculous system, but it's, it seems to be kind of working out.
Like it's this weird, like kind of machismo from China that they just want it recognized that like it's theirs if they want it, but they're also going to let them do their own thing.
It's like just a very bizarre dynamic, but it does seem like kind of the best case is to maintain the status quo where it's like, okay, you know, like at least they're not, they're not cracking down on Taiwan.
We'll all pretend they're one country or whatever and they let Taiwan do kind of what they want to do.
Seems a lot better than the prospects of some type of conflict.
You know, and just to make the point, you know, about like the Uyghur genocide and the social credit system and all of this, it's not to defend the Chinese Communist Party.
Like we said, I think I don't like any government, but I think they're a particularly authoritarian one and a very creepy one.
But it's just like, look, you know, it's like, you know how all of the people in the media and the government, how they lied to you about Iraq and they lied to you about Afghanistan and they lied to you about Libya and they lied to you about COVID and they lied to you about the economy and they lied to you about inflation and they lied to you about Ukraine.
It's like, I also don't think they're telling you the truth about China.
Like I don't think it's such a radical position to take given their track record.
And just I would just advise people like be wary of some of these claims and really look for evidence.
Like what, okay, what do you have to back this up?
Not just on taking some guy from the State Department or the CIA's word for it.
And, you know, China, they call themselves the Communist Party.
It's a one-party dictatorship for sure, but they're not communist in the sense of what it meant, what that word used to mean.
I mean, they're not communist like Stalin.
They're not communist like Mao.
They have businesses.
They have like whole areas of like thriving like private economies.
And so it's just there's some weird hybrid at this point.
They kind of embraced certain capitalist principles and that's made them much wealthier than they were in the past.
They still have a one-party dictatorship and a large degree of a surveillance state and things like that.
It's just, it's all a little bit more nuanced than I think a lot of the hawks make it seem.
Anything, any, anywhere else you want to go with this or what do you think we should talk about?
Yeah, I would just say, you know, with China and Xi Jinping, you know, I know he has kind of centralized power a little more than his predecessors and he does want unification with Taiwan, reunification.
You know, I think that's something he certainly wants.
But again, he doesn't want to launch, you know, a big war because that could be a disaster.
And that's one of the things, you know, in the way the Chinese Communist Party works, how I understand it from experts that, you know, I would trust is that if there's a big disaster, if something bad, really bad happens, you know, somebody's got to take the fall for it.
And if Xi Jinping launches a war over Taiwan and say they get nuked by the U.S., like, who knows what could happen?
That's going to be his legacy is kind of this failed war.
And, you know, what we've seen over the past year, especially is a real big increase in Chinese military activity around Taiwan.
And that's all happened in response to the U.S. increasing support.
That's kind of the big point, you know, I try to make.
I'm sure everybody remembers when Nancy Pelosi went over there back in August.
I mean, since then, China, there's this thing that they call the median line, which separates the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.
China would like never cross it with, you know, warplanes and, you know, they would stay to their side.
They started to cross it a little bit when Trump sent a few cabinet officials over there in 2020.
That was a big deal.
And then when Nancy Pelosi went, since then, just about every day, they send these planes over this line.
So this is ways that they kind of increase the pressure on Taiwan directly in response to what the U.S. is doing.
I just think that correlation is really important.
And when Biden signed the bill into law last year that had this new type of military aid for Taiwan, same thing.
They did big military drills.
You know, when Pelosi went there, they simulated a blockade for the first time.
They've never done that.
They fired missiles over the island for the first time ever.
It just shows how sensitive this thing is.
And we just, they just want to keep poking them.
And Pelosi recently, it was like a year anniversary of her trip.
And she's like, oh, you know, it was just a photo op.
That's all it was.
It was like a pre-election season photo op for her.
And there's actually polling that shows most Taiwanese feel that they're less safe now since Pelosi went over there.
So.
Yeah, it's just so reckless.
And it is like that is kind of, this is the way U.S. foreign policy seems to work, where we just, in the name of deterrence, we just poke and poke and poke at a country until we get them to respond.
And then we kind of have our justification for war.
It's just, I guess the big, the big game changer here, both in Ukraine and with Taiwan is, you know, it for my whole life, it was always kind of just understood that we don't really poke at you if you have nuclear weapons.
We kind of poke at everybody else because there's just, you know, whatever.
What's Saddam Hussein really going to do?
What's Mo Mar Gaddafi going to do if we come in there and just destroy your country?
Like, sorry, you know, which as it's still morally, you know, outrageous, but there is like truth to that.
Like, well, what is Saddam Hussein going to do?
He's going to go hide in a hole and then get caught and hung, you know?
What's Mo Margaddafi going to do?
He's going to go get, you know, captured and sodomized to death.
But now we're dealing with Russia and China where it's like, oh, no, there's a real answer to what are you going to do.
I'm sure everybody involved is hesitant to go that route.
But are you surprised?
Because I sure am that I always would have thought like even the like the powerful people in DC would be worried about a nuclear exchange because that's like they're also vulnerable.
It's the only thing that really short of like a revolution here, that's kind of the only thing that actually they're, them and their families are vulnerable to.
Yeah.
I mean, that's like I said, it's kind of more scary that like they're not taking this into account.
They're not thinking about nuclear escalation.
This is something, you know, Colonel McGregor says a lot is that there's people in DC that think they could fight a limited nuclear war with Russia.
They think they could keep it to tactical, smaller nuclear weapons.
And McGregor has said that quite a few times, which makes me think, you know, he really believes that.
And he was, you know, an insider at one point.
Nuclear Escalation Fears00:17:25
So, you know, I think that now there are people that think they could fight a limited naval war with China over Taiwan.
And it's kind of their dream, you know, fantasies about World War II and fighting Japan.
But again, there's going to be so many losses in this battle.
And that's just without nukes, you know, losses that Americans aren't going to be ready for.
You know, picture this happening.
You know, China moves on Taiwan.
The U.S. intervenes.
A ton of, you know, U.S. naval vessels get sunk.
We destroy a bunch of Chinese missiles in the mainland.
So that's what it would take.
The U.S. would have to attack the mainland.
So if the U.S. starts attacking the mainland, China is going to, you know, they're probably going to hit bases in Hawaii, Alaska.
You know, who knows how far it's just going to, who knows what's going to happen is the point.
It's just this escalation spiral.
And say, you know, this first three-week battle as they're picturing it, you know, these think tanks say that the U.S. will stop China from getting Taiwan, which I find kind of hard to believe, especially when they're saying the U.S. would take so many heavy losses.
But it's like, say, say that the U.S. fails to stop it and there's no nuclear exchange.
You know, I would think the U.S., I would be more worried about the U.S. using a nuke in that situation.
And, you know, it's just so insane, this whole planning that they're doing.
And what they just keep, you know, this is what they're doing.
This is the name of the game.
This is what it's all about.
All these U.S. government documents, the Pentagon's national defense strategy, the intelligence like reports that they put out, they say China's the big threat.
We got to get ready for war with China.
So, you know, it's just tough to think what is going through their heads here.
You know, what do they really think they can get away with?
Is this just about spending money?
You know, is this just a military industrial complex, you know, justifying, finding a way to justify spending all this money in this military buildup?
You know, it's just hard to imagine that that's all it is.
Yeah.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
You know, I was, I, I saw this, uh, this Glenn Greenwald clip recently, um, and I just really liked the way he said, I think this might have been, he was on Patrick Bett David's show, I think.
And he was talking about how when the Patriot Act was first passed, even in the, in the immediate wake of 9-11, it was still pretty controversial.
And there were still like a fair amount of people who were like, whoa, this seems like kind of not American, you know, like this kind of seems like not the type of thing we do here with this Patriot Act.
And that, and that that was the reason they put in the provision that it would expire in six years or whatever it is.
And then they were basically like, look, we're just doing this because there's this emergency right now.
And, but, you know, we'll have to come back in six years and we'll have to justify why there's another emergency if we're going to, you know, continue it or why we're still at a state of emergency.
And as I mentioned earlier, like nobody, nobody in the political class or the media class is talking about radical Islam as like radical Islamic terrorism is some big threat.
Like just nobody's, we've kind of moved on from that.
I know we still have some military operations that go on, but like we, we've moved on from that talking point.
And yet the Patriot Act is just always passed again.
I forget what they call it now.
Uh, they changed the name of it, but it's the same goddamn thing.
It's, it's worse than the original one.
Um, and it's kind of like almost really since 9-11, it's like, okay, we were in an emergency.
And then we just decided the emergency is never over.
We're just living in an emergency country right now.
We're at this like this constant frantic state since 9-11.
And there's like no, everybody at this point has just accepted that this is what the United States of America is.
And there's no like sense, at least in the political class, I think amongst regular people, there's a huge desire to like end the emergency.
Like let's just be a normal country again.
I mean, look, we had a lot of problems in the 90s and stuff, but like we were somewhat of a normal country compared to like what we are today.
And I think there's just tremendous desire to like, you know, I was saying this when I was on Rogan's podcast, like, could we just go like, let's, could we put five years together without being involved in a war?
Like five years without like funding a proxy war, invading a country, bombing a country.
Like we just put this together.
And you can see almost how easily, if it wasn't for the people who are in power, you could just say, okay, hey, let's make a deal with China that we're both going to stop ramping up these military exercises.
Okay.
We'll make a deal that we're all going to take this down.
We'll pull some of our forces back.
You guys calm down a little bit.
It seems like it really would not be that difficult to do.
I mean, I know you've done you've written some stuff on how the negotiations both sides were willing to negotiate in early, what is it, early 2022 in Ukraine and Russia.
And we're always like, it's like, it seems like negotiations would be fairly easy to come to.
It's like, it's pretty obvious what both sides wants.
Neither's going to get 100%, but you'll get some of what you want.
We'll get some of what we want.
There's just no political will to do it.
Yeah.
I mean, that, yeah, I've covered that quite a bit, how in the beginning of the war, when Russia first invaded, there were these talks that had a real chance.
And, you know, it's pretty clear, you know, that the U.S. and NATO were like, you know, killed that deal and promised Ukraine that they would give them, you know, this tens of billions of dollars in support that they have since then.
And now, I mean, things are so, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are dead and they just, they don't care.
The U.S., you know, officials and in the Biden administration, in Congress, Mitt Romney saying it's the best spending we've ever done.
No Americans are dying and we're hurting Russia.
You know, it's a proxy war.
There's no arguing that it's not.
And they don't care about Ukrainians.
It's kind of the big lie of this war.
One of the many big lies, of course.
You know, it's just they don't care about Ukrainians.
And I think it's a lesson for people in Taiwan, you know, that they don't care about Taiwan.
They see Taiwan as a cudgel that they could use against China.
And I'm glad you brought up kind of the emergency powers and the Patriot Act, because if we get into, I mean, even like a cold war with China, do you, did you see that bill that was introduced in the Senate under the guise of banning TikTok?
Yes.
Yeah.
That would give the government tons of powers over any kind of transaction, basically between an American and like a foreigner, like really insane overreaching powers.
And I think that's a good lesson for people, for libertarians as well.
Like, you know, TikTok is like this big boogeyman, you know, or it was for a while.
They've basically given control to the to the U.S., you know, for content moderation now.
That's basically how TikTok has survived.
But kind of that fear-mongering over TikTok could create something that bad, like the Patriot Act for the internet, essentially.
And there's going to be more of that with this stuff with China, especially if it turns into a hot war.
I mean, if that battle happens, we're going to go on a war footing.
You know, they're going to turn all our factories.
They're going to be making missiles and bombs.
They're going to be trying to draft our kids.
I mean, and it could happen really quick and people can get whipped up, even though, you know, most people don't like China.
Most Americans, you know, according to all the polls, they're, they're afraid of China.
They think China is our enemy.
And you see the frenzy.
I mean, when the Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S., everybody got whipped up into a frenzy so much that Biden shot down little tiny balloons after that.
They shot down three were basically like what they think were hobby balloons, like, you know, really small balloons using $400,000 missiles.
One of them missed over the Great Lakes.
I mean, how did that happen?
It's because of this, you know, fervor that, and, you know, when you mention the Islamic terrorism.
So this is why, you know, I still try to have hope, you know, that we're not going to just stumble into war with China, is how that kind of just went away.
That was the Islamic terrorism was the biggest, everybody was so scared of it.
You remember the whole Muslim ban thing?
You know, Trump wanted to ban people from all these countries.
And that was like on everybody's mind in the 2016 election.
2020, I don't even think anybody brought it up.
It was just gone.
So, you know, that's why when you get into these frenzies, kind of these diseases of the public mind, you know, I think is a good term for it.
Yeah.
They can go away.
They can be cured, you know, quickly.
So hopefully things change.
But, you know, unfortunately, we're just on this path.
And that's why I think more people need to be aware of what's happening with China because it can turn very quick.
And one other thing I wanted to mention, I mentioned the spy balloon, which is pretty clear now that that just blew over the U.S. because of unexpected weather and the U.S. was tracking it the whole time.
It wasn't a surprise or anything.
Did you hear about this Chinese spy base in Cuba story?
No.
So there was a report in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago that said China and Cuba are going to build this new spy base.
And it came out right before Blinken was supposed to go to China.
So actually, when he was first supposed to go, the spy balloon showed up and he canceled his trip.
Right.
And then this story came out.
And Ted Snyder, who is a columnist for anti-war.com, he wrote a really good piece on this if people want to check it out.
It has all the details.
But essentially, Russia had the Soviet Union had some kind of surveillance capabilities in Cuba throughout the whole Cold War.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, they had this signals intelligence, they call it, they could intercept phone calls.
And that little, you know, kind of spy base was taken over by China, you know, years ago.
And again, it's not the capabilities that they have are, you know, it doesn't give them anything more than like what low orbit satellites can give them.
But this story was essentially planted, you know, this is kind of an old thing to stop the Blinken trip.
And then there was another report saying that China and Cuba are in talks to, you know, create some kind of training facilities in Cuba.
And this is one thing Matt Gates, who I praise a lot because he's really good on wars in Middle East, Africa, and Ukraine.
Matt Gates says in response to this, oh, we should give Biden an authorization for the use of military force to invade Cuba and take out these Chinese assets.
And so first off, we don't know what the extent China's footprint in Cuba is.
I'm not, I don't think it's anything really significant.
But there's so many things we could do before invading Cuba.
One thing we could do is pull our troops out of Taiwan.
The U.S. just sent like 200 troops there.
And that's the biggest U.S. troop presence in Taiwan since the 70s.
You know, we just have all this room to maneuver and negotiate with China.
So, you know, I, it's just that they go straight to let's invade and take it out.
It's just nuts.
So, yeah, well, it's, I, I mean, I remember talking about this with uh Vivek Ramaswamy when he was on two that I could just go like, I was like, look, if you're really, and I don't know why I tried to push him on it and he wouldn't like go this far.
He was like kind of open to it.
But I was just like, look, we hold to get Vladimir Putin to do whatever we want, whatever we want, we hold the ultimate negotiating chip, which is just to agree to pull out of NATO.
Like if the U.S. pulls out of NATO, I guarantee you, you could get Vladimir Putin to do anything in exchange for U.S. out of NATO.
Like that's, that's been his biggest beef this entire time.
And it's like, and that would be good for us, right?
And like, Vivek's not going to argue with me on that.
I don't think any like populist Republican would even argue on me that like, what?
We were subsidizing the defense of wealthy European countries when we're $30 trillion in debt.
How does that make any sense?
It would just be a win for America.
And we could get Russia.
We could, we could definitely get him to end the war.
And, you know, I mean, we probably couldn't get Crimea.
We're never getting Crimea back, but I bet we could get everything else back for that because that is such a big chip.
U.S. withdrawal from NATO.
That would be such a feather in his cap.
And it's not even on the table.
No one, even the most radical, you know, like anti-establishment candidates.
It's not even on the table for them.
You know what I mean?
Like, and it's just so bizarre.
And like, yeah, there's, and by the way, there's a million steps before that that we could use as negotiating tools.
But anyway, I think the bigger point about, you know, like the stuff in Cuba there is just, look, I've, I've, uh, I'm old enough now that I've lived through several of these kind of war propaganda campaigns.
And you just, you get to the point where you can recognize it.
And you're like, oh, okay, I see what's happening here.
And it's so, and friends of mine, like people who I think are really good, but they get so conspiratorial about China, you know, even when it's like, you know, China, well, they're rigging the algorithm on TikTok in order to show our kids crap or while their kids are listening to, you know, kids play violin.
And I'm kind of like, okay, well, how do you know that?
And like, I'm just asking, like, what's the evidence for that?
And they're like, well, look, these are the most popular things on TikTok in China.
And these are the most popular videos on TikTok in America.
And you're like, yeah, but that could also just be a reflection of our culture versus theirs.
Right.
Like, I mean, do you have any evidence?
Because that seems pretty plausible to me.
I don't know.
Like, maybe it's just a fact.
Like, my generation was raised on like Jerry Springer and Howard Stern.
You know what I mean?
And like, this is now kind of the next generation.
And yeah, it's like even trashier than stuff back then was.
But did China do that?
It's like, are you really just making them out to be the boogeyman?
Like they're responsible for our entire like societal decline.
Like I, I think that's probably on us.
And I just see it's a lot at like every level there's and constantly like the um the uh what we I feel like what we always have to deal with is the unfalsifiable um counterfactual thing.
So like if if the policy in Ukraine is objectively a disaster, the war is a disaster, you go, okay, so we shouldn't do this because it's a disaster.
And then they go, but then Vladimir Putin takes Poland and then he takes everything.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like it's, they're just like, well, this will happen if we don't do this.
And so many people tell me that this China takes over the world.
If America doesn't have the empire, then China takes over the world.
And it's all all of this is so removed from reality.
Like none of this is happening.
Vladimir Putin is not moving on Poland.
China is not taking over the world.
And this is always the stuff.
What is happening is that this is the war propaganda.
I remember this vividly with Saddam Hussein stuff.
It's all like, oh my God, he's about to, there's going to be a mushroom cloud in Kansas because he's going to give this weapon that he doesn't have to a terrorist who he's not friends with.
But this is all going to happen.
And then Kansas gets nuked.
So what do you want to do, motherfuckers?
Let's go overthrow Saddam Hussein.
It's like, I just see this all happening with China.
And man, you would just think through the last, you know, 20 years that like, there'd be enough people who are like, no, just like enough, enough.
We're not doing it again.
And especially not with a much bigger, much scarier country.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing.
You know, we, we haven't done this in so in decades and decades, you know, like, and with all this new technology too, another thing that really scares me is like, you know, what we're seeing in Russia and Ukraine, you know, we're seeing them kind of use these small cheap drones a lot.
That's kind of new in like a big war like this.
But that's nothing compared to if the U.S. and Russia face off directly or the U.S. and China, you know, forget nukes for a minute, like the technology that might be used.
You know, Kyle Anslone wrote this up recently for the Libertarian Institute about how the U.S. is planning to, they want to get these, what they call drone swarms, which send like thousands of these small cheap drones up into the sky at a time, just like blanket the sky with these little drones, you know, to use in a war against China.
So I think like it could just be so horrific.
Again, forget nuclear weapons, what could happen here.
Donations and Antiwar Support00:03:45
So yeah, it's really disheartening to see so many people fall for the Taiwan thing.
And again, that really is ultimately the talking point.
You know, forget semiconductors.
The main China hawks are saying, you know, oh, if they take Taiwan, then the Philippines is 100 miles away.
And then, you know, you got Okinawa, but it's just, you know, there's no indication that China wants to expand that much.
Taiwan is a historic, very, you know, they look at it as unfinished business of the Chinese Civil War.
You know, we have to understand these things.
That's the problem is that nobody really understands.
Same thing with Putin.
One point John Mearsheimer always makes about Putin is that it wasn't until 2014 after the coup in Kiev, after Russia taking Crimea, that this narrative was born that Putin wanted to, you know, go into Eastern Europe, go into the Baltics, go into Poland.
He said before that nobody was saying it, which is really interesting.
Yeah.
No, I've made that point many times and I got it from Mearsheimer, but it is true that like nobody was calling you.
And you can go back and look at it.
It's like George W. Bush was saying, I looked into his eyes and he's a good dude or whatever his line was.
I looked into his eyes and I saw his soul and he's a good man.
And, you know, Hillary Clinton was like all about pushing the reset button and all of this.
If you really look at it, what I, what Vladimir Putin's ultimate crime was, and the reason why he has now been deemed this generation's Hitler or whatever it is, is that he prevented a U.S. regime change in Syria.
That was his ultimate crime, is that he intervened in Syria where we had a policy of war overthrowing Assad and he was invited in by the government to come defend Assad so that ISIS didn't take over Damascus.
And that was his great crime.
And that ever since then, he's been the enemy of the American regime.
And that it was since that all the stuff in Ukraine, the Madan, all the weapons and the funding in 2016 framing him for overthrowing our elections and just everything since that time has just been the corporate press, the political class has just been obsessed about the Russia, this threat that Russia is.
But it's funny because that before time, before he went into Syria, nobody was really saying these things.
You just, you can't go look at anybody on record.
Nobody was claiming that Vladimir Putin is some war-hungry imperialist.
It's just not the case because he wasn't.
That's just it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, there was all that propaganda also at the time, especially, I mean, Russia Gate, as you went over so well on Rogan recently, you know, that all this propaganda is just such a big part.
And with China, you know, we've been inundated with a lot of, you know, China prop anti-China propaganda.
And again, I think the point is, you know, we're not saying, you know, China's great.
Chinese government is great.
Although the country is pretty awesome.
I went there and had a good time, but we're not, you know, defending the Chinese government.
Just all these things that you, that people might not like about them, all the things that they're worried about them doing to the Uyghurs or to Taiwan.
That's not what this is about.
That's not what these people are concerned with.
They're concerned with China having, you know, more control and influence in its neck of the woods.
That's really what it is.
Yeah.
What this is about is what it's always about, which is about the U.S. Empire and the U.S. ruling the world.
And you, listener of this show, you're not part of that.
It's not you ruling the world.
It's them.
It's the people who are oppressing you the most having the most power.
Look, dude, we're over time, but this was really great.
We'll definitely do it again.
For people who are listening to the show, where can they follow you?
Supporting the Show00:01:04
Check out your work, all that stuff.
Yeah, so everything I do is at antiwar.com.
We're actually doing our fundraiser now.
We're entirely funded by our readers.
So if people want to support us, you can go to antiwar.com slash donate.
But if you go to antiwar.com, you see the top news section.
You know, I write a few articles in there each day.
And I also do a daily podcast and YouTube show.
It's called Anti-War News with Dave DeCamp, where I basically just go over, you know, everything I write that day.
You know, I've gotten a lot of people that wouldn't normally read antiwar.com listening to that.
So that's pretty exciting.
And you could also follow me on Twitter at DeCampDave.
Follow antiwar.com on Twitter as well.
And yeah, that's all my stuff.
Absolutely.
Listen, if you, if you are in a position where you can and you want to donate to something, antiwar.com is, I couldn't give it a higher, the highest possible recommendation.
They're just really, really an invaluable tool for a lot of us.
All right, Dave, thank you very much for taking the time.