Ezra Levant and Manny Montenegrino debate suing China over coronavirus, focusing on Wuhan’s lab proximity to bats and the government’s alleged cover-up—suppressing DNA data, punishing whistleblowers like Dr. Li Wenliang, and pushing false WHO claims—that may have prevented 95% of cases. While legal action faces sovereign immunity hurdles, Levant suggests sanctions or G20 exclusion as alternatives, but the segment pivots to praising Trump’s early travel bans, task force, and corporate negotiations (e.g., free public health ads), contrasting his crisis leadership with China’s authoritarian failures and Iran’s potential instability. The discussion ultimately argues that economic pressure, not lawsuits, is the most effective response to Beijing’s pandemic mismanagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Manny Montenegrino said to me yesterday, we should sue China.
So I started to look into it.
Is it possible to sue a foreign country?
And I found some interesting cases and I've got some ideas about reparations.
Let me make my case.
Before I get out of the way, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That gives you the video version of the show, which I would encourage you to get.
It's eight bucks a month, no big deal.
It's good TV watching while you're in quarantine.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, should we sue the Chinese government?
It's March 19th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
China is to blame for the coronavirus.
I'm not talking about the creation of the virus itself.
We don't know exactly how that happened.
China's high-security virus research lab just happens to be located in Wuhan.
I mean, what are the odds of that?
But other than that, unusual coincidence, we have no actual evidence that the virus was released from that government lab, let alone that it was some sort of biological weapon.
And I'm not even talking about another explanation that the virus came from people eating exotic animals or even eating animals alive, as is the custom in some parts of China, eating bats, eating bat soup.
It's shocking to our Western sensibilities, but more than that, it could have allowed the virus to leap from animals to people.
Just as an aside, there's an evolutionary reason why we humans gag at gross things, why we sometimes even throw up when something is gross just at the thought of it.
It's our body's natural way after a thousand generations of expelling things that could make us physically sick.
That sense of revulsion you feel when you see maggots on a dead animal carcass, for example, that sense of revulsion and the urge to throw up is nature's way of keeping you safe, of stopping you from eating gross things because they're dangerous to you.
I think maybe we should reinstill that natural instinct of disgust and revulsion for eating some foods, just saying.
But when I say that China is to blame for the virus, I'm not talking about hypotheticals like the Chinese government's Wuhan virus laboratory, the bizarrely Justin Trudeau approved sending samples of the Ebola virus to, can you believe that?
I'm not talking about bats.
Those are both possibilities, not certainties.
Like with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, we'll have to wait for the fall of communism in China to learn the truth.
By the way, I recommend that Chernobyl series on HBO if you're in quarantine.
Great cinema, very historically accurate.
But I'm talking about the incontrovertible truth that however the virus was caused in the first place, wherever the virus came from, the first willful, thoughtful, deliberate, strategic decisions by the Chinese dictatorship were to hide the facts, to cover up the problem, and even to arrest and punish the doctors who were talking about the virus in public, who were trying to warn the world.
That's incontrovertible.
That is indisputable.
As you know, the world's best disease fighters, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, they wanted to go into China right away to help and to learn more.
China banned them.
China didn't want them to find out the truth.
Why?
Probably the same reason the Soviets covered up the truth about Chernobyl.
They thought it was embarrassing and dictatorships don't like to be embarrassed.
No one does, but certainly not in democracies.
But in dictatorship, especially, the government needs to be seen as infallible, all-knowing, the protector of the people.
And in supremacist dictatorships like China, places where the government constantly talks about how they'll dominate the world, how they're superior to the free West.
This would be doubly embarrassing.
That's my attempt to explain why China covered it up.
If the virus did, in fact, come from the government research lab, that's a whole other level of embarrassment.
That could actually cause the downfall of the regime.
If this disastrous, murderous virus was actually created by the government of China on purpose, I think that would be it.
I think they would be over.
I think they would do literally anything to cover that up if it were true.
They would literally prefer the death of millions of their own people than to have such a truth come out.
That's just a hypothetical for now.
But whatever the reason is for the cover-up, we know they did it.
The cover-up.
They covered it up.
Here's the story in the state-run wire service, Xinhua, announcing the arrest of Chinese doctors for spreading rumors.
Here it is in English put through Google Translate.
The police arrested the doctors for talking about the virus, for trying to spread the word.
Those doctors were trying to warn people.
They were asking for help.
China shut them up.
China kept crucial information about the virus, like its DNA sequencing, secret.
That delay, according to Western scientists, let the virus spread throughout China around the world.
Had China not silenced its own doctors, 95% of the cases would not have happened.
The Chinese people would have been warned.
Travel from Wuhan to other cities in China could have been limited.
China could have stopped its own people from spreading the virus around the world.
China's Cover-Up00:07:49
Other countries.
And other countries armed with that information could have stopped travel from China months earlier than we did.
Trump stopped those flights about six weeks ago.
He was ridiculed by the media for it.
I mean, the World Health Organization, a UN agency that's controlled by China, they published the lie that the virus is not contagious from person to person.
China knew that was a lie, but they published it anyways.
Even now, China is lying to evade blame.
They're actually saying the virus is an American plot or something.
I'm not even kidding.
That's why Trump is pushing back by calling it the Chinese virus.
He really didn't start doing that until China started blaming America to divert attention.
But what do we know for sure?
We only know for sure that China's first response was to lie, to arrest the doctors, to hide the truth.
Just like the Soviet response in Chernobyl.
That Soviet response in Chernobyl cost the lives of many people in the Soviet Union, especially in Ukraine where Chernobyl is.
But ultimately, the costs of that decision were borne by the Soviet Union.
The massive human cost, the economic cost.
Watch that mini-series on HBO.
Read some history about it.
I believe Chernobyl, as much as Reagan's arms build up or the Soviet-Afghan War, is what brought down the USSR.
But this Chinese virus is different.
The bulk of the cost is being borne by the rest of the world in terms of human life and prosperity.
Chernobyl didn't put a single Canadian or American or Italian in the hospital or in the morgue.
Chernobyl didn't shut down businesses across the world just in the USSR.
So as our guest yesterday and former lawyer to Prime Minister Stephen Harper Manny Montenegrino suggested, can we sue China?
Can you sue a country?
Now, I haven't practiced law in years and I've never practiced international law of that sort.
There's a lot of international law actually, but it depends on treaties, immigration treaties, trade treaties, tax treaties.
But it's countries agreeing to be bound by rules that they believe are in their own interest.
And if there is a dispute, the countries agreed in advance to be bound by some sort of international judges like trade dispute panels.
Countries have to agree to accept a loss in those tribunals, otherwise what's the point?
So sometimes the mighty United States itself would lose a trade dispute and would accept losing because they agreed in advance to the process and they signed the treaty and they believe that treaty and the process is fair enough.
And if they stop feeling that way, they can get out of the treaty.
But my point is international law depends on countries willingly submitting to outside decisions that might go against them because there's no international police force.
There's no way of enforcing a ruling on a country that doesn't accept it.
Just the other week, the so-called International Criminal Court announced they were going to investigate the United States for war crimes in Afghanistan.
The obvious question is, yeah, you and what army?
Because the International Criminal Court isn't a real thing.
Here's a colorful map of the countries who have ratified the treaty that sets it up.
Green are the countries that have ratified it.
About 120 countries have ratified it, but you'll notice not the United States or Russia or China or India or Saudi Arabia, just to name a few countries.
So my point is, yeah, good luck with that, guys.
And that's my point.
How could you even sue a foreign country?
There's no global court.
China already controls much of the United Nations, like the World Health Organization.
China has a veto on the United Nations Security Council.
How are you going to sue China?
Where?
Not in their own courts, of course.
China's courts are not independent.
They are agents of the Communist Party.
Remember, those are the people who themselves participated in the doctor silencing.
And then there's the concept, and I think it's generally a good one, of sovereign immunity.
Sort of like diplomatic immunity, but applies to whole countries.
You can't just sue a country you don't like.
We generally accept that we handle other countries through diplomacy or, God forbid, war, not in courtrooms.
For some of the reasons I mentioned above, we can put sanctions on other countries.
We can even do what Trump is so good at using the bully pulpit, using Twitter to push and cajole and morally punish in a way other countries simply, you know, through his rhetoric.
I think Trump does that very well.
Don't deny that it works.
So back to the big question today, can we sue China?
If they were a company, the answer would obviously be yes.
At the very least, they were negligent with this virus.
They were not careful enough.
They did not live up to their duty of care, as lawyers would say.
They were willfully blind to the risks.
They had an obligation to take reasonable precautions.
They did not.
But it's much more than just negligence.
It was intentional.
When you get into a car accident because of careless driving, because you were playing with the radio or something, you generally didn't take positive steps to crash into someone else.
You were just foolish or careless.
But China went beyond an accident when it deliberately covered up the virus and deliberately took steps to silence the conscientious doctors of Wuhan who were trying to ring the alarm.
There were many good people in Wuhan trying to help, trying to stop the virus, trying to ask questions, to learn more, to help, to warn others.
The Chinese government deliberately and actively shut them down.
That wasn't an accident or carelessness like most car accidents.
Using the car crash analogy, that's not dozing off at the wheel or even driving drunk.
That's taking your car and deliberately ramming it into people to shut them up.
The arrest of China literally, the government of China literally arrested people who were trying to warn us.
What if it were a private company that did that?
Either negligently or willfully?
Well, we have lots of precedents.
One of them, a big one, is the 1998 master settlement agreement with the cigarette companies.
There had been a lot of individual lawsuits by states and the feds against cigarette companies for years.
What did those companies know about the health effects?
What did they hide?
What was important?
What wasn't?
What did they cover up?
Did they lie?
In 1998, Bill Clinton and the U.S. states came to terms.
A 25-year, $200 billion settlement, $200 billion.
The companies weren't shut down.
The payment is over time.
Obviously, if it weren't, the companies wouldn't have been able to pay.
They'd just have all gone bankrupt.
So it's an extended period payment period.
You could call it a massive tax increase, I guess, because that's pretty much what it is.
But it was, at least legally, compensation for past conduct about health.
There were also agreements about not selling smokes to kids.
But look, it's a fact.
Since the 1960s, the Surgeon General had warned against smoking.
No one alive in America or Canada doesn't know that smoking is bad for you.
Everyone knows the risks and everyone chose to smoke anyways.
But still, the company's made a huge settlement, $200 billion.
That's a fifth of a trillion dollars.
Now, smoking is a choice.
It's not foisted on you.
There are very few public places anymore where you encounter smoke if you don't want to.
So it was all voluntarily.
Anyone who got sick from smoking pretty much did so consensually.
Just like anyone who gets fat from eating cheesecake or gets drunk from drinking liquor.
You really weren't tricked or trapped or surprised.
You really can't sue the fork makers that you used that fork for the cheesecake or the shot glass that you used to drink the liquor.
Unlike the virus, there was no voluntariness there.
There was no joint negligence, as a lawyer would say.
We're not partially to blame for contracting this virus.
They did this to us, they, the Chinese government, by covering it up, by lying, by letting their people travel around the world, by arresting the whistleblowers.
And don't get me started, if the virus itself was a Chinese creation, but we don't know that.
But what we do know is surely enough, but what should we do about it?
Judgment Against Nations00:09:00
Before he was president, Donald Trump mused about offsetting Chinese industrial espionage against America's national debt.
As you know, America has borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars from China.
America owes that money to China, but then China went and stole hundreds of billions of dollars worth of intellectual and industrial secrets from America.
Trump's suggestion was, well, let's call it even.
Write off the debt, and that's, you know, because you stole stuff from it.
And that's mainly posturing and rhetorical, but it made a point.
Okay, but what about now?
The shutdown, and we don't know how long this shutdown is going to go on for, has already knocked trillions of dollars out of the stock market.
That means anyone who has a retirement plan, a pension plan just got poorer, and we haven't even seen the economic devastation from the layoffs from restaurants and movie theaters and amusement parks and the travel industry, tourism.
I flew from Toronto to Calgary and back the other week and the plane was just over the weekend actually, and the plane was three-quarters empty.
Think of all the little companies who support just that one industry, travel.
We're absolutely going to be heading into a recession because China lied and covered up the risk.
So can we sue for our damages?
Well, there have been lawsuits against countries before.
Just last month, lawyers here in Canada filed a lawsuit against Iran for shooting down that passenger plane this year.
They're suing for $1.5 billion Canadian dollars.
Let me quote from the story.
The suit names Iran, its supreme leader, the elite Revolutionary Guards, and others as defendants.
Iran admitted its missiles down the Ukrainian airliner by mistake on January 8th, killing all 176 people aboard, including 57 Canadians.
The lead plaintiff in the case is anonymous, primarily, preliminarily identified as John Doe, and described as immediate family to a victim identified as Jack Doe.
So you can imagine a lawsuit filed on behalf of anyone who got ill from the virus or the family of someone who died from the virus because of that Chinese virus.
And look at this.
Jonah Arnold is co-lead counsel with his father, Mark Arnold, who has represented clients in several suits against Iran, including a 2017 appeal decision that led to seizure of some Iranian assets in Canada.
Okay, so hang on, how did that work?
How did those victims of terrorism get a ruling, a judgment, and then actually use it to seize Iranian assets?
What about that sovereign immunity we talked about?
Well, that's fairly new here.
There's a change that was brought in by Stephen Harper that Justin Trudeau has not managed to repeal yet.
And we quote, foreign states are not typically within the jurisdiction of Canadian courts.
A 2012 Canadian law limited that immunity for countries Ottawa lists as foreign state supporters of terrorism, currently Iran and Syria.
So that was the wrinkle there.
Iran is liable in Canadian courts for terrorist acts because they are a terrorist state.
And look at this story here.
Sudan says it has signed a deal to settle claims related to the bombing of the USS Coal 20 years ago, a move that could end lawsuits filed by victims and their families and also improve Sudan's chances of getting off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Sudan's transitional government has made it a priority to get off that punitive list since it took charge last spring.
So that was 20 years ago, the USS Cole.
And Sudan, of course, is a terrorist state.
There were some technical problems with the lawsuit.
I won't get into them.
American courts said the lawsuit had to be served on the Sudanese government in Sudan, not just their embassy in America.
But nonetheless, the new government wants to clear it up and get back in America's good books.
Another U.S. judge awarded the victims about a third of a billion dollars.
They want to pay it and get over it.
But a dozen years ago, I don't know if you remember, Muammar Gaddafi paid out $10 million each to the victims of his terrorism, a bombing of a nightclub, bombing of a passenger jet over Lockerbie.
Now, I'm not an expert in suing sovereign states, very unique area of law.
You can sue, I guess.
You can even win a judgment.
The hard part is collecting the money.
You could seize assets in Canada or America, but not diplomatic assets, remember?
And again, it's one thing to have a piece of paper that says a foreign entity wronged you and owes you millions or billions of dollars or a trillion dollars, but now try to collect.
Even Canadian-American judges will be very careful not to violate the concept of sovereign immunity because that's our law.
And of course, we need to protect our Canadian property around the world too.
We wouldn't want foreign litigants suing our government and collecting against Canadian government assets overseas.
So there is a precedent to collect against governments, the Iran case, but mainly, if my cursory review of these few cases is accurate, it's only when the government on the other side agrees to finally pay up.
Usually, like all of international law, it's like what Stalin said about the Pope.
When the Pope expressed in a political opinion, Stalin said, how many divisions does the Pope have?
As in military divisions, you and me might say, you and what army.
You will not likely collect a judgment against China for inflicting the virus on the world, even though they certainly seem to be negligent or worse, probably criminal.
Because they're a country, not a company, not an individual.
They don't, on the face of it, meet the test of being a terrorist supporting country like Iran and Sudan and Afghanistan was.
And when Trump joked about setting off China's stolen intellectual property from American debt, he was speaking dramatically, not literally.
But what if?
What if an American court issued a trillion dollar judgment against China and that judgment was respected and respectable, but maybe not enforceable?
Is it still worth doing?
Maybe Because, although enforcing a judgment against a country wouldn't be like we'd enforce a judgment against a debtor in Canada, you can't, you have a debt, someone owes you money in Canada, you seize his car, you foreclose on his house, you garnish his wages from his employer.
While getting a trillion dollars for China couldn't be done forcibly like that against their will, it could happen like it happened with Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, or how Sudan is looking to make things right.
If there was a trillion dollar judgment against China, China could certainly afford to pay it.
They have trillions of dollars in foreign currency reserves.
In fact, China is probably the only country in the world that could pay for it in cash.
And if a handful of tobacco companies could pay a fifth of a trillion dollars on a payment plan, China could be put on a payment plan too for trillions.
So how would that work?
Well, China wants things from the West that they have simply been given, historically, out of naivete or out of goodwill, access to our markets, access to international treaties and courtesies like World Trade Organization, participation in things like the G20 summits, a seat on the UN Security Council, participation in the Olympics, participation in many things that are soft, that are voluntary, because they're part of the Brotherhood of Nations.
But their misconduct of these past few months shows they're not acting in good faith.
So why should they be given those privileges?
Why should they be treated any better than any rogue states?
Iran and Sudan are awful places, but when did they ever kill thousands of Americans and Canadians as is likely going to happen and cost trillions of dollars as is happening?
China is beyond negligent.
This goes to intentionality.
It's positively criminal what they did.
It was willful what they did.
They hid the facts.
China damaged all of us as individuals, some more than others.
China should pay those reparations.
Reparations, that's the word.
Like Germany paid reparations to Israel at the Holocaust, like descendants of American slaves seek reparations.
And many Democratic politicians in America agree, by the way.
Why not Chinese reparations?
Sue in court, pass a law, and wait to collect.
Maybe China needs sanctions on them first.
Maybe that'll be bartered away.
Maybe China needs to be kicked out of polite society first.
Maybe it needs an adjustment.
The Soviet Union wasn't invited into the G7 until it became a democracy.
And then after Putin became authoritarian, he was kicked out of what was called the G8.
Why is China in the G20?
Why is China in anything, let alone in our technology, in our media, seeking to build our 5G cell phone systems?
Reparations.
If America did this grievous harm to any other country in the world, America would pay damages.
There are a dozen cases of such reparations for American negligence around the world.
It's not even rare.
It's rare for China because no one has ever stood up to them before.
Maybe it's time now.
Why The Media Flipped On Cuomo00:05:46
Stay with us for more on this with Joel Pollack.
I mean, look, this is just coming back to where this conversation started after the press conference.
I hear what Sanjay is saying about Tony Fauci giving, you know, a little bit more wiggle room than others.
But if you look at the big picture, this was remarkable from the president of the United States.
This is a nonpartisan.
This is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint, from a human standpoint.
He is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today and yesterday, in tone that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty.
There you have it, Dana Bash of CNN.
Her last name, Bash, it's almost like Shakespeare would say, what's in a name?
She bashes Trump every day, but look at her there.
And she went on in that vein for quite some time, saying the president has risen to the occasion and is uniting Americans and giving people that feeling that he's in charge and doing the right thing.
It's almost like it's opposite day to hear that from CNN.
Well, joining us now via Skype from his home in the Los Angeles area is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
I have to say, first it was Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, then Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, two very Democratic states, now Dana Bash.
These people do not praise Donald Trump easily or lightly, yet all three of them have.
Right.
And it's not just the praise that any president would get.
I think there's a natural tendency to pull together, but Democrats and the media had been moving in the opposite direction for quite some time.
In fact, the dominant theme in media coverage up until about a week ago was an attempt to blame Donald Trump for mishandling the coronavirus outbreak, even though he imposed a travel ban very early, even though he assembled a task force in January.
Of course, they were busy impeaching Trump in January and February, so that certainly impeded things.
Try to imagine the outcry if Donald Trump had gone on television in late January and said he had to dismiss Congress for the sake of their own health because of a potential pandemic as they were trying to throw him out of office.
That wouldn't have gone over too well.
So our political system in our media basically made it more difficult for us to respond in a timely manner, and they continued in that vein for many days.
But then Gavin Newsom came out from California and he said, president's done everything we've asked him to do.
Andrew Cuomo from New York acknowledged the president, but then took a few jigs at him, saying that the administration felt chaotic or had a chaotic approach.
Trump then smacked him down to some extent.
And that stopped right away.
That sort of commentary stopped because the feeling was, I think, not just politically, but in terms of the spirit of the country, this sort of fight was not necessary.
We did not need governors to be rebuking the president.
We needed them to be helping.
The media tried to play up Andrew Cuomo for a day or so as the alternative national leader to Trump.
And when Cuomo fell in line, that basically ended that.
By Wednesday evening, you even saw Ilan Omar, who is an avowed opponent of the president, called very early on for his impeachment.
She's on the far radical left.
She's a member of the squad.
She said that his leadership had been incredible.
Oh, that is shocking to hear coming from her.
She hates Trump in her DNA.
I would say she hates America.
To call Trump incredible, I had not even heard that.
Yeah, she had praised the president on Wednesday evening after he announced that there would be a moratorium on foreclosures and rental payments and extension of tax deadlines.
The Trump administration has come in with a raft of relief measures aimed directly at working Americans.
This is a contrast to the Wall Street bailout of late 2008.
Now, you can argue that bailout was necessary because that was a financial crisis.
This is not a financial crisis.
The banks are very healthy right now, thanks to a decade, really, of restructuring and buildup of capital reserves, economic growth, both under Obama and especially under Trump.
So everything is actually in place that needs to be in place financially for the system to keep functioning.
That's different from 2008.
But also in 2008, The Bush administration and backed by John McCain and Barack Obama went straight to Wall Street with the bailout and offered liquidity into the financial markets.
You can argue whether that was necessary or not, but it never really made its way down to Main Street.
The Trump administration is taking on ideas from Democrats like Andrew Yang and saying, at least as an emergency measure, we're going to give cash payments to Americans just to keep the flow of money going because a lot of people may miss paychecks.
People are worried about being able to pay their bills.
Essentially, the administration has said, we're going to put all that on hold while we recover as a country.
This is nobody's fault.
This is not the result of a bad business decision.
There's no moral hazard.
There's no risk that we're rewarding bad behavior by giving people money, by helping small business and so forth.
This is the result of government decisions to shut down the economy so government is going to provide compensation.
Jobs Adapt In Crisis00:04:06
And to bring together people like Tom Cotton on the conservative right and Elon Omar on the radical left, that tells you something about how this administration is moving forward.
So they are picking up more and more political support by the hour.
You know, we've talked before.
I mean, sometimes I've used the phrase blue-collar billionaire.
There's that new book, The Republican Workers' Party.
I think Trump understands more than most traditional Republicans that supporting individual Americans, and up here, I would say individual Canadians, is more politically successful and in the end may be more a smarter policy than bailing out the banks.
I think that globalist worldview of the banks will take care of everything, free trade without any balance is fine.
I think Trump gets it as much as any Democrat does, that those ideas have been somewhat discredited either by themselves or by, well, frankly, if you look at the mood in America from Bernie Sanders to AOC, this anti-Wall Street, anti-capitalist theme, I think Trump's working around that.
I think it's impressive.
I think it's politically smart, and I think it's probably necessary.
It is necessary.
The other thing that's happening is that private sector companies, individuals, everyone's stepping forward to figure out what they can do to help.
The delivery services that people use to pick up lunch when they're at the office, those are now essential lifelines to people who cannot get to the grocery store or are afraid to leave their homes.
The delivery services are innovating.
They're bringing food to people.
You're looking at medicine, pharmaceutical companies that are coming up with vaccines and alternative off-label treatments.
There are all kinds of internet teleconferencing companies.
Zoom, for example, has seen a massive increase in interest and use over the last couple of weeks.
People are working from home using all these new applications.
So there are many industries that are suffering.
I saw an estimate that said upwards of 4 million jobs in the American travel industry could be lost as a result of all these quarantines, depending on how long they go.
But you're also seeing new jobs created in other industries.
There's heavy demand for cleaners right now.
People who can clean an office, people who can clean a home, can disinfect a surface.
Very, very high demand.
There's also incredible demand for people who specialize in handling infectious disease.
I happened to be on the New England Journal of Medicine website last night and a widget came up advertising jobs and everybody's looking for infectious disease specialists.
There are people putting their minds to work on trying to manufacture ventilators as fast as they possibly can to deal with an expected influx into hospitals.
So there's this tremendous flourishing of private sector activity that's being coordinated with the government that's being done in public-private partnerships and is being done in a very positive spirit.
This is not the private industry trying to make a buck off a national crisis.
This is everybody stepping up in their jobs to do what they can to help one another in a time when we can't really contact one another too directly.
You go to the grocery store, you see a few neighbors, take a walk around the block or whatever.
That's about the extent of it.
So it's presenting new challenges, but it's fortunate in a way that we have existing infrastructure and technology that we can use to build out to sustain us for as long as we need to.
The only challenge really is whether the tech infrastructure holds up.
And Ajit Pai, the Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, has started a project to strengthen the nation's broadband to make sure that there's not too much strain put on the system to build the capacity of the system because of course the internet's become so much more essential for the functioning of the country.
I heard today that Netflix is being asked or is asking consumers to stream just a little bit less because you want people to be able to work without interruption.
False Racism Punishments00:15:38
So your entertainment at home might have to be curtailed a little bit.
You might not be able to binge watch that episode of Game of Thrones right now.
Maybe wait till later at night when people aren't busy working and using the internet for vital services.
So you're seeing everybody pull together, everybody make sacrifices.
And as that happens, the president's leadership is becoming more important because he's, in a sense, the conductor.
He's not playing any musical instruments, but he's there with the baton, making sure that everybody can do their best.
And you're seeing a symphony, a kind of harmony of American efforts come together.
You know, you're so right.
And every day I see Trump making a new announcement of which CEOs he was talking to.
And, you know, Trump, people make fun of him, people criticize him, but you can see when he's buttering someone up and you can see when he's disparaging someone.
And he uses those very simple and blunt instruments to get what he wants.
And I mean, he is the ultimate deal maker.
He wrote a book, The Art of the Deal.
He loves making deals.
And I actually think he is the best fit every time there's a new industry group, the truckers, the grocery stores.
Yesterday, he was getting all the TV bosses to agree to run tons and tons of public health ads for free.
And maybe they would have on their own, but he pressed them.
And you know that he is a tougher negotiator than, say, Barack Obama.
You just know it.
And it's a pleasure to watch him twist the arms of all these corporate CEOs day after day because you know he's getting something out of them.
And maybe they would have given it voluntarily.
But when Trump calls and says, be on my phone call, they come and he gets what he wants.
I think it's quite impressive to watch.
It is impressive.
I think that Obama had other skills.
I'm not sure that any other president would have had the skill set necessary for this crisis.
And you're right.
We've seen the media go from telling us that Trump didn't have the skills to manage this to suddenly realizing that he does.
And you see that especially with regard to the confrontation with China.
You know, the Chinese government's trying to circulate a rumor, a conspiracy theory, that the American military created coronavirus.
And Trump, who initially was simply calling it coronavirus, has now started calling it the Chinese virus.
And our media initially accused him of racism, but he explained twice at his press briefings, the reason he did that had nothing to do with prejudice whatsoever.
He did it as a response to China so that people know where the disease originated.
It's nobody's fault, really, that this virus came into being.
But Trump wants people to know that it started in China and that China's efforts to deflect responsibility to the United States are not going to succeed.
Yeah, and that's exactly that style.
He does tit.
If someone is nice to him, he's super easy.
He's over-nice when someone does something for him.
And so you can tell when he's hyping praise on these business leaders, you can tell he got something from them.
But the minute someone shoots at him, it's like that old peanuts cartoon where, you know, Charlie Brown would throw one snowball and Lucy would throw back five.
That's Trump's style, is massive retaliation.
So some Chinese diplomat, no name nobody, tweets in English a conspiracy theory that the U.S. military does this, you're darn straight.
Trump is going to repeat endlessly Chinese virus because that's how Trump plays.
You work with and you get ahead.
And you need a tough guy like that if you've got a tough problem like this.
Yeah, and there's another point about that worth emphasizing.
If Trump had been the kind of person who wilts at an accusation of racism, he never would have followed through with the travel ban.
When he imposed the travel ban with China, Joe Biden called it racist and xenophobic.
Now, most people don't want to be called racist and xenophobic, and most Republicans bend over backwards to show that they're not, because they accept implicitly the media's and the Democrats' assumption that if you are for free markets and small government, you must be somehow racist because somehow that hurts people of color or whatever.
Trump doesn't care.
Trump does not care about being called a racist.
He is called a racist all the time, and he perseveres nonetheless.
Had he been the kind of president who backs down when accused of bigotry or xenophobia, he never would have insisted on that travel ban.
And as a result, there would have been many more travelers from China, from Europe also, coming into the country and spreading this virus unintentionally, but it would have been a much bigger problem.
So it tells you there's a real cost in human lives to false accusations of racism and xenophobia.
And you needed a president who would stand up to that sort of false accusation.
Otherwise, people would have died.
And we would have lost a lot of time.
We would have been in a much worse state than we are had he backed down.
Now, even saying that, I think the resistance he did get from people over the policy did cause him to take stock and perhaps see if this could be managed some other way.
But certainly having someone there who would not back down, again, and they were saying this was xenophobia, this was casting aspersions on Chinese Americans somehow.
It had nothing to do with that, but that's what the opposition were saying.
That's what some public health experts were saying.
We don't want to stigmatize people and so forth.
The WHO was saying it.
Trump stood up to that.
You needed someone who is not going to be phased by false accusations of racism.
There's a human cost to those false accusations, not just in terms of the person who's falsely accused.
But you may miss an opportunity to do what's right in terms of public policy if you're afraid of offending people.
Trump is not afraid to offend people.
His job is to keep us safe.
Yeah.
Well, I should tell you, Joel, I have made a personal project of tracking all the Chinese flights into Canada, which are still coming in, by the way, at least five a day between Vancouver and Toronto.
In fact, there's another flight from Shanghai that's about to land in Toronto as you and I conduct this interview.
So I don't know what Trudeau is worried about.
Maybe he's worried about being called racist.
Maybe he just believes so deeply in open borders.
It's shocking to me.
Let me ask you one last question.
I appreciate your time.
I see, I mean, I've been thinking, yesterday we had a guest on, former Canadian, very senior lawyer, who talked about suing China.
Now, obviously, top priority is public health and the economy, but the idea of suing a foreign sovereign nation is very difficult to do.
And traditionally, it's only done to terrorist states, Iran, Sudan, because otherwise sovereign immunity protects those foreign states, as it probably should.
But there was a $200 billion tobacco settlement with American companies for maybe covering up health records of tobacco.
Do you think that whether it's by lawsuit or reparations or political demands that America and the West will ever get some sort of compensation, not for the virus itself, which you correctly point out probably emerged naturally, but for the cover-up and the delay and the disinformation from the Chinese government that allowed that virus to propagate very widely?
Do you think that's something that would or should be followed through on whether it's three, six, nine, 12 months from now?
I don't see how it's productive.
I think that reparations, when you're trying to overcome an international crisis, can simply build up resentment.
We saw that, of course, 100 years ago with the Treaty of Versailles.
It certainly didn't help prevent the next war.
I think that China is its own worst enemy and that the best way to punish China is already happening.
People are pulling companies out of China.
They're pulling production out of China.
We are pulling our pharmaceutical industry out of China.
The United States realizes now that we cannot rely on China for ingredients in essential medicines.
We are pulling production back.
It's going to be a very painful process for the Chinese.
That is the cost they are paying for failing to protect the world's supply lines.
The supply chain of the world depends on China not allowing things like this to happen.
You want production in China to be inexpensive, not costly.
This is the single greatest cost that the world has absorbed since the Second World War.
And it's a punishment in itself to China.
I don't see how making China pay anything would help.
It'll just exacerbate tensions.
We still need to cooperate with them.
This was a legitimate objection, one of the few, but one of the legitimate objections to the travel ban back in January was we don't want to antagonize the Chinese.
We still need their data to fight the virus.
We hadn't sequenced the genome of the coronavirus RNA.
We needed to know what was in the virus in order to start working on a vaccine.
You can't do that if the Chinese government's not sharing data with you.
So you still need cooperation.
The Chinese scientists have given pretty good data to American scientists.
It's one of the reasons we knew about some of the early mitigation measures.
All of these things are important.
I think that there's a lot of casting about for some, not a scapegoat so much, but just a kind of media narrative.
A lot of people want to keep doing what they were doing before, and a lot of that is involved or tied up in political arguments.
I get that.
I'm tied up in some of them.
Some of them are important.
But we have to focus on what exactly the problem is with China.
China is not trying to destroy the rest of the world.
China wants to dominate the world.
And the big penalty they're going to pay is production moving out of China.
It's not really reparations.
It's, in a sense, the opposite.
We're denying them money.
We're denying them prosperity rather than demanding that they pay us because of the way they mismanaged this outbreak.
There's all kinds of stories coming out now about how they could have isolated it, they could have confined it.
People involved in passing information of the chain were punished.
By the way, that's been a feature of the Chinese system since the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s when Mao tried to accelerate agricultural production and plunged his, sorry, it was steel production.
And he plunged his country into famine because he was forcing farmers to turn their steel implements into steel nuggets or metal nuggets that were supposed to boost steel production but ended up starving the countryside.
Tens of millions of people died.
And the information never got to Mao.
The Chinese Communist Party planted crops along the train tracks so that when he traveled through China, all he saw were fertile fields.
And that's how China has worked.
That's why China has suffered famine after famine over the years.
Not recently, thankfully, but over the decades, the Chinese Communist Party, because of the way it operates, has imposed incredible hardship on its people.
And this coronavirus outbreak emphasizes the point that free societies, although they have certain vulnerabilities, free societies do better at adjusting and innovating to challenges.
And China's biggest punishment is to continue running under Communist Party leadership.
Joel, I really learned so much from you.
Let me ask one last question to you.
I don't know if you watched HBO's series, Chernobyl.
Have you watched that at all?
You probably don't have time for TV.
I watched it.
I know of it.
I haven't watched it, but I know about the series.
I only watched it because I was stuck on planes for so long for a while there.
And I found it riveting, even though I knew how the story ended.
It was fairly historically accurate, but it impressed on me just what you're saying.
The deception, the scapegoating, the hiding the truth, the saving faith.
If you think saving face was important for Russian and Ukrainian communists 40 years ago, 30 years ago, imagine how important it is for Chinese communists who have that extra sort of Confucian face-saving instinct.
I believe, having had my memory refreshed by what happened in Chernobyl by this fairly accurate mini-series, that more than any other thing, perhaps more than Reagan's arms buildup, perhaps more than the war in Afghanistan, I truly believe that Chernobyl is what undid the former Soviet Union.
Do you think it's possible or even likely that this disaster could be the undoing of Chinese communism?
I don't think so.
I don't think China is a country that is historically prone to free and democratic governance.
If you read the Analects of Confucius, which, you know, I happen to do in Europe, no, I took a course in it in college.
One of the benefits of the Harvard Core curriculum, you know, you had to learn from a variety of sources.
And so I chose actually at the time in the late 90s to study Chinese philosophy just on a lark.
And the central preoccupation of Confucian philosophy is governing a society, how to govern a society.
And given the size of China, even thousands of years ago, which was a vast, densely populated place, The difficulty of managing that society is absolutely paramount in the minds of the people, the thought leaders in that society.
It's part of Chinese culture, the task of governing.
And it's not how we in the West think about our lives.
If you think about the Judeo-Christian ethic, the individual has an inherent integrity that it doesn't have in any other system of philosophy.
The central preoccupation of our lives is how we each can live the best life, whether that's morally the best, economically the best, sort of the happiest life, whatever it is.
We're trying to make our own lives as good as they possibly can be.
Again, morally or hedonistically or whatever.
In China, the central philosophical occupation is not how to be happy or how to be good, but how to govern.
And I first was exposed to that also in college when Chinese environmental problems started becoming a topic of conversation.
And we had a Chinese environmental official visiting campus, and we had an opportunity to ask him questions, which is not something that happens too often in China, that you get to ask an official, a high official, a direct question.
So we used that opportunity.
And I remember asking him, what are you doing about all this local pollution in China?
Thinking that his response would be something like, well, we're going to clean it up.
We're going to adopt new methods of production.
We're trying to mitigate some of it.
No, that's not what he said at all.
He said, we're going to punish those responsible.
China's Governance Dilemma00:06:03
That is a cultural reaction.
It's not just a communist.
There's an element of communism in that too, of course.
But China is preoccupied with governing.
It's also an intensely nationalistic society, even though it's run by the Communist Party.
There's a nationalism with that communism.
And I just can't see Chinese society disintegrating.
If anything, China will invent some sort of national myth about how it's the unique ingenuity of the Chinese people acting collectively that enabled the world to overcome this disease.
The history of how this escaped China and went everywhere else will be obscured.
And a couple years from now, no one in China will remember it.
And if you bring it up that way, people will accuse you of anti-Chinese racist prejudice.
They're doing that already.
So I can't see China falling apart.
There's a cultural, I think, predilection in China for governing.
And by the way, it persists even in a relatively free society like Taiwan.
I mean, Taiwan's a free, open democracy and so forth.
But Taiwan was able to adopt disciplines for dealing with this disease very, very quickly.
It's one of the reasons Taiwan reacted so well, so successfully.
And that's harder to replicate in a place like Italy.
It's also hard in South Korea.
It's hard in Israel.
It's hard in the United States.
The freer the society, the more resistant people are to giving up private personal information, to being told what to do.
So there's diversity within Asian cultures.
There's diversity around the world.
But Chinese culture tends to emphasize that.
And I think that you're not going to see a disillusion.
Contrast that to Iran.
Iran is in big trouble because the government there has been completely inept, incapable of responding.
And Iran historically also has been a monarchical society, Persian society and so forth, plus Islamic civilization grafted onto the underlying Persian civilization.
You have, in a sense, culturally a preference for strong leadership, but you also have a pattern of revolution when the leadership is weak.
And as soon as people come out of their homes in Iran, once the quarantines are over and they need people to go back to work, you're going to see protest.
The government looks completely incapable of governing.
It failed the basic task of governance.
The Iranian people now know that their leaders cannot protect them and that their disastrous foreign policy has resulted in sanctions that have crippled the ability of their society to sustain itself without help from the outside world.
Iran is toast, at least the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people.
And China will be fine politically, for better or for worse.
There'll be lots of rivalry with the rest of the world, a lot of friction, more so than in the past.
And that may be a good thing.
Iran, I think, and I don't make predictions very successfully, but I think Iran is ripe for revolution, and we may see very dramatic changes in the Middle East as a result of coronavirus.
Wow, that's incredible.
Joel, you're very generous with your time.
Thanks for letting us reach into your social distancing base camp there at your house.
Stay healthy, stay safe.
As always, we learn so much from you.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Thank you.
And good luck to you guys up there.
Thanks very much.
Well, there you have it.
Our friend Joel Pollack.
Isn't that very interesting, eh?
I certainly learned a lot today.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my show yesterday about the Chinese coronavirus.
Paul writes, the Chinese government cares about the Chinese government and very little else.
The American government is taking action.
The Trio liberals care about pleasing their UN globalist masters and nothing else.
It's very strange to watch Justin Trudeau.
To me, the perfect comparison is Donald Trump gets on the phone with the biggest CEOs in America of various industries, trucking, restaurants, groceries, media, and he twists their arm until they squawk and give billions or tens of billions of dollars worth of service or changes.
He just calls them, gets it done.
Trudeau, I showed you yesterday.
He literally put up a help-wanted website.
Hey guys, can you sell us some masks and gloves?
There's such a difference in leadership, eh?
It's almost like Trudeau's never done anything in his life.
Tyson writes, I think the good that will come from all this is the realization that the Chinese government is extremely corrupt, not the Chinese people.
Well, it's true.
There were heroes.
There were doctors in Wuhan that believe in the Hippocratic oath, do no harm.
Do no harm.
Think about it.
So there was this virus that was starting to spread like wildfire.
What does do no harm mean?
Well, it means stop other people from being infected.
They were arrested for that.
So obviously there were good people there.
Unfortunately, the good people don't run China.
Yang Xin writes, I think that it would be more precise to call it a CPC, Communist Party of China virus.
You know that the CPC has ruled China for 70 years and the Chinese people are victims too.
Yes, I know.
And as Joel Pollock pointed out, tens of millions, in fact, I heard that Mao is responsible for close to 60 million deaths of his fellow Chinese people.
So he's Chinese himself, obviously.
I don't think in history there has ever been a virus that killed 50 million.
Like that's on the scale of the plague, the Black Death.
50 million, and who knows what the true numbers are now.
I follow some sort of renegade Chinese commentators who are publishing videos of giant burning pits in China.
Now, what is that?
I have no idea.
Are they burning bodies?
That's the thing.
You can't really know because there's no free press allowed there in China.