April 25, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| The reason Taiwan knew about this was because there were Taiwanese doctors who had heard from their mainland colleagues that the medical staff in Wuhan were getting sick. | ||
| So that's how you know human-to-human transmission is occurring. | ||
| It's when, you know, it's not animal-to-person, but person-to-person, the patients are transferring it to the doctors. | ||
| So Taiwan reports this, and it takes Weeks before, you know, I think on the 14th of January, you still had that famous tweet by the WHO saying there's still no evidence of human to human transmission. | ||
| two weeks after Taiwan told them that there was. | ||
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| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Reminder, everybody, you can get all of our full episodes absolutely ad-free, five full days early at rubinreport.com. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today is the managing director of Ideas Beyond Borders, as well as the New York editor for Spectator Magazine, Melissa Chen. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi, Dave. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I cannot believe that this is your first solo appearance on The Rubin Report. | ||
| You were on the show way back when, when we were on Aura TV, that's something like 20, 25 years ago, I think at this point, with our friend Faisal Amroutar, who's your cohort at Ideas Beyond Borders. | ||
| There's a ton I want to talk to you about, of course, but can you just very quickly, who is Melissa Chen? | ||
| How did you get to The Rubin Report? | ||
| Well, I have to thank you for having me on again, because that last time, when I did it with Faisal, I had the worst hair possible. | ||
| I was, for some reason, identifying as a male K-pop star, and I don't know what was going on, so I'm thankful to have another chance to show what it actually can look like, potentially. | ||
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Yes, your hair is looking very luxurious, by the way. | |
| Which is hard to do when there's no barber, okay? | ||
| I'll put that out there. | ||
| So my name is Melissa, and I now also am a journalist. | ||
| I write for Spectator, which is a British magazine, and I also run a non-profit organization called Ideas Beyond Borders, together with Faisal Almutar, who's a dear friend of both me and Dave's for a long time. | ||
| I grew up in Singapore. | ||
| So, you know, I only came to the US when I was about 17, came for college, loved the experience of living in a place with so much civil liberties. | ||
| And, you know, I guess I stayed after college. | ||
| I have actually a background in computational biology. | ||
| That was my degree. | ||
| And like a good Asian or a bad Asian, I guess, I'm not using my degree. | ||
| And I ended up running a non-profit and, you know, writing. | ||
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So that's how I got here. | |
| Yeah, all right, very good. | ||
| Let's just quickly recap a little bit about what you guys are doing with Ideas Beyond Borders, and then I wanna focus more on what you've been doing related to coronavirus, some interesting stuff in New York City, trying to get people supplies, and you have some knowledge on what's going on with China and the rest of it. | ||
| But just tell everybody a little bit about Ideas Beyond Borders. | ||
| Because before corona, there was a whole other world out there, and you guys were doing some really great stuff, and continue to do. | ||
| Right, I mean, it's interesting because early, You know, early January of 2020, the focus of this world was on the Middle East, right? | ||
| Right after the whole General Soleimani was killed in Iran, and that was shifting the focus to that part of the world. | ||
| It seemed like a hotspot. | ||
| There were protests going on in Lebanon, in Iraq. | ||
| And so, you know, that seemed like the start of World War III or something, and all of a sudden coronavirus just consumed everything. | ||
| So, Ideas Beyond Borders is a non-profit organization founded by my friend Faisal, who is an Iraqi refugee. | ||
| And what we do is we take ideas that are not available in Arabic, translate them into the language, and make them freely available. | ||
| We focus on ideas about science, about philosophy, and about civil rights. | ||
| Pro-liberty ideas, basically. | ||
| And the idea is just, you know, if you have a heteronormative, heteronormative, sorry, heterodox, you know, if you're exposed to heterodox ideas, that it would challenge people's minds and it will open up dogmatic thinking. | ||
| So that was the reason Ideas Beyond Borders was founded. | ||
| And actually today, Not only have we done a ton of books, Wikipedia articles, we've also done videos, and right now we're actually combating a lot of the misinformation about coronavirus in Arabic, because ever since China released that whole propaganda theory about, you know, the thing about, like, the U.S. | ||
| Army was the one that released the virus. | ||
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That's the kind of, like, conspiracy theories that take root in the Arab world. | |
| That's what they want to believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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All right. | |
| So we're obviously going to focus a lot on that, but very quickly, you mentioned that you grew up in Singapore until you were 16, 17 years old. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about what that was like and why that kind of led you to being someone that actually cares about freedom of expression and open inquiry and all that good liberty stuff that you talk about? | ||
| I mean, Singapore is a great place to grow up in a way. | ||
| It's very stable, very safe, and very affluent as a country. | ||
| Very, very high GDP per capita. | ||
| But the one thing that we didn't have was political freedoms. | ||
| So Singapore is ranked pretty low in terms of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and also very basic things like there's absolutely no freedom to assemble. | ||
| So if you decided to go into a public square and hold a sign that said something like, I don't know, impeach the prime minister or something, or even just against the death penalty, you would be arrested because you didn't get a permit for the protest. | ||
| And that's the kind of very ordered place, very ordered society that it has created. | ||
| But for me, it's always kind of been this thing on my shoulder, kind of weighed down on me that, you know, you couldn't just speak your mind. | ||
| How are we doing with that in America these days? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I knew I wanted to be in a place where this was just not even, | ||
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I didn't have to think about it, that you could just be free, | |
| be free to be yourself. | ||
| So that's why I chose-- | ||
| How are we doing with that in America these days? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Still a lot better, but it's heartbreaking to hear and see that these freedoms are slowly being eroded. | ||
| And willingly, we're doing it to ourselves. | ||
| And it may not be coming from the government, but when you have this kind of mob rule and cancel culture, it is a de facto censorship. | ||
| And it ends up having similar effects on your psyche, on society as a whole. | ||
| And, you know, it kind of like bubbles up. | ||
| But it's still very different. | ||
| I would have to say, you know, like there's a difference between getting disappeared by your government and getting jailed by your government for saying the wrong thing than it is to lose your job, but still sucks. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let's, let's talk a bit about Corona and China and some of the things that you've been doing. | ||
| So first I want to start, you had a tweet thread recently that you found a donor who wanted to put a whole bunch of money to get doctors and nurses. | ||
| Yeah, and he wanted to put money in so that doctors and nurses could get masks. | ||
| That's sort of the short version of it. | ||
| And suddenly you found out that there is a lot of red tape to make what should be simple things happen actually happen. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So, you know, this, what they call personal protective equipment, short of would be PPE, includes masks, gowns, you know, the face shields and everything that healthcare workers really need to use to protect themselves. | ||
| And A lot of people have been talking about, okay, you know what, we were in dire need of this. | ||
| We didn't stockpile, a lot of the hospitals didn't stockpile, the states didn't do it. | ||
| And so, you know, when you have a sudden rush of cases, as you did in New York City, the ICUs were overcapacitated. | ||
| That's when, you know, hospitals realized that Oh, no, we're running out of PPEs very quickly. | ||
| We're just going through them at such a quick rate. | ||
| And it was a huge shortage. | ||
| And it's not just in the United States. | ||
| It's pretty much anywhere else. | ||
| Italy is facing the same problem as well. | ||
| So a very, very kind donor reached out and said, I really want to help. | ||
| He's not the only one. | ||
| There are a lot of people that, you know, I mean, it's one of the best things about America is this ingenuity from just average people who just, you know, when there's a problem, they just step up and want to just contribute somehow. | ||
| And so what I started finding was, okay, I got people saying that, hospitals saying, you know, we need the PPE so badly, healthcare workers are saying the same thing, and then donors are coming forward. | ||
| But then to even make that match happen and get the masks to the people that need them was a complete Kafkaesque nightmare. | ||
| And it's in part due to all the different layers of regulation, starting with, you know, the employers basically said, if you talk to the press or if you post about it on social media, you might get fired. | ||
| And I think there was a case where a doctor in Washington state was fired for basically blabbering about a shortage. | ||
| And then you have the CDC and the WHO saying, you know what, masks are not needed, right? | ||
| This was some rhetoric that's been kind of circulating since the crisis started. | ||
| And that helps hospitals kind of like CYA, you know, cover your ass. | ||
| Because if masks are not needed, then the onus isn't on them to stock up and protect the workers. | ||
| It basically, like, protects them. | ||
| It gives them some liability. | ||
| If, let's say, you die on the job or something, then, you know, it's harder to sue because it's not required, right? | ||
| The CDC just said, you know, you don't really need masks. | ||
| And then you have compliance issues. | ||
| So like the FDA, you know, they need to certify all the incoming, the masks for, you know, does it do what it says it does and everything. | ||
| But then different layers of certification, different agencies have different standards. | ||
| And then you have this like bidding war. | ||
| So like all 50 states are bidding, the feds are bidding for the same You know supply pool and any of NGOs and then you have the global market and we're all just end up bidding against each other just driving the price up. | ||
| And then it's, you know, what should have been done is like, you know, perhaps start off with some sort of like a, all the governors kind of come together to start a consortium and bid, right, against global actors as well. | ||
| And it's just, there's just so much redundancy built into this entire market that it's been so difficult trying to get PPEs to the hospitals. | ||
| I know that a lot of my audience hearing this is gonna go, oh yeah, well of course, I mean regulation, red tape, this is exactly what the government does to get us all in a boondoggle where prices drive up, nobody can get what they want and the rest of it. | ||
| So is the best way to just get rid of all the red tape? | ||
| How do we then make sure that products that actually work are the ones getting to us if there's no regulation whatsoever? | ||
| I'm slightly playing the devil's advocate. | ||
| There's short term, long term issues. | ||
| So one of the stories that came out was this Brooklyn man was apparently hoarding. | ||
| He had started purchasing millions of masks or something and was hoarding a lot of them. | ||
| And we're so concerned about price gouging that if you're an importer here, you don't want to be guilty of price gouging. | ||
| So you don't import the masks because of the price fluctuations and the Feds are going to come after you. | ||
| As they did after this Brooklyn man who basically did nothing wrong except buy a ton of masks and hold on to them. | ||
| That's his property. | ||
| And they came and they seized it. | ||
| And while this is good intention, businesses or people shouldn't be trying to make a profit during a crisis. | ||
| The problem is that the price, when it goes up, is basically an incentive for producers to produce. | ||
| So we should be letting the prices fluctuate, right? | ||
| Because then we can rush to meet the demand. | ||
| And it's one of those, you know, policies or sentiments that just has unintended consequences. | ||
| It sounds good in principle, but it has unintended consequences. | ||
| I think, you know, the short term is we might need to sort of be a bit more protectionist, right? | ||
| I think it made sense to have export controls to prevent our current supply of PPEs leaving the country. | ||
| We should have done that. | ||
| But then in the long term, we have to let the prices, we have to let the market, you know, fluctuate. | ||
| Because it's going to correct itself. | ||
| You know what Facebook did? | ||
| Facebook prevented mask advertisements. | ||
| Because they were concerned about a hoarding issue. | ||
| So they basically said, all right, you can advertise now. | ||
| But then if you were really and you came up with a way to, you know, 3D print a mask, now you can raise money for the Kickstarter. | ||
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So it's really, really shooting ourselves in the foot. | |
| So you mentioned the WHO, the World Health Organization, and the CDC, the Center for Disease Control. | ||
| It seems like in the last month, the messaging out of the WHO specifically has been just absolutely all over the place. | ||
| And, you know, there's some people that say, oh, well, they didn't want to push people into masks sort of for the reasons you're saying, because then regular people who maybe don't need them are going to get all the masks. | ||
| The people who need them won't have access to them. | ||
| But have they as an organization really just kind of flubbed this thing from the beginning? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| There's no question that the WHO has, you know, basically abandoned its duties in so many ways. | ||
| I mean, you can go all the way back to December. | ||
| If you go back to December 30th, that's when China first reported to the WHO that there were these cases, you know, a cluster in Wuhan, about 41 people. | ||
| That was the first time it was reported. | ||
| A day later, on the 31st of January, New Year's Eve, Wuhan basically said, to the WHO. | ||
| Hey, we have heard that this is really serious and that there's human to human transmission. | ||
| This was on the 31st of December. | ||
| And the reason Taiwan knew about this was because there were Taiwanese doctors who had heard from their mainland colleagues that the medical staff in Wuhan were getting sick. | ||
| So that's how you know human to human transmission is occurring. | ||
| It's when, you know, it's not animal to person, but person to person, the patients are transferring it to the doctors. | ||
| So Taiwan reports this. | ||
| And it takes Weeks before, you know, I think on the 14th of January, you still had that famous tweet by the WHO saying there's still no evidence of human-to-human transmission. | ||
| Two weeks after Taiwan told them that there was. | ||
| And this has been the story of how they've handled this. | ||
| They've kowtowed to China. | ||
| Wait, let's just pause there for one sec, though. | ||
| Let's just pause there for one sec. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Like, what do you think structurally, as someone that knows about organizations like this, like, what happened in those two weeks? | ||
| Were they intentionally misleading us? | ||
| Did they just completely drop the ball? | ||
| Was there political pressure? | ||
| Was it, oh, they didn't want to be too alarmist? | ||
| I mean, is it some combination of all of those things? | ||
| No, actually, the problem is that Taiwan doesn't have membership to the WHO. | ||
| So China has very successfully muscled Taiwan out. | ||
| So Taiwan's not recognized as a member. | ||
| And, you know, for Taiwan, that's very dangerous, because, you know, if you don't have that connection to the WHO, you are not plugged into this global health alert system. | ||
| And the global health alert system is not plugged into Taiwan. | ||
| So whatever intel Taiwan had was completely missed. | ||
| And then the worst part for Taiwan is that because China basically muscled them out, when all the other countries were placing travel bans, they were trying to ban people from China traveling to their countries, they inadvertently banned Taiwan because Taiwan was seen as part of China, which is what China wants. | ||
| OK, so The WHO drops the ball, and then we've subsequently seen some other strange tweets, and we've seen some strange statements by some of their representatives. | ||
| Trump was talking about a ban from China back in January, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He instituted the ban, I think, 31st of January. | ||
| That's when the ban actually happened. | ||
| But at the time, the WHO was saying that they shouldn't do it. | ||
| That you shouldn't restrict travel to China. | ||
| And shortly after that, also the Chinese foreign ministry said that they reacted very badly to Trump's ban saying that it was racist and xenophobic to institute the ban. | ||
| Yeah, surprise, surprise. | ||
| So what do you make of the fact that now, because hindsight is 20-20, people are saying, oh, Trump didn't do anything in February. | ||
| Everyone knew that this was gonna happen. | ||
| Trump didn't do anything. | ||
| I checked yesterday, and it turns out that, you know, there was a Democratic debate on February, I think it's 7th, 19th, and 25th. | ||
| None of those debates mentioned anything about coronavirus, oddly, yet the media is now telling us that everybody was talking about all of this stuff in February. | ||
| Oh, nobody went on. | ||
| Could he have done more? | ||
| Should he have done more? | ||
| How do you balance keeping people sane and keeping the economy open versus a potential looming threat? | ||
| All of that. | ||
| I mean, he did suggest that he was somewhat distracted by the impeachment proceedings. | ||
| And for the whole month of February, you did have our journalist class doing one of two things, saying that this was just, you know, kind of the flu, just another flu, or warning people about, you know, that the stigma against Asian Americans was worse than the virus itself. | ||
| And so even on the 9th of February, you had the health officials in New York City saying, come out for a Lunar New Year parade. | ||
| Everything's OK. | ||
| Life is normal. | ||
| You know, stand up to xenophobia and racism. | ||
| So they were still acting as if, understandably, a lot of people miss this. | ||
| You know, it's OK. | ||
| Let's all just party and mix and stand in defiance to this To this virus. | ||
| So, a lot of people missed it, but I read yesterday that on the 29th of January, that Pino Navarro, who was the trade official in Trump's cabinet, actually wrote a memo warning and saying that this virus is the real deal, and there's going to be, you know, at worst, 2 million deaths, at best, 100,000, but we got to act on it. | ||
| And he proposed actually a travel ban. | ||
| Trump said he didn't read the memo, but shortly after, on the 31st, he actually did put down the travel ban. | ||
| That's one of the good things about Trump is that he didn't really care about that. | ||
| And this virus actually really fit in well with his ideological priors for being conservative on immigration and being a bit more nationalistic in terms of trade and engagement. | ||
| America first. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about just like the inner machinations of China? | ||
| Because right now it's like, just in the last few days, we've seen this thing where, you know, U.S. | ||
| cases are spiking, but China is reporting no new cases, no new deaths. | ||
| And it's like, all right, well, and then NBC News will literally make that statement. | ||
| The AP will make that statement. | ||
| And it's like, well, I guess that's sort of reporting in that you're reporting what China's reporting, but that's not really independent reporting. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about how information can or can't travel in China? | ||
| You know, the media's job is to be skeptical. | ||
| And towards that end, they are very skeptical when it comes to reporting about the Trump administration. | ||
| But they're not affording that same approach to the Chinese government, when of all people who you should be skeptical about, it should be numbers that are coming from a very closed authoritarian society. | ||
| And, you know, I don't think I think China has had a history of covering up numbers in general, people are very skeptical about even numbers coming out from their GDP calculations, how they miraculously always meet exactly 6% target, like exact. | ||
| So they have a history of hiding things and the fact that they had no qualms suppressing the whistleblower, censoring their social media. | ||
| Why, you know, why would we not assume that they're covering up their numbers? | ||
| So if we can't trust the numbers that we're getting out of China, and sadly, we can't really trust our own media to report on it properly rather than just regurgitate the numbers, how do we get some sensible information out of China? | ||
| Is there a way to do it that you can truly trust? | ||
| Well, you know, the CIA apparently, they submitted a classified report to the White House. | ||
| Bloomberg reported on it. | ||
| And they actually basically said that they've been trying to verify China's numbers and they were unable to. | ||
| So, you know, apart from intelligence agencies or using some sort of proxy, I think a lot of people saw these videos that were circulated in social media, all the urns that were, you know, going to funeral homes. | ||
| And it didn't seem to match up with what was recorded. | ||
| The problem is that a lot of these videos, once they get posted by citizen journalists on the ground in Wuhan, they end up getting taken down so fast. | ||
| So the information out of China is just unreliable. | ||
| And I mean, unfortunately, the only thing that we have to work with is the numbers they're submitting to the WHO. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit more just generally about our relationship with China, China's sort of geopolitical ambitions and some of the stuff that they've been doing that has kind of led us to this really precarious point? | ||
| Well, China's been on the ascendancy for a long time, ever since Deng Xiaoping instituted market reforms. | ||
| They insist on calling it socialism with Chinese characteristics. | ||
| And that's really just a euphemism for moving it in a more capitalistic direction. | ||
| And it's been slowly liberalizing economically. | ||
| And we've engaged with China since Richard Nixon went in and built that relationship. | ||
| And every president so far has engaged with them. | ||
| We've sort of subscribed to this idea that the more interconnected our markets are | ||
| and the richer China becomes, eventually it's going to liberalize politically as well, | ||
| that you'll see freedoms come in. | ||
| That the average person in China who is more affluent will start demanding | ||
| to have freedom of speech and political freedoms to vote their leaders out. | ||
| And that just hasn't been the case at all. | ||
| And if anything, China has become far more powerful than they've been. | ||
| And they're also growing in their ambitions. | ||
| So you can see this with their military expansions in the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, which is basically this infrastructure project where they signed up all these countries around the world to build infrastructure and that becomes what they call debt trap diplomacy. | ||
| So they're holding them in a way and using that as their economic clout as a way to have leverage on these countries. | ||
| So the Chinese system is really not compatible with the US's vision for the world and also values. | ||
| And I think it's quite clear that we're becoming strategic rivals and that, in fact, there's a good argument to be made also that China is posing a very, you know, possible existential threat to the United States. | ||
| So are you saying that for the two plus years that we were focused on Russia and Ukraine, perhaps we should have been focused elsewhere and that our eye was off the ball because of some other nonsense? | ||
| Is that what you're getting at? | ||
| Well, you know, one of Trump's campaign promises was, you know, he has been talking about China a lot. | ||
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You've seen these clips, like China, when he does that. | |
| That's just a central issue to his platform. | ||
| And he's been talking about it for a long time, that we got a very bad trade deal with them and he was going to come and fix it. | ||
| The problem with his rhetoric was that he sort of talked about it in the sense of making America strong again economically. | ||
| Bringing jobs home. | ||
| But he didn't talk about it, frame it in terms of this geopolitical struggle, which it is. | ||
| Maybe that's because of the need to, you know, to still have some form of relationship and, you know, in real politic with China. | ||
| And that would really offend them. | ||
| But all, you know, China analysts and, you know, people who have been on the ball on this issue have been sounding the alarm for a while. | ||
| Like, you know, it's, Look at how they're able to coerce us, even outside of their own borders, to basically parrot their orthodoxy when it comes to the whole NBA, Hong Kong fiasco, or even what kind of messages are embedded in our movies. | ||
| So you can see that they've been trying to influence from afar. | ||
| How dangerous is it that we owe them a lot of money? | ||
| These are our creditors. | ||
| I'm pretty sure we're never going to pay that money back. | ||
| Where does that put us? | ||
| In a very precarious position. | ||
| But there are also very strong signs that the Chinese economy itself is not very sustainable. | ||
| And that there are issues that, you know, we're just waiting for this bubble to pop. | ||
| You know, being indebted to China obviously is giving us a lot of issues when it comes to leverage. | ||
| And it's also a little bit of an embarrassment that the world's superpowers are unable to have that financial hold over a trading partner that's also a strategic rival. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, Trump has actually ballooned that trait, right, since our deficit, since he came into office. | ||
| And the way this crisis is going to go, that's just gonna get even worse with our economy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not just our economy and our government that's in bed with China, right? | ||
| I mean, we've got, you know, the NBA in bed with China. | ||
| We've got universities in bed with China. | ||
| You know, giant corporations. | ||
| So there's a multi-layered element to this, right? | ||
| And companies too. | ||
| You talked about NBC just now, right? | ||
| NBC's parent company, Comcast, actually had big deals in China. | ||
| They've invested billions of dollars to build a Minion land. | ||
| There's like theme parks. | ||
| I mean, I can't think of anything worse. | ||
| Like to me, that is literally hell. | ||
| It's getting, it's being a Minion land in Beijing. | ||
| So they've invested billions in these theme parks, Harry Potter Village. | ||
| And, you know, you can just imagine when China, what China did to the NBA, After one general manager said something about Hong Kong, where they just cancelled, you know, all the screenings of the NBA in China. | ||
| That was how they retaliated when they didn't like what one NBA manager tweeted. | ||
| Can you imagine, you know, the kind of leverage over media companies, over Hollywood companies, because, you know, they have business dealings with them? | ||
| What do you make of the way that everyone falls into line when it comes to China? | ||
| So like that NBA thing was pretty pretty amazing because it was a random general manager I think for the Houston Rockets or even maybe it was even an assistant general manager but a guy that nobody really knew his name outside of the Yeah, so he is the general manager, right? | ||
| But nobody really knows his name outside of the basketball world. | ||
| But after that happened, the amount of NBA players, LeBron James included, who all sort of bowed to China, the same people who will go on and on and rip America as a racist, evil state and tell you that Trump is Hitler, but immediately, all of them, the entire league, Suddenly was bowing. | ||
| Steve Kerr is a great example of that, you know, who runs around saying how awful Trump is and everything else, but suddenly when it came to China, ooh, gotta shut up real quick. | ||
| Well, the Chinese market is much larger than the U.S. | ||
| market for the NBA. | ||
| And they've been trying to get into China for a long time. | ||
| So this has been, you know, for them, just the biggest moneymaker, not to mention all the licensing deals, NBA stores there, shoe companies and all that. | ||
| I would say there's actually one player that's been pretty good on this China issue and that is Enes Kanter and that's because he himself knows what it's like to live under an authoritarian and what it's like to stand up to one. | ||
| Turkish Prime Minister. | ||
| In Turkish in this case, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's a shame that market access alone can really modify our behavior so much to the point where, you know, these players who are so quick to support causes and, you know, there was an NBA boycott of North Carolina because of the bathroom bills, that when it came to sticking up for our values, for the right of a, you know, Americans who just have an opinion about Hong Kong, all of a sudden it just went out the window. | ||
| That's really sad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, by the way, what's the latest in Hong Kong? | ||
| I mean, with everything going on right now, we don't hear anything about Hong Kong anymore. | ||
| But they were singing the national anthem on the streets. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The American national anthem. | ||
| And they were waving the flags and also waving the Union Jack. | ||
| Well, the coronavirus obviously has rendered all protests impossible, right? | ||
| So in that sense, it's really muted that down. | ||
| And also recently, well, they had this anti-masking law. | ||
| The chief executive of Hong Kong because they didn't want their protesters to be able to mask up. | ||
| But now, because everybody actually has to wear masks to protect themselves against the coronavirus, they had to rewrite the law. | ||
| So that's the last I heard about about Hong Kong. | ||
| But there are no protests going on now. | ||
| And it's a shame because, you know, it's so moving to see young people on the streets standing up against tyranny, standing up against authoritarianism. | ||
| What's your sense that once we get past this thing, which I assume you believe we'll get past it, how some of the nature of the relationship with China will change? | ||
| Or at least our discussion about what they're doing? | ||
| In a way, America has woken up to this. | ||
| It shouldn't have taken this, right? | ||
| But we've woken up to the fact that our industrial supply chain was located inside an adversary. | ||
| Our medical, you know, life-saving medical drugs, all the active ingredients or drugs were also made in China. | ||
| And just people are starting to see and wake up to this fact that there is a clash in value systems between the two countries. | ||
| And it cannot be, it just couldn't be more clear now. | ||
| It should have been clear to us, you know, what they did with the NBA, the Hong Kong issue. | ||
| It should have been clear. | ||
| But but now it's really hitting us. | ||
| And I think I mean, I've seen a lot of people now express the view. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I don't care about the cheap stuff anymore. | ||
| I rather just pay more and be secure and, you know, have our supply chains relocated back to America, especially when it comes to the sensitive stuff. | ||
| Not talking about, you know, making crayons or something. | ||
| We're talking about, you know, anything to do with With tech, the higher value add items. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So moving away from China a little bit, for our remaining time, you're a pretty astute observer of what's happening in America too. | ||
| And I know you've sort of been on your own political journey over the last couple of years that I think in some ways is sort of similar to mine, even though we come obviously from a very different starting point. | ||
| What do you make about what's happening right now politically in America, the way the conversation is? | ||
| As we're taping this today, we just found out that Bernie Sanders is dropping out. | ||
| We're holding this for a little bit. | ||
| Do you think Biden can even do this? | ||
| Where are you at with Trump? | ||
| What's your general take? | ||
| As the New York editor of Spectator magazine, which is actually one of the few places of journalism that I don't have to use air quotes around, which is a really refreshing thing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, I'm really excited that they gave me an opportunity. | ||
| And, you know, I don't think I've ever... They've never tried to muzzle me or steer me into an ideological track. | ||
| It's just write whatever you want, pitch whatever you want. | ||
| And so in that sense, I do have a lot of journalistic freedom. | ||
| In terms of where America is politically, this coronavirus issue really threw a wrench into it, right? | ||
| We were all kind of going along and all of a sudden the news just changed overnight, just completely saturated. | ||
| And at this point, it's not even clear if things are going to get lifted. | ||
| I'm hearing conversations now about voting and whether we're going to do this mail voting at some point. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But suffice to say, there is a lot of dissatisfaction about Joe Biden. | ||
| And I wrote a piece for Spectator about how I don't think the media actually vetted him properly. | ||
| I don't think they put him through the gauntlet in a way that they did do to every other candidate, right? | ||
| If you looked at Pete Buttigieg, Bloomberg, even Andrew Yang, you would find a hit piece on the New York Times about how they were either racist in their past or sexist. | ||
| Except maybe Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| But there's something there. | ||
| And Biden just wasn't put through the same pressures. | ||
| And so he's emerged. | ||
| And now, you know, the big question is about his mental state. | ||
| Does he have Not just temperament, but is he sane enough to actually be the President of the United States? | ||
| And when he's coming up against Trump, the optics, it's going to look so bad. | ||
| But the issue is, at the end of the day, the math just didn't work out for Bernie. | ||
| I know a lot of people liked him. | ||
| You're my friend now. | ||
| I guess Joe Rogan really liked Bernie, too. | ||
| But I see a lot of people kind of echoing what he said, which is, you know, Bernie or bust. | ||
| And it's creating such a such a big rift. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how that's going to get resolved. | ||
| Yeah, so as someone that's now in the media, what do you make of the media these days? | ||
| Because I'm sort of like, man, a lot of us have been screaming about the media for a while, and I think maybe now that so many people are trapped at home and they're forced online more, I think it's becoming more and more obvious to people that maybe weren't taking the temperature. | ||
| So that if you were watching CNN with their selectively edited Trump quotes, And normally you wouldn't pay that much attention to it. | ||
| Now you're stuck at home online and you're seeing full quotes be shared by other people where they stop his sentence right after he says, but this dot, dot, dot, dot. | ||
| Do you sense that the media has just gone completely crazy? | ||
| Is there a way to get them to come back? | ||
| I mean, can the New York Times reel it back in? | ||
| Can CNN reel it back in? | ||
| Or have they just chosen a model that they think is best, which is? | ||
| Well, I guess lie because that's what your base wants, something like that? | ||
| I saw that CBS was using clips of, you know, video clips of Italy when they were talking about the New York situation. | ||
| And that is just, it's gaslighting. | ||
| Italian hospitals, they were literally showing Italian hospitals. | ||
| It does erode the public trust. | ||
| I mean, I think we have to separate between the opinion pieces and the actual reporting. | ||
| You know, The International Bureau, these big organizations, right, like the New York Times, they do excellent reporting when it comes to the Middle East. | ||
| I mean, even on China, right, which recently expelled Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times journalists that were there for decades, expelled out of Beijing. | ||
| And now we don't have eyes on there. | ||
| You have opinion pieces and activist journalists. | ||
| That's really where I think the problem is. | ||
| And apart from just the business model issue, which I think we haven't really solved yet, you've actually kind of built a platform to solve it. | ||
| But that is one of the reasons why this world of activism journalism exists. | ||
| It's clickbaity and the incentives that reward that kind of journalism is still there. | ||
| I don't know how to solve this. | ||
| It's just apart from changing this and rewiring the whole incentive structure, you know, or just having what we do have now, this fragmentation of media is actually probably a good thing. | ||
| I know we used to say that it was a bad thing, but the fact that there is conservative media, I mean, frankly, Tucker Carlson, I'm so impressed with him, like the coverage that he has done since this coronavirus started. | ||
| And actually before that, he was doing really good stuff also in China. | ||
| But it's important, more than ever, that we do have these voices because it puts the pressure. | ||
| I had a tweet about this the other day. | ||
| So there was a clip where a Hong Kong journalist, Henry, from the WHO, a very senior official, and asked him about Taiwan. | ||
| And he just backtracked. | ||
| It was like such a shameful, you know, trying to weasel out of the conversation. | ||
| And it looked really bad. | ||
| And for the first four hours, the only media that reported on it was The Blaze, was Fox News, was PJ Media. | ||
| It was all the so-called right wing. | ||
| But if it didn't get picked up by them, the story would have never bubbled up. | ||
| And by picking up on it, they're forcing the mainstream media to respond, to log that. | ||
| And it kind of gets into the public consciousness in a way that, imagine if they didn't exist, we just wouldn't have. | ||
| So it is important that we have You know, competing interests, and at least there's a chance that the truth gets out. | ||
| Yeah, and I know for you, as I think someone, that you still consider yourself a good, decent liberal. | ||
| It's kind of funny that you have all these allies on the right, and you have to give props to conservative media, I suppose, to get these stories out there. | ||
| Unfortunately, we don't have any more time, but quickly, in 30 seconds, and then next time, we're obviously gonna do this in person, and it will be great to see you again. | ||
| Just give me your sense of when we get out of this, and are we gonna be okay on the other side of this thing? | ||
| I think we're going to have to learn how to live with it. | ||
| As long as there's no vaccine, as long as antiviral, you know, whatever antiviral treatments are still not developed, we're going to have to learn how to live with the virus. | ||
| And there's going to be waves. | ||
| So, you know, we're in mitigation stage now. | ||
| And I hope our curves start to flatten. | ||
| California is doing a very good job with it. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| But things are realigning and lives are changing. | ||
| All right, Melissa, that was great seeing you, even though we had to do this through the Skype machine. | ||
| We will do this in person next time, and good seeing you as always. | ||
| Hey everyone, we're obviously in some uncharted territory with coronavirus, and our plan here is to help you make as much sense of the situation in a non-alarmist fashion as possible. | ||
| If you're looking for reliable information from experts on the front lines of the pandemic, check out our coronavirus playlist, which we'll keep adding updates to right over here. |
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