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April 2, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:34
China's Global Conquest! Jack Posobiec and Stefan Molyneux
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Time Text
We'll wait till the Smurly is done.
And we are now live.
We are live with Jack Posobik of OANN. That's One American News Network.
Jack, thanks for taking the time today.
Great pleasure to chat again.
We last saw each other face-to-face in Poland, which is starting to look like an increasingly tempting sanctuary from the world's madness these days, given that they seem to be doing just about everything right these days, right?
Yeah, I mean, talk about a country that was very quick to shut down their borders, very quick to institute a lot of this health distancing, social distancing policies, and one that they're enforcing it very strictly as well.
Right, right. So we'll start with more recent stuff and then let's go back to I guess what happened yesterday, which has kind of been undone today, which is your access to the White House information.
Apparently they're trying to encourage a fairly strong degree of social distancing these days from you guys because apparently you weren't doing enough.
What's the story and how was it related to this whole Kennedy Center thing, this audio that was released?
Right. So over the past 24 hours, we've seen one cycle, but it's really, you know, dips back into the past, I guess, two weeks or so.
One American News has been commented on, I should say, from a lot of left-wing journalists for having access to these press briefings.
And having, now it's not myself, we have a separate two White House correspondents that are there, Chanel Rion and Jim Pellegrino, they're doing a fantastic job.
And, you know, they, Chanel, of course, asked sort of a joking question, obviously, about, you know, does President Trump consider calling it Chinese food racist when you, you know, say Chinese food?
Because they were, he was under fire for it.
And by the way, you know, I think when Barack Obama was president, he was constantly, in the Navy, we'd call it coking and joking, with a lot of the White House press corps.
They had a You know, a clear rapport there.
And there was seen as no issue with that.
However, when One American News was doing it, it was based with criticism.
Then that continued on for the next few weeks until last week.
So I've been working on, you know, I'm always digging up stuff.
I'm always trying to get leaks, get sources, stuff on the inside.
I broke a story where this place, the Kennedy Center, which is the Opera House here in Washington, D.C., Which, by the way, is a fantastic opera house.
They always do a great show. I've taken my wife there numerous times.
Love the place. But they put in $25 million for themselves in the stimulus bill, which was supposed to be for the workers of America who are stuck at home or have lost their jobs, been laid off because of the coronavirus restrictions.
I have two people within my immediate circle, let's say, who have been affected by this, who both have been laid off, right, and have now filed for unemployment.
It turns out that the Kennedy Center, because this phone call, a worker there had actually leaked a phone call to me with the Kennedy Center president saying that even though they planned to get this $25 million, that it wasn't actually going to be used for the workers.
It was going to be used for what they call operating costs.
And, of course, had all these dubious explanations for why operating costs were going to be covered rather than the actual worker payments, which I think everyone sort of understood, which was the spirit of the bill, was to help the people who were losing their jobs during this time.
Uh, after getting the 25 million, uh, the president then started, began laying off people, laying off the ushers, laying off the parking attendants, laying off even the musicians, the national symphony orchestra themselves laid off.
Right. And these, these are not, you know, uh, you know, John legend had some tweet up about how, Oh, well, you know, there's a lot of hardworking people out there.
I'm like, I don't think you get it, man.
These, these guys aren't exactly making the same kind of buco bucks as you guys in Hollywood.
Um, And so we got a lot of heat for that because I did leak this entire almost hour and a half phone call from the president of the Kennedy Center.
It got a lot of attention. President Sun tweeted it out.
And then two days after that, the WHCA votes to revoke the seating arrangement for One American News.
This is yesterday. Okay, so hold on.
Just for those of us not in the biz, WHCA? White House something something?
The White House Correspondents Association.
What is the White House Correspondents Association?
So that's sort of the official name for what I think is more politically referred to as the White House Press Corps.
But the WHCA is the more professional organization that sort of coordinates all press activity that goes on in that room, along with the White House.
And one of the reasons that it was originally created This idea was so that White Houses, there were public officials, wouldn't be able to ban journalists who they thought were pushing too hard, were digging too hard on the White House.
You could say the Nixon White House and Woodward and Bernstein, something they couldn't ban them if the WHCA would get involved and fight for the rights of access to the White House.
So it was put in place to ensure Freedom of the press to ensure public access to the White House for the press, right?
Fantastic reason. A wonderful, wonderful thing to have.
Freedom of the press is a very important thing.
It's what separates us from the totalitarian Chinese.
But then the WHCA We're good to go.
That ignited a massive firestorm across the internet and publicly.
Now, what did just happen, and I know we're live, so you may have seen this already, that the White House has invited us back again today for the White House briefing.
So essentially, we can go into the room, but we can't sit down.
It's incredible, isn't it? What?
You basically, you went from being kicked out of class to having to stand in the naughty corner?
Is that, if I understand this correctly, is this the level of kindergarten that we're operating at?
I think the analogy would be appropriate here.
So what you're saying is the gatekeepers...
Quite literally, it's mean girls. You can't sit with us.
So basically, the gatekeepers who were instituted to make sure that the gatekeepers didn't get corrupt themselves got corrupt and are now abusing their power.
Right. The people who were there to make sure that the gates stood open under the First Amendment, under the ideal of freedom of the press, that the press should have access.
And they should, by the way. Even CNN, I believe, should have access to the White House, right?
As long as you're there to conduct journalistic activity, if you're going to be adversarial, I think that's okay.
I think that's robust. I think that helps a democracy, right?
That's better. It challenges us.
Now, you can obviously have debates about the journalistic integrity of certain organizations, and that's fine.
But I think the general spirit of the idea is to allow for that access.
Now, here we're in a national security crisis, right?
And it's not just a public health crisis.
It is a national security crisis.
The United States has two aircraft carriers that have been affected by this thing already in the Western Pacific, one in Guam, one in Japan.
And so we absolutely need to start putting those differences aside, putting the partisanship aside, and trying to figure out just, hey, what the heck is going on, so that our viewers at home, all of our viewers, have Access to that information that's coming out from the White House because there's a lot of disinformation right now.
There's a lot of bad information.
There's some information that's quite good.
But I think we need to know at least what the official word is so that then we can take that and decide, you know, what we do with it.
We can criticize it. We can analyze it, etc.
And so their standing in terms of freedom of the press, people are going to remember this.
People are going to remember that a national press organization Right?
Tried to suppress another organization because they didn't like it.
Well, I mean, that is wretched.
And of course, then it's sort of veered into a popularity contest, people saying, well, there are bigger networks than OANN. And you had a great blowback on Twitter, which I will let you relish delivering to the audience here about CNN and its history of lawsuits.
Oh, well, CNN said OAN has a dubious journalistic reputation, to which I, Brian Stelter had said that, to which I responded, you know, funny because I don't recall having to settle any defamation lawsuits with underage Catholic boys yourself.
Well, this is the, first of all, the idea that Nick Sandman actually responded to my tweet and thanked me for it.
I bet, from his new villa in Tuscany.
So it is to me, of course, quite ironic that you would have a situation where CNN would be questioning the integrity and honesty of another news network.
And the whole point is this idea that there's a group out there who we can rely upon to determine the honor and integrity of a news organization.
I mean, it's like central planning for the economy.
It's like having to have a license to drive somewhere, not just in your car, but actually the route.
You can't centrally plan these kinds of things.
It needs to be an open marketplace of ideas.
May the best argument win.
May the best sophist win sometimes.
But this idea that you've got to run to someone to get a stamp of approval for your credibility, boy.
But I guess that kind of bothers people in the mainstream media now because of the internet.
One thing that I can personally attest to from my own experience with this White House going back to 2017 is that they've been incredibly open in terms of their press policies.
Almost any organization that applies for press credentials has received them from this White House.
And it's something that they really don't get credit for.
And regardless of what your feelings are on Donald Trump or any particular policy of his, We're good to go.
The White House controls press passes.
The WHCA controls the actual physical arrangement of the seats in the room.
Now let's talk a little bit about the history.
I, of course, did a whole documentary last fall on the history of China and its relationships to Hong Kong and how dangerous China was, the most evil dictatorial government in the world at the moment.
But that's, of course, tearing a page from your book because you've been talking about the dangers of China for many years.
Can you give the listeners here a little bit of a history of Jack in China and how you managed to gather this perspective and expertise?
Yeah, so, you know, look, I'm a young guy, but I've actually been traveling back and forth to China for about 15 years now.
Started when I was in college with a study abroad there and ended up staying, getting a job with the American Chamber of Commerce, lived in Shanghai for two years, traveled all over both mainland China as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan.
Tibet, Xinjiang, if you consider those parts of China or not, as they do.
Also, then later when I joined the intelligence community, China, of course, became a focus of mine.
I am a Mandarin linguist, so speak and read and write Mandarin.
In fact, my wife speaks it too, so we kind of, you know, when we're at dinner parties, we will switch into it sometimes when we want to talk about somebody about, or just talk about, hey, you ready to get going?
Yeah, I'm ready to get going. Funny enough, I believe the Trumans did that as well, because they were also Mandarin speakers.
And in that time, I've gotten to know the spirit of China, the Chinese mind in many ways, and understanding that...
The average Chinese citizen is once the same thing as any other human being in the world, right?
They want to be able to take care of their kids.
They want to be able to have sustenance.
They want to be able to have economic activity.
There is a burgeoning middle class in China.
However, there's a lot of structural deficits in that country, structural fractures that are starting to come apart now, not just because of the coronavirus.
I'm speaking in terms of prior to the coronavirus, but because people are seeing this boom That's happening in the Chinese cities, particularly along the coast.
That's not happening out in the provinces of China.
It's not happening in the sort of great middle of China.
And so you're seeing this huge disparity where the coastal areas of China are moving into more of an advanced society.
You could almost call them a first-world country in some of these cities.
And yet many of the people still out in the provinces are living in third-world country situations and under those types of conditions.
And because China, I alluded to this earlier, they do still maintain, and it's originally a Soviet system of internal passports.
They're called hukos. So as you were just actually saying about those licenses, about where you're allowed to drive and where you're not, they actually kind of have something like that in China.
So it's not so much about driving, but if you want to own, or you can't own land in China, but if you want to rent property in China, if you want to To be able to work in a certain area in China, you need permission.
So you need permission from the government, you need permission from the local government.
Well, not everyone's able to do that.
And so what you have are situations where people are then doing that without documents, essentially kind of like an undocumented immigrant, but inside the country itself.
So you're an undocumented migrant, you're living off of a black market, you're taking black market jobs at these incredibly dangerous work sites, We're good to go.
And you hear these stories of suffering and you hear these stories of hardship and your heart goes out to them because there's no easy answers for that.
However, it's the central government, the CCP, that Chinese party, the Chinese Communist Party, It's not something where they're wanting to allow these market forces Free economy forces to be able to go out and build up some of these areas because they still want that central planning.
They still want that central authority.
And so although China has opened up in many ways economically, they play this dance.
They call it socialism of Chinese characteristics where it's sort of we're allowing in some cases almost hyper capitalization.
Right? And sort of the way that they're dealing with IMF and the World Bank.
But it's all done through the party.
It's all done through JVs, a joint venture.
So any international organization in terms of a company that wants to do business in China, it has to be done through a joint venture.
With the Chinese government or with the Chinese company, which is usually state-owned or state-controlled.
And so because there's that such high degree of central planning, you end up with a mixed bag where some areas are booming while other areas are just still completely suffering.
Well, and some areas are booming with nobody there.
These strange ghost cities that go on there.
And so that's something that they've done to sort of prime the pump on unemployment because, and again, we're only talking about the context here, not even coronavirus effects, but You know, you have an unemployment factor that goes up by 1%, 2% in China.
You're talking tens of millions of people.
That's tens of millions of people that can flood out into the streets, that can start protesting, that can start challenging Communist Party authority.
And talking about the dynasties of China, they have this idea of cyclical dynastic history, right, the theory of dynastic cycles, that every dynasty in China is seen as sort of having its, we talk about bell curves a lot with these viruses, having a bell curve of It reminds me of Hegel's sort of world spirit that manifests itself in particular political agencies and gives them legitimacy and it's this magic paint that turns a murder into somehow a blessing.
Right, precisely. But then each dynasty falls into this cycle of decline, corruption, and then, and this is what's key, famine, pestilence, and disease are seen as signs of a dynasty losing that mandate of heaven.
And the only response to which would be that a new dynasty, a new movement that erects a new dynasty comes along to take its place.
Right. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the longevity of planning that is available to China for all of the evils of the doctrine.
You know, one of the things that's kind of nuts, Jack, about dealing with, you know, of course, dealing with the media at the moment is that Western late-stage democracies seem to be afflicted with terminal squirrel cases of ADHD. Like, it's all short-term planning.
It's all just surviving the news cycle, making it to the weekend, hoping that people forget over the weekend and starting again next week with some new thing.
But China has this – it's sort of like watching a Voldemort play chess with a toddler because they have this long-term strategy plan.
Like they talk about the center of humiliation from the beginning of the Opium Wars up until the post-Second World War period.
They have 50-year plans, they have 100-year plans, sometimes even longer, which they're able to put into place and to track and to plan for because they accept that this dictatorship is kind of like a train track rather than this running around hyper squirrel on cocaine that characterizes this Western democracy stuff.
So what are they trying to do?
What has been in the works?
What is their big plan that we're not being talked about?
Or plans, I guess. Yeah, funny enough, there's actually, before I get into that, there's actually a funny anecdote, and I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but it's good for understanding the situation, that when the British first came to China in the 1800s and first started to try to open up those diplomatic ties,
that the Emperor of China was heard to remark, so you mean to tell me that the most powerful countries on the other side of the world are one country that changes its leader every four years and an island ruled by a woman?
I just thought, why should I listen to anything these people have to say?
They're clearly idiots, right?
And that's the Chinese mentality, at least at that time.
What you're looking at now is China has targeted, and it's very key that you mentioned that century of humiliation.
Every Chinese student is taught in school about the century of humiliation.
From the start of, to what I just mentioned, the opening up with the British, to what they see as the pillaging of China, the softening of China, the opium wars, the flooding of China.
Opium-like products, opioids, right, into China by the British.
Opium dens coming in, and then the British being able to defeat the Chinese in war with technological prowess, then forcing China at the point of a bayonet to open up what they call treaty cities, treaty ports.
This is where the founding of Hong Kong comes in.
Hong Kong was kind of a rock.
Sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to mention as well, one of the things that struck me while doing the documentary was the research and the speech that I gave about how there was such a fear of shooting the messenger and being blamed locally for decisions beyond your control.
That people didn't even tell the emperor that the British were sailing up the rivers, that they were taking out the barges, that they were stealing.
They wouldn't. Oh, everything's fine.
We're winning. Don't worry about it.
Because they were so terrified of losing face, of losing their head as the result of failures that were largely beyond their control.
And it really, really struck me as the way that the coronavirus was handled as well.
Sorry, go ahead. No, you see the same dichotomy, or I should say a paradigm, come up in the Great Leap Forward, where some, and certainly the Mao apologists, really like to try to hold to this one as they say, look, these locals weren't telling Chairman Mao that their people were starving and cannibalism was becoming widespread throughout these areas because they didn't want to be shot and killed.
And so they lied to him when he would come out.
They lied to all the assessors.
Be that as it may, we still know responsibility lies, but you're right that this prior to Xi Jinping really consolidating power, it still was the prevailing dynamic throughout China.
It's the idea that of all power centralized in one node, one person, one body, the Politburo.
And to go back, though, The idea is they've had their century of humiliation, which ended in, of course, as they tell the story, in 1949, October, the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Chairman Mao gets up on the top of Tiananmen Square Gate and announces, which, of course, means the Chinese people have finally stood up.
It's this, you know, hugely famous quote.
It's like, right? I've always failed to see, Jack, how adopting a almost purely Western ideology like communism is somehow escaping the influence of the West and standing up for yourself.
Do they ever have... No, no, no.
Don't ask. Details.
- Those are details. - It's not a Chinese philosophy. - Chinese characteristics. - Zhongguo and cese, Zhongguo cese, the Chinese characteristics. Chinese characteristics, remember, Stefan.
Chinese characteristics. - All right, so we'll go with dim sum and ketchup.
All right. - So now, what they're operating under is Project 2049.
I call it Project 2049.
2049, they've pegged as, since 30 years from now, This is their target date, not just for the party, not just for the military, not just for any one sector of their economy.
It's the entire society, the entire Chinese civilization is, as you mentioned, a train track racing towards 2049, because that will be the one century mark of the People's Republic.
And in their mind, China, in Chinese, the central kingdom, the central kingdom of the world, the central kingdom under heaven.
They want to retain that status, to re-maintain that status, to retake that status by 2049, to be the central kingdom.
And at one point, they certainly were the center of all of Asia.
They feel that it's their right, they feel it is their destiny to be the center of the entire world.
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt as well, but from the Chinese perspective, and for those who've studied this kind of history, I mean, China was king of the world way back in the day when your ancestors and my ancestors were picking nits out of each other's hair.
You know, they had paper currency.
They had IQ tests to enter into the government.
They had beautiful writing and great poetry.
They had philosophy. I mean, they were like light years ahead.
Of Europeans, of Africans, and so on.
And this center of humiliation is a lot to do with, well, what happened?
Why are we no longer on top when before they could literally look at the unwashed masses of the world and say, thank God we're us and not them.
There's actually an interesting debate among Chinese historians or China hands, as they sometimes call themselves, where it seems to be at some point around the 1300s, the 14th century, where all of that progression, that explosion of advancement in technology just sort of plateaued.
And it seemed that, you know, they had reached the limits of, not the limits of their interest, right?
And they weren't trying to expand.
And they had consolidated most of China under one governance, right?
At multiple times, right? Even China today, as we see it today, wasn't the same as China.
I mean, it's been multiple countries in the past.
There's been three kingdoms period where they were, you know, constantly vying for power and for influence.
And so, but at some point, They sort of stabilized.
They leveled off.
They were being paid tribute by everywhere from Vietnam to Japan to Korea.
And that advancement, because of the lack of friction, because of their geographic distance from Europe, from Africa, they didn't really have any friction.
They had no natural adversaries.
And so the level of their technology and their civilization progression, it sort of leveled off.
And there's sort of this idea that they just went off into the mountains and started You know, writing poetry ever since.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is always a big question for me, which maybe we can talk about here or another time, which is, can societies ever survive their own success?
You know, you hear all these stories of the people who win the lottery, and then they just lose complete, their marriages break up, and they become drug addicts, and nobody likes them anymore, and everybody's suing them, and it's just like, I've heard a whole number of people say, man, winning the lottery was like the worst thing that ever happened to me.
And you can, of course, see this with rock stars and other young people get a lot of fame and money.
I don't know if human beings are well constituted to survive excess of success.
And yeah, they had very, they had weak neighbors all around them.
They had an unquestioned centralized government of near universal power.
And they had achieved the summit at the time of human development.
And it's like, hey, I guess, you know, when you get to the top of Mount Everest, you just stop climbing because then you just nothing left to climb.
And I think it was a great shock then when they realized that the formerly primitive cultures, particularly within Europe, had overleaped them somehow, and it's incredibly disorienting to such a confident, if not arrogant, culture.
You know, and that's the idea of it.
People will call this Zhongguoism or Central Kingdomism, this idea that it's almost at one point was an inferiority complex, but now is becoming more and more of a superiority complex, where they feel that it was stolen from them, and then now must be retaken by any means necessary.
What I mean that to say is it's not a religious feeling that they want to wipe out the West or kill all the Europeans, kill all the infidels like some Islamic radical group or anything like that.
It's just this idea that they ought to be on top of things, that they ought to be running They want every country paying them tribute.
So when you saw the NBA recently, when you saw all of these organizations sort of kowtowing, right?
That's why kowtowing was a thing, because they want that fealty.
When they have to go through these struggle sessions, like the eight doctors who were early on in talking about the coronavirus outbreak, why did they have to go through a struggle session, signing a public document, admitting that they were self-incriminating themselves and saying that they were spreading rumors and lies?
Because They demand fealty to the central power.
And if anyone goes against that, you are a rumor monger.
Anyone who's studied China or has ever looked at China, the word rumor is, I mean, it's almost synonymous with traitor.
Well, this is something that I think you got on the board early.
I got on board early, which is, it's not magic.
It's just that given how much China loves to save face, how much it is terrified of appearing incompetent or bad, so to speak, in the eyes of the world, by the time China admits that there's a problem...
There's a big problem.
There's a huge problem.
It's not like here you get a lot of early warning signs because of free speech and sometimes it leads you in the wrong direction, but at least you get these early warning signs.
But by the time China says, oh yeah, we've got a big problem with the disease, it's like, you know that that's a huge problem and that's why I'm like, pandemic, pandemic, man, it's coming.
Right, and so for anyone who's studied China closely, as you have, we all looked at that and realized, understanding the power of face, understanding the power of legitimacy, understanding the power of their public credibility that they're constantly fighting to maintain.
I mean, even to the point of you will never see a Chinese leader with white hair, right?
It's constantly, they have to dye their hair, regardless of what age they're at.
They're dyeing that, they want that jet black hair, no matter how, you know, I'm just making a note here that Justin Trudeau is Chinese.
Okay, got it. You know, that's quite a scoop you've given me there, my friend.
I appreciate that. All right, go on.
Hey, come on. He's got a beard now.
But when we saw them admitting it, taking major, major steps, I saw this back in mid-January of this year, It was so unprecedented and so flew in the face of everything that the Chinese Party, the Communist Party would normally do, that a Chinese leader would normally do.
It was almost 180 degrees the opposite of what you would predict them to do on a regular basis.
Not to mention that the massive economic The suffering that they put themselves through to be able to do that.
I mean, they shut down the engine, right?
They shut down the production factories.
They shut down the supplies.
That is where the money, the actual wealth is coming from in China because they're selling us our cheap TVs and our iPhones and everything else.
And so for them to do that and admit it on such a public level was stunning.
It was absolutely stunning to me as someone who's been watching China for 15 years.
I think the only time that I could even consider anything similar they had done was in 2008, prior to the August start of the Olympics, remember 8808.
in and around Beijing and Shandong province because they wanted clear skies.
So it was almost like a tacit acknowledgement that, yeah, we have some problems with the skies over Beijing.
There's increasing desertification around the city, actually.
The Gobi Desert is encroaching on the city there.
But that was probably the only time I could even think of something that was remotely similar.
So let's talk about the dominoes that have flattened the Western economies, the world economies, so to speak.
So Regardless of the origin story, I am leaning towards it was accidentally released from a lab.
If I had to bet, that's where I would put my money at the moment.
But What were the steps, do you think, that have people so mad at China?
What could China have done in an ideal universe?
What could China have done to mitigate or reduce the impact of COVID on the world economies, or the world as a whole?
Look, in an ideal universe, right, you've got China and the other leading countries of the world, the most advanced economies of the world, not just in America, but also across Europe, you've got medical professionals that are sharing information and certainly information when one of those tripwires is tripped of a potential pandemic, of a mutated pathogen that's now crossed into the human population.
Look, we know they're monitoring these things on a regular basis.
We know where SARS came from.
We know where H1N1 came from.
We know this came from diseased animals that then mutated, it was transmissible to humans, and eventually human-to-human transition came as another mutation, as a further mutation of that.
So, in an ideal world, we've got these organizations operating, and politics shouldn't play a part in it.
It shouldn't matter who's the chairman of China, it shouldn't matter who's the president of the United States.
It should be done on a regular basis.
This information is being shared and, oh my goodness, you know, we have, hey, we have something, we don't know how big it is yet, but we're tracking that on a regular basis.
That's what you want, right? That's what you want from someone who's being a legitimate partner, someone who's actually working with the public's good, the global good, as China's starting to say.
And so when China was allowed into the WTO in the 2000 and 2001 timeframe, there was this idea of will China rise responsibly, right?
Rise responsibly was sort of this idea that, and Michael Anton at the Claremont Institute last summer gave A talk on this, and he had this great line.
He said, you know, it's almost like, imagine you had a village, right?
And in that village, you've got your priest, you've got your mayor, you've got your sheriff, you've got your business community, and then you've got a gangster, right?
You've just got the head of the mob is also there.
And they're trying to fight the mob, they're trying to fight the mob, and they can't win.
They can't get rid of them, no matter what they do.
So eventually, at one point, they say, why don't we legitimize him?
Why don't we bring him in? Why don't we give him all the credentials he needs to have a seat at the table, and we're going to bring that mobster in into our organizations, and we're going to allow him a seat at the table, and that will correct his behavior.
And then the mobster says...
Boys, we're in!
Yeah, you know, when the criminal becomes the cop, simply police work becomes criminalized.
Explain this to me.
To create an analogy, explain this to me.
Why... Is the word Taiwan like Voldemort for the World Health Organization?
You've probably seen this young woman, a Taiwanese reporter, trying to question, I think it was someone at the World Health Organization, and trying to talk about Taiwan and, you know, the silence.
He cuts her off. He starts talking about China again.
What's the story there? So now you're seeing the, we call it soft power, right?
But I think soft power is kind of a misnomer because this idea that, oh, it's soft, it's nice, it's fun, it's just money, it's just economics, it's just international lawfare.
It's not that big of a deal.
You can just let it go. The only thing you have to worry about is military power.
Military power is the only thing that matters.
And even as a guy who was in the military, a former Navy officer, you know, this is something that they look at it that way.
The Chinese don't look at it this way.
The Chinese, going back to a book that was written in 1999 called Unrestricted Warfare.
It was written by two Chinese senior colonels.
And they realized that they stood at a technological deficit with the West, that they weren't going to beat the West on technology.
This is 20 years ago. Today, you might be able to talk about that a little bit.
But they realized that what they could do is use the West's Other avenues of power as avenues of their own influence and control.
They realized that they could corrupt, they could get into, subvert and corrupt international institutions, which all of these countries have agreed that they would abide by, that they would give power to.
Well, if you just corrupt those institutions, now you can then lead those powerful countries by the nose.
This is called lawfare.
For the Chinese, it's part of their overall military, their overall global strategy.
It's part of that Project 2049 that I spoke about.
They believe the exact same thing with the economy.
They're not only looking at their rise in terms of what's good for...
They're not a free market economy.
They're a planned economy. They are a centrally controlled economy.
They're looking at how do we strategically control sectors of rare earth elements is a great example of this.
How are they able to control sectors of the world's resources, sectors of the world's economy, debt, the World Bank, the IMF, going into other countries and getting them into these, I call it debt trap diplomacy, right?
So going into a country and saying, oh, I'll extend you a line of credit.
Like Djibouti is probably the biggest one right now.
Well, Africa, they're doing that consistently with.
Right, so you're seeing the US and China really fight over sort of who has that influence over Djibouti.
And there's military bases of the United States and China almost right next to each other, right there in the Horn of Africa, which of course controls the very strategically important Red Sea, right?
If we want to continue doing this, if we want the world's oil economy to be able to flow from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, to the Mediterranean, that Red Sea is pretty important.
So why do you think the Chinese Are targeting the places that they're targeting, building the things that they're building.
And then when these countries can't pay that line of credit, they say, oh, you know, be more than happy to wipe that debt off your record, but going to owe us a couple of favors.
Well, I mean, I think I saw Sopranos episode or two had exactly the same plot.
And this is the thing, too.
They've written entire books about this, which are publicly available.
This isn't some secret decoder ring that you have to figure out from the back of a cereal box from 1950.
This is really up front.
And it's so crazy to me, Jack, that for years and years and years...
Well, basically, since Russia was no longer communist, we've been told, oh, that big danger, Russia, Russia, Russia.
And it's like, I really don't see it.
I really don't see it. It's more just covering up for communism.
And here's the thing, too.
I don't know if you know these numbers, but my gosh.
The amount of embedding in the Chinese economy that the mainstream media has is truly staggering.
Hollywood is obvious, right?
So this year, even before COVID, China was projected to surpass America as the world's largest consumer of movies, right?
So the world's largest movie market.
But it's even the news organization is heavily embedded and interlinked with the Chinese economy.
It's actually less common in the conservative media because of the fear and hostility towards communism.
But man, I mean, the mainstream media just seems to be ridiculously compromised, which is why they're more mad at people like you and me than people who've unleashed a global pandemic.
Yeah, that's right. And it's also because it's not even so much about, you know, sort of left-wing, right-wing.
It's more about independent versus corporate.
So you see a lot of these corporate entities that control these major organizations.
I mean, look at, you know, look at the Washington Post.
It's on my Amazon. You look at Bloomberg, for example.
Look at Comcast and NBC, right?
And so those corporations are doing business with China on the back end.
Disney, of course, right? And everything, the massive conglomeration that Disney is.
I think I can't imagine.
I always kind of wonder, by the way, total aside, but we're doing this, what Walt Disney would think if he could see his company today.
He wanted to create dreamlands for kids and families and look at everything they're into today.
And they're all doing business in China.
So they've got a massive, massive Structural blind spot.
They've got the blindfold on when it comes to China because they don't want them reporting on what's going on over there.
Whereas an independent media, if you're working for an outlet that doesn't have those ties, you're much more free to be able to speak your mind and be able to do reporting that wouldn't otherwise get out like that.
Right. Okay. I have a million questions, but given that we're live, I thought maybe it would be kind of cool to take some questions.
I'm going to favor my own listeners briefly, and then we'll get to Q. Oh, yes!
That's right. We'll get to Q. All right.
Do you think that China is only struggling with the virus because the population is less healthy than the population of Western countries?
I don't know that they're still struggling as much.
It's really hard to tell. Of course, you're not going to get any actual numbers out of China.
But it has, of course, struck me like half the Chinese men smoke.
It's very few of the women. And smoking, of course, is a lung-compromising situation that COVID is going to exploit to create greater mortality.
Do you think that general health in China is having a strong effect on the virus?
I think it might.
Unfortunately, one of the issues there is that we just don't have good data into what's actually going on in China in terms of this, in terms of who it's affecting.
We now know that some of those initial numbers, those sort of memes were, oh, it only affects the elderly.
You know, we're just false.
They just weren't true. And so it is affecting a lot of people in various other degrees.
However, there are a lot of comorbidities or pre-existing conditions throughout the West as well.
I mean, there's certainly in Eastern Europe, smoking is a massive, massive public health issue as well.
But you look at the United States, obesity, diabetes, heart conditions are all still very prevalent.
And still smoking in the United States, by the way, is one of the leading causes of prevent...
I believe it's the leading cause of preventable death.
And so there are still a lot of issues.
Man, just driving around Washington, D.C., and when I even do see people out, and it's quite few, we're kind of a police state now here in Washington, but they even locked down the cherry blossoms, if you can believe that.
They've got cops out there patrolling, so you can't go see the cherry blossoms.
But when I see people smoking, when I say, do you know there's a lung pandemic going around?
There's a lung disease that's running around.
You guys are smoking. It's like, are you asking for it?
Oh, man. If there's ever something like the flattening of the curve, I totally get that.
But if there's ever a time where you want to start improving your health habits, boy, before the second wave of this pandemic hits, which it's going to, statistically and historically, this is a really, really good time to stop smoking, to start exercising, to lose some weight, to do all the things that you know you need to do, but, you know, maybe you need the kick in the COVID, but to get it going on.
Do you have any sense of, because the rumors about the origin of this thing are flying fast and furious, do you have any sense from your contacts in China whether they think it was something that came in through the Wuhan market?
Was it something that they're afraid was engineered?
Do you have any sense of what the Chinese people are talking about with regards to the origin of this thing?
Well, one thread that's running around on the Chinese internet right now that's going huge is apparently that there's...
And again, this is what the Chinese are talking about.
This is not me reporting this, but there's a...
I'm going to get the name wrong, but it's Huang Yingjing.
And there's a missing researcher from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And now the Chinese government has come out multiple times and said, oh, she's fine.
Don't worry about her.
She's perfectly well.
She's perfectly okay. Oh, it's just a woman whose bio has been scrubbed from the Internet?
That's right, yeah. And so knowing the Chinese the way I know them, I'd say, well, if any of that were true, you'd put a camera on her, right?
You'd put her up in front of the camera.
Proof of life, man. Proof of life.
Here I am. I mean, they've done this multiple times.
In fact, very early on in all of this, Uh, when, when the bat soup, uh, sort of videos were going viral, they actually had one of the Chinese, uh, influencers come out who had been, you know, kind of responsible for making that go viral about eating bat soup.
They made her apologize. They actually made her put out a statement apologizing for her bat soup videos from like, you know, a year or two ago that had popularized eating bat soup in China.
It was almost, uh, it was almost a meme.
Oh, get your bat soup. I remember that.
Yeah. I was just here in the United States last year.
And so this idea that there's this researcher that everybody's looking, and on the Chinese internet, I'm telling you, it's like they get these, and it's PhDs that are talking about this too now.
It's academics who are talking about it as well as just sort of And they're called netizens, like citizens' netizens in China, trying to find any sign of life.
You know, they're tracking her family, they're tracking her contacts to see if anybody can see where she actually was.
I mean, rumors are going crazy about her.
I mean, there's one rumor that there was an accident, blood was spilled on her.
There's a rumor that she was part of an experiment, that she was taking an experimental vaccine and things went wrong.
There's so many rumors.
That are flying right now.
But that's key, is that even within China, they're not necessarily buying the official line on this, and everybody's trying to figure out whether or not this was a patient zero situation, or if it was, was it related to that market?
And so, actually, one of the things that I think is entirely plausible is, regardless of whether it was something that escaped from the lab, necessarily, I'd look at the sourcing, right?
I'd look at the sourcing of the bats in that lab and say, is it possible that a bat was being brought to that lab from, you know, look, if you're going out looking for diseased bats, you're not going to be able to trap bats that are only diseased.
You're going to just go and collect a lot of bats all at once and bring them all together and then, you know, try to sell them.
Probably some third party organization is going to collect all the bats.
Maybe some farmers are trapping them and sell them to the organization.
But I bet you maybe there's somebody who works for that company, that group, or somebody who has some kind of tie to the institute who says, you know, I hear in the wet markets, a case of these will go for, you know, 10 times as much.
So maybe one fell off the truck, and then I'll go sell it to the wet market.
So one that was then, you know, and it's just a what-if scenario, but I don't think you need to go to the level of, you know, where these people saying it's some kind of bioweapon and say, no, just look at if there's an economic incentive there and you're in a place like China where we know a lot of these controls aren't being followed and we know that there's this craze about eating bats, it doesn't seem like it would take that much for a bat that was destined for the institute to end up in that wet market.
Right, right. Okay, so the response that people have to this coronavirus has a lot to do with, and I, you know, I'm getting criticized from all sides, which usually means you're on the right path in general, but maybe you've had this as well.
So there are a lot of people who fear I think rightly so, that governments are going to use this kind of crisis to extend and expand their powers.
And so what they do is they say, well, if I can somehow believe that coronavirus is not a big deal, then I'm going to be able to push back against this martial law and against this usurpation of powers and shutting down of churches and all that kind of stuff that's going on.
Now... What do you think are the major dangers that free people face or those of us who are still nourishing ourselves on our remaining freedoms with this kind of crisis?
What are governments going to be trying to do?
I'm not talking about Trump in particular.
I think he's pretty committed to the freedoms that we have.
But, you know, he's not the only person in power in America or in the West.
What do you think they're going to try and do to exploit the situation as they generally do?
Well, I think it's absolutely healthy for citizens of any free society to maintain a healthy skepticism of government information, a healthy skepticism of what's being put out.
I think it's important for people to use critical thinking.
I think it's important for people to always sort of keep their radars on when things are going on in the country.
However, when it comes to this particular situation, I do think this is a time where we're seeing an external threat that's hit our society that's now become a sort of global threat.
And it does make sense to take a lot of those precautions.
Now, are governments going to try to use this to an advantage?
Are politicians going to use this to an advantage?
I mean, look, we've seen human history.
It's just human nature that someone at some point will eventually want to give in.
The temptation is obviously going to be so high to be able to use this for their advantage.
And so that's why I think, you know, we started this thing talking about those White House press briefings, but there's also briefings that are going on at the governor's levels for 50 governors here in the United States at the state level.
And I absolutely think that the press should be very adversarial and very questioning of anything that's going on in the United States or in any country right now to find out what the specific information is, What are the numbers you're looking at?
If you're modeling involved, what are the guts of that model?
What kind of information are you putting into that data?
Donald Trump stood in front of a graphic last week or a couple of days ago that said 100 to 200,000 dead is our goal.
And he absorbed that in the sense of he put that on his shoulders because of the sort of enormity of his persona.
But I think to a lot of people, that was a really shocking moment.
It was certainly a crossing of the Rubicon kind of moment to have any president out there.
And the optics of it clearly are, you know, as a guy who did some political staffing, I say, oh, no, don't stand in front of the mass casualty billboard.
But Just because of the sort of magnanimous type of very loud personality that Donald Trump has, I think people also saw it as him being willing to accept that number And this is very important.
Obviously, we want to make the number lower than anything like that.
And so people sort of understand they're using these different types of social ploys.
They're using different propaganda. I mean, there's so much of a social autopsy that's going to be done on all the steps that took place here.
The ways at which, you know, I was driving into Washington today.
So I live about 30 miles out of D.C. And I was driving in and the roads were It's practically empty.
And yet there's a sign flashing on the side of the road.
Maintain social distancing.
I said, what? Am I going bumper to bumper here?
And it was just amazing that we went from not even considering this a threat in January, in some cases, to having a sign on the side of the road on my way to work.
From the government telling me to maintain social distancing.
So we're looking at how the power is organized.
We're looking at how the power is rolled out.
We're looking at the levers of power.
And it's very interesting to see how that's maintained and very interesting.
And hopefully, we make sure that, and this is the prerogative, I would say, of citizens, in some cases, First Amendment lawyers, constitutional lawyers, to make sure that our rights are also maintained throughout this process.
Q, I believe none of it.
I believe it is a substitute for the return of a divine savior that's going to save the Republic.
What are your thoughts? So, I've come clean about a lot of this in the past, but The initial QAnon posts that were done on 4chan before they went over to 8chan were actually done by some people that I was in sort of direct message chat groups with.
You mean cahoots? The technical term is cahoots.
There was no cahoots.
These were guys who came up with a new meme every week, right?
And they were, you know, it's, oh, Jack, we've got this idea.
Jack, we've got that idea.
We're going to run with this. Oh, you guys go do your thing.
You guys could do whatever, right?
And at one point, I remember them telling me, oh, we're going to start this, you know, this thing.
It's going to be on 4chan.
Now, this is in the aftermath of Charlottesville, right?
The aftermath of everything that took place at Charlottesville, the horrific death of Heather Heyer.
And They had this sort of idea that if they created something that maintained sort of the original nuggets of anti-establishmentism, going after the deep state, working on behalf of patriots, but eschewed all of the racism that was associated with Charlottesville, that they would then be able to sort of lead people in the right direction.
So they had sort of a positive...
A positive motivation here.
However, it blew up from there.
And as memes do, as I did, there used to be a thing on Fortan called FBI Anon that was around in 2016.
And so there was FBI Anon, there was CIA Anon, and then QAnon became sort of like the next in the line of those.
And FBI Anon was always talking about Hillary Clinton and the laptops and Wiener and the server and everything else.
And so QAnon was sort of a hearkening back to that after things had gone sort of horrible in Charlottesville.
And so this thing took on a life of its own.
Now 4chan is an anonymous posting board.
However, they then moved over to the website 8chan, which does allow, through the use of these things called trip codes, which does allow for almost a sort of authentication factor to make it at least appear as if one person is posting the same time through multiple posts.
However, that would be seen by whoever is called the board owner.
Their IP address would be seen, the hash code would be seen on the other end and so then people started to try to monetize it people were trying to make money off of it people were trying to And it just became this sort of complacency factor.
It's sort of a hopium then of don't worry about anything.
You don't have to take any activity.
You don't have to organize the plan.
You can just write. Just trust.
It's all going to be taken care of.
And at that point, I went back to those individuals and I said, look, guys, would you at least be willing to come forward and talk about the role that you had in this?
Early on so that people could understand where this came from and that there isn't some magical going on the behind the scenes plan.
I mean, yes, of course, there's there's the regular what we can see plans to fight globalism, to fight terrorism, to fight narco trafficking, to fight this disease right now that are being done at the White House level.
But there isn't some deeper secret organization that's carrying out things behind the scenes.
It's the people that you can see.
It's the people that you know.
Here's another question. Why has Trump taken on the cartels in this time of crisis?
Well, I think that in any situation, right, when the lion is weakened, the jackals move in, right?
And so you know that when the United States government is distracted, when people understand, and I mentioned this as well in terms of the aircraft carriers, the two aircraft carriers that America essentially has that are at degraded capacity right now in the Western Pacific, that everyone's sort of looking around as to how they can take advantage of this.
And this is part and parcel of human nature.
So the drug cartels are looking at, hey, can we sneak across the border very quickly?
Can we do something in the Caribbean while everyone's distracted?
And so I think that that's a major issue that's going on right now.
I also see that there seems to be a sort of Venezuela angle with the whole thing there.
They've just recently declared Maduro, they indicted him as a narco-trafficker.
They've labeled him as a narco-trafficker.
It seems to be that this organization is taking place not with the Mexican cartels, but it seems to be in the area of Venezuela.
And so I'm wondering if there's some lingering ideas in the administration or at the governmental level of sort of pushing back on the regime of Maduro and getting this guy Juan Guaido in power there in Venezuela.
It's really frustrating to see a giant aircraft carrier taken down by a microbe.
It's like people have never seen War of the Worlds and how you deal with superior military technology.
I know you've got a show to get to.
We'll just do one or two more questions. What are your thoughts on the bailout as a whole?
Well, you know, I mean, look, I was the one that broke the story about the Kennedy Center and I brought this video of or an audio tape of the Kennedy Center president coming out and saying that we're going to accept 25 million dollars from the United States government from the taxpayers, but we're not going to give it to our workers.
We're going to use it on our own mismanaged finances.
And we're still going to lay off workers.
We're going to lay off the National Symphony Orchestra.
Which, by the way, I like the Kennedy Center.
I take my wife to the Kennedy Center.
We go to see shows there.
I think it's a great date night.
This is a time where you've got a situation where people are hurting.
And I personally wish that they had done a clean bill of just-a-month direct payments to people that were put on unemployment that were laid off in terms of this.
And what they're doing with the banks in terms of this is by giving those banks essentially no-risk loans, not to go too down the rabbit hole of finance, but by giving them no-risk loans at a time when A lot of the small businesses and medium-sized businesses in the United States are hurting and have been weakened, and in some cases maybe close to or approaching insolvency or underwater.
The banks are going to be able to take a larger stake in middle America than they've ever had before.
And it's this incredible situation where now you can privatize your profits, but if you have losses, you just get another bailout.
We socialize the losses.
And so for all those...
You know, sort of the free market wing of the conservatives out there.
It's like, hey, where are you guys on this, you know?
Right, right. Okay, well, listen, I really, really appreciate your time today.
Let's see if we can shave this in under an hour.
Jack, if you could tell people, I'll put a link to your book.
It's already embedded in the description.
Well worth reading. Can you tell people where to get a hold of your work, your Twitter handle, and how to get a hold of One American News Network?
Best place to find us is oneamericannews.com.
So it's O-A-N-N.com.
You can see all the places that we're available there.
We're on Cloud TV. We're on Roku.
We're also available on a variety of cable providers.
Then as far as myself, I live on Twitter, of course.
It's at Jack Posobiec, J-A-C-K-P-O-S-O-B-I-E-C. I'm also on Parler, which is the free speech alternative to Twitter.
And I would encourage you guys to check that out as well.
If you're interested in tweeting about things that Twitter might label as disinformation or wrong thing or rumor mongering, Right.
Well, thanks. I really, really appreciate the updates.
Great to get that level of expertise.
Stay safe. People, please tune in to One American News Network.
Please read Jack's book.
Follow Jack on Twitter. It is an entertaining and very illuminating Twitter account.
So thanks so much for your time today.
I hope to talk again soon. Thanks so much, Scott.
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