March 6, 2021 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:09:58
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you you | |
| yesterday we were talking about something called Strauss how | ||
| generational theory And according to that theory, which was developed some time ago, about 25 years, they say that we are in the fourth season, the winter period, where we'll be entering some kind of crisis. | ||
| On that show, we talked a lot about what that crisis may be, and we should be in the peak of it, so perhaps it's some kind of internal conflict here in the U.S. | ||
| But there's also something called Thucydides Trap, which suggests we may be looking down the barrel of war with China. | ||
| Strauss how generational theory could be predicting that maybe the crisis we face is World War three or some kind of large international conflict and that may be China So one of this we have a bunch of different stories pulled up one of which is about China wants to teach young men masculinity Because they're scared about changing gender roles and it's something very different than what we see here. | ||
| So maybe the crisis we're facing is multifaceted Well, we're gonna talk a lot about China today and what's going on with the Biden administration, what's happening in the South China Sea and Taiwan and Hong Kong, and pineapples apparently getting bought up like crazy because war can be weird. | ||
| And we're joined today by the crew from China Uncensored. | ||
| So why don't you guys just introduce yourselves and let everyone know who you are. | ||
| Hey, Tim, good to be back. | ||
| I'm Chris Chappell, the host of China Uncensored and America Uncovered. | ||
| I'm Matt Gnaizda, the producer of those shows. | ||
| And I'm Shelley Zhang, the humor ninja of those shows. | ||
| Official title. | ||
| Official title. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| So we're going to talk just a lot about China, I guess. | ||
| It'll be the Friday What's Happening with China episode, I suppose. | ||
| And I think it's probably important, too. | ||
| I'm glad you guys came because before Joe Biden got elected, there were a lot of questions about what we might see under a Biden presidency with policy towards China. | ||
| And you guys were mentioning that some of the people he had in his transition team were very favorable, friendly towards what China had done, what they would do. | ||
| Probably doesn't sound all that good for us, so we'll get into all this stuff. | ||
| Before we do, however, head over to TimCast.com, become a member, because we've got a ton of exclusive members-only posts. | ||
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| We had James O'Keefe, Sidney Watson, and you can even see this one right here. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
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| It really, really does help. | ||
| Let's talk about this first story. | ||
| And before we started the show, I asked you guys if you knew a lot about the gender role stuff, the culture war stuff. | ||
| And then in the context of China, I think it's really, really fascinating what's happening in Southeast Asia in general. | ||
| Because I think, Shelley, you mentioned like K-pop and stuff and how they're kind of worried about it over there. | ||
| Let me read a little bit from this article from NBC News and then we'll just we'll talk about it. | ||
| NBC reports China proposes teaching masculinity to boys as state is alarmed by changing gender roles. | ||
| Boys in China traditionally are expected to be strong leaders, get good grades and excel at sports, but the gender balance in China is changing. | ||
| They say they start with this like I hate when journalists do this out with a story. | ||
| No one invited Bu Yunhao to be in their group for the annual class trip. | ||
| The other fifth graders at Shanghai Shangdi Experimental School made fun of the 11-year-old, calling him too girly. | ||
| Quote, I wanted to run away right out of the classroom, said Yunhao, now 13 and a first-year middle schooler in Shanghai. | ||
| Some of his classmates made fun of his high-pitched voice and the way he screamed when he tried to maintain discipline among his fellow students as a class monitor. | ||
| Others teased him for spending so much time with the girls and said he acted like he was trying to date the other boys in the class. | ||
| The bullying eventually stopped, but a recent announcement by the government that singles out boys who don't fit traditional Chinese ideas of masculinity has revived the painful memories. | ||
| The plan to, quote, encourage masculinity in male students has inflamed a debate over modern gender roles as China's government increasingly emphasizes what many consider to be outdated and damaging stereotypes for men and boys. | ||
| I think it's interesting because that perspective is wholly American. | ||
| Like, in America, it's very much... I'm reading the story and it's like, if that happened now, there would be a PSA. | ||
| They'd bring in bully experts and then say, no, no, no, it's okay that he's effeminate and things like that. | ||
| But it also reminds me of that commercial that we saw out of China a while ago where they put the black man in the washing machine and he comes out as Chinese. | ||
| People in the United States were outraged. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| You're so racist. | ||
| People in China laughed and didn't seem to care at all. | ||
| So I wonder what your guys' thought. | ||
| I don't know whoever wants to jump in about the gender roles in China and what you guys think is happening. | ||
| Well, one thing that jumps to mind is, you know, back in the Cultural Revolution, it was sort of the opposite, where they were making an effort to, like, completely eliminate any kind of gender. | ||
| Like, the women had to dress in almost, like, military attire, very baggy, had to have short haircuts. | ||
| any kind of display of femininity was not allowed and now... | ||
| similar now I guess right? well I think the women are allowed to be and | ||
| encouraged and that reminds me of the guy who had a was found out to have a hundred | ||
| mistresses I think he wanted he wanted them to be very feminine still. he got | ||
| executed by the way. | ||
| Haskell it quickly. | ||
| It did. | ||
| Well, I mean, there's also a lot of corruption, so it wasn't just that. | ||
| It was also the three metric tons of cash they found in his home. | ||
| Oh, okay, okay. | ||
| I thought it was like a guy who was like, I want a bunch of women! | ||
| Off with his head! | ||
| No, no word on what happened to the women. | ||
| I believe it, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know where the mistresses are. | ||
| But yeah, Shelley, you made a good point about sort of the influence of South Korea on China. | ||
| Yeah, I think the thing is that with the growing, like, K-pop, K-dramas, like, this whole Korean wave coming, and, like, there has been kind of more, like, the more effeminate kind of male has been, like, the ideal in movies and music and all this stuff, and it's affected China a lot. | ||
| and in response the Chinese Communist Party tried to basically have their own like patriotic boy bands and patriotic they love that word yeah and then it's it didn't quite work well but they're trying to like basically use um like Chinese culture to fight this like incoming Korean like popular culture that they didn't like and then you've also got this so like in Chinese the word for like the type of like effeminate like male like these like really pretty young men is called like small soft meat like small tender meat all right so that's so that's become like super hot and then the Chinese Communist Party is like that's not masculine enough meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party is making movies like Wolf Warrior right like they want like the Chinese Rambo | ||
| It's really weird, though. | ||
| I mean, they're communists, and then in the United States, the right criticizes all of this stuff by saying those trying to strip away masculinity are communists, right? | ||
| So we had Jack Murphy on the show recently, and he went on this tirade about Marxism is inherently anti-masculine because they want to get rid of the patriarchy and things like that. | ||
| But how does that make sense that the Communist Party of China wants strong, burly, masculine men, and they're literally the Communist Party? | ||
| It's like, well, there are different different tactics to communism. | ||
| And in a communist country like China, they want a big, fearsome military that intimidates other countries. | ||
| China is definitely gearing up for the day they invade Taiwan. | ||
| They've been very open about wanting to invade Taiwan. | ||
| They've said this for decades. | ||
| And so I think this is partially a response to, like, creating an image internationally of, like, this is a fearsome military force that will be able to take Taiwan. | ||
| Don't mess with it in the South China Sea. | ||
| But is this have anything to do with what's happening in the U.S.? | ||
| Are they responding to what's happening here? | ||
| I know you guys mentioned Korea, right? | ||
| Isn't a lot of what happens in Korea related to, you know, they want to sell to America. | ||
| They like the culture that America exports. | ||
| They try to adopt certain things like that. | ||
| Like boy bands weren't invented in Korea. | ||
| Yeah, they... I don't know if they were invented here in America, mind you. | ||
| Well, K-pop... | ||
| They definitely were obviously inspired by the American music industry, but I think they've been fairly unsuccessful at really penetrating the U.S. | ||
| market outside of, like, BTS or, like, Gangnam Style, which was... But Psy isn't, like, a real... He's not the typical. | ||
| He's not BTS. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's not as serious. | ||
| It's, like, very hokey and silly and, like, he's making fun of it, kind of. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't know you can say that, like, that Korean style is appealing to the U.S. | ||
| because it really hasn't done that yet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though there's a lot of good K-pop out there. | ||
| No, but I mean, like, is Korea trying to be like the U.S. | ||
| in terms of how pop culture works, right? | ||
| They're emulating... A lot of countries do this. | ||
| America has some kind of pop culture phenomenon, and then, you know, they emulate it. | ||
| I mean, we emulate a bit of the British stuff, too, when we've had various different artists come from the UK. | ||
| I'm just wondering if China's reaction to this and the things they're doing is countering the United States, right? | ||
| Like I was saying about the communists thing. | ||
| Are they looking at the U.S. | ||
| and being like, we're going to do the opposite of what the U.S. | ||
| is because the U.S. | ||
| is bad? | ||
| Kind of like how tribalism works. | ||
| I actually think they're kind of trying to do the same thing that the U.S. | ||
| did, but in, like, the 80s. | ||
| Like, they want to use, you know, soft power to project, like, the way that, you know, American Blue Jeans or... I brought up Rambo, right? | ||
| Like, like U.S. | ||
| this... or Top Gun, like, these type of, like, um, movies that, like, celebrated, like... They love Top Gun in China. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, this kind of... | ||
| masculinity that that kind of like power like that appeals to the Communist Party because that seems like it's like oh then you have the power to like Wolf Warrior was about you know these Chinese soldiers who went to rescue Chinese citizens who were you know in Africa right so like they were you know the whole idea was like the motherland will never leave you behind like it was this like whole like very patriotic yeah it's like 80s yeah yeah And the whole idea, like, the Communist Party uses the propaganda of the century of humiliation constantly. | ||
| The idea that, you know, foreign forces have humiliated the West, and so China needs to be strong. | ||
| We need to be strong and fight against the hostile foreign forces. | ||
| What do you think the sentiment among the Chinese people is, though? | ||
| I mean, it doesn't really sound like the Communist Party is communist. | ||
| That's a big conversation there. | ||
| So, you know, there's a lot of elements to communism and a lot of people think, | ||
| oh, communism is about the government says, here's what products have to be made and who does what | ||
| jobs. Right. And I think that's that's true. But that's only at, you know, 5 percent of what | ||
| communism is. You know, ultimately, communism is about power and control for the Communist Party. | ||
| And so they'll use these ideas of creating a utopia on earth, and you know how it goes. | ||
| They promise equity, they promise equality, and ultimately some animals are a lot more equal than others. | ||
| That is the leadership of the party. | ||
| What we see in China is there's a lot of capitalism going on in the sense you have a lot of private industry now and you have in the last 40 plus years since the reform and opening up started in 1978. | ||
| Huge explosion in private industries. | ||
| But the reason China is still completely a communist country is number one, the Communist Party actually controls all those private industries. | ||
| So you've got, you know, Alibaba, Any company has to have a Communist Party branch in the company that's even funded by a company, and they're involved in big decisions that are happening in the company. | ||
| In fact, even foreign companies that go into China, like McDonald's, IKEA, they all have party cells in the country by law. | ||
| They have to have party cells in the company. | ||
| And so there's that control of private industry. | ||
| On top of that, you've got some of the biggest industries in China that are directly state-owned enterprises. | ||
| Steel, coal, telecommunications, some of the construction. | ||
| So that element is communist. | ||
| And then on top of that, you've got the sort of communist legal system, which is that they don't have the kind of legal system we think of here. | ||
| You've got obviously the rubber stamp Congress. | ||
| But you also have the way that they rule is not through rule of law. | ||
| They rule through these mass political campaigns, which is a whole other topic. | ||
| But simply put, Xi Jinping will say something like, we need to improve the quality of public | ||
| toilets in China. | ||
| And then everyone in China has to get involved in sprucing up these things. | ||
| And some local officials go nuts and they build these million dollar golden toilets | ||
| for foreigners. | ||
| Look how great we're following this policy. | ||
| But it's a political campaign. | ||
| Private companies have to do it, local officials. | ||
| And you get promoted based on how well you follow the policy. | ||
| And even if the policy is ludicrous, or even if you take it to an extreme, that doesn't matter. | ||
| Because, you know, as a local official, you're not accountable to voters. | ||
| You're accountable only to the higher-ups who are giving you your position. | ||
| So in that sense, it's still completely communist, even though it seems to have the elements of capitalism. | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| Michael Bloomberg? | ||
| Who said something about how Xi Jinping has constituents he has to... Oh, he said he's not a dictator, right? | ||
| Yeah, he's not a dictator. | ||
| So you say he doesn't have voters. | ||
| Michael Bloomberg disagrees, sort of. | ||
| I mean, is there a possibility that if the people are upset, Xi Jinping will not be in power? | ||
| Well, let's ask the Uyghurs. | ||
| I don't, I don't think that, like, but like, there is, like, there is this, you know, this whole populism versus the elites thing that's happening basically all around the world. | ||
| In China, the Communist Party is like uniquely positioned to take advantage of it because they're a Communist Party. | ||
| So they already say, you know, it's the people's this, the people's that. | ||
| But Xi Jinping has specifically made an attempt to be a populist leader within the Communist Party even. | ||
| So, he'll do things like his anti-corruption campaign, which was really about, kind of, getting rid of his political enemies, but a lot of it was positioned as, like, we're getting rid of, like, the excessive, like, elite communist members who are just, you know, wasting money and drinking and having mistresses and this kind of stuff. | ||
| And then he'll be photographed, you know, eating steamed buns at, like, an ordinary restaurant with the common people or, like, He's a guy you could have a baijiu with. | ||
| Yeah, he's a guy you could eat a steamed bun with. | ||
| It's very Maoist in that way, where it's man-of-the-people type of propaganda. | ||
| So he's making a specific play to become the populist leader, I think probably partly because of the power struggle that's going on within the party. | ||
| So he kind of understands that he needs to have the ordinary people on his side, quote-unquote. | ||
| That's what drove the Cultural Revolution. | ||
| Mao was kind of on the outs. | ||
| He used the love of the people, particularly the psychotic young youth, activated them, and then he was back in power, basically. | ||
| So that's powerful. | ||
| Do regular people in China like, generally speaking, the Communist Party or Xi Jinping? | ||
| Well, they'll certainly say so publicly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| It's hard to really know what the opinion is because there is no forum that they can really... Actually, Clubhouse was kind of an interesting example of Maybe some signs of dissent. | ||
| Like Clubhouse, there were Mandarin language chat rooms that would very, very quickly fill up to their 5,000 person max capacity. | ||
| And this was for a very brief window. | ||
| I think it was only about a week or so that Clubhouse... Well, it was a weekend. | ||
| It was a weekend before they shut it down. | ||
| It was just this little bit of crack where people inside mainland China could have actual uncensored access to the outside world. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And they were talking about Xinjiang and the Uyghurs and the concentration camps and all this stuff. | ||
| They were hearing from Uyghurs. | ||
| They were hearing from people in Hong Kong and Taiwan. | ||
| And so I think that's a sign that people in China are aware on some level that they are being starved of information. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And they're going for it. | ||
| But also people on Clubhouse, like you're talking about, you know, wealthy Chinese people or upper middle class Chinese people. | ||
| Yeah, not rural farmers. | ||
| You know, yes, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, my experience mainly with overseas Chinese people is that they've generally been, seem to be positive towards | ||
| the Communist Party. | ||
| And I think that's a lot of times because you have a very small subset of people that end up | ||
| making it to the United States. And the reason they got their wealth so they could come here | ||
| is actually because they had connections within the party. | ||
| And many of them were party members And so you've got like a very small and non-representative subset of wealthy or influential overseas Chinese who are saying, we like the Communist Party. | ||
| Well, they say, oh, maybe there's a few issues, but basically it's been really good for China. | ||
| You're talking about the people who have come here within the last like 10 years. | ||
| The last 10 years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so but then you have like if what you're really talking about is the other 1.3 billion Chinese people, you may have a very different perspective. | ||
| And I remember, Shelley, when you were talking with blind Chinese rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng about what was on the ground in China. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he talked about how, you know, many people are very fed up with the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| They just cannot express it online because they know. | ||
| I mean, people have been arrested in China for Calling Xi Jinping a steamed bun, for example. | ||
| Or Winnie the Pooh, right? | ||
| Yeah, so it's not a joke that people are seriously getting in trouble for what they say online. | ||
| Yeah, well it's happening here now, just in different ways. | ||
| I think it's interesting how we've basically just outsourced censorship very different from what they do. | ||
| I mean, for them it's the Communist Party that dictates the censorship, right? | ||
| Here it's just, oh, we can't interfere with what the monopoly wants. | ||
| So now you look at how all the conversations here are being controlled. | ||
| It seems like there are parallels, not completely identical, but still similarities where people are getting, you know, it's getting worse and worse here. | ||
| Well, Tim, they're private companies. | ||
| They have the right to, you know, monitor their own businesses. | ||
| Don't you support billion-dollar conglomerates like Google? | ||
| See, that's the issue. | ||
| It's always the centralized power. | ||
| If we give all the power to the government, you'll end up with a similar problem. | ||
| However, we have a Bill of Rights in this country, so there's at least that to protect us in the event that in the U.S. | ||
| we say, okay, we're going to nationalize or regulate these companies. | ||
| But you'll still run the risk, no matter what the supreme power is, the centralized, unified authority, no matter what it is, it's going to tell you, you can't do things it doesn't like. | ||
| Well, I mean, the foundation of the United States is the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely, so it's a system in place to prevent the elite from getting too much power, because what always happens is the people who become elite think they should have more power, and have a general disdain for all of us other schlubs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they know better than us, Chris. | ||
| Shouldn't we let them tell us what to do and what to think? | ||
| My problem with the elite is they don't recognize that I should be amongst them. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| That's fair, yeah. | ||
| Jerks. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I have a very high IQ, I'm sure. | ||
| My mom told me. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, well, to a certain extent, I mean, the Communist Party is just the elite. | ||
| The people who choose to join it, they're doing so because they know they will get the elite ranks, the privilege, the access. | ||
| They use the same line that communism has used all along, that there's class struggle, the world would be a better place if there weren't this group oppressing everyone else. | ||
| And so they are the people and then they kill everyone. | ||
| Well they kill the bad people and then take over and then obviously since they're the good guys they can do whatever they want. | ||
| Everyone has to... That's right. | ||
| And it's hard when you get into power on the premise that you're fighting those in power because then you don't want people to fight the power when you become the power. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, then they just have to come up with a group to target, right? | ||
| So, you know, you target the students in 1989 and they become the pariahs and you massacre them. | ||
| There's always some enemy to fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In the late 90s, the enemy was Falun Gong, but, you know, they then killed them for their organs. | ||
| And there was the Tibetans, which they've been targeting for a long time. | ||
| And now that they've run out of the Falun Gong organs, they go to the Uyghur. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and actually, you know, we had a guest on our show talking about how, like, there's not a lot of Falun Gong practitioners in China anymore of a certain age group because so many of them have been killed for their organs. | ||
| And now the Communist Party has just moved on to a new group to get new organs. | ||
| What do they use the organs for? | ||
| For transplants. | ||
| I mean, I think... For like the people they like? | ||
| For party members? | ||
| Or people who can pay for it? | ||
| It's commercial. | ||
| It's commercial. | ||
| I mean, look, a human, you know, a human heart could be retail for $100,000, $150,000. | ||
| A set of lungs, $100,000. | ||
| Dollars. | ||
| Dollars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, so the value of a human life in China is very specific. | ||
| You know, it's about $450,000. | ||
| That's how much a human being is worth. | ||
| on the black market of organ trade. | ||
| Well, not even black market, because the point is Chinese state-run hospitals. | ||
| And so like what's happening with the Uyghurs, like we know about the concentration camps, right? | ||
| We know about how they're treating women and so on. | ||
| But the thing that's not reported on very much is in Xinjiang, it is very likely that | ||
| a lot of those people are being used as sort of a human organ bank. | ||
| And when there's someone who wants an organ, they find a match from within that concentration | ||
| camp system and they will do a speedy match. | ||
| And there's a lot of, you know, I don't know if you want to go into it here, but there's | ||
| a lot of evidence to suggest that they are in fact using Uyghurs for that. | ||
| And it's coordinated by the same system that is doing the labor camp. | ||
| So it's all part of the party's plan. | ||
| This is not some black market group or whatever doing it. | ||
| It's a fully coordinated effort. | ||
| It's the way that they subsidize their medical system because the government is not paying | ||
| for it anymore. | ||
| They're not paying for the medical system? | ||
| Well, it's sort of socialized health care, but like, that's not really a very accurate way to describe it because it's very misleading. | ||
| So, well, it's socialized medical care, but it's not very good. | ||
| But also, like, the state isn't really giving it much money. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so it has to support itself through... The hospitals are, yeah, kind of on their own. | |
| They need to make their own money. | ||
| Hospitals need to make their own money. | ||
| And one of the key ways they do that is through transplants. | ||
| So whenever we hear this argument that, you know, the United States is one of, like, three countries without universal health care or something, China actually doesn't provide that kind of coverage for people? | ||
| Well, I mean, they purport to do so. | ||
| But the problem is that, like, Like, you can go to a hospital and that'll be provided, but you'll still have to pay for your own food in the hospital. | ||
| You have to pay for your own nurses in the hospital. | ||
| There's a lot of things about that system that don't work. | ||
| You have to buy your own medicine still. | ||
| It also depends on who you are and where you are. | ||
| And what kind of publicity there is going on. | ||
| Like, during COVID, there was a lot of, the country is paying for the medical care of these people who are getting the coronavirus. | ||
| Anal swabs for everyone. | ||
| You know, yeah. | ||
| Okay, that's different. | ||
| Yeah, that was for Americans, actually. | ||
| Yeah, foreigners. | ||
| Foreigners are prohibited. | ||
| You wanna go? | ||
| Well, it's funny that, you know, look, we can talk about China, China, anal swabbing, | ||
| American diplomats or whatever, but we are talking about organ harvesting, which is like | ||
| a little bit worse. | ||
| It's a little worse. | ||
| A little bit, huh? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| A lot of it worse. | ||
| But that system, the organ harvesting system, has been going on for a long time. | ||
| And as I understand it, it really ramped up in the early 2000s, because they had all these Falun Gong in prison. | ||
| And so they're like, well, what are we going to do with all these people? | ||
| And they're super healthy, because they've been doing Qi Gong. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| You've got healthy people. | ||
| They don't drink or smoke. | ||
| They're in good physical shape. | ||
|
unidentified
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Perfect. | |
| Perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ideally you want them to be like 28. | |
| We're talking just billions of dollars. | ||
| I mean, this is really about money. | ||
| You see that China did ramp up the construction of specialty hospitals designed specifically for organ transplants. | ||
| And this is at a time when there is no organ donation system. | ||
| Yeah, for a lot of cultural reasons and whatever, maybe all across China a few hundred people or at most a couple thousand people are volunteers, organ donors. | ||
| And their system isn't even really functional in most parts of China. | ||
| So the vast majority of organ transplants are from non-voluntary donors. | ||
| And they're not even executing enough convicted criminals to account for the tens of thousands of transplants that are happening every year. | ||
| And so these organs have to come from somewhere. | ||
| And the reality is, almost certainly, that they're coming from one or more repressed groups. | ||
| Falun Gong, probably the biggest. | ||
| Maybe Uyghurs, now Uyghurs, because there's not enough Falun Gong organs left. | ||
| You know, to some degree, Tibetans and house Christians, I think. | ||
| You mentioned that the Falun Gong are healthier. | ||
| Is that similar for the Uyghur Muslims? | ||
| They don't drink? | ||
| Things like that? | ||
| With the Uyghurs, it seems like there is a specific, they call it a halal organ harvesting. | ||
| For the customers in the Middle East? | ||
| Yeah, there seems to be a specific desire for that in those communities because they don't eat pork. | ||
| They don't drink. | ||
| So that's why there's advertising for medical transplant tourism in the Middle East to come to China. | ||
| And there's even at the airport in Urumqi, which is the main city in Xinjiang, a sort of like fast track organ line. | ||
| You can Google it and find photos of this just to speed up anyone who's boarding a plane who's carrying organs. | ||
| So they're attracting Middle Eastern customers who are, they're very ethical customers who only want halal organs from Muslims. | ||
| Ethical? | ||
| Very ethical. | ||
| Because they want the halal organs. | ||
| But then they're like, harvest the organs of this innocent Muslim as well? | ||
| It's unclear if the people getting the organs, how much they know. | ||
| There's a certain degree of... Willful? | ||
| I don't know, I don't want to know. | ||
| Yeah, like, it is not possible to order an organ. | ||
| You can't schedule it two weeks in advance. | ||
| Except in China you can, though. | ||
| Wait, China you can schedule? | ||
| You schedule it on a day, typically about two weeks. | ||
| Have you guys ever seen the movie The Island? | ||
| Who was in it? | ||
| Was it Leonardo DiCaprio? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it was Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. | |
| And they're basically clones, so that when their non-clone counterpart in the real world needs an organ, they harvest the clone. | ||
| So it's like, you could order, as a wealthy person, be like, I'm going to need that, you know, heart in a few months. | ||
| And they would be like, okay. | ||
| And they would start prepping the cologne for harvest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder, you know, I'm not a Muslim, but I wonder what the actual scripture says or the teachings would say about being a Muslim and then going and then having a country that is subjugating Muslims. | ||
| Taking their organs and then you as a Muslim are like, I'll take that organ. | ||
| I can't imagine that's Right in like in their religion, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, but people within the same religions have been killing each other for centuries So, I mean there's always that but I think that the that the people who are going to get the organs I think they typically aren't thinking about the source. | ||
| They don't want to think about the source and no one is Yeah. | ||
| Like a heart? | ||
| them think about the source. And so it's just like, oh, I'm just going and getting a transplant. | ||
| And that's from a voluntary donor. That is what they will be told. Yeah, they will be | ||
| told it and like, and they might have their heart missions, but they don't want to think | ||
| you don't want to let your mind go down that path. Yeah, right. | ||
| I guess when people are faced with death in an organ, they'll believe whatever they have to believe to justify their existence. | ||
| I mean, but like, also the Western, you know, medical system is supporting this. | ||
| And they don't have the excuse of the fact that they're facing life and death. | ||
| Because the transplantation society has willfully not looked into this and have been like, Uh, like, we don't see anything wrong happening in China, and, you know, there's been a lot of brouhaha over China's done a lot of cutting-edge organ transplants, like... Cutting-edge. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Organ transplant, uh, research. | ||
| A lot of, like, the new... Bleeding-edge research. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Bleeding and resuscitation. | ||
| A lot of the new drugs that are coming out that make taking organs out of people easier, letting the organs survive longer outside the body. | ||
| These things are all coming from China in the last decade or so, and it's because they're doing all of these transplants. | ||
| It's like a society that doesn't care at all about the individual. | ||
| That's pretty accurate. | ||
| Yeah, that sums it up. | ||
| Yeah, and unfortunately, China is trying to draw medical and scientific talent from around the world | ||
| because they have access to a lot of funding, state-backed funding, | ||
| and there's often not the kind of moral restrictions holding them back. | ||
| Like, in the U.S., for better or for worse, you have all kinds of restrictions. | ||
| Like, stem cell research is a huge issue. | ||
| None of those kind of moral dilemmas ever hold back the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| So, like Shelley was saying, they're able to make these breakthroughs in organ transplant technology because They have willing live test experiment. | ||
| Willing? | ||
| Yeah, willing. | ||
| Yeah, the Communist Party is willing to sacrifice them for the good of the party. | ||
| There was the guy who was talking about head transplants and how he had practiced it several times on him. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| Head transplant. | ||
| But they can't connect nerves or anything like that. | ||
| He was saying he was getting real close to being able to do that. | ||
| Which is to say he was failing each time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| Yeah, so there's definitely a lot of really ghoulish things probably happening within the medical system. | ||
| What about Americans? | ||
| If a rich American went there, had money, would they be like, whatever you say, sir, right away? | ||
| Here's your kidney, good sir. | ||
| I'm sure in principle. | ||
| I like I have no specific There are some countries that have outlawed organ tourism to China because like Israel was one of the first countries to do it actually South Korea has now Taiwan has I think these are there was a lot of tourism coming from like South Korea and Taiwan You know, Asia. | ||
| So like when, but once like this started to become known and then like doctors in those regions started speaking up and being like, we should not do this. | ||
| Uh, but like, it's still a very under the radar issue in general. | ||
| Has the world always been this way, or are we just in every possible conceivable iteration of a dystopian nightmare? | ||
| Book burning, censorship, zealotry, communism, organ harvesting, organ tourism. | ||
| It's like all of these stories, not just here in the US, but around the world, and it's like... It's like every single nightmarish dystopian novel has come into existence at the exact same time, or around the same time. | ||
| It does make you think, like... | ||
| It's always been this way? | ||
| Well, it just shows an inability for people as a whole to really stand up to these kinds of things. | ||
| Very often what happens is they get manipulated by those in charge to go along with these kinds of things. | ||
| To go along with the censorship, the book burning, the killing of the group, the bad group that's hurting society. | ||
| It's very easy to be manipulated. | ||
| That's the crazy thing, too, about, like, in the U.S., not to derail too much off of China's internal problems, but, you know, they claimed Trump was demonizing migrants and Muslims. | ||
| Well, they were demonizing American citizens. | ||
| You know, so we do see, regardless of which faction is trying to gain power, demagoguery and attacking a specific group seems to be the strong path to power. | ||
| Since you mentioned that, like, Xi Jinping recently said the U.S. | ||
| is the biggest threat to China's development, and imagine if Biden said that about China, or any U.S. | ||
| official. | ||
| I mean, I think Trump said things similar to that, right? | ||
| He got a little close. | ||
| But Biden's gonna be like, come on, man, you know, China, they're helping us out, they're good people, you know? | ||
| He's a master diplomat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Indeed, yes. | ||
| Well, so let me pull this story up here and then we'll talk about U.S. | ||
| and China. | ||
| Axios reports Americans increasingly see China as an enemy. | ||
| Overall, 55% view America as a competitor. | ||
| So you were right earlier. | ||
| I was wrong. | ||
| You mentioned it was about 34% viewed as an enemy. | ||
| Among Republicans, 53% view China as an enemy and only 20% of Democrats, but it's about a third of | ||
| Americans, see China as an enemy. Perhaps not enough for any real conflict, but at least in | ||
| that regard with China now demonizing the United States, I wonder if this is a step towards a | ||
| potential military conflict. I don't know where you guys, your views are right now between that | ||
| scenario happening? Well, so for a point of context, the situation in Hong Kong, | ||
| on. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party has been very successful at completely annihilating any trace of democracy in Hong Kong. | ||
| Once Hong Kong is taken care of to the Communist Party's satisfaction, the next goal is Taiwan. | ||
| And that is something that will draw in the entire world. | ||
| The U.S. | ||
| has made obligations to defend Taiwan in the event of any kind of invasion. | ||
| And Taiwan is a very strategic location in the region. | ||
| So sooner or later, we are going to see Taiwan become a flashpoint. | ||
| Is Biden going to actually protect Taiwan? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I'd say no. | ||
| Well, so he was the first president to have essentially what is the Taiwanese ambassador. | ||
| They're not called an ambassador because of the one China, whatever. | ||
| But he was the first president to have this Taiwanese representative come to the inauguration. | ||
| He has carried on freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea and in the Taiwan Strait. | ||
| Uh, so he's done all of those things. | ||
| We just he hasn't explained what his China policy is. | ||
| So in many ways, the Biden administration has said many of the right things, but they haven't done much yet. | ||
| And it is six weeks. | ||
| Six weeks, right, right, right. | ||
| And even the Trump administration, it took a while for that administration's China policy to kind of crystallize for a variety of reasons. | ||
| You know, looking at the U.S. | ||
| migrant crisis that's happening right now, and I'm not assuming you guys know a lot about it, but Joe Biden is getting a lot of criticism from the left and the right. | ||
| It's typically being seen as a dramatic failure by both political parties. | ||
| Obviously, there are establishment Democrats who are supportive of Joe Biden, Republican party, Trump populist types, they're super critical, and left populists are looking at Joe Biden as though he's failing miserably in this regard because he's not really getting anything done. | ||
| He's not helping the migrants in a capacity where they'll be able to come in here and get healthcare and get access. | ||
| Well, they're kind of coming in and being released. | ||
| It's not all that great. | ||
| Some are being deported, but then the Trump supporters see it as he's not doing anything to stop it. | ||
| I only bring that up because I have to wonder if that's something that we really can see and understand as Americans. | ||
| We understand the border. | ||
| We understand the arguments made around it. | ||
| Is that a sign of Joe Biden's leadership on other issues as well, which may reflect on what could happen with China? | ||
| Well, I think from things that have been said, and again, this is things that have been said and not done, they talk about diplomacy cooperating with China. | ||
| China might be a rival or a competitor, but we need to cooperate with them on climate change etc etc but the fundamental issue is when you look at the Chinese Communist Party as a regime that is committing genocide and that as we can see in the case of Hong Kong lies about any promise it makes how can you cooperate how can you be diplomatic | ||
| with this kind of monstrous authoritarian regime. | ||
| So it blows the fundamental premise of what he's said out of the water. | ||
| I think the danger for the US and the Biden administration here is that | ||
| they are going to want to differentiate themselves so much from the Trump administration | ||
| that they have to be like, well, we are going to be diplomats. | ||
| We're going to talk about diplomacy. | ||
| We're going to talk about cooperation. | ||
| This whole line about China being a rival, but we have to still cooperate on shared goals is one that's consistently been said by like every Biden nominee that's gone up in front of like Senate hearings or whatever. | ||
| So you have to say this is the line from the Biden administration. | ||
| The problem is that's not what the Chinese Communist Party means by cooperate. | ||
| The word in Chinese, it just kind of means like exchange in any way. | ||
| So it could be just like, you know, the cooperation doesn't, it doesn't mean like we're going to both work together on climate change. | ||
| It means if you want me to do something about climate change, uh, yeah. | ||
| What are you going to give up? | ||
| Like, what are you going to give me? | ||
| I don't think you're going to do anything. | ||
| I think, I think it's duplicitousness. | ||
| They're going to say, don't worry America, we got you. | ||
| You give us the billion dollars and then we'll get right on it. | ||
| And then what billion dollars? | ||
| So the promise was in four decades we'll be carbon neutral. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As they're building more coal-fired power plants. | |
| We've seen challenges with cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party in the past. | ||
| If you look at the George W. Bush administration, they initially took a tough stance on the Communist Party, but after 9-11, They're like, well, we have to work with the Communist Party on fighting the biggest threat, which at the time was terrorism. | ||
| And so the idea is we're going to work with China to fight global terrorism. | ||
| And what did China do? | ||
| They didn't cooperate towards America's goals on fighting terrorism. | ||
| They basically used it as an excuse to go after their Chinese Muslims, like the Uyghurs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The Obama administration then said, oh, we have to cooperate with China on climate change. | ||
| And, you know, what happened? | ||
| Well, China signed, you know, the Paris agreement. | ||
| But ultimately, what did China actually do was build a huge number of coal-fired power plants, releasing massive amounts of carbon. | ||
| They ramped up their carbon emissions while using the excuse of being a developing country. | ||
| But on top of that, they also stole the renewable energy technology from U.S. companies, wind | ||
| power technology and solar technology. | ||
| And now if you want to buy a solar panel in America, you're basically buying one that's | ||
| made in China from knocked off American technology. And that's how the Communist | ||
|
unidentified
|
Party cooperates on climate change. It's also powered by coal. Right, right. | |
| when they build the... | ||
| You know, you're ragging on China coming down real hard over the burning of this carbon and all that stuff. | ||
| But they did build that big TV thing, right, that showed the sunrise. | ||
| Oh, I know that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's all the smog in the air. | ||
| You got to give them credit for at least giving people a glimmer of hope, right? | ||
| It can't just be a dreary post-apocalyptic smog wasteland. | ||
| Xi Jinping promised he's going to transform China into a moderately prosperous society. | ||
| I got to say, I feel like the U.S. | ||
| is already lost. | ||
| You know, I think we're in a propaganda war, an information war, an economic war, and we are... I don't think the physical confrontation matters as much. | ||
| If it comes to a point where Taiwan knows the U.S. | ||
| has become too weak to actually defend it, and their option is allow China to come in or die, I mean, I feel like they might just be like, well, we've got no defense anymore, we've got no leverage, that's it, we're China now. | ||
| It's hard to say because they know what it would mean for Taiwan is they become the next Hong Kong. | ||
| And Hong Kong is looking more and more a little less like Shanghai and a little more like Xinjiang. | ||
| That was a point you made the other day where it's very... What does that mean? | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| It means like it's basically like when the Chinese Communist Party is turning Hong Kong into another Chinese | ||
| city They're not turning it into like Shanghai or Beijing like | ||
| one of their show They're turning it into Xinjiang which is basically an open-air | ||
| prison, right? | ||
| There was like all the crackdowns in Hong Kong now, like they're basically going to | ||
| Essentially strip out all the democracy that existed like no more being able to vote for people in the legislature | ||
| Like it's just they're completely dismantling it and there was maybe a bill that's gonna come up in front of the | ||
| legislature That is now completely controlled by pro-Beijing officials | ||
| That would allow the Hong Kong government to stop people from leaving Hong Kong | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like so that then it really does become like a giant prison. | ||
| And there is no prominent Hong Kong activists that is they're all either in jail or in exile at this point. | ||
| And a lot of people we had interviewed in Hong Kong just a year and a half ago are in jail now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So really what happens in Taiwan will determine whatever happens with the next But I mean, you look at these American companies, that's why I say it. | ||
| Was it LeBron James, who came out and defended China? | ||
| And then you had, was it Steve Kerr, I think it was? | ||
| Well, we don't talk about Black Lives Matter, or they don't talk about Black Lives Matter, so we're not going to talk about what's going on over there. | ||
| And it's like, dude, they're concentration camps. | ||
| It's a big difference. | ||
| And the NBA has a training camp in Xinjiang, and Disney thanked Yeah, we talked about that. | ||
| All these industries, they make so much more money there. | ||
| You gotta look at who owns these big companies and their access to wealth. | ||
| American companies, I shouldn't even call them American companies necessarily, they're multinational corporations at this point, and the people in charge of them are like, I'm rich, I can do whatever I want and no one will stop me, why would I care about anybody else? | ||
| I mean, BlackRock has this whole webpage about unleashing the potential of Chinese bonds. | ||
| Like, yeah. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It means like, invest your money in China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Pump up the regime. | ||
| Yeah, you'll invest your money in China. | ||
| You'll get back a good return and you will sell out everyone else into serfdom or slave labor. | ||
| If China takes Taiwan, China becomes a superpower. | ||
| It's no longer the U.S. | ||
| is more powerful. | ||
| It would be a tremendous loss for democracy worldwide. | ||
| Yeah, this is what Xi Jinping was saying about the, you know, West is in decline, the East is rising. | ||
| I mean, it's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But at the same time saying that the U.S. | ||
| is the biggest threat to China. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| More like the U.S. | ||
| is the dominant power around the world, and it's who needs to be displaced if China has to take over. | ||
| What about the EU? | ||
| They'll stand up. | ||
| My understanding is that the goal of the European Union was to compete with China because they saw how quickly it was rising and they needed some kind of united force. | ||
| They're not succeeding at that. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| And that has to do with the manufacturing and corporate power of Germany in particular being very interested in developing relationships with China. | ||
| Angela Merkel has been very supportive of that. | ||
| Volkswagen went into China in like 1978 or 79. | ||
| It's like the first Western company to go into China. | ||
| Volkswagen has a bad history. | ||
| Well, all of these companies that go into China, they create a Chinese Communist division within the company for the Communist Party. | ||
| So if you have 50 or more employees, then you're required by Chinese law to have a party branch within your company. | ||
| And this applies not just to Chinese companies, but also to foreign companies. | ||
| Foreign companies also have to work with a Chinese company, by law. | ||
| Yeah, so they need a partner, and until recently it had to be a majority partner, 51% majority. | ||
| And so essentially the foreign company can operate, but there are certain things that they can and can't do according to the party whims, and the party is in there with every major decision. | ||
| McDonald's having a party branch in China, it's hard to understand what that would really mean. | ||
| But when it comes to Volkswagen, their party branch is going to help arrange things like cheap labor, for example. | ||
| Or Nike will have a party branch, and maybe there's certain political things that Nike can't say, and there's also possibly the help that they give. | ||
| You get very cheap labor from Uyghurs who don't have much choice. | ||
| Well, this is why Nike was fighting against a forced labor bill that would have potentially gotten them in trouble for using forced labor in Xinjiang. | ||
| Not that they were directly using it, but because of the web of how many of like, you know, you source something from this person who sorts something from this company down the line, and then somewhere along the line, there's Uyghur slave labor. | ||
| I mean, it was so easy and cheap, so they decided to just do it. | ||
| It's not just Uyghur slave labor. | ||
| There's a lot of prison labor. | ||
| There's just a lot of dissident prison labor. | ||
| It's not just the Uyghurs. | ||
| It's just that the Uyghurs are the biggest population. | ||
| It's very visible in a way. | ||
| They're an ethnic minority, so you can kind of tell who they are. | ||
| In one region, too. | ||
| Versus just, like, well, like, so the issue with Falun Gong was they were just anybody. | ||
| They were just people who did Qigong practice, and so they blended in, they weren't, like, in one location, so you couldn't, like, see, like, oh, this is the specific concentration camp where they're putting them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So... That sounds horrible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We do not want the Chinese Communist Party as a superpower leading the world. | ||
| I don't think we can do anything. | ||
| Is it pessimistic to say it's over? | ||
| What do you guys think? | ||
| I think it is pessimistic. | ||
| There has been, you know, we all know the Trump administration was a bit controversial. | ||
| China was one of the few bipartisan issues. | ||
| I would imagine the Biden administration said it's reviewing the Trump administration designation of what's happening to the Uyghurs as genocide. | ||
| I can't imagine it would be politically feasible for Biden to come out and say, well, you know, maybe it isn't genocide. | ||
| I just can't imagine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That happened. | |
| He came out and said, well, you know, there are cultural differences in China. | ||
| What he said was wrong for many reasons. | ||
| Not quite that. | ||
| He has been clear about condemning the treatment of the Uyghurs. | ||
| I don't think he'll use the word genocide personally. | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| Because it's just like how the Canadian parliament recently voted that it was genocide. | ||
| But Trudeau and his entire cabinet basically just didn't show up for the vote. | ||
| Because they were like, the government abstains. | ||
| I can actually understand and respect why Joe Biden would not do that. | ||
| Because he needs to go in and be able to have some kind of relationship to actually have influence in a certain capacity. | ||
| However, while I can understand that, and the same is true for Trump, when he would go and negotiate, like, why is he talking to Kim Jong-un or whatever? | ||
| Like, what is he gonna do, throw a bomb first? | ||
| At a certain point, there's a line, we gotta figure out how we stop these things. | ||
| I mean, the gulags in North Korea are nightmarish, and the genocide and the concentration camps in China are probably the worst possible thing we could imagine existing, in terms of what a human could do to another human. | ||
| How do we stop it? | ||
| If we don't have a president who's willing to say, that's the line. | ||
| The line is, shouldn't the line for, I don't care if it's Trump or Biden, be literal genocide? | ||
| You should say it. | ||
| Shouldn't Trudeau say it? | ||
| Well, as you say, that's, it prevents them from having any kind of diplomacy, quote unquote. | ||
| But the way I see it is when you enter into genocide, is diplomacy really Soft diplomacy. I mean you can still have diplomacy to a | ||
| certain degree you could have I'm good You know we're we're sanctioning you we're making demands | ||
| you end this now or else because this is a red line But we have these we have Trudeau and Biden who are like | ||
| well now hold on there. You know yeah You need to have red lines that there are consequences for | ||
| crossing those red lines, and I think we had all the red lines of Syria | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think with the genocide, this is why genocide is such a touchy issue. | ||
| It's if Western democracies, and now the Dutch parliament has come out and also called it a genocide, if they actually start using the word genocide, then it becomes a lot harder for not just like leaders of countries to just act like China's normal country, but also, you know, Wall Street for businesses, because really the thing that we can do to stop China is to cut off the money. | ||
| That is the number one thing. | ||
| They won't do it. Yeah, you have all these special interests like I like I would mention the NBA | ||
| You had blizzard the hearthstone thing with free Hong Kong. | ||
| Yeah. Well, that's free Hong Kong's long since past I suppose | ||
| They were there's there's an opportunity each and every step of the way for companies to say no to China and they | ||
| don't do it No, I think that's where | ||
| it has to be like when we were talking about how people now see more and more people see China's enemy or | ||
| Like like some kind of threat like it has to be people who it has to be so bad for these companies in the u.s | ||
| to not cut off that source of money in China or whatever that they are willing to do it like If the alternative is that they really, like, with Google and Dragonfly, like, it's such a bad thing for them that they actually have to stop, like, that's where we have to go. | ||
| That was Employee Revolt, wasn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Employees at Google said no to the, you know, Dragonfly. | ||
| Dragonfly? | ||
| And good on them. | ||
| And I wish employees at Nike and the NBA would... I mean, if you had, you know, if you had a bunch of NBA stars, like real stars, who said, you know, we got to condemn what's happening there, then there'd be enough public pressure that there couldn't be much the NBA would do. | ||
| LeBron James needs to call out genocide. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I have no problem with basketball players using their fame to talk about political issues in the U.S. | ||
| What's happening in China is so bad that if you even talk about it in China, you get arrested. | ||
| So you can't criticize your own government inside China. | ||
| It's a very different situation. | ||
| But I think the overall looking at why is the Chinese Communist Party so powerful and | ||
| how have they gotten so much power in the last 20 years, it's all because of foreign | ||
| investment. | ||
| It's partly just the money directly, like investing in Chinese bonds, investing in Chinese | ||
| companies and that sort of thing. | ||
| But it's also the foreign companies coming in, giving their technology, allowing Chinese | ||
| companies to learn from and even steal a lot of this technology and outcompete these industries. | ||
| And then it's us buying those knockoff products back here in the U.S. | ||
| So that whole economic system is the fundamental core of that is foreign companies, especially U.S. | ||
| companies, engaging in that market. | ||
| So to the degree that you can cut off the foreign company or American company interaction with China, That's the degree to which we're going to be able to rein in that authoritarian power. | ||
| And we have to focus there. | ||
| But it's clear that even the Trump administration, which seemed to really want to do it, was unable to achieve a whole lot with that. | ||
| Well, it's going to take a lot, a lot more Google dragonfly situations where people working here who have that power as employees, empower citizens and as media to say, we're not going to tolerate our companies working with a genocide dictatorship. | ||
| Also, you know, consumers not buying products made in China. | ||
| Don't go to an NBA game. | ||
| The other thing that the U.S. | ||
| government could do was what the Trump administration started doing, like actually putting Chinese companies that work with the Chinese military on entity lists, like blacklisting them. | ||
| Getting them delisted from the stock exchanges. | ||
| Yeah, so soon there are going to be a bunch of big Chinese companies that can't trade on Wall Street anymore. | ||
| But is Joe Biden going to keep those policies going? | ||
| Don't know. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| He hasn't said. | ||
| I kind of feel like he wouldn't do that. | ||
| Like you mentioned before, you know, he's going to try and differentiate himself from the Trump administration. | ||
| So already, you know, we had this, uh, this Trump put in this executive order about keeping China out, Chinese made, you know, equipment out of the U.S. | ||
| electrical grid. | ||
| And then Joe Biden's like, we're going to freeze that rule. | ||
| So it's no longer in effect and review it. | ||
| And I'm like, if you want to review the rule, wouldn't you leave the restrictions in place? | ||
| Why would Joe Biden just say, okay, yeah, China come back into the U.S. | ||
| electrical grid? | ||
| I think it's a little unclear what happened. | ||
| And like, he could potentially be using that for his advantage. | ||
| But there was sort of a blanket freeze on a lot of last minute policies by Trump, which I think is in general pretty common for an incoming president to do. | ||
| And the issue is with Biden, like, so that could be... I'm so fine. | ||
| He's frozen those, he reviews them. | ||
| The issue with the Biden administration is it comes under this cloud of Uh, Biden personally and a lot of the people he's appointed to his cabinet, their past failures with China policy, uh, scandals like Hunter Biden, putting this cloud over Biden. | ||
| It gives him the appearance of like, you should not be questioning if the U S president is really going to condemn genocide. | ||
| Yeah, and we are. | ||
| And the other thing, too, is I think it's fascinating how they say that, you know, Donald Trump was the Manchurian candidate for Russia or whatever, that he was a Russian asset, he was a puppet or, you know, and all that stuff. | ||
| And now we actually have this circumstance where, you know, we're six weeks out and Joe Biden has not given an address to a joint session of Congress. | ||
| You'd have to go back to Jimmy Carter in 1977 for the last time it took this long. | ||
| Now, he was into April, so maybe Joe Biden will still beat Jimmy Carter and give some kind of speech, but he's not given a press conference in the entirety of his six weeks. | ||
| So, already things seem to be a bit unprecedented. | ||
| And then we had that scenario where he was talking to the Democratic caucus, and then he says, I'll take questions, and the camera shuts off. | ||
| The feed ends. | ||
| Now, many people on the right said, as soon as Joe Biden offered to take questions, they turned the camera off. | ||
| And the response from the journalists was, he took the questions off camera. | ||
| You're misunderstanding. | ||
| You're confused. | ||
| And my response is, why? | ||
| Why was he doing the session live and then took the questions off camera? | ||
| That's a ridiculous excuse. | ||
| Because either way, the American people deserve to see what our politicians are asking the president and what he is saying to them. | ||
| When I saw that, I was sitting here with Jack Murphy, and Jack was just like, Manchurian candidate. | ||
| Not literally, just kind of joking. | ||
| What's going on to where the President of the United States isn't doing press conferences, isn't giving an address to the Joint Session of Congress, and then he can't even answer questions on a live stream? | ||
| Who is he? | ||
| What's he doing? | ||
| And then you tie that into the Hunter Biden stuff. | ||
| Flying his son in Air Force Two to China for that private equity deal. | ||
| And then, am I supposed to trust this president has our best interest at heart as we're entering either the Strauss-Howe generational theory winter, or Thucydides' trap? | ||
| There's academics who are telling us, we're in for some serious trouble, and we're looking at genocide, and we're looking at organ harvesting, and we're looking at Hong Kong falling, now we're looking at Taiwan. | ||
| It looks like China is getting away with every single thing they've done wrong, and we're doing nothing about it, but say what? | ||
| Maybe some sanctions here and there? | ||
| Well, I think that 2020 was actually a banner year for the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| It didn't start out that way. | ||
| It looked like the world was going to turn against them after the coronavirus. | ||
| It's amazing they turned that. | ||
| They turned that completely around, and now they are using that as propaganda for how well that their system is doing compared to everybody else. | ||
| More reason to cooperate with China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And I think that, like, the one thing, the Biden administration recently came out with their interim national security policy. | ||
| And reading that, I was actually pretty worried about how they were going to, like, deal with China because it seemed to kind of revert back to, like, an Obama administration era of, like, the whole thing that we were talking about before about, like, we need to cooperate still. | ||
| The Trump administration specifically, in their national security policy, called out the Chinese Communist Party and said, you know, it's a Marxist-Leninist organization, said, we are going to treat this the way that the Chinese Communist Party treats this, which is, they said that they are in a great power competition with the U.S. | ||
| So fine, we acknowledge that, you know, China says that we're in a great power competition with them. | ||
| And the Biden administration seems to have gone back to that like, oh, you know, we disagree, we're economic rivals, we're competitors, but we can work together on some things. | ||
| And then the other part of the national security policy that I found kind of a little bit alarming is the fact that they seem to want to blur the line between foreign policy and domestic policy. | ||
| Like, there's a specific part where they talk about how, you know, we can't just have foreign policy and domestic policy be separate. | ||
| We have to, you know, if we really want to have effective foreign policy, we have to fix our own internal problems. | ||
| So then that brought up, like, systemic racism and equity and all this stuff. | ||
| So it seems like if that's what they want to focus on, they're going to be too focused on, like, internal things and this ideological battle and not focused enough on the genuine threat that the Chinese Communist Party is. | ||
| Which is strange because the executive branch, their main thing is to deal with foreign policy. | ||
| Domestic policy is supposed to be the legislative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, here we are with every single line item of China violating some kind of human rights, civil rights, stealing, destroying. | ||
| We're buying back our own technology that was stolen from us and then cheaply knocked off. | ||
| Built by slaves. | ||
| Built by slaves. | ||
| And they just keep doing it. | ||
| And we just keep, you know, doting along, accepting it. | ||
| I will say, I posted a meme, though, that made everybody angry. | ||
| It was on, I think it was the 20th, I said, the peaceful transition of power from the previous administration to the new administration is complete. | ||
| And it was a picture of Vladimir Putin and then Xi Jinping. | ||
| And I was like, there you go. | ||
| Whatever your political ideology is, you know, the left viewed Trump as this, like, beholden guy to Russia. | ||
| But Russia wasn't really doing all that much. | ||
| I mean, sure, there's conflict over pipelines and, you know, Ukraine and things like that. | ||
| Syria, perhaps. | ||
| But what's happening with China really does seem to be, it could be theoretically the catalyst for some very serious major war. | ||
| If we're not already in the peak of it, which is information war. | ||
| But, you know, that's why I have to wonder about the things we see in America in the culture war. | ||
| Is it really in the best interest of either America or China to engage in a hot war with missiles and bullets? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| It never is for anybody. | ||
| It's very expensive, and then you have to hope you're going to win. | ||
| But information war, it's more surreptitious. | ||
| It's aversive. | ||
| So I wonder, you know, to what extent China is influencing our social media and manipulating us much the way they accused the Russians of doing it. | ||
| I don't know if you guys have seen anything that would suggest those kind of operations. | ||
| I think it's a little different, actually. | ||
| What China's really been manipulating very successfully is American elites. | ||
| And it's almost like they don't have to do the kind of awkward, like, Twitter thing, right? | ||
| Where they're, like, having dummy accounts on Twitter and trying to influence people on Facebook. | ||
| Like, the Chinese Communist Party is much better at this than Russia. | ||
| They just tweet it out, right? | ||
| The members of the Chinese Communist Party are tweeting really offensive things. | ||
| They have a picture of the Australian soldier or whatever. | ||
| It reminds me of that Simpsons bit. | ||
| I don't know if you guys have ever seen the episode where Bart joins a boy band that's subliminally trying to get people to join the Navy. | ||
| And the Navy recruiter tells Lisa, we recruit by the subliminal, the liminal, and the superliminal. | ||
| And Lisa goes, superliminal? | ||
| And he goes, yeah. | ||
| And he opens the window and goes, hey, you! | ||
| Join the Navy! | ||
| And then Lenny and Carl are like, OK. | ||
| So that's kind of what I feel like when I see these like high rank, you know, these like, you know, officials in the Communist Party or like Chinese government officials, blue checkmark on Twitter, tweeting some ridiculous, absurd conspiracy theory about the election or the president. | ||
| And it's allowed. | ||
| They're allowed. | ||
| They're allowed to do it. | ||
| I'm like, there it is. | ||
| That's the that's the super liminal right in your face. | ||
| We're lying and we can do whatever we want. | ||
| We don't need bots. | ||
| I, well, so a good example of this is, um, how China manipulates language. | ||
| Matt, I'm going to pass that off to you in just a second. | ||
| But like, just like one example of how Chinese propaganda seeps into, uh, American discourse is going back to the Biden town hall. | ||
| How he was talking about how China had the century of humiliation. | ||
| They need to have the strong centralized core. | ||
| That's Communist Party propaganda that's being parroted by the president. | ||
| And that's not saying he's not unique in that. | ||
| It's because the Communist Party is very good at taking language and changing the meaning of it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's not just that, which I get to in a minute, but the... You'll circle back to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm paying attention. | ||
| The overall idea is like, you know, Tim, you talk about the overt stuff, the superliminal we're seeing on Twitter, which is the propaganda from the Chinese foreign minister. | ||
| But the real way that we're seeing that influence is actually through what's called elite capture. | ||
| which is the Chinese Communist Party convincing influential people around the world, | ||
| including American politicians, American business leaders, American academics, and journalists. | ||
| These are the thought leaders in American society, and the Communist Party is influencing them. | ||
| And now these groups, the politicians, the business leaders, the media, | ||
| are all the cheerleaders for the Communist Party. | ||
| And it may not be so obvious that they're saying, rah, rah, rah, communism, because they're not saying it that way. | ||
| What they're saying is like, well, look at, you know, China's lifted millions of people out of poverty. | ||
| China is a competitor, but we need to work with them. | ||
| And they've gotten people to parrot these lines, which on the surface seem reasonable, but actually they're exactly what the Communist Party wants. | ||
| And they do that through a variety of influence campaigns to get these people on their side. | ||
| The challenge is, like, when we hear, you know, whether it's, you know, Bernie Sanders saying, oh, we know, but, you know, China, I don't like authoritarianism, but China has lifted 700 million people out of poverty, right? | ||
| It's that's the propaganda line that's making you think well maybe they do have some elements to their system that work is look how many people they've lifted out of poverty and it is true that since 1978 hundreds of millions of people in China have gotten out of poverty. But it's not the Communist Party | ||
| that lifted them out of poverty. It was the Communist Party that put them in poverty in the first place. | ||
| But then how did they get out of poverty? It wasn't government policy. It was actually the | ||
| reform and opening up. The Geiger Keifung started by Deng Xiaoping in 78. And these policies | ||
| gradually took the boot off of people's necks so that they could have businesses and start their | ||
| own enterprises in the free market. And people lifted themselves out of poverty. And for investment. | ||
| It's kind of like when it's, you know, in the summer and it's really hot and you're really sweaty. | ||
| So you go under the blanket for a few seconds and then you get really hot. | ||
| When you take the blanket off, it feels really cool and refreshing for a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So maybe what we should do in the US is have this extended lockdown where we destroy everyone's business for maybe a year. | ||
| And then after about, you know, two years, because, you know, Biden's saying next year is normal, then we can be like, look at all of the people the Biden administration has lifted out of poverty. | ||
| He's a tremendous leader. | ||
| Starting with the bankers. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which, I mean, they came in real quick to save those folks. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, I'm not saying there's anything, you know, necessarily wrong about trying to keep the stock market from having a complete crash. | ||
| But definitely there are some shortcomings in terms of the overall response. | ||
| But anyway, to get to the point about, like, you've got the Communist Party getting people to repeat these lines. | ||
| But the problem is, you know, when you hear this, you know, lifting millions of people out of poverty, you also have to realize that China now says, for example, You know, being out of poverty is a human right, right? | ||
| It's the top human right. | ||
| It's the main human right. | ||
| Sounds like Bernie Sanders. | ||
| It's the main human right. | ||
| And so a lot of people on the surface, they think, oh, well, like, yeah, like, like, it's so bad to be in this abject poverty. | ||
| Like, maybe, maybe it is a human right to have money. | ||
| And, you know, you can agree or disagree on that, but that's not the point. | ||
| The point is that now, you know, you've added, the Communist Party has added economic prosperity as a human right. | ||
| And they've gotten a lot of people to kind of go along with it. | ||
| But what you're not seeing is that they haven't just added on to the meaning of human rights, they've actually changed the meaning. | ||
| China is using that instead of giving people the human rights that we consider human rights, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| You don't have the right to life when you can be sent to a concentration camp or killed for your organs. | ||
| Or welded into your apartment so you can die. | ||
| The fact that that's happening in China as part of their COVID response shows a complete disregard for human rights, a complete disregard for individual liberties. | ||
| But you got a MacBook. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean... Well, and then China says, ah, but we stopped COVID. | ||
| Yeah, we had to weld people in their homes, but we stopped COVID. | ||
| Which isn't true. | ||
| The giant bar they like wedge between the door and the wall so the door can't be opened. | ||
| There's one of like a woman being dragged into like this box on a pickup truck screaming the whole time. | ||
| Yeah, well I think the other thing with the elite capture is like, one thing that it's important to notice, and I think we'll see more and more of this, is you'll see people saying we need to re-engage with China. | ||
| There was a Foreign Affairs magazine article by this guy named Ryan Haas that was basically saying, you know, China alarmism doesn't help anyone. | ||
| Like, that was basically the title. | ||
| Sounds like Mark Cuban, right? | ||
| Yeah, like, yeah, this whole idea that, like, oh, we can't, you know, Mark Cuban, definitely the whole, like, China's a customer, so we can't really criticize, I don't want to criticize them because they're a customer. | ||
| But, like, this whole idea that, like, we need to, like, re-engage, like, oh, the Trump administration was wrong to, like, you know, they made the conflict worse when really it was really the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| But the whole idea is that we need to now Like, we need to soften our stance on China. | ||
| China's not so bad. | ||
| The Communist Party is not so bad, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just a little genocide. | ||
| You want to talk about that atrocious Economist article? | ||
| Oh yeah, there was an article in the Economist after the whole genocide thing with the Trump administration, and they said, okay, the Canadian parliament was voting that it was genocide, and the Economist ran this article basically being like, Is it really genocide, though? | ||
| Because, you know, when people, even though the UN definition of genocide includes trying to eliminate a people, including by preventing births and sterilization and things that are happening to the Uyghurs in China, like, that is part of the UN Convention on Genocide. | ||
| Like, that is defined as genocide. | ||
| The Congress was like, but most people think of genocide as being mass murder. | ||
| So if it's not to that point yet and we use the word genocide, aren't we kind of You know, isn't that worse for, you know, future genocides that, like, we've now cheapened the word genocide? | ||
| Well, specifically said, they're not slaughtering them as they're being butchered for their organs. | ||
| Well, no, the organ harvesting is just win-win mutual cooperation, cooperation on the Communist Party's terms between the Uyghurs and the organ recipients. | ||
| Yes, there's an exchange going on, so it's cooperation. | ||
| As long as two parties are willing in this, it doesn't matter if someone else isn't. | ||
| I mean, it's a democracy, so it's for the good of the majority. | ||
| Yes, what do they say, the people's democratic dictatorship? | ||
| Well, if they don't view the Uyghurs as people, then there's no, as humans, there's no human rights violation, right? | ||
| Oh no, the 56 ethnic minorities of China are very happy. | ||
| Every year they have a wonderful New Year's show where they bring them all out and have a little dance number. | ||
| Or they'll give the BBC a guided tour of these alleged concentration camps. | ||
| And they're singing and getting job skills. | ||
| And they're dancing for the camera with bruises over their eyes. | ||
| But it's very hard for foreigners to see what's actually happening in China. | ||
| I think you have to break it down, yeah. | ||
| You just don't get access as a foreigner. | ||
| The last time I was in Mainland, which was more than 15 years ago, it wasn't even so closed off. | ||
| But at the time, they wanted foreigners to be in certain parts of the big cities. | ||
| And they wanted you to be on tours, and they didn't want you to go outside of that. | ||
| And if you did go outside of that, the authorities might try to get you to go back to your hotel. | ||
| And now it's even more restrictive. | ||
| They keep journalists out of going to villages where controversial things are going on. | ||
| Essentially, a foreign reporter can't possibly get into Tibet or Xinjiang anymore. | ||
| The people who are going to China, the politicians, the business people, the academics, they're going to the cities, they're getting on these high-speed rails, they're staying in the five-star hotels, they're eating at nice restaurants, and this is the part of China they see, and so they have a very skewed view of what China is. | ||
| OK, well, so here's a bit of optimism for you. | ||
| You're saying you're pessimistic. | ||
| Yeah, Matt, that's absolutely right. | ||
| It's hard for foreigners to know what's happening in China. | ||
| The reason I started China Uncensored in 2012 was because everything we've talked about tonight is really not new. | ||
| It's been going on for decades. | ||
| I started the show because Americans didn't know about it. | ||
| Americans weren't talking about this and just thought China was like, oh, you know, developing country, it's a democracy, right? | ||
| There's a president. | ||
| There's a president. | ||
| But now you talk about this Pew research. | ||
| And it's totally shifted. | ||
| People are talking about the Chinese Communist Party in a way they were not even eight years ago, even five years ago. | ||
| It's interesting, the president thing, because I have had multiple conversations with friends of mine who were like, didn't know that China didn't have democracy because he's called President Xi Jinping, even though the word in Chinese is not president, it is chairman. | ||
| Chairman of the state. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So like the word that they use in Chinese to talk about Xi Jinping. | ||
| There's a different word that they use for president that they used to talk about Biden or, you know, like it's like the word is zongtong. | ||
| Why do we call him president? | ||
| It's propaganda? | ||
| Because they started translate in the 80s. | ||
| They started translating president that Zhu Xi, which is chairman as president, like officially the official translation in China, in China. | ||
| And so it's manipulation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that that's they twist the language. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Another example, I want you to tell the story about the struggle, Xi Jinping and the struggle. | ||
| Yeah, so Xi Jinping recently gave a speech to young Chinese Communist Party members where he told them, you know, you know, you have to like really believe in the party and carry on the strong traditions and spirit of the party. | ||
| And the Chinese language, in the English state-run media reports, it was like, oh yeah, and he was inspiring them to talk about, you know, how great the party is and serve the people. | ||
| In Chinese, there was a, like the term that they, he kept bringing up was the term struggle, which is douzheng, which is a Marxist-Leninist, like Chinese Communist Party idea of using the dialectic, right? | ||
| Like two opposing sides, and then they have to struggle, and like one has to win against. | ||
| So it's like oppressed versus oppressor. | ||
| Or, you know, proletariat versus bourgeoisie, whatever. | ||
| So it's like in China, like the Chinese Communist Party will have, you know, in the Cultural Revolution, you had to dojeng against the counter-revolutionaries, like this idea of struggling against an opposing side. | ||
| So in Chinese, Xi Jinping said struggle. | ||
| The whole time during the thing like we have to young Communist Party members must remember this to struggle the Communist Party is like tradition of struggle all this stuff completely wiped out in English because they don't want to make the Communist Party look like that. | ||
| So we look back at history and we know the Cultural Revolution was horrifying. | ||
| Struggle sessions and all that stuff. | ||
| What was before Communist China? | ||
| Was it also an oppressive system? | ||
| Was the government horrible to its people? | ||
| Well, people kind of mistakenly talk about Chinese history like it was its monolithic thing, when in fact it was very diverse over thousands of years and there were definitely times where | ||
| the Sahajid was more prosperous and stable, there was times it was more oppressive. | ||
| Like even like we started talking about like the masculinity thing and like in a lot of | ||
| articles I was reading about that the sort of Western take on that was well you know | ||
| in China they believe that you know yang masculine is strong and you know yin is weak and women | ||
| again, as women and should be weak and submissive. | ||
| And that's not even really accurate. | ||
| That's a complete misunderstanding of these Ancient Chinese principles, like yin and yang, are supposed to be in balance. | ||
| In many martial arts, they say, in Daoism, the soft overcomes the hard. | ||
| So soft yin does not mean weak. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, golly, what was I trying to say? | ||
| I was asking the government before the Communist Party, was it oppressive? | ||
| Well, I mean, which government, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, which of the dozens of... Immediately preceding the Communist... Oh, so the Republican period. | |
| Is that what it was? | ||
| It was horribly corrupt. | ||
| It also was dealing with World War II and fighting Japanese. | ||
| And fighting Communist subversion. | ||
| And the guerrilla army. | ||
| This year marks a hundred years since the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, which was connected to the Soviets, which the Soviets had tried to, you know, start the third Communist International, the Comintern, and get that branch going in China. | ||
| Because at the time, the idea of the Soviets was, we're going to have communism spread around the world. | ||
| So they were starting all these party cells. | ||
| So the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, and then it was followed by a little bit of chaos, | ||
| and then the Republic of China came about. But within a decade, you had the Communist Party | ||
| starting and essentially sowing chaos throughout the country to the degree that they were able to, | ||
| sometimes working with the Republic of China government, sometimes fighting against them, | ||
| but always, even when working with, they were subverting it from within. And so there was no | ||
| real chance for the Republic of China government to be a fully functioning government. And it was | ||
| a very difficult time. And I'm not defending some of the things that happened there, because there | ||
| were some challenges, but— It's the classic Communist Party tactic of, you know, the Republican | ||
| Period of China. | ||
| It was corrupt. | ||
| There were definitely issues. | ||
| There was wealth inequality. | ||
| So the Communist Party uses that and said, hey, these guys are oppressing you. | ||
| This society is, you know, these are the bad guys. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| And Mao would go to the poor peasants in the countrysides and promise them a better future, a more equal future. | ||
| Now, the elites of that period, the ones who, you know, towed the party line, were they spared? | ||
| Oh, I mean, the biggest victims of the Communist Party are Communist Party members. | ||
| I mean, even before the Communist Party actually ruled the country, there were tons of purges within the party. | ||
| The Yanan Rectification. | ||
| That basically meant thought control and thought reform and brainwashing. | ||
| That was kind of where sort of one of the first sort of mass brainwashing campaigns in history is the Communist Party. | ||
| brainwashing and torturing other Communist Party officials in a part of China called Yan'an. | ||
| Like, that's how they treat their own people. | ||
| How do you think they're treating everyone else? | ||
| I mean, the guy who's supposed to succeed Mao, Lin Biao, right? | ||
| Oh, died in a mysterious plane crash? | ||
| And then suddenly, like, he was like, Mao's the second in command, then mysteriously died. | ||
| And then suddenly the word was, oh, he was very bad. | ||
| He was communicating. | ||
| The campaign to criticize Confucius and Lin Biao. | ||
| It was like the mass political campaign to criticize the political enemy. | ||
| But if you look at Marxism, if you read Marx, Marx's view is that, Karl Marx, not Groucho Marx, the view is that the history of humanity is a history of class struggle. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And this is, I believe, an inaccurate view of humanity and history, but that's the Marxist view, and that was the Leninist view, and that was the Maoist view, and that's the Xi Jinping view. | ||
| So the idea is that There are always these two opposing forces that always have to fight. | ||
| And the only way for history to progress is through these groups struggling against each other. | ||
| And so the communists, they believe this actually. | ||
| And so they believe that they must struggle against enemies. | ||
| And if there's not an enemy, if they've defeated an enemy, they need to create another enemy. | ||
| So there's always going to be an enemy. | ||
| There's always going to be a persecuted group. | ||
| There's no way for a Communist Party to not have a group that they're going after, because that is the way they see their own society and power is moving forward. | ||
| There has to always be class struggle. | ||
| Which is why we as Americans should be very concerned with Xi Jinping telling the new cadre to struggle. | ||
| Because who's it going to be? | ||
| I mean, on a foreign policy level, the Chinese Communist Party has to struggle with the United States, which is the global hegemon, right? | ||
| So there's always going to be that struggle. | ||
| Do you see parallels between the Cultural Revolution and what's happening today? | ||
| Because, you know, a lot of people call what's happening with cancel culture struggle sessions. | ||
| Well, so, it's... This is something that has been, people have made that comparison before, and it creates a lot of controversy because there aren't roving bands of Red Guard killing people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think they were like, the Red Guard, they were literally murdering just people in large numbers. | ||
| So the thing, the question, the real question is, how does a society get to that point? | ||
| What breeds that? | ||
| And so we do need to be vigilant because if this happened once before in human history, it could happen again. | ||
| Well, like how many people were the Red Guard killing? | ||
| Uh, numbers of people who died in the Cultural Revolution, it varies a lot. | ||
| Probably, maybe 15 to 20 million. | ||
| The high end is 20 million, as an estimate of how many people died during the Cultural Revolution. | ||
| There was no period among these revolutionaries where they knew they were in the Cultural Revolution. | ||
| It was only with hindsight we looked back and then said, here's where it started. | ||
| No, the Cultural Revolution was a specific campaign by Mao. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It was called the Cultural Revolution. | ||
| To eliminate the four olds, which was old thought, old culture, I forget all the olds. | ||
| I just mean, like, was there a point where Mao was like, okay, today's the day we start. | ||
| Go and kill people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, he was like, today we must start the Cultural Revolution to, you know, basically rectify the culture of the party. | ||
| So there was an actual, like, start date for that. | ||
| And it ended when he died. | ||
| And people were like... | ||
| After a really long time. | ||
| Well it was a decade. | ||
| But a long time. | ||
| I remember speaking to one Chinese person who was alive at the time and they said it was basically, we talk about like the 10 years that we went crazy. | ||
| I mean, it was really bad. | ||
| Although in some areas, it was worse than others. | ||
| And by the end, Mao was kind of not doing well, so it kind of petered out. | ||
| But literally, you had to quote Mao's Little Red Book to be able to buy food. | ||
| Or get on a bus. | ||
| You had to say a quote from Mao. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But, like, you know, I understand why some people see parallels with what's happening in the U.S. | ||
| today. | ||
| I think that there's a few big differences, and the chief one is that the U.S. | ||
| government protects freedom of speech. | ||
| And, you know, even if you get canceled on Twitter and kicked off of YouTube and, you know, your books are banned from the publisher, like, you're not going to be arrested. | ||
| You're not going to be... There's no legal mechanism to send you to prison. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| There is. | ||
| They just lie. | ||
| I mean, take a look at the Antifa riots throughout the Pacific Northwest. | ||
| We just learned there was an investigation that found 31 of 90 had their charges dropped and many dismissed with prejudice, which, according to one expert, this is extremely rare for them to actually do this. | ||
| Some of these were felony charges where Antifa literally assaulted an officer. | ||
| Their charges are dropped. | ||
| Now, when it comes to the out group, which would be these Trump supporters at the Capitol, You have the instance of some people... This is really interesting because I'm seeing journalists say this. | ||
| The shaman guy with the horns? | ||
| Apparently he argued in court. | ||
| The cops waved him in. | ||
| And it's on video. | ||
| The cops are waving, and people are following the cops waving, and then the cops open the door. | ||
| Not everybody who went in the building were shoving their way through police and fighting with cops. | ||
| There were many circumstances where the doors were just opened up. | ||
| Now, I think, obviously, everybody who went in the building was dumb, and it was a huge mistake for these people. | ||
| But you take a look at how, after, you know, six, seven months of rioting and cities being burned down, and these Antifa people— I mean, the vice president was soliciting donations to bail her out. | ||
| So we can say there's no legal mechanism, in a sense, but there is a cultural mechanism that guarantees if you're a far leftist and you burn down a city, it is very likely that you will face no cultural repercussions. | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| I mean, they're not being targeted by law enforcement as terrorists. | ||
| The vice president's raising money. | ||
| Joe Biden's own staffers were raising money to get them out. | ||
| But if you're a Trump supporter who was just in D.C. | ||
| You're this woman. | ||
| She's a psychological operations officer in the army. | ||
| She was simply attending a speech. | ||
| She's under investigation. | ||
| One guy was a rapper. | ||
| He's an artist. | ||
| His label dropped him for simply being in D.C. | ||
| when this happened. | ||
| So, that's what's scary to me. | ||
| We can say, oh, but we have a constitution. | ||
| Sure, but what happens when the federal government just lies? | ||
| And then you have the entirety of the establishment Democratic left saying, good. | ||
| They want to do a commission on these people now. | ||
| I think it's, you know, maybe the fear is perhaps a bit pessimistic. | ||
| But maybe the fear is that they learn from what these other countries did and how to avoid, you know, falling into certain traps. | ||
| They don't want to kill people. | ||
| They want control. | ||
| They don't want to look like the villains themselves, especially in an age of social media and instant transmission of information. | ||
| So they use clever manipulation to make sure their political dissidents are stripped, destroyed, and removed. | ||
| And that's what's happening. | ||
| I do think that it is different in the U.S. | ||
| If the Cultural Revolution happened in the U.S., it could not happen the same way that it happened in China, because we do not have... We have guns. | ||
| Well, besides that, the whole mechanism is started in China by the state. | ||
| It's started by the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| It's top-down. | ||
| Also, the cult of personality Mao had, which doesn't exist. | ||
| You're saying there's no cult of personality around China? | ||
| I think that, like, in the U.S., the mechanism is, like, if you have these tech companies, if you have, like, the Democratic Party, or, like, you have this, like, cultural mechanism for it, that is, like, a different manifestation, but it could, like, psychologically, there are similarities, I would say. | ||
| And especially in terms of, like, things like the, you know, reporting on people, like, There are things that could happen with this cancel culture stuff that's going on that could follow, like, the course of the culture revolution without being a thing that is done by the... The bloodbath. | ||
| Yeah, or done by the state, exactly, or like, you know. | ||
| But it could have, like, the same... You could have neighborhood watch committees where, you know, or, you know, everybody's looking at whatever, you know, you're pulling up what you said on Twitter 20 years ago. | ||
| Perhaps we're just not at that stage of what the Cultural Revolution was yet, but we do have, you know, just recently the, it was Christopher Wray, I believe it was FBI, saying, you know, domestic terror coming, you know, I don't know if he specifically called out Trump supporters, but I think he said, you know, far right, domestic terror is the biggest threat we're facing. | ||
| You've got the Democrats saying Trump supporters and QAnon, they're claiming that they need to keep these troops surrounding D.C. | ||
| with razor wire fences and these, and you know, razor wire and these fences because of these conspiracy theories about Trump's true inauguration. | ||
| You are getting from mainstream press a narrative over and over and over again of who the evil is calling for, they're calling it the 1-6 commission. | ||
| They want a 9-11 style commission on what happened at the Capitol. | ||
| They're acting like it was on par with 9-11. | ||
| And they're continually demonizing Trump supporters, populists, right-wingers, conservatives, to the point where, you know, we've mentioned it several times now, Echelon Insights interviewed Democrats, what is, you know, of these things, how would you rate your level of concern? | ||
| The top concern among Democrats is Trump supporters, white nationalists, white supremacy, and among Trump supporters, among Republicans, it's illegal immigration, taxation, support for the police, very run-of-the-mill conservative positions. | ||
| It seems like the narrative we're getting from the mainstream press about how bad and awful the right is in this country is reaching that level where, I mean, people I think are ready to burst and go insane. | ||
| So perhaps it's not the point where you'll see Redguard going around literally murdering people, but we are getting to that point where I believe it's entirely possible you will see the Democrats come out and straight up say, Arrest them all. | ||
| Every single one. | ||
| Because we're already getting to that point. | ||
| Nicole Wallace on MSNBC said, if they were in a different country, would have blown them up by now with a drone strike. | ||
| What, wouldn't Mitch McConnell think Trump should be arrested for what he did? | ||
| We have an article from The Root, where they said Republicans are enemy combatants, that we must treat as enemy combatants. | ||
| The Root, in 2018, according to Newswhip, was the number one publication on the left. | ||
| Now, the right got substantially more engagements, but they were still number one. | ||
| What happens when you have prominent Democratic politicians, people like Ocasio-Cortez, saying, Ted Cruz, you tried to get me murdered. | ||
| And they're telling this to people over and over again. | ||
| Where do we go in a year? | ||
| Perhaps right now we're saying, oh, but in the Cultural Revolution, they were called upon by the party, by the political figures to go and do these things. | ||
| And it's like, okay, well, maybe in a year they do that. | ||
| Maybe in two years, three years. | ||
| All I know is right now, I'm constantly being told by the press how Trump is an insurrectionist who tried to overthrow the United States government, and YouTube has deleted every iteration of his speech from CPAC. | ||
| This level of tribalist demonization isn't stopping. | ||
| It's escalating. | ||
| It's getting worse. | ||
| And it seems to me like we are dangerously close to this point where the hysteria reaches this level. | ||
| Perhaps we have a president in Joe Biden who he's already failing his first test in the migrant crisis. | ||
| The left is outraged over his migrant detention centers for children. | ||
| The right is outraged over his releasing of COVID positive patients, COVID positive illegal immigrants into Texas, as well as shutting down Trump's border wall. | ||
| So now you've got both sides angry with him. | ||
| He didn't get the stimulus checks out. | ||
| Are we potentially looking at a pathetic and failed leader who causes widespread demoralization among even moderates in this country that results in Donald Trump running again in 2024 against Kamala Harris, who does not have the charisma to win? | ||
| Trump ends up getting a decisive but slim victory. | ||
| And then you have all of that conditioning over four years of the demons of the insurrectionists. | ||
| Trump finally completed his insurrection. | ||
| He took the country over. | ||
| We must go. | ||
| We must purge. | ||
| We must stop this. | ||
| Or perhaps it goes the other way. | ||
| Trump becomes president and says they're the bad guys. | ||
| They're the ones trying to subvert it. | ||
| The hyperpolarization is getting just that scary to me. | ||
| Well, democracy is very fragile. | ||
| And, you know, you were mentioning the commission making the comparison to 9-11. | ||
| What's the lesson of 9-11? | ||
| The government used terrorism to create the Patriot Act, which was really more about making the government more powerful and taking away the rights of the American people. | ||
| I mean, it's about power and control and what you kind of just described was a struggle session, essentially. | ||
| And so this is where people need to learn from history and see the patterns. | ||
| Are these actual threats that are being discussed, or is it just somebody creating that opposition that they need to have the dialectical conflict? | ||
| Well, that's it. | ||
| The struggle, right? | ||
| There's something to struggle against. | ||
| There's an interesting book that talks a lot about this sort of thing I think you're talking about. | ||
| It's called How the Specter of Communism is Ruling the World. | ||
| It makes some interesting points. | ||
| Well, people can read that themselves and draw their conclusions. | ||
| But it looks at history and you do see, you know, there are people who learn from all of these tactics that have been used for control. | ||
| And people who want control, they're not idiots. | ||
| They look at what has worked and what hasn't worked and refine. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party is a much more refined Soviet Union. | ||
| They're not making many of the same mistakes the Soviet Union did because they learned from them. | ||
| That's why the Chinese Communist Party is still here. | ||
| Yeah, they constantly talk about Gorbachev and how nobody can be a Gorbachev, basically. | ||
| Remember when people thought Xi would be Gorbachev? | ||
| I remember there was an event held in D.C. | ||
| A bunch of Trump supporters were protesting against massive multinational billion-dollar corporations that were suppressing speech, political speech in the U.S. | ||
| The Trump supporters were protesting and targeting billionaires. | ||
| Antifa showed up and physically attacked them. | ||
| It's interesting that you have this demonization. | ||
| For the populist right, it's the elites, it's the establishment. | ||
| For the populist left, it's the populist right. | ||
| And I wonder if that's just the convenient tool of the establishment to say, get these people to attack them because they're attacking us, using this idea of the struggle, this conflict between factions, to make sure nobody actually goes after them. | ||
| If they keep doing that, well, eventually using Trump supporters, conservatives, and populist right-wingers as your scapegoat will result in such extreme hyperpolarization that people start getting killed. | ||
| We've already seen with the riots over last year, I think there was 19 official deaths caused by the riots, and then there were, I believe, 11 or 12, about 12 peripheral deaths just in, like, as a result of the rioting, some people died for certain reasons. | ||
| But then we also had that That guy in Portland who took two in the chest from that Antifa guy. | ||
| He had the Black Lives Matter tattoo on his neck, the revolution fist, and he shot him twice in the chest. | ||
| When you say riots, you're talking about the mostly peaceful protests, right? | ||
| Yes, where buildings were on fire and destroyed, and over $2 billion in insurance payouts, not even the total cost of damage that we saw, and the vice president and president supporting those actions. | ||
| You want to know something absolutely insane? | ||
| Andrew Cuomo, there's a new report coming out that he, his administration instructed the health department to obscure the amount of people who died in nursing homes as a result of their policies. | ||
| On March 25th of last year, Cuomo announced his policy to send COVID patients into nursing homes. | ||
| Nursing homes resisted, saying this will introduce the virus into the most vulnerable populations. | ||
| They said, so what? | ||
| 15,000 people died. | ||
| Cuomo covered it up, and that is confirmed. | ||
| One assemblyman has said it's a coordinated criminal conspiracy. | ||
| I've said, send the guy to prison. | ||
| Andrew Cuomo still enjoys a 65% approval rating and a 60% favorability rating among Democrats. | ||
| When you have that level of... He's been accused of harassing women. | ||
| Three women have stepped forward. | ||
| And even prominent Democratic, like, left-leaning liberal-type figures in the media are criticizing him, saying he should resign. | ||
| Democrats are saying he should resign. | ||
| It is now being reported by mainstream left, right-wing publications. | ||
| He killed these people. | ||
| He covered it up. | ||
| The Democrat voter still favors him 65%. | ||
| So when you have things like that, it says to me, like, tribalism owns everything. | ||
| You could have, quite literally, when Donald Trump said I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, he wasn't kidding. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Yeah, tribalism, it's, it's, it is a tool of dictators. | ||
| It's, uh, the more, the less we see each other as fellow humans that actually have more in common than we do differences. | ||
| That gets easily used when we start to just see the other, the enemy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, how about we take Super Chats? | ||
| We'll see what the audience has to say. | ||
| If you haven't already, smash the like button and subscribe at the notification bell. | ||
| If you're listening on iTunes, Spotify, or any other podcast platform, leave us a good review, give us as many stars as they allow, and then write why we're the best, because it really does help the show. | ||
| And I guess the saying goes, the only way people find out about podcasts is from people who listen to podcasts, so if you like it, you just gotta share it. | ||
| But again, smash that like button and let's read some of these Super Chats. | ||
| So usually this happens if we have a pinned bit of merchandise. | ||
| I can't see the name of the person who gave us the first super chat, so I apologize. | ||
| But they ask, have you ever watched Attack on Titan? | ||
| And if so, do you see parallels that it has with our reality? | ||
| Have any of you watched Attack on Titan? | ||
| Can't say I have. | ||
| It is like the most popular anime, but no idea. | ||
| I've only seen a couple episodes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, let's see. | |
| Toby Walker. | ||
| Oh, this is very important. | ||
| He says, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat. | ||
| Did you know there are 16 unique species of penguins? | ||
| Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat. | ||
| Unique New York. | ||
| Specific Pacific. | ||
| Specific Pacific. | ||
| Toy Boat, Toy Boat. | ||
| Congratulations, you got me to say those things. | ||
| Are you trying to like do a deepfake or something by having me say all of that? | ||
| Unique New York. | ||
| Jordan Jones says, I hope that the team is doing well at TeamGuest IRL. | ||
| At what point do states and individuals stop sending resources to the federal government that is pushing radical left policies that are hurting their well-being? | ||
| I honestly have no idea. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do you guys see any... I know your specialty is more China, but perhaps that was just my opinion thinking, you know, being more pessimistic, but what's your prospect on this country? | ||
| Do you think optimism, pessimism? | ||
| I am ultimately optimistic. | ||
| I gotta say, after that last spiel of yours, the optimism's a bit... I have drained the optimism from you! | ||
| No, I mean I think ultimately... | ||
| This was something they talked about in ancient China. | ||
| People innately are good. | ||
| Well, in ancient China they didn't always agree with that either. | ||
| But I think people, there's an innate goodness to them that they want to, they value, there are universal values that people have. | ||
| And I know that's not something that's necessarily... people like to talk about universal values anymore, but... You know, I can be both pessimistic and optimistic at the same time in saying that I think the night is always darkest before the dawn, and we have not yet reached the darkest point of the night yet. | ||
| So it seems like things are going to get pretty bad, but then maybe after the tumult, things will be a bit better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think people do need to get a better, better understanding of some of the things that are happening and that will take time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Lua Coder says, I am distraught that lots of our manufacturing industry has moved over to China. | ||
| Even Roblox, I used to play play back in 2011, is opening their market to China. | ||
| The checklist for UGC is absurd. | ||
| Is there any grassroots lobbying that can be done to bring our manufacturing back? | ||
| Interestingly the Biden administration is currently doing a review of supply chains in the U.S. | ||
| So this is something that I think Democrats care a lot about and Republicans from a national security standpoint and from like a kind of you know a workers rights you know like populist standpoint. | ||
| So this might be one of those things where we do start to bring back some of the at least | ||
| critical manufacturing like drugs, medical supplies. | ||
| Chuck Schumer was talking about making some kind of law to help us out-compete China. | ||
| So I think a lot of the things that happens is that U.S. | ||
| politicians, when they talk about China, they don't actually have a very good idea of what the Chinese Communist Party is. | ||
| They're more using it as a mirror to reflect the U.S. | ||
| But in this case, because of the supply chain issue, I think this might be something where there's a concerted effort to bring back American manufacturing. | ||
| People just need to buy American more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe we need more philanthropists. | ||
| We need more nonprofits. | ||
| We need more industry to focus on American products and American costs. | ||
| We need think tanks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| New independent think tanks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Bobby Bob says, should the U.S. | ||
| break up, would there be any negative effect on China, such as U.S. | ||
| businesses leaving? | ||
| I think if the U.S. | ||
| broke up, that would be like the best thing that ever happened for the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| They'd have a party. | ||
| They would have a real Communist Party. | ||
| Well, that's why I wonder about, you know, do they want to influence this culture war? | ||
| They do. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think, I don't know that they're directly doing it, but like they definitely want to play it up. | ||
| They want to use it whenever they can. | ||
| Because it weakens the U.S. | ||
| And it's in the sense of the Marxist class struggle. | ||
| It is pitting one group against another group. | ||
| And so, again, I wouldn't say the Communist Party is behind it, necessarily, but they certainly like it, and it certainly fits the way that the Communist Party would do things if they were to try to sow discord within China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Turk Longwell says, Tim, a question for your guests. | ||
| Can anyone please comment on how you think a hot war would play out between them and us? | ||
| Great show. | ||
| Smash the like button. | ||
| A hot war? | ||
| Well, it depends on whether or not they have Taiwan or not. | ||
| At the moment, China is not in a – I don't think they could really sustain like a full-on war with the United States. | ||
| With Taiwan, the U.S. | ||
| has access to the Chinese coastline. | ||
| There's support from the Quad, an alliance that's been building up between the U.S. | ||
| India, Japan, and Australia, which I wonder what the Biden administration is going to do about that alliance. | ||
| But also just in the event of a hot war, it would become impossible for any American industry to work with China, | ||
| and then China loses its access to money. | ||
| Well, I think that's a big one. | ||
| So also, um, it would be likely a naval war. | ||
| Uh, and right now the U.S. | ||
| still has naval superiority in the Pacific, but the U.S. | ||
| Indo-Pacific commander just came out and said that China might get parity by 2026. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Uh, because they're really building their naval fleet right now. | ||
| They have more ships and submarines. | ||
| Yeah, so, I mean, in some ways, like, if a hot war would happen, the sooner it happened, the better it would be for the U.S. | ||
| Because the longer... Like, it just gives the Chinese Communist Party time to build up the military and... So you're saying double the military budget? | ||
| I mean, I think that they have to take the military, and they are talking about this, and take the focus away from the Middle East and, you know, go back to focusing on the Pacific. | ||
| Yeah, when the U.S. | ||
| made the shift to Middle East fighting, the Navy became support for the ground troops. | ||
| And in that time that the Navy was kind of being pushed to the side in the U.S., that's what China focused on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| China's anti-ship ballistic missiles already have a considerably longer range than U.S. | ||
| anti-ship missiles, which, if you think about what that means in an actual ship-to-ship warfare, is the Chinese ships can get their missiles off much sooner and sink the American ships before the American ships can do anything. | ||
| But the solution isn't to double the U.S. | ||
| military budget. | ||
| No, I was just kidding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I mean, like, it would be much easier to just stop investing in China. | ||
| You're saying we should blow up China now, before— I'm kidding, I'm kidding. | ||
| All right, we got Samuel Powell says, Tim, you are wrong about Gen Z. As a Zoomer myself, I would say that at least 60% of us are conservative. | ||
| We most are afraid to speak out. | ||
| The reason most of us are closeted is because most of the people who have the authority around us hate anyone who has right-leaning views. | ||
| Most of us are anti-porn because it's affected us negatively from a young age. | ||
| Well, then I would just say perhaps I am wrong and you are more conservative. | ||
| I have pointed out that the Pew Research shows there's a slight movement towards conservative for the first time in like four generations, but then you have to be brave, I suppose, and just speak out. | ||
| What's the worst that's gonna happen? | ||
| You gotta learn how to actually hunt for your food? | ||
| Oh heavens, like humans had to do that for thousands, tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years. | ||
| I guess, you know, my thing is that having grown up in a rough and tumble area and being homeless, I'm like, what's the worst someone could do to me? | ||
| They're not gonna hit me. | ||
| And even if they did, is that really the worst? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| You know, you get a scrape? | ||
| Look, if you've got people around you that are abusing you and saying insane things, then just simply stop, leave, ignore them. | ||
| Just don't engage with these kind of people. | ||
| Stick Newcomb says, I own a shop called Texas Holster Solutions. | ||
| I'd like to send you a holster for one of your pistols. | ||
| Who can I email about this? | ||
| Also, keep up the work, y'all. | ||
| The show is 100% graphene, lol. | ||
| If you go to TimCast.com, I believe in the contact area, there's emails, but there's also a P.O. | ||
| Box address if you'd like to send stuff. | ||
| All right, Justin Bookman says, this is very off topic, but I'm getting out of trucking, looking for something to work from home. | ||
| You guys are the smartest people that I know. | ||
| What do you suggest? | ||
| Tim, doth read the news and let slip the Ian of war. | ||
| We are guerrilla. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, working from home. | |
| Here's what you do. | ||
| I had this guy who was super rich told me, what's something that you're an expert on that is a common concern of people? | ||
| Really easy example would be, like, dating. | ||
| Most people, be it a man or a woman, wanna have some, like, better understanding of dating. | ||
| So, what he said was, if you're good, if you have good insights, and you're a good person, and you wanna help people, you simply write a small book, and then you advertise it on Facebook and Google, You find out what your price point is per advertisement. | ||
| So if it takes $5 worth of ads to sell one book, sell it for $5.50, and you've automated the system, and then you make passive income from one book you've written, and it could seriously be like 50 pages. | ||
| And so he explained to me that, you know, one of his paths was he had done things in his life, like he worked out and he trained, and then he realized he was actually pretty proficient in this, very amateur, but he wrote a book about what he did and said, not medical advice, I'm just a guy, here's my ideas, and he made a million dollars in a year. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| Shelley, we should write a book. | ||
| If you guys wrote a book called China Uncensored, and it was just not even that long and it said, you know, understanding the basic facts about China and what you need to know, and then you put it up, you just do like ads on Google or Facebook or whatever, it's automated. | ||
| So it takes, you know, if five dollars in ads gets you a thousand views or whatever, And every thousand views gets you one book sale, $5 and 50 | ||
| cents. | ||
| And you're making 50 cents every for every thousand views. | ||
| So it's just automatically pulling in money. | ||
| Eventually everybody's read your book. | ||
| And then, you know, what do you do after that? | ||
| You had to write something else, but you know, there you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You make a million dollars. | |
| All right. | ||
| Edud says, Tim, the USA is actually being censored by the CCP. | ||
| Remember, Facebook, Twitter, and Google hired the firm responsible for the great CCP censorship firewall to tailor their algorithm to prevent right-wing extremism. | ||
| Have you guys heard that? | ||
| I know we mentioned this the last time we were on the show, that there was a case of one of the Facebook fact-checkers being tied to some company that was getting funding somehow or another through China. | ||
| I don't remember all the details, but I know we did talk about that. | ||
| There was genuinely a concern about that, that these fact-checkers, they get money from somewhere. | ||
| But there is a lot of AI research going on in China. | ||
| Like Google, they did shut down their Dragonfly censored search app, but Google is in China now doing AI, and they're not making a big public splash about it. | ||
| But Google wants to be in China because they have access to enormous amounts of data. | ||
| There's no user privacy restrictions in China. | ||
| And so Google's working with Chinese companies to build up Google's own AI systems. | ||
| And no doubt Google is or will be at some point intending to use that AI technology developed in China with Chinese companies and Chinese data, and then use that for its American customers. | ||
| Is that a direct connection of the Communist Party using it to censor Americans? | ||
| I don't think there's a direct connection there, but there's certainly some, you know, within a few steps, there's some connection to China. | ||
| Association with an authoritarian regime always pulls the democracy down. | ||
| It makes it less free. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Nova Zero says China uncensored gang. | ||
| How much damage do you predict Xiao by Zhang and Kamila will do to the entire APAC region? | ||
| Oh, OK. | ||
| I was like, who? | ||
| There's one more I say. | ||
| Did you notice how allied nations have been slowly cutting out the U.S. | ||
| in their dealings? | ||
| That I pronounced horribly, I'd imagine, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| I'm still going over the name. | ||
| Isn't he trying to, like, make Chinese out of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Oh, Kamila. | ||
| I didn't notice that. | ||
| I was just like... I mean, you know, Joe Biden talks about reestablishing relations with allies. | ||
| And I think, you know, there's some degree that he's trying to do this, especially in Western Europe. | ||
| where it seems like we haven't actually lost any allies over the last four years, | ||
| but certainly there's been some diplomatic tensions there. | ||
| There has, however, been a lot of progress since 2017, building up alliances in, for | ||
| example, the Asia Pacific region, such as the Quad, India, Japan, Australia, and the US | ||
| working together to counter the danger of the Chinese Communist Party in their military. So | ||
| there have been a lot of alliances. | ||
| Also Central and Eastern Europe. Oh yeah, actually the last four years I've seen a lot of helping | ||
| develop relationships with Central and Eastern Europe to counter the pressure that they've been | ||
| getting from China, to counter the investment from China. | ||
| Even to some degree in parts of Africa, U.S. | ||
| money trying to counter the influence of China. | ||
| Although I'm not sure that's been super successful. | ||
| You know, the whole thing about, you know, we lost all our alliances and now we have to get them back. | ||
| I think that's not an accurate picture. | ||
| It's just that certain alliances have been strengthened and certain alliances have been weakened. | ||
| But the U.S. | ||
| hasn't lost any allies. | ||
| except maybe China. I mean, I would argue that's probably a good ally to lose if you're going to | ||
| lose one. But like, you know, things have changed, things have shifted. And then, you know, Europe, | ||
| are they trying to work with, you know, do they want to work with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? | ||
| Like, yeah, on some things they want to work with the US on. | ||
| on climate change and they want to get the Iran deal back. | ||
| But, you know, they signed a big trade deal with China. | ||
| The E.U. | ||
| signed a preliminary trade deal outline with China without consulting the U.S., which was a bit of a slap in the face. | ||
| Because the Biden administration asked them to wait. | ||
| Yeah, it had been under works for years, was heading somewhere. | ||
| And yeah, they ignored the Biden administration's request. | ||
| Well, before they were the administration saying, we're almost in power, just wait. | ||
| But these alliances do take time. | ||
| And six weeks is not enough time, I don't believe, to see what the trajectory of the Biden administration is going to be. | ||
| To build up or destroy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Eric Miller says, hilariously, YouTube put in my recommendations the movie Big Trouble in Little China. | ||
| Also, if Texas has a problem with the caravan, send them to D.C. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah, because China Uncensored is in the title, so, you know, they'll just take the keyword and then you get, it's a fun movie. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Coop Diggity says, I love y'all. | ||
| I'll watch this later. | ||
| Be safe. | ||
| Ian, I disagree often with your viewpoints, but often I find you have a unique viewpoint I haven't thought of. | ||
| Lydia, thanks for being awesome and pushing buttons, and Tim, thanks. | ||
| Well, Ian's not on the show tonight, and Luke is on vacation, so we just got the China Uncensored crew. | ||
| But there you go. | ||
| Publius the Good says, my buddy Dylan Witcher was banned from China when we were in high school because he started a massive free Tibet website in 2002. | ||
| We were fighting this for decades. | ||
| My first political fight was Tibet. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Yeah, didn't they remove that? | ||
| It was like they did the new Top Gun movie, Top Gun Maverick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the patch on Tom Cruise's back, they removed Tibet. | ||
| Oh, it was Taiwan. | ||
| Taiwan. | ||
| Taiwan and Japan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Well, you know, you got to please the CCP, so. | ||
| Publishthegood also says, FBI says the entirety of all 1 million of conservatives are under investigation. | ||
| Antifa terrorists are all out of jail. | ||
| I disagree on the cultural revolution here. | ||
| I have actually emails between DNC Congress and Antifa. | ||
| So you disagree? | ||
| Is it because they hate each other or something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| QuestioningChina says, secret police were invented 600 years ago in China Ming dynasty. | ||
| Google Eastern Depot. | ||
| You guys know about that? | ||
| I haven't heard of Eastern Depot. | ||
| I also imagine secret police have been around for longer than 600 years. | ||
| But that does sound like an interesting thing. | ||
| Steven Valdez says, Chris, I had a super Patreon account with you guys for seven months, but never got my name at the end of a video, as promised. | ||
| Messaged you guys three times on Patreon. | ||
| Love your work, but was hoping you could respond. | ||
| I missed that message. | ||
| Shoot us an email at ChinaUncensored at gmail.com and we'll take care of it. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| We get the job done here at Tim Castile. | ||
| We make sure we hold the powerful elites to account. | ||
| Truth to power. | ||
| For a long time our team was basically like the three of us plus one video editor. | ||
| Honestly, the truth is we do drop the ball sometimes. | ||
| We're sorry about that. | ||
| And I'm the producer, so really it's my problem and not Chris's problem. | ||
| But definitely a big thank you to everyone who supports our work. | ||
| China Uncensored would not be possible without the viewer support on Patreon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we're a really small company and it's mostly viewer support and not YouTube ad revenue that's actually running our channel. | ||
| So thank you for that contribution. | ||
| I'm sorry I missed that. | ||
| Garnett says, call Chinese organ harvesting what it is. | ||
| Farming humans. | ||
| Bring it up to your vegan friends. | ||
| Ask them if they won't eat meat for moral reasons. | ||
| Why the heck are you supporting a president who is A-OK with butchering Uyghurs like cattle? | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| I'm sure that'll be great dinner conversation with people who are not particularly politically active. | ||
| So you got some friend he's eating like, you know, a kale chip salad or something. | ||
| And you're like, so you don't eat meat? | ||
| And they're like, no, I don't eat meat. | ||
| Then why do you support Biden, you butcher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they're going to be like, what? | |
| No, but I do think it's a, it's a really fair point. | ||
| You know, Biden needs to, I think Biden should have come out right away and said, this is genocide. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| It must be stopped. | ||
| He, on the campaign trail, he did call it genocide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Or his, his campaign did. | ||
| I don't know that he actually did it himself. | ||
| He never said the word. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The G word. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mao DeMighty says, my ears been ringing all night, but I wear this cowl like Bruce Wayne though. | ||
| Zanguo Uncensored, Tim read my mind PM message. | ||
| Oh, PM message. | ||
| Thanks for quoting this. | ||
| Mao, you got it. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Supra says they call it the Patriot Act because that is whom it goes after. | ||
| Ah, there it is. | ||
| Jake Mahaney says the CCP is arming Iran, allowing Iran to conduct proxies in the Middle East. | ||
| Biden is allowing China to commit genocide while simultaneously gearing up for reunification of Taiwan. | ||
| Yeah, it sounds like things are, uh, pretty bad. | ||
| I have to say, uh, maybe that's why I'm a little pessimistic. | ||
| OMG Puppy says, Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. | ||
| Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil. | ||
| Eric Hoffer, the true believer. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Christopher says, you said you were planning on making a new site and new content. | ||
| Would this be free or eligible for Timcast members or a whole new subscription? | ||
| Uh, so we're planning on making a network of different websites and it's one subscription for all of them. | ||
| So quite literally my, my, my goal is if you are a member of Timcast.com, I just want to make sure we just keep making more and more stuff for you and ultimately have one parent brand that, you know, if you're a member of it grants you access to basically everything. | ||
| There are going to be some things, because they'll be joint ventures, where they'll be entirely separate subscriptions and websites, so... I think the new show we're planning on doing will not be part of this, because I'm doing it with other people. | ||
| And it'll have to be its own thing, so... But ultimately, that's what I want to do. | ||
| I want to do shows, originals, sketch comedy, documentary, and have it just be part of one big brand, so ultimately, everybody who is already a member at TimCast.com will get access to all this really cool stuff we're planning to build. | ||
| Quite literally, the membership you have, that money is going towards expanding, hiring new people. | ||
| We actually have some people coming out soon to interview about jobs because we're going to be doing a lot more, producing a lot more, and then hopefully that helps us make more money and start more companies. | ||
| So if you really like the show, then go to TimCast.com, become a member, smash that like button, and share the podcast. | ||
| And aside from that, I've got my other YouTube channels as well, but we're trying to do more and more and more, to put it simply. | ||
| Claymore says, human is the most racist word there can be. | ||
| Words of racism are words designed to defy people. | ||
| Who ad man? | ||
| Racist, I say, it should be the rights of man. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Dom, uh, let's see, what is it? | ||
| Dom Nall, 1989 says, has China Uncensored seen J.J. | ||
| McCullough's video on Falun Gong in which he mentioned China Uncensored as Falun Gong propaganda? | ||
| Ooh, smack. | ||
| I never actually watched that, but we are completely independently produced. | ||
| We have no connection to Falun Gong any more than we have connection to the Jews, which is something I've been accused of as well. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| Yeah, there was uh, I think I mentioned it to you guys last time There was apparently some campaign hitting up medium like small size youtubers with decent followings Maybe like tens of thousands where they would say hey just upload this video to your YouTube channel That's all and we'll pay you, you know 500 bucks or 600 bucks and it was some guy explaining why the Falun Gong was a dangerous cult and he was like complaining that they were performing in New York and that Everyone should go and complain to the Performing Arts Center to get Falun Gong banned or whatever That was really weird when I saw that. | ||
| I'm like, who would upload to their channel a video from some random person? | ||
| But also, it should be a red flag if the authoritarian communist party is persecuting a group. | ||
| That should be a signal that you shouldn't also be persecuting these people in a free country. | ||
| Maybe there's something wrong with the group that's doing the persecuting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, but people go after us, and that's whatever, you know. | ||
| All right, Kara May says, Hey Tim, thanks for reading my super chat. | ||
| Oddly bandersnatchy, but it's fine anyway. | ||
| Cuomo definitely performed genocide. | ||
| Am I crazy for finding this obvious AF? | ||
| Cuomo killed 15,000 people. | ||
| And it wasn't just him. | ||
| There's some other governors as well. | ||
| And they were warned of this, so... Man, it's a creepy time, I'll tell you that. | ||
| Alright, anything about Texas. | ||
| Please talk about 3F and the CCP's stated aims to literally destroy the United States. | ||
| In your opinion, are we in immediate danger? | ||
| Are we so compromised from the inside that all hope is lost? | ||
| I don't know what the 3Fs are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
3F. | |
| No idea. | ||
| And the CCP's stated aims to destroy the United States, is that a thing? | ||
| Well, they're very clear about struggling against the United States, that the United States is the enemy. | ||
| They are the whole unrestricted warfare thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, the Chinese Communist Party is already at war with the United States. | ||
| We talked about that last time. | ||
| Unrestricted warfare. | ||
| I mean, we're we're we're being slammed by cyber war. | ||
| I mean, China is going after our infrastructure. | ||
| That's one aspect of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Financial warfare. | ||
| Information. | ||
| Drug warfare. | ||
| Information warfare. | ||
| It's a big one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Let's see what we got. | ||
| Alexander Hale says Cuomo's high approval rating is about as legit as Biden's approval rating. | ||
| It's fake, just like all the polls before the election was fortified. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Published the good says we haven't even begun to fight John Paul Jones the original Alex Jones not advocating violence | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe? | |
| FBI historically accurate That's what he said. Was it he was in a he was a in his | ||
| ship and they were firing cans at each other and Yeah, and his ship was like just slam and he was like we | ||
| have not yet begun to fight We haven't even begun to fight famous quote | ||
| Lester Leo says us should learn how Taiwanese handle elections | ||
| Taiwan treats voting security and transparency seriously given how China always wants to influence it. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| We were there for the Taiwan election and they have a pretty good system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Security? | ||
| A couple things about Taiwan election security. | ||
| Number one, you have to show up in person and show your ID. | ||
| Number two... Paper ballots. | ||
| They're paper ballots. | ||
| Number three, at the end of the voting day, anyone from the community can come in and stand there physically and be an observer. | ||
| There's not selected observers. | ||
| Anyone just can randomly arbitrarily show up and they can watch the ballots being counted, read aloud, and tallied on a board. | ||
| Not just aloud in the building, but they can actually see it. | ||
| Yeah, the observers can actually observe, right? | ||
| And so for the in-person voting ID, clear chain with paper ballots and the observers, it's very, very hard to commit fraud there. | ||
| Well, the flip side of this, obviously, is that, you know, if you can't vote by mail, you could say, well, there's maybe some disenfranchisement. | ||
| And I think that's true. | ||
| And every country has to figure out what's the balance between security and ensuring the integrity of the election and making sure that more people have access to voting. | ||
| Taiwan has made that choice to ensure security because they're under so much threat. | ||
| from the Communist Party. | ||
| And other countries may at least want to look to that model for inspiration to some degree. | ||
| And I think also Taiwan's only been voting since like 1996. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| So they treasure, like for presidential elections, so they treasure their democracy a lot. | ||
| And I think it was, you know, all of us felt quite moved watching the whole process of people bringing their kids to watch the vote count and things like that. | ||
| Love their democracy. | ||
| Yeah, it was really amazing. | ||
| Yeah, like, everybody gets the day off to vote, but you have to go in person. | ||
| So, like, people flew from overseas to go back to Taiwan to vote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Justin Wheeler says, Will Timcast ever have an app? | ||
| We are working on it right now, actually. | ||
| So, we know that most people who watch and listen are doing it on mobile, and so we are trying to build that mobile app so it's really easy for members to just log in and do all that really cool stuff. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Nick Timko says, I got my wisdom teeth out this week and watching your podcast has really helped keep my mind off the pain. | ||
| Oh, I hear that. | ||
| I'm glad. | ||
| I had a really, really bad impacted wisdom tooth, this one. | ||
| And getting it taken out was like, the dentist, it looked like he was doing, you know, street construction. | ||
| Yeah, and it was I was shaking and sweaty and just like for like three days I was like all these painkillers was like the worst pain ever So isn't it nice to know that your show is less bad than that? | ||
| Yeah, just a little bit a little bit a little bit less bad than getting your wisdom to the ripped out of your face Please have us back. | ||
| All right. | ||
| A horrible gamer says, Shelly, how did you become aware and start spreading the word about China? | ||
| What is the story of you partnering up with Agent Smith against China? | ||
| That's classified. | ||
| I see. | ||
| But my parents came from, well, I was born in China and my parents came to the U.S. | ||
| in the 80s as grad students. | ||
| And then they brought me to America. | ||
| And we were all in the U.S. | ||
| by the time the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre happened. | ||
| And my dad, before, he had gotten a scholarship from the Chinese government to study, get his PhD in America, so he was supposed to go back. | ||
| And he was intent on bringing us back until the Tiananmen Square massacre happened, and then he basically just was so furious. | ||
| Like, the Chinese students in America at that time, they marched in the streets of the U.S. | ||
| against the Chinese government. | ||
| That's how bad that was. | ||
| And basically we ended up staying in the U.S. | ||
| because the Bush administration at the time gave Chinese students who had been in the U.S. | ||
| and protested during the massacre like amnesty because the idea was that you could be, you know, if you went back to China you could be persecuted for protesting in the U.S. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Al or AI, whichever one says, Cuomo didn't kill anyone. | ||
| Anyone in medicine can tell you people can't stay in hospitals and are sent to nursing homes for long-term care. | ||
| It's a cost thing. | ||
| Except when they have the Javits Center and the Mercy available and empty, and the nursing home said, you will introduce the virus here. | ||
| And then Cuomo was like, geez, what have we done? | ||
| We better hide the numbers. | ||
| Otherwise we might get investigated by federal prosecutors. | ||
| That's literally what happened. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| He killed him. | ||
| That's an interesting question. | ||
| We've definitely seen India standing up to the Chinese Communist Party in a way that it had not done in recent history. | ||
| front that India would attack China? | ||
| That's an interesting question. | ||
| We've definitely seen India standing up to the Chinese Communist Party in a way that | ||
| it had not done in recent history, not just on the border where there's been confrontation | ||
| between Indian troops and Chinese troops where Indian soldiers were actually killed last | ||
| year, but also in Indian society there's been a huge ban on many types of Chinese apps. | ||
| There is a growing cultural awareness of, you know, after Taiwan, India could be one | ||
| of the next targets. | ||
| China is working with Pakistan. | ||
| It's building potential military ports all around India, what's called the String of Pearls. | ||
| And the idea is that China will be coming after India. | ||
| Not right now. | ||
| Well, piece by piece on the border. | ||
| Well, once the U.S. | ||
| collapses into, you know, the Democrat states in the North, for the most part, join Canada, and then the rest become Jesusland, as the meme dictates, then China won't have any unified opposition, for the most part, and then they can shift their focus to India, maybe Australia. | ||
| Well, it is still a risk, too. | ||
| You can't do it too quick. | ||
| Otherwise, India and Japan and Australia, maybe South Korea, though, There was a whole thing about election interference in South Korea involving China, but that's another story. | ||
| Yeah, step at a time. | ||
| All right, let's see. | ||
| We'll take one more right here. | ||
| Rita Ho says, maybe two more, invite a Taiwanese KOL to talk about election integrity and how to fight information warfare. | ||
| That sounds pretty cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What's a KOL? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I gotta look that up. | |
| Key Opinion Leader. | ||
| Do you just come up with that? | ||
| No, that's actual abbreviation for it. | ||
| Oh, OK. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Gabriel McLeod will do this last one, says the potential for diplomacy with China implies those in a position to be diplomatic have any interest in enacting change for the good of the world instead of simply maintaining the status quo. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Alright, we'll leave it there, but if you haven't already, you guys gotta smash that like button on your way out before you go. | ||
| You just gotta, you gotta reach over and you gotta give that little button a tap because it really does help the channel. | ||
| And you should subscribe, hit that notification bell, and share the show with your friends. | ||
| Share the clips. | ||
| We put up clips, you know, every single day from the show. | ||
| And check us out on all podcast platforms, iTunes, Spotify, etc. | ||
| You can follow me on all social media platforms at TimCast. | ||
| My other channels are YouTube.com slash TimCast and YouTube.com slash TimCastNews. | ||
| This show is live Monday through Friday at 8 p.m., so we will be back Monday. | ||
| But thank you all so much for hanging out. | ||
| Smash that like button, I'll say it again. | ||
| And do you guys want to mention your social media and your show? | ||
| Yeah, you can follow us on YouTube.com slash China Uncensored as well as slash America Uncovered. | ||
| You'll get a lot of really interesting information about the US and China. | ||
| You can also find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. | ||
| Shelley, you have a very nice Twitter. | ||
| My Twitter is at Shelzhang, S-H-E-L-Z-H-A-N-G. | ||
| And we also, did you say the podcast? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| I always forget the podcast. | ||
| So we also have a podcast, China Unscripted, on YouTube and all the podcast platforms. | ||
| Oh, very cool. | ||
| Do you want to mention, do you have Twitter or anything? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| No, I don't tweet. | ||
| He helps us make all the other things. | ||
| Well, there we go. | ||
| And I am Sour Patch Lids here in the corner. | ||
| You can find me on Twitter at Sour Patch Lids as well as on Mines at Sour Patch Lids. | ||
| And I'm also on Instagram and Gab at Real Sour Patch Lids. | ||
| Everybody, thank you all so much for hanging out. | ||
| I don't think we're going to have a special extended segment tonight, but, uh, and it's always because I'm trying to do something for the weekends where literally every single Friday I'm like, we're going to go to the range and we're going to film it and then we don't because people are leaving. | ||
| You know, Luke was on vacation. | ||
| We had, we had the dude from Phoenix Ammo here and we were going to go and it's going to be awesome. | ||
| Film some drills. | ||
| And then Luke is like, I'm going on vacation. | ||
| See you later. | ||
| And I was like, all right, I guess so. | ||
| We'll try and get something up this weekend as an actual on the ground video vlog. |
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