Ep 113 | Why COVID's Origin Is the Biggest Story in the World | Josh Rogin | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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We're going to speak the unspeakable.

That's tough to do.

We live in a world that no longer values courage, a world that rewards cowardice.

Oh, so brave, so brave.

It's really important to recognize the people who will stand up for what is right.

And today's guest has courage.

He is a columnist for the Washington Post, a political analyst for CNN.

Why would I have him on?

Because he speaks the truth.

He's an award-winning journalist, and when I say journalist, I mean he's one of the few people who can actually call themselves a journalist.

His allegiance is not to the right or to the left, but to the truth.

Until recently, roughly about the time Joe Biden took office, questioning the origin of COVID-19 was completely forbidden.

COVID began with a bat, and it was in a wet market, and anyone who challenged that was quickly labeled labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Well, today's guest was not intimidated.

He questioned, he challenged, he's been to China.

His courage has paid off.

He documents the whole twisted story in his latest book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Z, and the Battle for the 21st Century.

If the greatest test of courage is the willing to sacrifice, he's passed.

Please welcome Josh Rogan.

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So, Josh, when we first spoke about COVID,

you were exposing the possibility of a lab leak.

Then we spoke when Fauci, I think, lied to Rand Paul.

Would you agree with that?

I don't know what his intentions were, but he definitely said things that were false.

In the old days.

In my day, that was called a lie.

In other words, he could just be totally wrong.

I don't know.

Doubtful.

Now China this week is saying that the virus is man-made, except we made it and sent it over there.

Is that where we are?

You know, Glenn, I happen to believe that the origin story of how we got into this pandemic is the biggest story in the world and the most screwed up story in our public discourse.

And it's for a number of reasons that you and I have discussed, including the fact that our leading scientists like Anthony Fauci have distorted and misled the American people as to what was our relationship with these Wuhan labs also because the Chinese Communist Party puts out like a series of ever-changing propaganda lines that don't make any sense on their face including the one that you just mentioned that it came from the United States and Fort Dietrich or some other such nonsense including the fact that Democrats refused to join congressional investigations to unearth the origin of the virus including the fact that the Biden administration won't release the intelligence, including the fact that the media has screwed up the story by driving a false narrative, which is that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory for a year before admitting that it wasn't, but failing to examine how they got it wrong.

And so it really is a failure of all of our public institutions in a grand way that we're struggling to scratch our way out of right now.

And that's why I think it's so important to emphasize that, first of all, this is not a political question.

The origin of the coronavirus has nothing to do with whether you're a Democrat or Republican.

It has nothing to do with whether you like Trump or you don't like Trump.

It's a crucial bit of history and a crucial bit of scientific information that tells us what we need to do to make sure that we don't have a pandemic every two years.

And this is why I think that we're nowhere.

You know, despite the fact that after a year and a half, finally, we can have a discussion on a podcast about the lab league theory without getting canceled.

That's nice.

Don't get me wrong.

That's better than it was a year ago.

But in terms of actually uncovering the truth of how we got into this dystopian reality that 7 billion people are living through, that's still going on, no, we're nowhere.

There is no real investigation, partially because the Chinese government won't allow it and partially because the U.S.

government won't push for it.

It is phenomenal to me that they still wonder why some people won't take the vaccines.

You know, you've been lying to us in one fashion or another for the last year and a half.

Then at the beginning, you can say, Well, we didn't know, we just didn't know this, we didn't know that, we were all kind of in it together, but we aren't all in it together.

The big corporations won, the little guy was screwed,

some became little mini dictators in different states.

The mask was good, then the mask was bad, then the mask was good, and then 20 masks you had to wear.

I mean, it's crazy.

We have every institution

has either lied

or covered or was just smarmy every single institution in the United States that was involved in this.

What do you expect

a group of citizens to do?

Of course there are people that don't believe you.

Well, right.

I happen to have to agree with everything that you just said.

All of our institutions failed.

All of our medical leaders, all of our government leaders, our media leaders,

they failed us.

The first responders, they performed valiantly and continue to do so.

And they are the true heroes of the pandemic.

Everyone else, and you know, I was trained as a mainstream media journalist for 17 years to trust the scientists, right?

That was what you would think.

But then it's shocking to people to learn that, oh, wait a minute, scientists, even public health officials, are human beings.

And sometimes they make mistakes, and sometimes they have conflicts of interest, and sometimes they actually lie, and sometimes they're actually corrupt.

And, you know, sorting through those things is supposed to be the job of the media, but it failed because the media got caught up in, the mainstream media got caught up in its own war with the right-wing media and its own war with the Trump administration, which again has nothing to do with the origin of the coronavirus.

It has nothing to do with the lab league theory.

It's just Washington being Washington and getting caught up in its own BS.

And, you know, it's one thing to say that, okay, in the first months of the pandemic, we can excuse a lot of those mistakes.

A lot of people were getting sick.

There was a lot of confusion.

There was a lot of misinformation.

I get that.

But here we are, 18 months into this thing, a year and a half after the outbreak.

And not only is there no, you know, sort of accountability, there's no even sort of mea culpa to say that, okay, well, our institution screwed up.

It's not too late.

We actually have to still do the work of...

coming together on fighting the virus and then also coming together and figuring out what happened.

And, you know, that like I said before, that's just not going on.

And, you know, again, there's plenty of blame to go around and there's plenty of blame to still go around.

But I don't blame people out there in the country who look at all of these records of mistakes and the lack of accountability and saying, why should I believe you?

I happen to believe the vaccine.

People should get the vaccine, but I can't blame people for not trusting Anthony Fauci when he says get it because

the fact is that there are some bad faith and some good faith attacks on Anthony Fauci.

Not every attack on him is valid, but some of them are.

And the ones that I agree with happen to be the ones about how he is thwarting congressional investigations and distracting people from looking into this lab league theory.

And there's a reason that he's doing that.

And the reason is because in this case, he has a conflict of interest.

I don't believe in this case he's a bad person or he's trying to get the world sick.

I think he has a conflict of interest.

His research is tied to those labs.

He helped fund those labs.

It doesn't mean he funded the virus.

It just means that he was involved with them and he was giving our money to them.

And he was

to oversee them.

But he also did give

money

for the research that may have led to this virus.

Absolutely, but this is where I sort of think that, you know, as we were talking about before,

you know,

he could give you a scientific or an academic explanation for why that's not illegal.

In other words,

whether or not...

So, but that's not the point.

The point is that, is not whether or not the specific contract led to the pandemic.

The point is that Anthony Fauci was in charge of a system system that was transferring huge amounts of scientific knowledge into these risky labs that have no oversight and no transparency in a crisis.

And it was his fiduciary responsibility to keep an eye on that, to oversee that, to make sure he knew what was going on in those labs that the U.S.

government was funding.

And he won't even answer basic questions about it.

And how can we have a society where public officials are above questioning by Congress, by the media, where they can just tell all of us to go pound sand and

help the Chinese government, in fact, thwart the investigation into the pandemic.

I think this is a case that I haven't seen,

I haven't seen anything like this probably since Nixon,

where the crime is not as bad as the cover-up.

I think if Fauci would have come out early and said, yep, we were doing work with the lab.

Here's what happened.

It may have been a problem,

and I take responsibility.

If he would have done that right away, I think Americans would have accepted him and said, okay, all right.

But because of this weird cover-up,

I don't think there's going to be any forgiveness in the end, if we ever find out.

Right.

And there's a reason that not just Anthony Fauci, because I think there's a group of people, including Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes for Health, Peter Zazik, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance,

and several other people who are in the business of working with Chinese labs to dig up viruses and play around with them.

Okay.

And that is their business and that is their industry.

And I think the reason that they don't want that business to be thoroughly investigated as a possible source of the pandemic is because they're looking to expand that business greatly.

And if you just read what Anthony Fauci said in the New York Times about a week ago, he said, we're going to need billions of more dollars of U.S.

taxpayer money in order to greatly expand our digging up of viruses all over the world and then bringing them back to labs, including labs in China.

And that's his plan.

He wants to double the size of his organization.

He wants to,

his theory is that we didn't do enough of this research.

And all I'm saying is, okay, well, shouldn't we find out if this research caused the pandemic before we expand it sixfold?

Correct.

Shouldn't we at least do the investigation?

It's not to accuse Anthony Fauci of starting the pandemic.

It's to say, hey,

you now admit.

begrudgingly that you don't know what was going on in these Chinese labs.

That's what the intelligence shows.

That's what the Trump administration released on January 15th that the Biden administration confirmed is that they had another side of the lab, the side that they worked on with the Chinese military, where they were doing the coronavirus research.

They didn't tell Anthony Fauci about.

So I could believe Anthony Fauci when he says, okay, we didn't fund the pandemic.

That's not the point.

The point is that you didn't do your job to oversee your collaboration with these labs that in the crisis tell us to go screw ourselves.

And if you think about that problem, you have to ask yourself, okay, well, is it a good idea to continue throwing U.S.

money into these labs, especially when we can't even get in, when they won't even let us in the door, when the coronavirus pandemic breaks out on the doorstep?

And Anthony Fauci's answer to that on CNN a couple of weeks ago is yes.

He says, yes, we have to do more.

So why would we do this in Japan?

If we want to do it, you know, it's, it's like, you know, oh, look how unsafe nuclear power plants are.

Just look at Chernobyl.

No, that was that was made by the Soviet Union.

That's, that's not a good case to say nuclear power is dangerous.

The Soviet Union was dangerous and sloppy.

The same thing could be said.

If we want to do this research, then let's do it ourselves and do it right.

Let's not farm it out to somebody where we don't have any kind of,

I mean, why are we moving it to China?

Well, originally, a lot of it was moved to China just for that reason.

You know, the Obama administration banned gain of function research in 2014.

A lot easier to sponsor in a country that doesn't have that ban.

And then when you think about it, okay, well, then

we had cables in 2018 that told us that U.S.

diplomats visited those labs and said they were too risky and that they were not following the proper safety standards and that they were doing research on bad coronaviruses and how they could affect humans.

They essentially told us.

if the lab leak theory is true, that this could happen at this very lab.

And our policymakers failed, okay?

And that's because we put the scientists in charge of overseeing the scientists and that's because when the obama when the trump administration actually uh lifted the pause the rules under which they lifted it were devised by the nih and anthony fauci and that's why anthony fauci can stand in front of rand paul and say i didn't break the rules it's because he wrote the rules and he knows the loopholes and he drove a truck through those loopholes and now he's bragging about those loopholes and now he's asking for more money uh to expand those loopholes and i can't think of anything more dangerous again, if the lab leak theory is true or even if it's not true.

Because what we now know is that these Chinese labs can't be trusted.

We now know, and even Anthony Fauci begrudgingly admits that,

they're not doing open science, actually.

They're doing what they're doing for the party.

Because in China, the science is run by the party.

And in China, the scientists only say what the party tells them to say, or they die, or they get jailed and

disappear, or worse.

Okay.

And so Anthony Fauci is not in charge of U.S.-China relations.

And this is why, because it's not just a science issue.

It's a national security issue.

And this whole field of research.

Didn't we know that when the head of the military's biological weapons program was running it?

I mean, isn't that clear?

You know, you have this battle, and this is

detailed extensively in my book, Chaos Under Heaven,

which I wrote in the middle of this pandemic.

And it details that what happened inside the the Trump administration was that the national security people said, we have a problem here, and this might have come from the lab, and we need to look into it.

And the health officials said, no way, don't worry about it.

And Xi Jinping told Donald Trump, no way, don't worry about it.

And then they threatened the United States and said, if you want your PPE and masks, this was in the first months of the pandemic, you'll shut up about these labs.

And then they went around the world and did the same thing, bribing and coercing and threatening countries all over the world.

There's a reason that the Chinese government cover-up is centered around the labs, right?

There's a reason that they won't let anybody into the labs, that they've squashed all the science.

They're censoring all their scientists.

Any journalist who said anything different was jailed or disappeared.

And so if you, there was a ton of people inside the national security community, including inside the Trump administration, who were sounding this alarm.

But they were shouted down.

And then when it burst into public awareness, the media took the side of the scientists.

And this was led by a combination of sort of source bias and anti-Trump bias and confirmation bias and

basic laziness and incompetence that runs most of the mistakes in the mainstream media that you see to this day.

I mean, I've worked in, Glenn, I worked in eight different mainstream newsrooms, okay?

It's not really a conspiracy.

It's usually just groupthink and incompetence.

That's exactly right.

And I think a lot of these newsrooms followed Peter Dashik and Anthony Fauci.

You told them, you know, don't write anything about the Ladlick theory.

That's crazy.

And they can't admit that they got captured by their own sources, that actually they didn't do their jobs.

And, you know, they don't want to get dunked on by the right-wing media and the mega media.

But, you know, I'm part of the mainstream media.

I have no problem admitting when they get something wrong and when the right-wing media got something right.

And it's the same thing with Trump.

If you read my book, you'll see that there's some praise of Trump and there's some criticism of Trump.

None of our figures are public figures are infallible.

We don't live in a society where we have dear leaders and supreme leaders and kings and princes, right?

We live in a society ruled by men, right, with systems of oversight and accountability.

And that's what broke down here because all of those systems didn't want to admit that even

people like Anthony Fauci could make mistakes, could have flaws, could have conflicts of interest.

But that's the reality, and that's what we have to sort through right now.

I don't think the Biden administration is ready to come around to that, frankly.

They still want to just throw up their hands and say, oh, well, we'll never figure it out.

That's what you're going to see when they have this 90-day intelligence review.

You know, first of all, what about the intelligence community?

How can we have the intelligence community review its own failure?

Think of the failure that's ongoing.

And if you read the articles about this review, it's really crazy and shocking because what they always say is, well, the intelligence community is starting to look at a bunch of data that they didn't look at from the Wuhan labs until last month.

And to me, that strikes me as, why didn't they look at it?

Why is it...

Why did it take them 18 months to look at their own data, right?

And then every article you'll see about this review says the next thing it will say invariably will be, well, it's really, it's a lot of stuff.

And you know, we're, they don't really know what to make of it.

They don't have any Chinese-speaking, you know, scientist intelligence guys, to which my reaction is, why not?

How is it that we spend $80 billion

a year on these agencies?

They don't have any Chinese-speaking scientist analysts.

How did they miss that?

And that's the, what that leads you to is the inevitable conclusion that this Wuhan lab thing, again, we don't know if it's true.

I'm just saying we need to check it out.

Why can't we check it out?

Don't tell me not to check it out.

But if it is true, it's the biggest intelligence failure since, I I don't know, 9-11 and WMD put together.

It means that we've been spending our national security budget, 10 times that of the rest of the world combined, on the wrong stuff, on targeting jihadis in Yemen, and nothing on watching a bunch of risky labs run by the Chinese military right next to where the pandemic broke out.

So the intelligence community is...

Go ahead.

But no, I was just going to say that this is...

This is what happens.

That's a scandal.

It is a scandal, but that's what happens when the group think, if you will, all says that China

is the

model for

the next generation and they're not really enemies and we got to work together with them and see their point of view.

No.

I mean, there's a growing number of Americans that are very, very clear.

China is not the friend of humanity, free humanity, not just the United States, but freedom itself.

And

we are just, we've been playing footsie with them.

I mean, we just elected a guy whose son is deeply in bed with the Chinese Communist Party.

What are we doing?

Well, you know, I'm glad you framed it that way because it really is

the existential challenge of our time.

It is not the same as the Cold War, but it's on the scope and the scale of a Cold War.

And by the way, a Cold War is not the worst outcome of the grand competition with China.

A hot war is the worst outcome.

And

in order to avoid that, what I say is that we have to do more to confront the problem now.

That inevitably, as you look through history, totalitarian, pseudo-religious, genocidal, expansionist dictatorships expand until confronted.

Invariably, it happens every single time.

And so by ignoring the problem, we actually make the situation much more dangerous.

And that's why I think you saw in the Trump administration a lot of different groups of people push for a turn of American foreign policy that the Biden administration, to its credit, has continued.

But the problem is that we're moving way too slow.

And yes, as you point out now, there's this sort of counter-argument, oh, China's not 10 feet tall, they're only six feet tall, so we can all go to sleep again.

Don't worry about it.

And to me, that seems that part of that is driven by the corruption of people in the business class and the Wall Street elite who are making money off of funneling our money and technology to China.

Some of it is the simple fact that a lot of these communities haven't woken up to the realization that our collaboration with China is being weaponized on their side.

It doesn't matter if we think engagement and cooperation is wonderful and that's going to cause the Chinese government to liberalize economically and then politically and then they're going to become just like us.

China doesn't feel that way.

Xi Jinping doesn't think that way.

We know it because that's what he says.

Okay.

And we have this like, you know, crazy discussion about China in Washington where no one listens to what Xi Jinping says.

And what he says is very clear that he wants to shape a world order to make it safe for China to achieve its dream.

And that dream includes making the world safe for autocracy, repression, and all sorts of malfeasance that affects us in our daily lives.

And if you're sitting at home wondering if you're going to get the coronavirus and you haven't seen your grandmother in a year, then you know that somehow we can debate how much that you know,

what happens in China affects us.

The pandemic should have made clear to every single human being that what happens in China relates to us.

It affects our national security and our public health.

And if you can't collaborate on a pandemic, and we can't because they are telling us to go screw ourselves when we asked to go inside the lab that happened that is right next to the outbreak, which had all the bad coronaviruses in it, where they were doing all the bad coronavirus research.

Hey, can we look inside that lab?

No, go screw yourself.

If you can't collaborate on that, what can we collaborate on?

What's the thing that we're supposed to collaborate on?

Climate change?

Well, to be honest with ourselves, China's building coal plants faster than the rest of the world combined.

You know, human rights?

I don't think so.

They're committing a genocide.

Trade?

No, it doesn't look like that's going to work either.

Oh, how about pandemic prevention?

Well, they just showed us in very clear terms that that's not going to work either.

They're going to weaponize our engagement against us if they can.

And our job is to, you know, protect ourselves and to protect the American people.

And if we can do that in collaboration with free and open societies around the world, that would be great too.

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So, what's it going to take?

If not, this,

what's it going to take?

You know, I think, first of all, what I say is that, you know, we have to understand that, you know, the China issue and our politics is getting hyper-politicized to our detriment.

And we have to understand that, you know, what it's actually going to take is for both sides of our politics and

our society to come together on what essentially is a shared problem.

I realize that's a tall order, okay?

But what I see is is that these debates over how to deal with a China that is increasingly expansionist, aggressive, repressive, and interfering in our lives are taking place not just in Washington, but in academia, in the tech sector, on Wall Street,

in our sports, in Hollywood, right?

These are all of these major industries are affected by the CCP's strategy and malign behavior.

And we all need to start talking to each other about it.

We all need to start finding where we overlap in terms of

the people.

We can't find those places because if we disagree, we're hatemongers, bigots, racists, whatever.

I mean,

how do you have a conversation with the NFL or the NBA about China when they'll ban anyone from saying the truth about China and it's turned around on people that are just saying, well, can we just talk about the facts here?

You're turned out.

You know, they're doing the Chinese government work for them.

Right.

It's a perfect example because, you know, when the NBA got punished to the tune of $400 million

for one tweet, one tweet against I stand with Hong Kong.

One guy tweeted that, and

all of a sudden, $400 million of their revenue disappears in a second.

That was a wake-up call, okay?

Maybe not for Adam Silver, right?

Maybe not for Joseph Tsai, who owns the Nets and is an Alibaba founder, but for millions of NBA fans who realized in that instant that

if we want to preserve our freedom here in America, we have to stand up to China exporting its repression onto our shores.

Now, of course, the NBA totally screwed that up.

But what I say is that, okay, well, the NBA is not actually a foreign policy organization.

And rather than dunk on them, what if the government went in and said, hey, listen, NBA, rather than just bashing on you for doing the wrong thing, which you clearly did, what if we offered to use our diplomatic power and our economic sanctions and all this to stand with American corporations to tell the CCP, no, you know, screw you, you can't punish the NBA for one tweet.

We're not going to stand for it.

What if we brought together all the leagues that Chinese people like to enjoy, and they all got together and said, no, our people can tweet what they want, or you'll have no MBA in China, and then you'll have to explain to your own people why LeBron James is no longer coming to town.

You know, these are ways that the public and private partnership could be established.

We're not doing that, of course, because we're not sophisticated enough in our policy and in our discussion, which leads me to the next way that we sort of get at this, which is to have conversations like the one we're having right now, Glenn, this conversation, right?

This is an hour and a half of thinking about this problem in a non-partisan, non-political way, right?

You and I come from different parts of the media environment, different parts.

I'm sure we have different ideologies on various issues.

It doesn't matter because on this issue, you and I both realize an essential truth, which is that this is a problem that can no longer be ignored, that where it's going to take the entire country and our entire society to wrap our heads around it.

It doesn't mean we all need to overreact, doesn't mean we need to rush into toppling the CCP.

It just means that no longer can we countenance the part of our political discourse which says, never mind, it doesn't matter.

The CCP is not going to take over the world and we can just let it go.

Because it's clear to everyone that I talked to when rolling out this book, and I talked to people on the left and the right.

I went on from Joe Rogan to Steve Bannon, I don't care.

I say the same exact thing, which is this is an American problem.

This is a problem of free and open societies battling

what is a rising danger and a rising threat.

And yeah, it's a complex problem that's going to require solutions that make that have costs and that have risks and that force Americans to sort of choose between competing interests and go against our sometimes instinct to maximize profits.

And it's a really difficult conversation.

I'll tell you when Trump first put the sanctions on them,

I'm not a fan of sanctions.

I don't like

trade barriers.

But I called him and said,

I have to tell you,

what you're doing with China, I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's right.

You're the first one that's actually taking a tough stand against China.

Every single one, Republican and Democrat, have bowed to China.

And I don't want to get into a war with them.

I don't have anything against China, except

we're living through what is probably going to end up being another Holocaust, and we'll all go, gee, I didn't know when we clearly know.

You know, I don't want a war with them, but I also don't want them to rule the world.

And what they did with the PPEs, what they're doing with 5G, if I'm not mistaken, that is what they traded for, right?

We'll give you the PPEs, but you're going to take Huawei's 5G.

Explain why that's so bad.

Yeah, that's what happened in Brazil.

And again, yeah, the goal here is to avoid the conflict with China that neither side seeks, right?

To find an accommodation whereby they can have their country.

It doesn't mean we're going to shut up about their human rights, but that we're primarily concerned with how they operate in our societies, that we're primarily concerned with protecting ourselves and ensuring that we have the same national security and public health and economic freedom and prosperity that

we have had this whole time, more or less.

And the Chinese Communist Party has not agreed to that.

They are not on board with that plan.

They are not convinced.

Despite the tariffs, despite the sanctions, despite all of the public condemnation, we have to be honest about the fact that nothing has changed their calculus so far.

And there's a risk of going up this escalation ladder, right, that we have to be conscious of.

But that's still not an excuse to ignore the problem, you know.

And when it comes to China's actions around the world, what they did in Brazil was they said, if you want your shots, you have to take our Huawei.

And Brazil folded, right?

Because how could they deny their people life-saving medication in a crisis?

Although I would just say that the Chinese shots are largely not really that good, especially against Delta, but that's a separate issue.

What they did in Paraguay was they said, you have to drop diplomatic recognition of Taiwan.

In other words, the party doesn't just operate in its economic interest.

It threatens and blackmails countries in its political interest, okay?

And that's a different kind of problem.

And the Paraguayans said, no, screw you, we can't do that.

But at the same time, it caused that government to suffer greatly and those people to suffer greatly.

So they're torturing and blackmailing countries.

They punished Australia in the middle of a pandemic by shutting down its beef and wine imports, which is like 40% of their agricultural economy in the middle of a pandemic for asking about the COVID origins.

That's a capricious form of cruelty.

And what the world is seeing now is that...

China is a nationalist, everyone thinks, oh, America is not a superpower.

That's no good.

Oh, look at all the mistakes that we've made.

Like, yeah, I agree with that.

Okay.

Mistakes have been made, right?

The interventions, I get that.

people are sick of our military interventions.

I totally,

you know, we may differ on the exact policies, but

there's no doubt that mistakes have been made in American expansion around the world, but people are getting at

the last 20th century.

A lot of it is because of America intervention one way or another.

But here's the crazy thing.

The alternative, a Chinese-led world order, is much, much, much more.

And I think, and

that's what people are coming around to realize.

And that doesn't just apply to to free and open societies.

If you're in Africa, if you're in Latin America, uh, and you're dependent on your country's survival to

pretend that like the Uyghur genocide doesn't exist, that's a tough position to be in.

We should be more active in engaging those countries, we should learn from the mistakes of the 20th century.

But the bottom line is that a Chinese-led world order is a very scary world to live in.

It's a world where not only are we not able to sort of practice our

what we call our way of life?

You know, our ability to speak freely and to,

but we'd have a world where the Chinese model would be exported, a package of authoritarian tools, surveillance and AI and prisons and monitoring that

they will sell to any dictator who's

willing to purchase it.

Sometimes they'll just give it to them, you know.

And we could see many examples of that all over the world.

And that means millions and millions more people in horrible suffering on our watch, and we should care about that.

Let me go back to the coronavirus for a second.

You mentioned the Delta virus being worse.

The bat lady

has come out and said, oh, there is much worse than that coming.

What are your thoughts on this?

And

what is coming?

And why should we listen to the bat lady?

Right.

Well, let me tackle the last question first because, you know, The Dr.

Shi Zhong Li, who ran the bat coronavirus research, still does at the Won Institute of Virology for 15 years,

has been the one that they put out to talk to the international community.

The problem is twofold.

One, as we mentioned before, if she says anything that counteracts the party line, she goes to jail.

We never see her again.

And her whole family goes to jail.

She knows that, right?

So she can only really say the party line.

But two is that what she is saying actually

is demonstrably false in some cases, and in other cases, is at odds with what the U.S.

government is saying.

In other words,

she's lying in some cases, and in some cases, she's calling the U.S.

government liars.

So picking through all of that and understanding it through the lens of a Chinese Communist Party propaganda operation is an interesting project in and of itself.

But all that gets us to, you know, to spare the viewers the details of this lie and that lie, is that we can't trust what Dr.

Xi says, okay?

And we can't trust what the lab says, because, again, if they say the wrong thing, they're going to die.

So we just have to understand that.

But

the core of what she's saying, I think, is in this particular instance, is true, which is that we are only in the, what, third or fourth wave, and there will be many more coming.

And

the longer that this festers, the worse the variants will get.

And isn't it usually the opposite?

Doesn't it?

Well, if you ask Robert, well, that's a good point, because if you ask Robert Redfield, who is the head of the CDC, who went on CNN in February and said that it probably came from the lab and then disappeared, right?

He's like in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Where is that guy?

He gets on CNN, says, not only do I think the virus came from the lab because I know what was going on in that lab, remember, he's a virologist, unlike Anthony Fauci, immunologist, unlike Peter Dashak, zoologist, virologist.

Robert Redfield said, I think it came from the lab because of the way it acts.

Because a super virus that acts this way, that's so, that came out so transmissible to humans and is even that much more efficient at being transmissible to humans as it mutates indicates that somebody tinkered with it.

That's what he said.

Okay, and then they called him a racist and he got canceled and he's gone.

And we haven't heard from him since.

So I think what you're seeing is that a lot of these countries, again, more and more scientists are coming out now just to say, first of all,

there's no way to rule out that the outbreak was linked to the lab.

Second of all, just because some scientists say you can't see the lab's work in the virus doesn't mean anything because it could have been connected to the lab, but you wouldn't be able to detect detect it in other words scientists don't have the final word on this and third of all we have to investigate the labs whether the chinese government wants us to or not and that's not going to be easy but that's something that we must must do and the intelligence community can't do it by itself because they have a conflict of interest because they screwed it up already okay and that means more congressional investigations more public investigations more releasing of intelligence and more coalescing of the international community around a real look into this thing.

I mean, we didn't get to talk about the WHO yet, but if you just look at what the WHO is proposing, it's laughable.

Okay, it doesn't make any sense.

They're proposing to negotiate with China to get back into the lab,

which the Chinese government has already rejected, which they already tried once and wasted a year trying to do.

And so

again, Glenn, this is not to be an attack on Anthony Fauci.

This is just to say

he can't be in charge of this investigation.

He can be a witness.

He can be a material witness, okay?

but he can't be the prosecutor.

And we're going to need somebody else to do that investigation.

And if that person would like to stand up, that would be great.

Yeah.

And I was going to say, who would that be?

It's got to be Congress.

That's the only way I see it going down.

And that means we're going to have to have some Democrats or wait until see if the Congress flips.

If the Congress flips, then you've...

Then you've got subpoena power in a day.

And, you know, Anthony Fauci is going to be in a lot of hot water.

If it doesn't, then we're going to need some brave Democratic senators, I think, to say this is important.

I think you see some of that now.

They're testing the waters.

They're waiting to see what the Biden administration comes up with.

I'm here to tell you, the Biden administration,

you know, doesn't have any political incentive to get to the bottom of the pandemic.

Now, they don't care, right?

They're not invested in the lab league theory or the market theory or anything because they weren't around.

It wasn't on their watch.

Their hands are clean.

At the same time, if it does turn out to be the lab league theory or if they press too hard for an investigation, well, that upends their delicate relations with Beijing.

They're going to need a climate change deal with Beijing.

That's going to make that more difficult.

It's going to throw their progressive left-wing members under the bus because they've been saying the lab league theory is racist for a year and a half, even though it's not racist.

I mean, if you think about it for a few seconds, I always thought the

wet mark, oh, the markets in China have bat soup.

I always thought that was way more racist if you just think about it than lab.

Then there was a mistake in a lab, right?

That's not a racist thing to say.

That's a happens all the time.

But Chinese people that eat bat soup seems more racist.

But anyway,

totally wrong.

Are we really

no?

I have not.

I have not.

There's markets everywhere.

You go everywhere.

There's markets.

They call them wet markets.

There's markets.

Yeah.

You can't go anywhere without running into a market.

Okay.

It doesn't mean that it's all weird and that the pandemics are coming out of the markets.

We got to close down all the markets.

That's crazy.

Of course, the Chinese are never going to do that.

They disavowed the market theory.

The Chinese CDC said it didn't come from the market.

But, you know, the Fauci's of the world don't care.

They're just like, oh, yeah, it's got to be the market.

And maybe there was a palm civet and we got to go look for raccoon dogs in markets all over Southeast Asia until we find the one with the pandemic virus in it and I say to those people go go to those Indonesian caves for 10 years don't call us we'll call you have fun if you find the palm civet that's the source of the pandemic let me know and meanwhile someone else has got to investigate all these bad coronavirus labs i mean don't we don't we pretty much know the the origins of almost all of these viruses pretty quickly

you know it depends because

this kind of gets into the statistics argument where a lot of people say, well, most of the viruses statistically come from nature, which again is like interesting, but not actual evidence, not relevant.

We only care about this one, right?

We don't care about, you know, and I think the lessons that you can draw from the SARS pandemic was that, yes, they eventually did find the source host.

Yes, it did take a very long time.

But The other things that we can draw from the SARS pandemic is looking at the Chinese government's response.

They hid the outbreak for four months.

They hid the science.

They lied to the world about the outbreak.

People died because of that, okay?

And they did the exact same thing here.

So, you know, people are focused on the science.

I'm saying focus on the party.

Focus on the system of the country where it broke out.

And you'll understand much more about how we got into this terrible, terrible mess and how we're still in it.

You know, and that's what people don't understand is that we're not dealing with open science.

We're not dealing with an open society.

We're dealing with a genocidal regime that has no compunction about killing its own people, much less killing us.

Go ahead.

No, go ahead.

Once you internalize that, then it explains a lot more about how they've been acting, and then you realize the soup that we're in.

And that's when you realize, oh, maybe it's not a good idea to give them billions of more dollars to dig up more dangerous viruses and bring them back to more Chinese labs to play around with.

That's crazy.

That's a crazy thing to do if you understand what's going on in that country right now.

Are we kind of America in the early 1930s with Germany, where now history, you kind of look back and you're like, oh, that was a really bad idea.

But we had Nazis here in America.

There was huge, the Nazi Bund Party in New York and New Jersey that was happening.

You had

Nazis

or sympathizers in our universities.

We just scooped up military spies that were in our university from China.

And for some reason, Joe Biden decided to let the DOJ not prosecute any of those guys.

I can't think of a reason why we would do that, but it seems very reminiscent of

another decade.

Yeah, I mean, again, I think the World War II references, like the Cold War references, tell us some things that we can learn from and are also imperfect in fundamental ways.

And so what I get from this, because everyone's like, oh, well, you know, what do you want?

A Cold War?

We're going to go into a Cold War.

And I'm like, wait a second, don't use

the Cold War as a political cudgel to tell me not to confront the Chinese Communist Party.

And there are some things we can learn from the Cold War.

Similarly,

the main thing that I learned from, you know,

from my reading of the history of how we got into World War II is that when it comes to nationalist socialist regimes that are willing to commit genocide and are increasingly militarily aggressive, their appetite grows with the eating.

And that the exact wrong thing that you can do is to appease their ambitions because it emboldens them to become more powerful and more dangerous.

And that's when I look at Hong Kong and I look at the Uyghur genocide.

That's what I think.

I think, oh, that's appeasement because the world is standing by and doing nothing.

And a few sanctions here and there from the Biden or Trump administration doesn't mean squat when it comes to 2 million people.

people in concentration camps right now as we're having this conversation.

And in my book, I describe in great detail how the U.S.

and the rest of the international community stood by while millions of Hong Kong residents fought valiantly to preserve the limited freedoms that they had and lost.

Okay.

And we didn't do squat to help them.

And now we're trying to clean up the mess afterwards.

It's too late.

And then I look at Taiwan and I think, okay, they're next.

And they know it.

Okay.

And do we know it?

And are we going to stand up this time?

Or are we going to let what it's essentially a democratic country?

Okay.

And I've been to Taiwan.

It's a country for all intents and purposes.

I don't care whether the U.S.

government recognizes it or not.

Those people are not part of the PRC and they don't want to be.

But they're not powerful enough to stand up to Beijing on their own.

Is that going to be the next domino to fall?

And if you think about, oh, what had we done something different in Munich or had we done something different at this stage of the World War II?

Yeah, I think that's the lesson that we need to draw.

Not that we're at World War II, but that, hey, appeasement is how we made the situation much, much more dangerous.

That's a pattern that we're repeating right now, for sure.

If we would have stood up in Hong Kong, Taiwan would not be next.

Possibly.

Exactly.

And why would Xi Jinping, and a lot of people talk about a military invasion of Hong Kong?

I don't think that's what's going to happen.

You know, the model that Xi Jinping used in Hong Kong was to threaten military invasion, but to use all of the other elements of coercion to just get it under heel.

And that's political interference, economic coercion, you know, just screwing with their information environment, buying up all their media, jailing all the people that say anything that you don't like, and turning the country from within.

That's what they did in Hong Kong.

And yes, there was a lot of violence too, but not a really full-scale invasion.

So I think that's what you're going to see in Taiwan.

Tons and tons of coercive pressure.

And selling them a bunch of tanks is not going to fix that.

So can the United States, under the Biden administration, marshal the international community to give Taiwan

the ability, the capability to defend itself from those things?

I don't see that happening at all.

And then if they take Taiwan, then I think it's all downhill from there.

Yeah, if they take Taiwan, don't they?

I mean, where is the stop?

There is no stop on them.

Exactly.

And, you know, again, the appetite grows with the eating.

That's how expansionist, nationalist, socialist regimes tend to operate.

So, again, I think we have a window of time that's dwindling fast to convince the leadership in Beijing that there's another way.

And that will include some decoupling and some trade-offs and some costs and some behavior changes on their part for sure.

And they're not convinced yet.

All signs point to this getting much worse.

Everything we see, all the data, all of their actions, you know, and the Biden, the Trump administration was good in flipping over the chessboard, but they were bad at setting it back up again.

And that's what the Biden administration is trying to do, but they're slow at it.

And they're caught with their own internal contradictions.

And they're still thinking in sort of a 2016 kind of world when the Chinese are thinking in a 2025 kind of world.

And, you know, when you talk about the pandemic, we think of it as like, we're having these discussions.

Oh, should we, should kids get masked?

Can we go out for a beer?

They're thinking about which industries to invest in.

They're thinking about which continents to purchase.

They're thinking about

the economic devastation, how they can first take advantage of that, and then take advantage of the rejuvenation and the reconstruction, and then use that to advance their political agenda.

In countries all over the world, we're not playing that game.

Why is it that China has vaccine diplomacy with all of these countries

who don't want to be under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party just to save their citizens' lives?

And we have no counter to that at all.

We're giving our shots mostly to the COVAX system, which is the WHO, which crazily enough is not only taking our good graces, but then taking our money and paying it to, guess who, the Chinese government, to buy Chinese shots that don't work, to give third world countries crappy Chinese shots that were paid for by the U.S.

taxpayer.

Because that's how stupid we are.

That's how far we are behind in this thing we call competition.

If we're funding the UN, which is getting fleeced by the Chinese to actually make the situation worse, because if you have bad shots, you have a false sense of security and these countries make bad policy and it just leaves us in this nightmare even longer, but the Chinese get paid off of that.

That's crazy.

That's a broken policy.

That's only one of the hundred things I could mention that we need to fix.

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Tell me about the Uyghurs and what's really happening there and how much we know.

Yeah, Glenn, I mean, this is the issue that I find in talking about China that connects with people the most, you know.

But it's also one of the issues that the Chinese government spends the most time trying to lie about and spread disinformation about for a good reason, is because it's horrific.

And

it is the the largest mass atrocity uh on our planet and it's getting worse not better and you know people will quibble over the definition of genocide right definition of genocide is a legal determination to be sure and essentially uh it it it has two requirements destroying a group of people in whole or in part with the intent to reduce their population.

Now, there's two things in there, destroying the people and the intent.

So what some defenders of the CCP will tell you is that, well, we don't really know what their intent is.

Maybe the Chinese government screwing with the Uyghurs because they screw with everybody.

And maybe they're just concentration camps are terrible, but they're not genocide.

What I say is, first of all, that's wrong.

Second of all, it's irrelevant.

In other words, we know their intent because of the documents, because of what they say and what they do and what they write, that people are too lazy to read and translate, but it's very clear, okay?

When you have things like...

mass forced sterilization, when you have things like mass-forced abortion, when you have things like stealing tens of thousands of children from their parents and educating them in schools thousands of miles away uh you know implantation of iuds on a mass scale that's an intent to reduce the size of a population that's genocide as far as i can tell now even if you don't believe in that

what's happening there is is is horrific and what i did in course of reporting my book chaos under heaven is that i interviewed a bunch of the survivors okay because whatever statistic you want to throw at me These are real people and their stories are horrific and their stories are true.

Their scars are real.

They didn't invent the scars that they showed me.

And

the stories

make your skin crawl because essentially, what started in Xinjiang as sort of a slow erosion of their freedoms, you know, now you can't go to the mosque, now you can't eat pork, now you can't wear a beard,

now you can't study your own language, now you got to go to, you know, school in Mandarin,

evolved into something much more sinister, which was massive surveillance and monitoring at all times.

In other words, the entire province is an open-era prison before you get to the camps.

Your life is already horrible.

And then there were the camps, political indoctrination, torture, all that stuff.

And then when you get out of the camps, your nightmare is just beginning because then you got to go to the factory.

What factory?

Shut up.

Get in the car.

We'll take you to the factory.

And now you're stitching together Nikes or picking cotton for the rest of your life.

You're not,

you can leave the factory.

You can't go home.

You don't have a choice, right?

You're not a slave because they'll pay you, but it's forced.

You're not allowed to say no.

And if that all wasn't bad enough, right?

Millions of people who lost all dignity and agency, lost their children, their homes, their culture, their language, their right to wake up and do the job that they want to do or any job that they want to do, practice their religion, all of that.

If that wasn't bad enough, what we see now is that the Chinese government is expanding that model to other places.

And the camps are coming to Tibet, which has been through enough, believe me.

And then next, they're going to go to Inner Mongolia.

And there are 57 Chinese ethnic groups, right?

And each of them has got to be living in morbid fear, okay?

And, you know, I don't believe that our country is perfect when it comes to race relations or its treatment of Muslim Americans, but we never put two million of them in camps.

Okay, so it's not the same.

In other words, whatever criticisms you have of the U.S.

government, I have many.

This is not the same.

This is something that our society was supposed to have evolved past.

It is the only word that you could use for it is evil, which is a very serious word, which is a word that deserves justification and explanation.

But it's a word that somehow we can't seem to do without because when we see it, we have to call it out because

we see it so plainly.

So, why are these companies?

I mean, is it just money?

Why are these companies knowingly engaging?

Why is Facebook, why is Google, why are they engaging and actually helping them do these things?

Is it just an IBM and the Holocaust kind of situation?

Some of it is corporate greed.

Some of it is that these companies are actually not American companies anymore.

They're international companies.

They don't really have any allegiance to our country or to our values at all.

Some of it is willful ignorance.

Some of it is,

you know, that they're corporate hostages, that they've gotten into a mess by doing business in China that they thought was going to be fine, and it's not fine.

And now they have no choice because they have to kowtow to the CCP at every opportunity.

Now,

none of these companies is going to voluntarily

do the right thing.

And what we're finding is that

only through dragging them into the reality that this is actually not just the right thing to do, but also in their long-term business interest.

Because essentially, if you're in the business of being complicit in slave labor or genocide or crimes against humanity, eventually that's going to catch up to you.

The problem problem with U.S.

corporations is that they only care about the next quarter.

And the problem with the Wall Street firms is that they actually understand the long-term risks, but they don't care.

And really,

I have more sympathy for the corporations that are corporate hostages of the CCP than I do for the Wall Street firms that are funneling money into the Chinese system,

including the companies that build the concentration camps, including the companies that build the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls, including the companies that build the missiles that are pointed at us and that are hacking our intelligence services.

And that's just the greatest transfer of wealth and power and influence from America to China that I've ever seen.

And it's happening all the time.

And just look what's going on on Wall Street these days, Glenn.

Did you see like in the last month, and I wrote a column about this in the Washington Post, in the last month, the Chinese government started cracking down on its own companies, right?

Because they're in their own existential power grab mess and they're evil and nasty to each other.

I think of it like a mafia organization, Glenn.

That's what the CCP is.

That's how you have to think about it.

It's the largest extortion racket racket in the world.

The party goes around to all of its corporations.

They're like, oh, nice company got there.

Be ashamed if something happened to it.

Then they go do that.

They do that to every country.

And sure enough, each one of these companies has to pay up.

But the crazy thing is that when they did that, they cracked down on Tencent and DD Global and just ruined these companies.

American investors paid the cost.

Hundreds of millions of Americans are invested in these companies that are building the machines that are pointed at us.

And that's because Wall Street is making fees on both ends.

And that's because they're prizing prizing short-term profits over the long-term credibility and integrity of our capital markets and our stock exchanges.

And if you just think about the grand strategic competition, how can we have a government that's going to sanction a company in China for building concentration camps?

And then Wall Street comes in and gives it 10 times as much money from your pension fund, from my pension fund, from the Army's pension fund.

It doesn't make any sense.

That's how stupid we are.

That's how crazy we are.

That's how far behind we are in this competition, that we have a system where the Congress passes a law, and then a year and a half later, the State Department says, okay, you know, this company is going to on an entity list, and you can no longer trade with this company.

And then Wall Street comes in and gives them a trillion, you know, $10 billion,

and they're richer than ever.

You know, that's it.

And I, you know, people at Wall Street, you know, people or even Wall Street journalists are always mad at me.

They're like, well, you know,

that's risk.

You know, people are doing.

No, it's not the regular risk.

It's when they don't understand.

We're dealing with a nationalist, socialist, totalitarian, expansionist, genocidal, psychotic mafia organization that's funding the richest country in the world, and we have to think about it differently.

You just used a lot of terms.

You know, the CCP is communist, but I'm not sure communist is the right way to describe them.

They're becoming an and maybe have been for a while, an oligarchy where you have

these oligarchs that kind of rule, except unlike Russia, well, I guess maybe the same is in Russia, too, with Putin.

You step out of line and you're dead.

You're gone.

So what system

do they actually have now?

I think it's a cartel.

I think that's the most accurate way of describing the party.

It's a criminal organization that runs a country.

And, you know, they have...

Do they believe in anything?

Does President Z believe in anything?

They believe in their own survival and accumulation of power, which for them is going swimmingly, by the way.

They are the richest organization in the world.

They're much more powerful than any other organization.

Donald Trump,

one of the reasons he admired Xi is because she had all this power.

Donald Trump couldn't control his own legislature.

He couldn't control his own economy.

He couldn't do the things that he wanted to do because he was mired in this broken, dysfunctional Washington system.

He was very jealous, and he told she this all the time, that she could just do anything they want, president for life.

Doesn't that sound great?

Now, you know, the problem with that is that, you you know we still think of it as like oh just a regular government so we send our deputy secretary of state to meet with their foreign minister to sit around the table and think about what let's have a committee to build a commission to have strategic discussions and and that's what they that's what we've been doing for 40 years the strategic and economic dialogue became the economic and strategic dialogue then it became the comprehensive economic dialogue then it became the comprehensive economic and strategic dialogue and the chinese are laughing the whole time because they're sending all of these

bureaucrats at us to keep us busy while they actually do what they want to do at the party level.

You know, and there's a ton of stories like this in my book where people go to China and they meet with like the foreign ministry guy and they're like, oh, this is great.

Everything's going to be great.

And then they don't realize that that guy is worthless.

And think about the trade negotiations, right?

Even the Trump, who was it, Lighthizer, he kept saying, oh, yeah, we got to bet on the reformers in China.

You know, we got to, you know, if we just support the reformers, they're going to liberalize.

It's going to be great.

That's not happening, okay?

And, you know, we just have to be honest about that, that the party controls everything.

And it's merged with the security state in a very nefarious way.

So basically, what you have is a security state,

like call it a deep state, the MSS, the Ministry of State Security, some really evil guys, murderers, okay, and crooks, right?

And then you've got the party, and they've melded together into a super faction.

And it's all factional, like any mafia family.

You've seen the Sopranos, right?

They will kill each other.

You know, Tony killed Chrissy in the end.

He strangled him to death.

That's how they are.

And Xi Jinping will murder anybody who gets in his way.

So, how do you deal with that?

I think you deal with that like the FBI deals with any criminal organization, right?

Like if you were the Justice Department and you were trying to bust up the mob, that's how you deal with the CCP.

And so it leads you to a bunch of different policies than the ones that we're performing now, which is to like, you know, let's start seven dialogues about arms control and check in in two years and see what happens, which is, you know, really, really awful.

So what should we be doing?

Give me some example of the way you would treat

the CCP.

You know, again, so this is like, it depends on which part of the problem that you're talking about.

But first of all, I think we have to be honest and clear about what we're dealing with.

In other words, we have to view every engagement with them

through their lens.

In other words, if we have a scientific collaboration, just for one example, we have to read their documents about viruses.

You know what they say about viruses, Lynn, in their own documents?

They say that viruses, especially coronaviruses, are a dual-use technology that has military applications.

That's what they said.

It was in Chinese, so nobody in the NIH or the intelligence community can read it because apparently nobody speaks Chinese for some reason.

But that's what they said.

They said they want to become the best in biowarfare dealing with viruses in the next 10 years.

Now, if you read that and you understood it and then you thought, okay, well, maybe we should pay attention to our virus collaboration, that would lead you to a number of steps.

It doesn't mean we can't do it.

It just means you have to have more oversight, more accounting.

You have to be clear about what you're dealing with.

Same thing in our markets, right?

Apparently, we can't leave the oversight of investing in Chinese companies to J.P.

Morgan Chase because they don't have our best interests at heart.

Okay.

And so it means we have to inject national security into our discussion about protecting our capital markets.

It means we have to figure out what to decouple and what not to decouple.

We can't live in two different worlds.

We can't live in two different existences.

It's not going to work.

We're going to have to have trade.

We want exchanges with Chinese people.

We have to separate the Chinese Communist Party from our discussion of china or from the chinese people because you know they're not responsible for the things that their uh leaders are doing uh in in in most cases you know you wouldn't blame the italian people for the mafia right so you wouldn't blame the chinese people for the ccp it's not their fault and in order to have a relationship with china that doesn't veer off into that war we have to have those inter exchanges now that's all very complex it's a in other words there are no simple solutions And if you look at a sector like the academic sector, well, that's where things get a little sticky because we want to have have exchanges but we don't want to have them on China's terms we don't want to have you know we don't want to have to shut up about the Dalai Lama in order to have an exchange program with a Chinese university all of course that's what they would want right when Chinese students come here and we want their money right the schools want all that money that's like how all of our our colleges are are surviving or getting rich or whatever

we have to make sure that their rights are protected, right?

That they're not getting spied on and that they're allowed to actually participate in our universities and not just sit there and monitor each other until until they all get scooped up or their families get scooped up.

You know, so in essence,

there's a thousand things that we need to do.

And all of these things have costs and risks and require us to have tough conversations and often put our own political BS aside.

You know, when you think about like information and how to deal with Chinese propaganda, right?

It's not really a Democratic or Republican problem.

It's an American problem.

When you think about, you know, the NBA, well, that's something that the private sector and the public sector are going to have to put their heads together on.

We just don't operate that way, you know, because

as I'm sure you believe, in America, we guard our institutions guard their independence from the government fiercely and rightly, right?

That's our system.

But this is a problem that they can't handle on their own.

And so

is that a problem?

I mean, is that our system anymore?

The government.

Look at your FBI.

Pardon me?

Right?

Look at your FBI example.

The FBI

went and charged, and the DOJ charged a bunch of Chinese scientists, right?

That's an expansion of the security state,

clear as day.

But that's one that I support because there were a bunch of Chinese spies spread throughout our institutions.

So that's two different values.

I'm against an expansion of surveillance and monitoring and all that.

But at the same time, I want them to find the actual

suspense.

But it seems to me that we're using now many of the early techniques of China to monitor.

We are starting to see tech and the government start to merge together.

We're seeing our Justice Department, our Capitol Police are now, I mean, this is a quote, they're now becoming an intelligence agency.

The Capitol Police?

What is happening to us?

I don't think we have.

I think there's we're on the same road, it seems.

Yeah, no, I, again, I, I find myself agreeing with you.

I, I, we can't become the thing that we're fighting.

Yeah.

Okay.

We have to figure out a way to be the best version of ourselves without sliding into the authoritarianism that makes them so effective.

Give me the thoughts on how many in Washington, A, really know the threat, B, are interested

in it,

or C,

look at it as

a friendly situation, or worse yet, I kind of like their system.

I mean, how many people are actually like like the regular American that says, I don't want to be like that?

Yeah, I'll give you the lowdown.

Inside Congress, there's a bipartisan consensus for being very, very upset about what's going on in the U.S.-China relationship and then doing essentially nothing about it.

And there are thousands and thousands of bills that get introduced.

And every single time the congressman or the office or the senator's office calls, Josh, we just got a solution.

We just introduced the bill.

Okay, tell me when it passes.

Because almost none of it gets implemented.

And if you just saw the huge China bill that came through the Senate, the Schumer bill, right?

Because Schumer is supposed to be the Democrat who's stuff on China, it doesn't really do shit.

And the problem is that the House is not even going to pass it.

So it doesn't even do the little things that it's supposed to do because there's very little chance it's going to become law.

So Congress cares a lot, but it's so dysfunctional,

they're basically useless.

Now, they're good in terms of education and public pressure and getting the government to do things.

Now, the Biden administration is split between those three camps, right?

One camp is people who want to do more on China, right?

The other camp is people who think, no, no, no, we just got to go back to business as usual.

These are the business interests.

These are the Wall Street interests.

The trade groups.

That's what you see right now.

You see the pushback to the pushback.

That's the phase of this thing that we're in, where they say, wait a second, you crazy China hawks in Washington.

China's not 10 feet tall.

They're only six feet tall.

Go back to sleep.

We're fine.

Okay.

And that's pretty nefarious because that's fueled by lobbying money that's directly linked to their business inside China.

So it's by its nature corrupt.

And then the third team is the political team.

Now, it's interesting because in the Biden administration, they know how to read polls, right?

And the polls say that Americans want a tougher approach to China, Democrats and Republicans, you know, across the board, you know, except for a very, even, even the, even the, both sides of the Republican Party.

Now, the Democratic Party, you still have the progressive left, which is warning that this is going to become another military-industrial complex, you know,

a destination for trillions of wasted funding.

And we can get into that if you want to, but almost the entire political spectrum of voters now realizes that they want their government to protect them from increased Chinese malevolence.

But the Biden administration, despite the fact that they lean towards that,

is basically caught up in its own processes.

And they're just not doing enough.

They're just not doing it fast enough.

How much of those processes, I mean, you know, when I saw Hunter Biden's art show,

it was so clear to me even before I knew that they were marketing this art to the Chinese, not to Americans, not to the European, to the Chinese.

It is so clear how much of

the way we react or don't react to China is influenced, do you think, by direct money?

Yes, on both sides.

And to be clear, I think the public record shows quite quite clearly, and just from what we is not in dispute, that Hunter Biden and James Biden were doing business with shady Chinese characters by trading on the Biden family name for years, to the tune of millions.

I don't think that can be honestly disputed.

Nevertheless, it's something that we're not allowed to talk about.

And what I would say is that I think that's

nefarious and that they and corrupt and that they knew what they were doing and that they should

answer fair questions about that.

At the same time, the Chinese Communist party does that to everyone to any elites they can capture on both sides there's a story in my uh book about neil bush you know who shows up in china and strange women keep arriving at his hotel rooms to have sex with him and they ask him that in his divorce proceedings in the transcript that his wife's lawyer says uh mr bush didn't you find that unusual that strange women in china kept coming to your room to have sex with you and his answer was yes i find that very unusual

that was it so this is what this is what we have we have the chinese government willing to throw money and or favors at any elite who's willing to be corrupted.

And so we're only as strong as our weakest link.

And the best way to prevent that corruption is by exposing it and by naming and shaming those Americans who are on the dole, who are taking the money.

And that's tough because what the Chinese government does is they launder it through something called the United Front, which is a network of organizations and entities, Hong Kong billionaires, Thai billionaires, Malaysian billionaires, whatever, Taiwanese billionaires, who do the party's bidding by funneling billions of dollars into our institutions, into our systems, to corrupt them from the inside.

And that United Front system is a very tough thing to talk about.

But there's a ton of it in my book, Chaos Under Heaven, if you want to learn more.

But the bottom line is that rooting that out is part of the essential part of the competition.

And

it's not just one party.

They will literally corrupt anyone

who will take the cash, who will take the dangle.

Let me

go to journalism for a second.

Sure.

You've been a journalist for how long?

18, 19?

17 years.

17 years.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Got that.

Except you

are now being positioned as an op-ed writer.

When you write things.

I am an op-ed.

So you don't have a...

What you're

all of the research that you're doing on China, the Washington Post, you haven't,

you don't think belongs off an op-ed page and into news?

Okay, so I'm employed as an opinion columnist of the Washington Post.

In that opinion column, I do a ton of reporting because of my background as a 50, spent the first 15 years of my career, I was a

straight news reporter for seven different major publications.

That's not uncommon at the Washington Post.

They have a long history of columnists who do reporting, David Ignatius, Robert Novak, you name it, Walter Pincus, going all the way back.

So, yeah, I get it that there's a need for transparency in the paper, but yeah, I have a job where I can, my boss likes to say we like to figure out what's going on before we figure out what we think about it.

And that's what I try to do.

I try to give my opinion, show my work, be transparent with my biases, and also tell my readers something that they didn't already know before.

And if I do that, then that's a good day of being a Washington Post columnist.

Now, you know, what goes on in the news side of the Washington Post, I have no idea.

We have a firewall, but I'll just say that, like, in newsrooms across the country, I think what you're seeing is a blurring of the line.

That as I look around the newsrooms, not singling out anyone specifically, I see a ton of opinion on the news pages and a ton of news on the opinion pages.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as readers know what they're getting and are educated enough to sort through it.

Well, that's where I think.

Hang on just a second.

That's where my confusion comes because there is more news in the opinion pages many times than there is in the actual news section.

It seems like the news section is afraid or corrupt, and the newspaper says, well, let me give this to you

and you do that, but it's in an opinion.

That way we can distance ourselves from it.

Right.

I mean,

again, I think that my theory is let a thousand flowers bloom.

That I think in America, we have a long tradition of straight news, opinion news, and hybrid news, and that dates back to our founding fathers.

And that's all good.

And, you know, the Washington post doesn't tell me anything to write i write i have i write what i want and no one's ever told me what to write or what not to write and and and so i've used that freedom to report on this story because i think it's the most important story in the world that the pandemic affects all of us and that to understand the pandemic we have to understand the u.s china relationship and vice versa uh so sorry not sorry for doing a ton of reporting that's what like that's what i'm gonna do as long as they allow me to do it and you know as for the newsrooms again i think on again not talking about the washing post specifically but what I've noticed

in watching what's happened with the Lab League story, just for one example,

is that they're just not perfect, that they make mistakes, that they are susceptible to groupth and confirmation bias and source bias.

And it doesn't matter what part of journalism you're in, those are things you have to be aware of.

And

I know from watching you all these years, that's something that you pay attention to very carefully, that you're constantly examining your own assumptions.

You have to.

And that's not a, you have to, because with new information, it changes.

And the important important thing is not to be right at the beginning.

The important thing is to be right at the end.

And the only way that you can be right at the end is if you're willing to admit you might not have been right in the beginning.

So in other words, the process of journalism should be a constant revision.

And that doesn't matter if you're an opinion guy like you were me or if you're on the news guy or whatever.

It's the process.

The integrity is in the process.

And that's where I think a lot of journalism has gone wrong, is that they've forgotten about

the process of professional journalism, which is not really about news or opinion.

It's about, am I doing my best to

understand my biases, to do the legwork, to make sure that what I'm saying is true, and then to engage the counter-arguments honestly and truthfully, even though I disagree with them?

And that's what I think about when I go to write a column, whether it's news or opinion or what else.

And I think there are still a lot of people in mainstream journalism who are doing that every day, but the Ladley Theory was not a great example of that.

When you look at what's happening.

Does that make sense?

Yes, it does.

When you look at what happened

because of COVID and the steps that the American government took to pour money into big business, into Wall Street, into the banks, and just screw the little guy,

how is this going to be written 100 years from now, do you think?

You know, I think it'll be an example of sort of

the severe damage done by the Beltway lobbying complex, right?

This is the people who get paid off during these crises are always the people who are well-connected in Washington.

And this is just the latest, latest boondoggle.

And we're talking about trillions of dollars.

It doesn't matter if you're looking at those COVID bills.

Remember, they're like, oh, it's a trillion there, 3 trillion there, it's another 3 trillion.

What's in it?

Don't worry about it.

Just

so chock full of corruption that no chance of achieving the aims that they were set to achieve.

And then the second thing I think we'll realize is that

throughout this pandemic, which again is only beginning, right?

This will be a many, many, many year event.

That's if we don't get another one, but just this one, in terms of the economic effects, the industrial effects,

the humanitarian effects that will happen all over the world from countries that are still suffering.

As the international economy is destroyed, that will hamper our own recovery.

And then the actions of bad actors like the Chinese government, which are going to come in and exploit all of that.

I think what we're going to realize is that

we failed to look past our nose.

And that we're stuffing money into every hole that water is coming out of without thinking about what happens in six months from now, much less two years from now, much less 10 years from now.

Think about the different industries that we're going to need.

Think about the technologies that we're going to need to onshore, right?

I mean, it could be anything.

It doesn't have to be 5G, by the way, Glenn.

It could be masks, right?

Never in 2018 could you pitch a mask factory in the United States.

It doesn't make any sense, right?

Why would you build a mask factory in the United States?

It makes no sense at all.

But in 2021, you don't have to make that argument.

We're going to need our own masks.

You know why?

Because last time we were in a pandemic, we got blackmailed over masks to shut up about the coronavirus origin, and there's going to be another pandemic.

So, I guess we're going to have to have our own masks and our own vaccines and our own chemicals and our own medicines.

And these are big, big reorientations that the infrastructure bill, you know, laden with fat as it is, doesn't even try to address.

So, I think that's what history will judge us for.

One last question:

Your book is Chaos Under Heaven,

and if I'm not mistaken, that comes from Mao.

Right?

That's right.

Why chaos under heaven?

Explain what that is.

The quote, which was attributed to Mao, but we couldn't actually figure out if he actually oversaid it, goes like this.

There is great chaos under heaven.

The situation is excellent.

And Mao is said to have believed that the more his enemies found themselves in internal disarray, whether it was the Japanese or the Guomandong or whoever, the better it was for the Chinese Communist Party.

That's the attitude that Xi Jinping has right now.

That the more we're caught up in our own personal dysfunction, talking past each other,

debating

minutiae,

attacking each other, and living in a society where our focus is on what can divide us rather than what can unite us, that all redounds to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.

And that's what I saw during the Trump administration.

I saw a lot of good people inside the Trump administration trying to get their heads around this very serious and very urgent problem.

But that the chaos, not just of the Trump administration, although it was extremely chaotic, as you well know, but in our society and in our discourse, made that effort all the much more difficult and less successful.

So until we fix that, until we fix ourselves, until we realize that we all have some sort of shared patriotism, if not shared humanity,

you know, the chaos will only continue.

I remember saying about 2009, I said

the operative word in the future is going to be chaos.

And anyone that's trying to add chaos is going to be a big part of the problem because there are too many people inside and outside.

They understand if we can just divide and just keep us fighting.

I keep thinking, what are all of the things that are actually being done?

What's actually happening while we're arguing over nonsense?

Just nonsense.

The world is changing under our feet.

And people will wake up one day and go, when did that happen?

While you were arguing.

Yes.

We have to wake up to the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party.

We have to wake up to the fact that this is the most important foreign policy issue that any of us will ever deal with, in my opinion.

And we have to wake up to the fact that we're dealing with an organization that means us harm, okay, that is not a benign actor in the world that is intentionally and deliberately and comprehensively seeking to undermine our security, our prosperity, our freedom, and now our public health.

And that's a problem of a scope and scale, the likes of which we haven't dealt with in our history.

It is the greatest challenge that our country has ever faced, and we do have the capacity to rise to it if we decide to do so.

Josh, thank you.

We'll talk again.

Thank you.

Anytime.

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