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Hey everybody. Tim Mo from the Bulwark here. I wanted to make sure you guys saw this horrific story about the deportation we have planned for Henguan, a Chinese whistleblower who fled China after documenting their abuses of the Uyghur Muslim minority there. I want to explain what's happening with in this story in particular because it's so nightmarish and so awful. I also just want to do a quick rapid fire at the end. We will have a broader video later with with somebody who's more of a China expert. But there have been a bunch of other stories that have caught my eye over the last couple weeks related to just the degree of Donald Trump's weakness on China, both in the category of things that he is doing and things that he isn't doing. That across the board to the extent that there's any great power competition going on right now and that the that we should have any sort of hawkish feelings towards China. Like Donald Trump is maybe the most pliant and prostrate president we've had facing a great foe or a great competitor on the world stage in memory, I mean, certainly, you know, and certainly in my lifetime. So I want to talk about hang first and then we'll do rapid fire. A couple of these other China stories. This is from New York Times shout out to Amy Kin and Chris Buckley for their work on this headline. As he recorded China's detention of Uyghurs, the US wants to deport him to Uganda. I can read from you a little bit of the lead here to give you the context. In 2020, a Chinese citizen had heard reports about the mass detention and surveillance of Uyghurs. He wanted to see if they're true for himself. So that citizen Henguan made a risky decision, driving across the country from eastern China to Xinjiang, where he tracked down and secretly shot video of, of these re education and detention centers, mostly holding Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic group. That footage became a rare visual piece of evidence of the scale and forcible nature of China's clampdown at the time. Well, even still, Beijing's claiming that these were voluntary camps, that they hadn't done anything wrong. 2021, Mr. Yuan fled to the US reapplied for asylum. The great American tradition that people fleeing communist countries, political dissidents fleeing communist countries, could find safe haven and safe refuge here. But this August in New York, he was detained by ICE again. Look, we could go down through the whole annals of history, like, what is the US for if not for welcoming people that were political dissidents in other countries, were whistleblowing, were providing evidence of the horrific human rights abuses in those countries and when to come to the US for freedom? And what better? Like, when you think about, like the meta, like the great how did we win the Cold War? Right? And like, there's a lot of mistakes we made. You know, we could all go back and forth on, you know, various choices militarily. Like, in the end, the victory in the Cold War was like an economic one, but also a narrative one. Like that in the end, people saw and believed that the US model offering freedom for people, offering economic opportunity for people, was a winning one, not the model of people behind the iron curtain of repression and, and economic scarcity. Right, like that. Fundamentally, the propaganda war. And I say that in this case, I say propaganda in the best sense. The propaganda war, the promotional war about the American system, free markets and free people, was a huge part of our success. And as we look for this competing model that we have with China right now in another world where we didn't have a wannabe authoritarian, that would be part of the process as well. Like, we would want nothing more than in our global competition with China than to say, hey, the guy that got the video and blew the whistle on their internment camps came to America and is able to live freely, is able to flee and get asylum and find opportunity here, because that is what America is about. We're the land of milk and honey. We're not anymore. And this is simultaneously a horrific human rights abuse that we are inflicting on this whistleblower. And also just a massive rake step in cell phone. In the global competition against China. Just a little more on the details. When it comes to Hang Guang. So he's detained in August. There was a public outcry at the time, concerns they'd be sent back to China. At which point you are essentially, you know, submitting him to a life in prison, war camps underneath the Xi's communist regime. After that outcry, the administration changed this decision. Unclear with whether as a troll or what sadistic fuck in the administration decided this was the right thing to do. But instead of sending him to China, they're now planning on sending him to Uganda. Needless to say, this man has no connections in Uganda. But you know who does? China. They share strong economic and defense ties with the country. And so who's to say he wouldn't be in great danger in Uganda? His lawyer says here to tell in an interview to the New York Times after the hearing, quote, it's more than likely that for such a highly sensitive person like Mr. Gwon, that Uganda would send him back to China. It's possible that the horrific atrocity of that happens anyway. And it's just, I guess the US decides they can kind of wash their hands of it and say it wasn't their fault since they sent him to Uganda instead. I mean, just ridiculous. It should be noted that it's not as if he committed any other crimes in this country and that he ended up getting wrapped up in a raid led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations team that was targeting his landlord. So truly just a case of bad luck. An asylee in this country trying to get legal residence has a very legitimate case where he can discuss the danger they'll be back in his home country and we're going to send him to Uganda and maybe back to China for life in prison or who knows what other horrors might await him. It's just. It's sick. It's sick. We're doing this, man. And I do encourage you to speak out and, and if you want to contact your representatives or senators about this, I think it's as good of an issue as any. Going broader and more meta back to once again, this kind of great power struggle that we potentially have with China. It's just, it's truly unbelievable and I think really underappreciated just how weak Donald Trump has been in this and just how much of an advantage he has provided to the Chinese about what country kind of controls the future, what country has most influence on the global future. We could go through kind of a broad list of meta examples. The trade wars that we have engaged in have created a lot of countries deciding that China is more reliable and that they should re engage with them when it comes to trade. We've seen this many allies that had previously been with us and isolating China in various ways economically are now re engaging with them. Our abandonment of the global south and the cuts from USAID and others is allowing China to make friends and influence people, so to speak, in the global south and to have more control and influence, as evidenced in this one case by what's happening with Uganda. And China has an economic relationship with them. What we're doing, we're just sending them people we want to deport. So I mean, you can just imagine what the feeling is from countries in Africa and elsewhere about who they think is a more reliable partner. So those are a couple of examples. But recently we had these series of stories. There's just, it's just alarming how weak we are with relation to China. There's the trade deal with agriculture where we essentially are giving China the most access to the most powerful AI chips in exchange for some soybeans. That is the deal. And we haven't even got the soybeans yet. And the China has promised us a certain, certain barrels or bushels or whatever the fuck of soybeans. And. And they're not even close to meeting what they had promised in that deal, like AI chips for soybeans. That's the deal. Soybeans that they were already buying from us, by the way, before our stupid trade war. And what a cell phone that is then today in the Bulwark. There's just a really excellent article that I would recommend that everybody check out and we might do a longer video on it later, but the headline is the FBI spent a generation relearning how to catch spies, Then Cash Patel as China's spies grow more aggressive, the FBI is distracted and off balance. The article basically just lays out the way that our counterintelligence agencies, with Tulsi, Gabard and Castratel in particular, are just not up for the challenge of dealing with the Chinese spy games and what they're doing in this country, undermining our safety and security. So that's one, there's a story. These are more kind of right wing cultural issues. So I think that there's, you know, maybe room for disagreement on both of these. I think I'm going to be pretty hawkish on them. But Trump got pushed back for his plans to allow, I think it was 600,000 Chinese students into US universities. It's like that. It's so crazy to me. Like, we're cutting immigration everywhere. Like, the only people we're letting into the country are white South Africans. And, and, and we're, and we're now like making, you know, prioritizing student visas for Chinese, for the Chinese people. I'm not, I'm not against letting you know, Chinese students study, study here, of course, but it is pretty bizarre that given again, the, the potential competition we face with China. Like that is the area where Trump is deciding to liberalize his immigration policy. And I just, I put it, I can think of like 100,000 other places where I wish we had a more liberal immigration policy than then on student visas for Chinese nationals. On top of that, you have the pardons for Chinese criminals that are in business with Trump. And this story from the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. We've basically these many cases in America where you have Chinese citizens, wealthy Chinese citizens essentially buying wombs in America, having kids be born here, be American citizens. They haven't even come here to visit their kids. Like, nannies are watching the kids. This is a crazy story in the Wall Street Journal headline, the Chinese billionaires having dozens of us born babies via surrogate. There's no regulation around that. That's not something that we have any concerns about. We are asleep at the switch when it comes to China. Let's just run down that list again. Like, we are deporting Chinese whistleblowers. We are allowing Chinese billionaires to buy American wombs by the dozens in order to get access to American citizenship. We are increasing the number of Chinese students that are, that we are bringing to our universities. We are pardoning Chinese criminals. We are trading the Chinese our advanced AI chips in exchange for beans. A hill of beans. We are abandoning our engagement on the world stage and driving our allies into the Chinese arms. We are doing a worse job than ever at identifying CCP spies inside our country. This is an F like Trump's behavior. And just kind of no matter what your view is on how the degree to which you see China as a threat, at least there is a competition. And right now we are basically conceding and rolling over and the world is looking at the options, and we have an inverse of what was happening in the Cold War. In the Cold War, people were looking at the options and saying, look at the American model and how successful it is now. And look at how, you know, kind of small and controlled and backwards the Soviet model is. And now a lot of people looking on the road, they're seeing the inverse. They're seeing an American model that is erratic and closed and closed minded and shrinking and like, they're seeing at least a Chinese model that, that might have Harvard human rights abuses, and it does, but they're at least a reliable partner. So, look, that's not my view. I find the CCP to be utterly appalling. And if the future of the world is a future that the CCP wants, I think that's a very dark place indeed. And so I want this to be a competition that the west and liberal societies, small liberal societies, win. And, and right now we are losing it badly. And Donald Trump is potentially, potentially giving away the game intentionally. I don't know. He maybe has business. Is there a better description for what has happened in that list of events than the fact that Donald Trump is doing business with the Chinese and, or with Chinese interests and we know he's doing business with Chinese crypto interests. So maybe this is that. Maybe he's purposefully throwing the game and hurting America to benefit himself. I don't know. But it's a series of stories that is extremely appalling and concerning. And I just, I hope and pray that somehow we can intervene on behalf of Henguan and protect him, because somebody that was showing a lot of bravery and courage speaking out against the Chinese regime should be able to find a safe haven somewhere in this world and hope we can find him one. All right, thanks, everybody. Subscribe to the feedback. We will be talking to you again soon.