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China is not just America's geopolitical opponent. They are our geopolitical enemy. They have been our geopolitical enemy since the establishment of the Chinese communist regime in 1949. Now, you may have spent some decades pretending that this isn't true. Richard Nixon famously moved to open China as a way of separating China from the Soviet Union at the time. And some neoliberals may have opened our markets to Chinese goods, hoping that free markets would lead to political moderation. But all that time, China was still our enemy. The People's Republic of China is a historically mass murdering, currently terror supporting, surveillance state of unprecedented proportions directed at destroying America's global hegemony. And they're taking the long view. They can wait us out and they are taking advantage of our openness to defeat us. Whether it's stealing literally tens of billions of dollars in ip, stacking American universities with Chinese operatives, or infiltrating our political system, China is in fact our geopolitical enemy and it's time to fight back. Today we'll discuss how to do so. Plus, we'll get to the legacy media doing the work of the West's enemies. The new inflation report showing the impact of President Trump's Iran operation and also why Americans are not having babies. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. So this week President Trump is headed on over to China. He is bringing with him many of the tech leaders, some of his diplomats and top cabinet officials. While that is happening, it has now been revealed that the mayor of Arcadia, California, which is sort of a mid major city, a person named Eileen Wang, has now resigned because it turns out that she was a foreign agent, allegedly of China. According to the Los Angeles Times, Wang served as mayor of the San Gabriel Valley suburb and entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors over charges she acted under the control of the PRC to promote propaganda in the United States between 2020 and 2022. From late 2020 through at least 2022, Wang worked with a person named Yao Ning, Mike sun, that would be her former fiance, to run a website called US News center that branded itself as a news source for Chinese Americans. Both Wang and son executed directives from Chinese government officials, posted, posting, requested articles, reporting back with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories according to the plea agreement. They did propaganda on behalf of the Chinese government is basically what happened. Turns out that she was mayor of Arcadia. Well, if only this was an isolated incident, but it absolutely is not. We actually have Chinese agents who are honeycombed throughout the American government at all levels. Back in 2024, a person named Linda sun, who is the deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York and previously an aide to Andrew Cuomo, it was alleged that she used her position to block Taiwanese representatives from meeting with governors, alter messaging and obtain state proclamations on behalf of Chinese officials. She was prosecuted by the doj. You all remember Fang Fang. That'd be Christine Fang. This would be the honeypot Chinese agent who is stupping Eric Swalwell. And Eric Swalwell, of course being a dullard, didn't recognize what was going on at the time. Supposedly Victor Davis Hansen actually hilariously pointed out that Fang Fang had tried to hit him up. But he's smart enough to realize that random, decent looking 20 year old Chinese women don't just run up to professors at Cal State Fresno. In any case, she fled the United States in 2015. In 2013, you'll recall that there's a Dianne Feinstein, top staffer who had been there for 20 years, a staffer and driver in Feinstein's San Francisco office who is reporting back to the secret services of the Chinese government. There's an activist named Xu Zheng Wang who founded an organization in New York that collected information on the Chinese diaspora and reported it back to the Chinese secret services. He was convicted of this activity in 2024. There's a donor named Cindy Yang in 2019 who founded the National Committee of Asian American Republicans who was accused of selling access to President Trump and his family and was being investigated by the FBI. A Harvard professor of chemistry and chemical biology named Dr. Charles Lieber apparently had a contract with with the Wuhan University of Technology that paid him handsomely. He did not report that income to the irs. And he was also involved, allegedly with the Thousand Talents Plan which sought to bring foreign scientific expertise to China. He ended up relocating to China in 2025. By the way, good indicator that you're working for China is you end up living there. Because ain't nobody who really, really really wants to move to China full time. Not an amazing place to live unless you are receiving benefits from the Chinese government. In 2019, Harvard researcher Xiao Zhang Zhang was arrested at Logan Airport for trying to smuggle 21 vials of biological research in a sock. And he ended up being deported. And of course, just last this week, actually, a man identifying himself as Chris Chen, according to the New York Times, came armed with a lucrative offer when he reached out to an aide to a House committee focused on threats from China. The staff member, according to the report, from the New York times was offered $10,000 or more by barely lifting a finger. All he needed to do is agree to phone calls every other week to share information about the committee's work and US Foreign policy about China. So Chen, it appears, was essentially acting as a cutout for the Chinese. The aide, instead of accepting the deal, reported it to his bosses on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. And the panel concluded that Chen was not a Singapore based business consultant, but instead likely a Chinese intelligence officer or a contractor seeking a new recruit. And as we know, China's technological development has been largely based on stealing American ip. We are talking about not tens of billions, hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in American IP stolen by the Chinese. We know that China sends exchange students to the United States to learn about our technologies, to make connections, and then to act as Chinese operatives. China is, in fact, trying to eat our lunch by using the power of being able to cram down suffering on their people in order to challenge us geopolitically. Well, all of this leads up to President Trump heading on over to China. There have been some rumors that President Trump is going to make overtures to China by not selling as many weapons to Taiwan or by allowing China to invest in data centers or manufacturing centers in the United States, both of which would be terrible ideas. President Trump is traveling with a lot of our business leaders, and this speaks to some of the big challenges already coming up. More on President Trump's trip to China and what we can do to fight back against China's opposition to the United States. I mean, they're infiltrating pretty much every area of American life. We'll get to it in a moment. First, life changes quickly. Families grow. Responsibilities grow. Expenses grow. 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They also help handle the paperwork and guide you through the process, which is probably why they have thousands of five star reviews on Google and trustpilot. Protect your family with a policy that grows with your life. With Policy Genius, you can see if you can find 20 year life insurance policies starting at just 276 bucks a year for a million dollars in coverage. Head on over to policygenius.com Shapiro to compare life insurance quotes from top companies. See how much you could save. That's policygenius.com Shapiro again. Over the past few decades there's been this perception that if we became intertangled, economically speaking with the Chinese government, somehow this would liberalize the Chinese government. Precisely the opposite has happened. And so there are a number of massive industries in the United States that have their supply chains chiefly based in China. That is true for Apple, it is true for Tesla. It is true for a number enormous number of American businesses. And so a lot of big business people are traveling with President Trump to China. That includes Elon Musk as well as Tim Cook. According to the New York Post, Meta President and Vice chair Dina Powell McCormick, BlackRock chairman and CEO Larry Fink, Boeing president and CEO Kelly Ortberg are also part of the U.S. delegation. Again, President Trump is trying to right the U.S. trade imbalance with Beijing by having the Chinese buy a bunch of stuff from us, including soybeans and planes and other goods. The reality is, what we actually should be trying to do is box China in. We should not be looking for China to buy more of our product. We should be trying to buy less of China's product. The president was right about that. And of course the idea that China wants to coordinate with us on AI is total nonsense. So there's apparently a conflict inside the Trump administration over cooperation with China on AI. According to the Washington Post, as President Trump prepares to travel to a summit in China, his administration has sharply split over a plan to give US Intelligence agencies a bigger role in evaluating AI models. According to two people familiar with the matter, the White House is grappling with new cybersecurity threats posed by Mythos and similarly advanced models. So again, there are a lot of people in the administration who are saying that the federal government should take a sharper eye with regard to AI and their models. And then there are people who say, well, hey, hey, if you use the federal government, particularly if it ends up being turned over to Democrats to basically crack down on AI, you are giving China an advantage, which pretty clearly happens to be true. So what should we be doing about China? What should we be doing about China? Because this has implications for our foreign policy in a wide variety of other spheres. I've been making the argument for a very long time that what we actually need to do with regard to China is cut them off at the knees. The best way to do that is to economically isolate them. This took the fore in 2020 when China unleashed the Wuhan virus on the rest of humanity by lying, by pretending that it was not transmissible human to human, by fibbing to the who, which was basically a Chinese front organization at that point. And a lot of folks correctly pointed out that we have manufacturing chains leading back to China and we need to find ways to actually decouple from China. This is right. So what should we be doing? Well, if we actually want to isolate ourselves from China, if we wish to decouple from China without China eating our lunch with other countries, we. We need to use both carrot and stick. That means we need to cut good trade deals with, for example, Canada. And one of the reasons that I was opposed to President Trump's trade war with Canada is because it would push that government into the arms of the Chinese. In fact, Pierre Poliev was the Conservative Party candidate in Canada, was slated to win the prime ministerial election over there. He ended up losing because of the trade war. And the person who replaced Justin Trudeau ended up being Mark Carney, who is perfectly warm toward making common cause with the Chinese. We need to cut better trade deals with all of the people who are in the in between, who might move toward China and might move toward us. We need to offer them carrots. That's better trade deals with Canada, better trade deals with the Europeans, better trade deals with Japan and South Korea and Indonesia and Malaysia and Australia. We need, in other words, to isolate China by demonstrating, by flexing our economic power. And the way you flex your economic power is not purely by telling people they can't have access to our markets unless we get better access to theirs. The way that you flex your economic power is by cutting deals that isolate China. Pick between us, you can either have access to American markets or you can have access to Chinese manufacturing. Those are your choices. And if we actually utilized our power in this way, we could isolate China. We needed to do that before we decided that we were going to heavily tariff China. We also can cut off their sources of revenue and power. And this President Trump has been doing with alacrity. Again, as I mentioned yesterday on the program, if you look at Trump's foreign policy and what he has been doing. Much of what he has been doing is directed at minimizing Chinese power and influence. The operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela was designed to cut off a chief source of oil revenue for China. Something like 4 to 5% of all Chinese oil imports were coming from Venezuela before. That is not the case now. Venezuela was a geopolitical ally of the Chinese. Now Venezuela is under the American dumb. The. The same thing, as we'll discuss in a little bit, is happening in Iran. Much of what is directed against Iran is actually directed against China. China receives 10 to 15% of their entire oil importation from Iran. And now it turns out that Iran is actually harming China by shutting off the Strait of Hormuz. When it comes to the Strait of Hormuz, yes, it's not having an amazing impact on the American economy, but it is hurting China much worse than it is hurting us. China receives 54% of their entire oil imports from the Middle Eastern region. And Iran right now isn't just cutting off its own oil to China because of the embargo that we have on their oil exports. It is also literally attacking Chinese shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. It is preventing those ships from moving from Qatar, from Iraq, from uae, from Saudi. So US Isolating Iran is in fact cutting off a source of power and revenue for China. US Helping Ukraine to defeat Russia in Ukraine is a way of cutting off a support base for China because, of course, Russia is basically a giant gas station for China at this point. What else can we do? Well, we can obviously strengthen our own economy. One of the big problems that we have is massive dependency here in the United States on China buying our debt. China owns trillions of dollars in American debt at this point. They buy American bonds, and then the tacit threat in doing so is that at a certain strategic point, they could flood the market with those American bonds. They could take a loss. They could cram that down on their own citizens, just make their own citizens poorer. They don't really care about their citizens. Obviously. They live in an authoritarian communist state. So what they could do is flood the market with cheap American bonds, making it difficult for us to raise more debt in order to pay our bills. Well, this again goes to the fact that if you wish to be a world power, you cannot be a bloated welfare state. Being a bloated welfare state is a choice. I know that there's a third rail of American politics, and that third rail of American politics is all of the entitlement programs. I understand that President Trump has taken the position and many Republicans. JD Vance have taken the position. Marco Rubio They've all taken the position that the entitlement programs in the United States require no systemic changes. The problem with that perspective is when you bloat your own economy, when you create enormous anchors on the American ship of state, it is very difficult to move in the ways you need to move us. Being dependent on the Chinese to float us our debt is a huge problem. What we should be doing is we should be getting lean and mean in terms of how we actually run our ship of state. We should be making our economy not only more innovative, but lower on taxes. We should be cutting down the bloated welfare state, not building it up. Because the better shape we are in, the less we have to sell our debt to our geopolitical enemies who could use that as leverage against us. And finally, we really, really need to cut off China's avenues for stealing our IP and destroying our institutions. One easy way to do that, zero Chinese foreign exchange students. Zero. I understand that there's a lot of incentive for our university systems to bring in Chinese foreign exchange students because foreign students pay full freight while American students pay a discounted freight. We should not be importing students from places that hate the United States and in order to study at our universities, period. End of story. I do not care whether those are students from Iran. I do not care whether those are students from sub Saharan Africa. I do not care whether those are students from China. It does not matter. Bringing people to the United States in order to access our systems and then go back to their home countries is a gigantic mistake. There is no upside for us. It is all downside. And I guarantee you that stacking Chinese students at a bunch of top American research institutions is one of the ways that RIP is being stolen by the Chinese government. So there are lots of things that we can do. And again, on the international stage, to get back to what is going on in Iran right now, as President Trump prepares to go to China, one of the top issues is what is going on in Iran. And President Trump has an enormous amount of leverage that he ought to use with the Chinese. The Chinese have been supporting the Iranians throughout this process. There is a report that is out today with regard to Iran that the Pakistanis, for example, have actually been hosting at the behest of the Chinese. Iranian planes in Pakistan. Pakistan and China are closely tied. Pakistan has been acting as a Chinese cutout. Qatar and China are also closely tied. China's interest when it comes to Iran is in ensuring its own oil supply and in building up an anti American base in the Middle East. In the same way that back during the 60s and 70s the Soviet Union wanted to build up an anti American base in the Middle East. So they started pushing Arabist propaganda and trying to ally with, for example, the Egyptian dictator Nasser. That was the goal. The goal of the Soviet Union was to infiltrate the Middle east and create geopolitical connections there. The Chinese are trying to do the same in the Middle east right now. The problem they are facing is that the most powerful countries in the Middle East, Israel, increasingly the uae, those countries are very strongly allied with the United States. Saudi is sort of playing at halfsies. Saudi wants to ally more strongly with the United States. They're afraid of a Democrat being elected and them going back to bad relations with a democratic government, sort of like they had under Joe Biden. And so they've been triangulating with the Chinese. The bottom line though is that the base of operations for China in the Middle east is Iran. And the fact that the President of the United States is working strongly in order to hamper the ability of the Iranian government to spread its tentacles across the Middle east, that is a major move by the President. It is not just directed at the Iranian government, it is directed at China. The President is expected to tell China to cut off their support for the Iranian government. By the way, there's a very easy way for the President to achieve this. The best way for the President to achieve a Chinese cutoff in support for Iran is to bomb the Iranian oil facilities. If Iran no longer has energy to offer to China, China's interest in Iran declines markedly. It declines even more markedly if Iran not only has no oil to export, but they are holding up all the other oil that China needs in order to power its economy. At that point, does China really, really feel like upholding the Iranian malacracy for the fun of it? The President has an enormous number of levers that he can pull right there. Well, the President is, it appears, getting more militant with the Iranians because I think that there's sort of a weird catch 22 that exists in foreign policy thought with regard to Iran right now. On the one hand, there's idea that there can be a deal, that the nuclear dust will be turned over in a deal. And on the other hand, the idea is that the United States can stage some sort of operation to go get the nuclear dust. There will either be a deal or there will be no deal. And we'll have to put boots on the ground. There is, in fact, a third option here, and that is to chop off the arms of the Iranian regime. To chop them off and basically leave them like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As I say, you cut off their entire economic future, barring a reintegration into the world economy and an end to sanctions, which could only come through a deal. And suddenly the math changes pretty radically. It seems the President may be thinking in this direction increasingly. Yesterday he talked about negotiating with the moderates versus the lunatics in Iran. Here's what he had to say.
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You have the moderates and you have the lunatics, and I think the moderates are more respected. The lunatics want to fight till the end. You know, there will be a very. It'll be a very quick fight. But I call them. You have. Just like our country, we have lunatics too. We have. I call them lunatics. I call them stupid people, too. But in Iran, they have. The modern moderates are dying to make a deal, and then you have the lunatics. And I guess they're a little bit afraid of the lunatics, but. And why not? The, the level of ferocity for protests, you know, the. The people are watching it. They want to go out on the streets. They have no weapons. They have no guns.
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Well, President Trump also pointed out that the ceasefire is on life support at this point, which of course is. I mean, the Iranians are still firing and shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. For the time being, the ceasefire remains in place.
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It's unbelievably weak, I would say. I would call it the weakest right now. After reading a piece of garbage they sent us. I didn't even finish reading it. They said, I'm not going to waste my time reading it. I would say it's one of the weakest right now. It's on life support. They understand. These are all medical people. Dr. Oz, life support is not a good thing. Do you agree? Bad prognostic. I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support, where the doctor walks in and says, sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living
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well. Again, the President is not wrong about this. And as I say, this has impacts for China. According to CBS News, Pakistan is quietly allowing Iranian military aircraft to park on its airfields, potentially shielding them from American airstrikes. Iran also sent civilian aircraft to park in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistan's reliance on China for military assistance has risen dramatically over the past decade. A Stockholm International Peace Research Institute study showed that China supplied about 80% of Pakistan's major arms between 2020 and 2024. So this entire negotiation with Pakistan, in which Iran and China are aligned, again, what President Trump is doing in Iran is in fact largely directed at China. In fact, yesterday the US treasury cut off some 12 entities that were enabling IRGC sales to China. According to the Treasury Department on X quote today, Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets control is designating 12 individuals and entities for their role enabling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sale and shipment of Iranian oil to the People's Republic of China. The IRGC relies on front companies in permissive economic jurisdictions to obfuscate its role in oil sales and funnel the revenue to the Iranian regime. Instead of using this revenue to support the struggling Iranian people, the regime directs it toward weapons development, backing terrorist proxies and funding security forces that suppress citizens freedoms. So again, that is correct. So recognize what the President is doing in the Middle east is directed against China. It is part of a broader plan that is depriving China of its oil supplies and its allies. Now, again, what the President is doing here obviously requires sacrifice on the part of the American people. And people have said the President should explain that more clearly. The biggest sacrifice right now is again inflation. When it comes to the gas prices, that's very real. People are experiencing it and we can't pretend that away. According to the Wall Street Journal, consumer prices rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier. That is a clear impact of higher gas prices since the start of the war in Iran. If you exclude food and energy, then inflation is up year over year at a 2.8% rate, which again is not wildly high. 3.8 is pretty high. And that is because of course, of the surge in the oil prices. Now, when we hit the end of the war, those prices are gonna drop precipitously. All the conditions are there. When the Strait of Hormuz opens again, UAE is no longer a part of opec. They are going to pump like crazy. Iraq needs to make up for lost time. They're gonna pump like crazy. The same is true of Qatar. The same is true for Saudis. So the price will decline markedly. And in the aftermath of the war in Iran. But all of this is directed again against China. So what is China's hope? Well, China's hope is that we remain stupid. There is a reason why China has been operating algorithms like the TikTok algorithm that are in fact directed at Americans. That's really funny. There are a lot of people who are very skeptical of American efforts abroad. They'll talk about American caused color revolutions or American propaganda abroad. How terrible all that is. Now, I'm of the opinion that some color revolutions are good and some color revolutions are bad, and many are not actually color revolutions. Some of them are legitimately revolutions in countries, and we support those revolutions that were going to exist anyway. But to pretend that our geopolitical enemies do not take advantage of our openness here in the United States in order to harm us is nonsense. They absolutely do. Much of what we see online is a controlled op run by the Chinese, run by the Iranians, run by the Russians. That is why there are so many anti American messages that seem to pick up extraordinary steam, because every poll of American citizens shows that Americans are generally reasonable and rational people who live well within the realm of reality. But that is increasingly untrue. And the reason it's increasingly untrue is because people spend an awful lot of time online. Now, there are a lot of psychological phenomena that show that individuals tend to follow the herd. It's a very real thing. So one psychological experiment, for example, will place a person, a normie, in a room with a bunch of other people. And it turns out everybody else in the room, except for the normie, is an actor. And the experimenters will go to the normie and they will show them a line of a particular length. And then they will show them three comparative lines, one that's longer, one that's the same length, one that's shorter, and they will ask them which line matches up. Now, if you ask the person in isolation, they'll get the answer right every time. It's a very easy question. However, what the experiment shows is that if all the actors around the normie start saying that the longer line matches the normal line, then the normie will start to mirror that out of fear of standing out from the herd, out of fear of exercising psychological independence. Well, the online arena is built for this. It's built for this. It's the number of likes on an X post. People think that is reflective of reality, even if it is not. And so if you can generate a bot network or an echo chamber, that radically increases the belief that many people are actually supporting a thing. You will get normies to start following that particular perspective. And that is how you end up mainstreaming delusion and conspiracism. That is it. To pretend that foreign operations have nothing to do with that is really stupid. They clearly, clearly do. And you can see it in the polling coming up. We'll be joined by the former ambassador to China, Sam Brownback. Plus, we'll get to Iran and the latest there. What's going on with the inflation report? A lot going on today. First, small businesses are one of the few things actually holding the American economy together at this point. These are people who take real risks. Opening restaurants, running construction companies, starting logistics firms, building software companies out of garages and spare bedrooms. Despite what politicians love to say, a lot of these businesses are operating under enormous pressure. Here's the reality. More than 70% of small businesses need additional capital at least once a year. 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Joining me on the line to discuss all of this is former ambassador to China and the Office of International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback. He has a brand new book out titled China's War on Faith, talking about the CCP carrying out systemic global campaigns against religion and what CCP is doing to infiltrate America. Ambassador, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
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Hey, thank you for having me on the show and highlighting this. I think this is just a critical topic. And now the president's headed to Beijing. We need to be talking about this stuff.
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So, Ambassador, I want to talk about the extent to which China has infiltrated our systems. It's trying to use our own systems against us. I've been saying for a long time that China is not just a geopolitical opponent. They are in fact, a geopolitical enemy of the United States. They seek to subvert American global hegemony. They are seeking to make alliances with America's enemies. This is what they do. Why don't you talk a little bit, and you do in your book, about exactly what China has been doing in terms of infiltrating our economic institutions and our other institutions.
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Well, thank you for putting it just that way because that was the thing that Ronald Reagan had to convince this country of on the Soviet Union. We had a detente period beforehand. They are over there, we're over here. You know, just we'll fight over some areas. But it was detente. And Reagan said, no, this is an evil empire and we are going against it and we win, you lose. That's the nature of what communism is. It seeks this hegemony to be able to take over the entire world. They're seeking to push out the United States. They've been at war with us. Whether we realize they are at war with us or not. And whether we declare and push back against that, that's what I think we've got to do. What I point out in the book is that one of their key groups that they track and they push against and they can't stand is relig all religions. It's the Tibetan Buddhists, it's the Muslim Uyghurs, it's Falun Gong, it's Christians, all of them, because it answers to a higher authority than the government, the Communist Party. And that's something they just cannot tolerate, will not tolerate. And they do it not only in their own country, they push their satellite countries to do something quite similar.
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Ambassador, one of the things that they obviously have done is infiltrated our economic institutions. I've talked about how they've infiltrated our universities. They've turned American businesses into essentially operatives on their own behalf by. By us trying to open up China politically by opening them, opening them economically, we ended up locating an enormous number of critical supply chains in China, and that has allowed them to basically leverage the United States into kinder treatment as they steal our ip. What are the kinds of things that you saw as ambassador to China that made you say, wow, China really does not have some sort of cooperative interest at heart?
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What I saw that really turned me on this with the concentration camps in Xinjiang or East Turkestan, whatever you want to really refer to it as, it's never been a part of China until the Chinese Communist Party took it over. But when they put in place concentration camps, and this is in 2018, that I first started to notice this. You're going, what? In 2018? We have concentration camps in the world? And then if you get out of the concentration camps, you have this digital police state that's around you with cameras everywhere and tracking devices on your phone and keyword searches. They were putting in a beta test of how you mollify a religious population, and they were doing that. And then they export that technology to other authoritarians and dictators around the world to make them better dictators, to build up their side of the aisle, if you will. Their side of the camp, of the communists, the authoritarians, totalitarians. That's what I saw, and that's when I sounded the alarm in 2019 in Hong Kong. I gave the speech, China is at war with faith. It is a war they will not win. But we've got to stand up and push back against that. And thankfully, President Trump has done more on religious freedom than any modern president, arguably more than any president since Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the original Religious Freedom Charter in Virginia, he's a guy that really can and should be in a position to push back against what China is doing.
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Ambassador, you mentioned obviously their attacks on faith. A large part of that is not just communism, it's also an attack on America. Cuz America of course is a faith based country and one of the things that they have been attempting to do is basically infiltrate pretty much all of our systems. You mentioned digital authoritarianism, but obviously algorithms like TikTok that were designed for American consumption are designed in order to undermine America's belief in her own principles. You see China trying to spread its tentacles abroad via places like Iran, places like Venezuela. The President's been fighting back against a lot of that. What are the best strategies the United States should be using in order to curb Chinese influence operations?
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C
Number one, we need to realize we're at war. I think that's the first step is we got to say and need to go to the American public. Look, this is a system that's diametrically opposed to us on this foundational issue of religious freedom. We look at as cornerstone, human right. They look at it as an existential threat. Then I think we need to start bringing into the White House the Vice President, the Secretary of State, Chinese dissidents that have been persecuted for their faith. Have them tell their story to the American public, to our leaders. We should convene a leadership summit of world religious leaders and talk with them about religious freedom for everybody, everywhere and including in China. Because China fears religious freedom more than they fear our aircraft carriers or our nuclear weapons. I think as we start pushing on our principles, remember religious freedom 250 years ago. This is a foundational principle that allows the United States to form and it's really what people first came here for. So this is us in principles, standing on our principles at a time we're under attack by a regime that wants to remove us from global leadership. I think these are some effective ways we can start to effectively push back against this Chinese communism authoritarianism, growth around the world.
- [35:05]
A
Well that is Sam Brownback, the former Governor of Kansas and former Ambassador to China. His book is China's War on Faith. Go check it out right now. Ambassador, thanks so much for the time, really appreciate it.
- [35:14]
C
My pleasure Ben, thank you.
- [35:18]
A
So apparently 30% of Americans believe that at least one in three Trump assassination attempts may be staged. And again if you look at White House correspondents dinner, a majority of Americans apparently believed it was staged or were unsure. 56% of Americans, that's true. 53% of Americans believe that Butler, Pennsylvania was either staged or they were unsure about it. The Trump International Golf Club assassination attempt, again, a majority of Americans say it was staged or they were unsure. And this does break down by party, so by party idea. Again, people tend to believe the things that they find it emotionally resonant to believe. So again, not a shock. It turns out the Democrats and independents, people don't love Trump are significantly more likely to believe that particular events were staged. 34% of Americans who are Democrats believe that the White House Correspondents Dinner assassination attempt was staged. 42%. 4 in 10 Democrats believe that the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt was staged. That compares to 13% of Republicans on the White House Correspondents Dinner and just 7% on the butler, Pennsylvania shooting. Independents are somewhere in between. Again, the question is why this conspiracism has cropped up. The answer is, of course, our mainstream legacy institutions have failed us. I spoke about this at University of Austin a couple of weeks ago. When people don't believe places that were supposed to tell them the truth, they start believing everything and anything. And typically they resonate to things that are, one, popular and two, filter with their priors. And so what you end up with is a wide variety of Americans who side with America's enemies because they don't like Trump. So they side with America's enemies or they don't like what's going on in their life, so they buy the lie that there's some conspiratorial elite who is making bad things happen in their life. Our enemies know this. Alexander Dugin's been writing about this for 30 years. The Chinese Communist Party writes about this sort of stuff. It is not as though they are hiding the ball. What they say to their own intelligence apparatus is that they are attempting to turn American opinion against itself, and it is working. And there are some people on the left who have acknowledged that it's working. Sam Harris. I have huge disagreements with Sam Harris about, for example, President Trump. But he is not wrong when he tells Winston Marshall that the left is increasingly allying with, for example, Islamist enemies of the United States and the West.
- [37:39]
D
The left has been successfully manipulated by Islamists and apologists for Islamists. In certain cases, this is a knowing alliance, and in certain cases, just frank manipulation. And people on the left are morally confused. You know, I don't think someone like Hasan Piker is confused. I think he knows exactly what sort of alliance he has. And I think that's true of Mamdani, too. Do you think Mamdani is an Islamist, certainly an apologist for Islamists. The fact that he can't quite figure out what's wrong with the phrase globalize the intifada, and that the worst he'll say of it is that he doesn't use that language, nor does he encourage it, but he's not going to condemn it. He's a proud DSA member. They were out on October 8th supporting Hamas. There's just no way that should be possible. And there's no way that anyone who's got that level of callousness and confusion, confusion, being charitable, should be running a major American city. Right. Much less being the poster boy for the future of democratic politics. So, I mean, there's something very sinister about the way Islamists have spread their ideology through the west and targeted liberals.
- [38:39]
A
Well, again, you can see the impact of that last night in Brooklyn. So last night in Brooklyn, there was yet another anti Israel, anti Semitic march. And you can't call it an anti Israel march when people are flying Hezbollah flags. They're literally flying Hezbollah flags and attacking Jews outside the synagogue. This is in Brooklyn. Apparently they marched by a bunch of houses in Brooklyn as well in an attempt to intimidate. Here is some of the video of that New York City anti Israel march. Again, the guy with the Hezbollah flag is not just in the crowd, he is literally leading the march. Hezbollah, for those who don't understand, is an Iranian backed terror organization responsible for the murder of hundreds if not thousands of actual Americans. Not just attacks on Israelis or the destruction of Lebanon, which they've also done. The Christian Lebanese government destroyed in large part by Hezbollah and its allies. Again, these are people who are marching in American streets. If you don't think this is a foreign op, I don't know what to tell you. It obviously is. It is people who sympathize with foreign powers who hate America and the West. Here you go. Here's what it looked like in New York last night. Again, these are people in Islamic garb waving Hezbollah flags. And there's a map. Right behind this is liberation and return. And the liberation, by the way, is like the entirety of the State of Israel, like Israel should disappear. So these people, according to Zoran Mamdani, are just exercising their, you know, generic right to protest, you know, outside a Brooklyn synagogue. So these protesters showed up right outside a Brooklyn synagogue, a place of worship. Here's what it looked like. Doing full Islamic prayer rituals outside a synagogue, which again, I feel like if they wanted to pray, then there are many mosques, as it turns out in New York City, the only reason that you go and you pray right outside the synagogue and start yelling at people with your face covered like a terrorist, by the way, I mean, many of these people are covering their faces with keffiyehs like you would see in the Middle East. And this is the Third World brought to the United States. Pretty clearly. This required something like 400 police officers to prevent the assault of Jews who went to a synagogue. Here is, here's some of that footage as well. So now that New York has turned into a hotbed of Islamist activities, you literally have Jews having to be protected by hundreds of police officers for the great crime of being Jewish and being pro Israel in New York. And again, when I hear people suggest over and over, well, they're not being attacked for being Jews, they're just being attacked for being pro Israel. I'd just like to point out that if you said that black people who are being attacked at a civil rights protest were not being attacked for being black, they're being attacked because they're pro civil rights, that might raise a few questions. All of this again is part and parcel of a broader attempt by international powers to attack the West. There's a report from the US State Department about how the UN aided mass migration. The report is pretty stunning. The report suggests last week the United States refused to participate in the UN's review of the Global Compact on Migration. The United States objects to the Global Compact on Migration and UN efforts to facilitate replacement migration to the United States and our Western allies. Why? Well, it turns out that UN agencies, working with the non governmental organizations they fund, established a migration corridor through Central America and to the US border. As the American people suffered under an unprecedented wave of mass migration, the UN was on the ground pipelining migrants to our southern border. UN officials greeted migrants along the route through the deadly Darien Gap. UN funded NGOs handed out maps to migrants en route to the United States. After facilitating mass migration to the us, UN agencies condemned the deportation of illegal immigrants. They did the same thing with regard to Europe. UN officials staffed all ends of the Mediterranean migration route into Europe. Then UN agencies condemned frontline states, refused to open their borders. The Global Compact on Migration claims to support safe migration. But again, mass migration was a strategy fostered by the un. The UN is a trash organization. A trash organization. And when you have the UN Secretary General, the abhorrent Antonio Guterres, calling for global institutions that reflect the world today, understand he is doing the work of the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians. This is what the UN is. There are entire institutions dedicated to the submission of the west to foreign powers.
- [43:10]
E
The continent has enormous potential, but that potential is being constrained by an unfair international system. Too many African countries face egregious borrowing costs. Too many climate vulnerable countries are still waiting for the support they were promised. And too often African countries are expected to live with decisions made in institutions in which they have no equal voice. That must change. We need deeper reforms of the international financial architecture. Greater investment on terms that allow countries to build, grow and transform, and global institutions that reflect the world as it is today, not as it was 80 years ago.
- [44:03]
A
Again, 80 years ago. He means the dominance of the United States. That's what he's talking about. And he is saying that we need to basically submit. The United States must submit our global power to foreign institutions. The good news is for the UN and for China and for Russia and for Iran, they have an enormous amount of members of the left in the United States who are willing to do their dirty work for them. Not just the left, by the way, in the US you also have the left in the uk, in France, many other places that are willing to submit to all of this. Well, one of the institutions in the United States that is extraordinarily warm toward anti Westernism is, of course, the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof has a truly egregiously reported piece today that is making all sorts of waves in which he claims that Israel is performing sexual violence on Palestinian prisoners. And it's making huge waves because he makes extraordinary claims. He claims that Israel has been training dogs to rape people. He provides zero actual evidence of this. He claims that Israel is employing, quote, unquote, systematic sexual violence. Again, the evidence that he provides of this is rooted in the testimony of people who are open advocates for Hamas. And then he makes the suggestion that Israel is doing 10, seven sexual violence every single day. Here was Nicholas Kristoff truly either a gullible dupe or one of the most terrible people in American journalism? Again, the New York Times put this piece in the op ed section because there's no way it would have cut muster when it came to the actual news section. So they had to stack it in the op ed section because of the poor sourcing here, because of the lack of investigative rigor. Here is Nicholas Kristoff saying something insane. Look, whether you consider yourself pro Israeli or pro Palestinian, here's one thing we should be able to agree on. We're anti rape. The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day after day. Do you understand what he's doing there? He is saying that what happened on October 7, which was in fact mass rape. And there's another report out today with actual data, which we'll get into in a moment. And it is not a coincidence that Christoph dropped this report literally the day before that massive report came out about Hamas's practice of Systematic Rape on October 7th. And then he's saying it's happening every single day. The report is essentially sourced directly from advocates for Hamas. So he claims that he's reporting based on conversations with 14 men and women who had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or member of the security forces. And then he says, this is pretty. This is pretty great. He says, quote, some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. Yeah, some might wonder that, considering that that is a routine practice in the Middle east where people legitimately make things up, including entire allegations of genocide, mass starvation, manufacture allegations of the shooting of children, all of it. But he says, no, no, no, no. That, to me seems far fetched. Well, if Nick Kristof says it's far fetched, then probably it's not far fetched. Who does he quote, by the way? Again, I would be shocked if there is no sexual abuse of anyone in Israeli prisons. In the same way that I'd be shocked if somebody said there was no sexual abuse of American prisoners and American prisoners in American prisons or in the UK or France. Right. It is a staple of literally every prison movie ever that there is sexual abuse in prisons. But that is not what Kristof is alleging. He's alleging that there is systemic sexual abuse in Israeli prisons. Who is he counting on? A freelance journalist. This is how he characterizes him. Named Sami Al Sai. This would be the same Sami Al Sai who posted on October 8th that, quote, the green flag of Hamas fluttered over the occupiers camps and tanks and adorned the foreheads of the heroic fighters. Long live the heroes. Al Sai works for the Qatari propaganda outlet Al Jazeera. The article relies on reporting from a place called Euromed Human Rights Monitor, which sounds, you know, anodyne. There's only one problem. It is an actual NGO supporting training to develop storytelling journalists in Palestine whose leadership are linked with Hamas. As for that bizarre claim that Israel trained rape dogs, Kristof cites a nut job named Shael Ben Ephraim. This person was a teacher at UCLA who had to leave after multiple sexual harassment allegations involving inappropriate conduct toward minors. And then he tried to rebrand himself and then just put out that rumor and then the UN picked up on the rumor, printed it, and then it was laundered into Nick Kristof's columns. Other sources. One, Issa Amro, whom Christoph describes as a nonviolent activist, called the Palestinian Gandhi. Well it turns out that in 2014, Amro suggested Israeli occupation is killing our lives. And he accused Israel of a genocide operation in Gaza. Not now, like years before. October 7th. These are the people that he is quoting as the unbiased. Unbiased sources demonstrating the level of sexual assault. Tons of anonymous sources, entirely unverifiable. He quotes a bunch of left wing Israeli groups that would basically be the equivalent of BLM in the United States. Okay. All of this was designed to obscure an actual gigantic report that came out from the Civil Commission, an Israeli women's rights organization that was not rooted in random people who were unnamed. Instead, that report relied on evidence of 10,000 photos, more than 1800 hours of video, 430 plus interviews and testimonies from survivors, witnesses and medical staff, and materials from multiple sites of the October 7 attack, including kibbutzim, the Nova music festival, shelters, morgues and hostage locations. Much of the evidence in that particular report was rooted in, you know, the dead bodies of the people who were raped or who were shot in the genitals. That report, quote, each case cited, has been corroborated by witnesses, including first responders who attended the scene. The report, comprising some 25 experts and contributors, had worked with a group of researchers who geolocated photos and videos from the scene, pinpointing the location of each victim and cross referencing it with other evidence. Many of the victims bodies were mutilated on October 7. The repeated nature of the violence, including sexual torture, killings following sexual violence, forced nudity, restraint to victims, threats of forced marriage, filming and disseminating imagery of sexual violence indicates this was an integral part of the attack. So it is not a gigantic shock that the New York Times would, hours before that story dropped, put a Nick Kristof op ed based on the thinnest sourcing imaginable out there, suggesting mass rape by these. Again, always count on the legacy media to do the work of America's enemies. Always count on them. They always will. And again, none of that is to deny that sexual violence takes place in prisons. Obviously it does, but that's not what Nick Kristoff is arguing. He's arguing it's October 7th every day in Israeli prisons because he's doing propaganda work on behalf of some of the people who hate the west the absolute most. And this is part and parcel of a left in the west that really kind of despises the state of the West. Graham Platner, who is the Senate candidate in Maine, you know, the guy with the. With the Totenkopf tattoo, like the actual death's head tattoo from the ss, and a person who is warm toward neo Nazi podcasts. He says a revolution is necessary in America. I do 100% believe that a political revolution is entirely necessary. Yeah, Bernie does, too. Oh, well, I mean, a political revolution is necessary. Why would it be necessary? Because America is so terrible. Meanwhile, Senator Raphael Warnock, who again is senator from Georgia, he says that a moral rot is eating away at the fabric of our country. What is that moral rot? Well, it's people he disagrees with.
- [51:48]
F
There's a kind of moral rot that's eating away at the fabric of our country. It's all the way from the White House on down. And you're seeing this infection and its impact in negative ways.
- [52:08]
A
According to Warnock, any black man voting for Trump is too many. Here he is with the Pod Save America Bros.
- [52:16]
F
Everyday people know that the system is stacked against them. They know it in their bones. And they don't always have the words that we want to use.
- [52:26]
A
They know it. Do they feel like they can change it?
- [52:28]
F
They feel it, yeah. I think that that's the thing. Do people feel empowered to change it? And I do think that there are a lot of people who feel powerless, which is why they signed up for Donald Trump. There are people, and I do think it's overstated. Donald Trump didn't have this whole huge slew of black men voting for them. I think part of that was a game they played during the election in 24. I think they were trying to create a permission structure, a bandwagon, so people would jump on it. But they were no overwhelming one is too many. But there were no overwhelming numbers of black men voting for Donald Trump.
- [53:04]
A
Again, Warnock saying there, the key there is when he says that the system is stacked against them. This is the thing foreign powers rely on. They do. They rely on Americans to say the system is stacked against the common American. And I understand this is also how politicians make bank. This is how politicians get popular, is by telling you that your grievances, your problems in life are not your fault, they're somebody else's fault. But the reality is that in the freest country in the history of the world, it's time for Americans to grow up. Generally speaking, yes, there are huge problems in America, sure there are systems that are sometimes stacked against you, but we ought to be able to name those systems. We ought to be able to correct the problems in front of us. The idea that there are insuperable problems buried within the American systems, evil cadres of elites manipulating that. What we need, in the words of Graham Platner, is a revolution. That is the kind of stuff that foreign enemies are loving. They love every element of it. They love it. It is their favorite thing. And this is why when you see Democrats, for example, trying to claim that what just happened in Virginia and what is a fairly generic voting rights case is somehow yet another racist attack, it's just nonsense. It's a conspiracy theory. So we didn't talk at length about this last week, but on Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court, which the way that Virginia judges are selected, they're basically selected by the legislature. Those judges, I believe there's seven of them. One was selected by an entirely Democratic legislature. Three were selected by a Republican legislature. Three were selected by a mixed legislature. So is not like a wildly right wing Virginia Supreme Court. They found that the referendum passed in Virginia to redistrict Republicans out of existence in Congress, that that was unconstitutional. There are a couple reasons. One, because the referendum itself was mislabeled. It said it was restoring fairness. It's very difficult to claim that you are restoring fairness when you write 45% of the voting population out of Congress. Second, they said that there's a specific process under the Constitution of Virginia to lawfully adopt a constitutional amendment and that was violated in the way that this process worked. So it was a procedural issue, bottom line. Well, Democrats claimed instead that this was yet another attempt by the elites to grind under boot heel the American public. Here, for example, was AOC saying that the Virginia Supreme Court was overturning elections. The systems are broken.
- [55:24]
G
Virginia was in election of 3 million Americans. This court did not overturn a map. It overturned an election. An election. And when we talk about the balance of power and check in a system of checks and balances, it's one thing for a court to check a legislature or an executive, but the end all and be all of power in America should be the people elections. It should. And the result was clear.
- [56:02]
D
And so I think it actually was pretty close.
- [56:05]
G
It was close, but it was clear.
- [56:07]
A
The fact that David Axelrod has to correct AOC on this again. There's this conspiracism that has driven pretty much all politics in the United States for decades at this point. The idea that if you don't get what you want, it's because there's a conspiratorial elite willing to overthrow your life and harm you. And that is a massive problem for the United States, by the way. It extends all the way down to marriage. There's a new piece in the Trash publication in the New York Times talking about why we are having so few babies. And again, the answer as to why we are having so few babies is actually quite clear. Why are we having so few babies? Fewer people are getting married and fewer people are religious. That's the answer. And there are no more answers. Those are all the answers. This idea that is rooted in sort of economic turmoil is nonsense. There are lots of poor countries all over the world where people have tons of babies. The notion that this is rooted in the inability of people to get married is total crap. It is easier to get married now, in 2026 than pretty much any time in human history. You have more freedoms, you have more rights, you have more abilities, you have more economic capacity. The idea that there's some sort of gigantic conspiracy to stop you from getting married is total trash. It is nonsense. Nonetheless, the New York Times ran a piece called by a woman named Anna Louise Sussman called Inconceivable the Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty. And basically the case that she makes is the reason that people are not having babies is young people's inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the Vibes theory of demographic decline. I would just note at this point that we had a lot more certainty about where things were, economically speaking, in, say, 2006. And guess what? The birth rates were still really low. It turns out that when people are irreligious and rich, they don't have lots of babies. That's it. That's the whole thing. I mean, again, I hate to break it to you, but if you want to have lots of babies, if you want to get married, you can still do those things. You can still do the fact that people who speak common, basic virtues, those are some of the people who are hated the most in the online world demonstrates, I think, where we're at. It is much easier to get rich in the online world, in a world that is not real. By claiming it is impossible for you to get married. You're a young dude, you're having trouble getting a date. It's because women suck. It's because women are terrible, and it's impossible to find a good woman you don't have to go to church. Even if you went to church, would you find a good woman? Women are really just venal and terrible. Only fans, girls. That's all women are. That feels better for a lot of young men. Then, hey, you know what you might want to do? Get a job, work out, look decent, go to church, find a girl again. One of those things puts the responsibility on you and says you can do it. I find that to be an empowering message. A lot of people would prefer the grievance. Erica Kirk, who's been raked over the coals for the great sin of being the wife of a man who was shot to death again. I will never get over the fact that we are now eight months into the period after Charlie's death, and there are still people who are supposedly her allies who will allow the mockery of Erica Kirk and who will continue to uphold the people who are doing that sort of mockery. It's insane. So she gave a speech at Hillsdale in which she talked about getting married and raising a family. Again, this should be basic common sense stuff to conservatives, and yet she is being overlooked and attacked in favor of conspiracy theorists who will tell you that your problems are insuperable.
- [59:25]
G
Charlie would often encourage People, like Dr. Arn said, to get married young. Not rushed. Not rushed, but young. I just want to encourage all of you. To the men, you are called to provide, you are called to lead, to anchor your families in strength and consistency. To the women, you are called to nurture, to build, to shape lives with wisdom and endurance.
- [59:55]
A
This used to be just a normal thing to say, and somehow it has become even sort of looked down upon on the right. Why? Because there's conspiracism and idiocy that has rotted brains. Full scale rotted brains. And if you think that's a coincidence, it is not. It is not. It is not just because of social media and the value of grievance and conspiracism. It is because, in fact, there are people all over the world who are happy to watch America tear itself apart. It's a thing that they would like to do, so don't let them do it. Instead, be a good American citizen who considers the actual facts. Don't be the moron who looks at the crowd and says, this line is the same as the much longer line just because the crowd's telling me that. Instead, why don't you look at the evidence of your eyes and ears as opposed to whatever people are telling you is the most clickable and the most approved opinion. All right. Coming up, we'll get to the president unleashing a housing policy that I think is kind of problematic. Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us. Sam.