MADE IN CHINA
In this episode, Dinesh reflects on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Author Frank Gaffney joins Dinesh to discuss whether China can be held accountable for its crimes against humanity. Dinesh also asks whether social media is opening up to the question of what really happened in the
THE DINESH D’SOUZA PODCAST – See transcript below.
In this episode, Dinesh reflects on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Author Frank Gaffney joins Dinesh to discuss whether China can be held accountable for its crimes against humanity. Dinesh also asks whether social media is opening up to the question of what really happened in the 2020 election.
HIGHLIGHTS
Dinesh D’Souza: I’m back with Frank Gaffney, executive chairman and founder of the Center for Security Policy. We’re talking about his book, “The Indictment.” Frank, it seems I think you’d agree that because of its economic power, China [00:23:00] is in many ways more dangerous than the old Soviet Union ever was. And now you’ve raised the possibility that we might go from a Cold War with China to a more hot war, maybe something that is triggered by Taiwan, but then spreads much more, much more broadly. My question is, is the United States ready for this? I mean, it seems like this is coming at a time when we couldn’t be more or internally divided, when the military here has gone woke, at least to a degree, when we don’t seem to be having a lot of strategic discussion about how to handle a situation like this. Do we have the preparedness to deal with what China has in store?
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Dinesh D’Souza: [00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Waltzer, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth. Book your free call with her team by going to friend of dinesh.com That’s friendofdinesh.com. Coming up it’s the anniversary of Tiananmen Square and I’ll talk about the significance of that. Author Frank Gaffney joins me. We’re going to talk about whether China can be held accountable for its crimes against humanity. I also want to ask whether social media is really opening up to the question of what really happened in the 2020 election. If you’re listening on Apple, Google or Spotify or watching on Rumble, please hit the subscribe button. I’d appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D’Souza Show.
.Announcer: [00:00:49] America needs this voice. The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division and lies. We need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth. This is [00:01:00] the Dinesh D’Souza podcast.
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:01:07] It is sometimes said that there is within human nature, a love of freedom that cannot be fully shut down. Certainly the American founders believed it and they believed it kind of in the face of enormous evidence to the contrary. Because think about it, before the American founding. For many centuries, most countries, in fact, all countries had lived under various forms of tyranny and monarchy and oligarchy. But there was no such system that had been set up to ensure the maximization of human freedom and human fulfillment. And yet, even today, we have countries that have shut down human freedom. The most notable example of which is [00:02:00] China. Now, in the 20th century, probably the great symbol of unfreedom in the world was the Soviet Union. But in the 21st century, it is clearly China, whose tyranny stretches across over a billion people. And because of China’s wealth and China’s technology, they’re able to establish systems of surveillance and social control that even the Soviet Union couldn’t have dreamed of putting into effect. And yet now we remember this goes back to 1989, the magnificent expression of human freedom in Tiananmen Square, followed by a ruthless crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party. This was a student movement. It actually began almost as a kind of Woodstock people gathering and smiling and laughing and eating in Tiananmen Square. And it all looked like this was a [00:03:00] this was a display of human aspiration, but also human fearlessness. And and then the Chinese brought out the tanks. The tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square.
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:03:15] There’s kind of an iconic picture of these tanks rolling in and even more iconic image of a single individual. I don’t even know his name. I tried to find out, but we can just call him, you know, Tank Man, a single, solitary guy standing there in front of a tank, as if to defiantly signal, I will not back off. I will. I’m standing here because I represent freedom. And you, the Chinese Communist Party, represent tyranny. Now, we haven’t seen anything like it since, and the Chinese have done their best to shut it down and to shut down not only discussion of Tiananmen Square, but even the mention [00:04:00] of it, even the knowledge of it. I’m somewhat reminded here of the way in which we have censorship now in this country that tries to make us forget certain things or forget about all the things you saw about the 2020 election. In other words, you can’t openly discuss it. Now, I’ll be talking later in the podcast about how YouTube has modified its kind of election fraud policy. But the Chinese have been so successful and they are successful partly because they control everything that happens in China that today most Chinese and particularly young Chinese born in the 21st century, let’s say Chinese who are in their teens or early 20s, they don’t even know about Tiananmen Square. They don’t even know that there was such an uprising. And so it’s all the more important that we remember, because memory is one of the ways in which we preserve things that that the bad guys would like to have erased. [00:05:00]
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:05:00] These things live on in our memory and we pass them down so that other people who might not otherwise know about them would know about them. Now, I realize we haven’t seen a whole lot of discussion about Tiananmen Square. And that’s partly, I think, because the media in this country is by and large trying to erase not only the crimes of the Biden administration or elites in this country, but China. It’s almost like the media in this country recognizes that there is a sort of a Sino-American alliance, an alliance between the Biden regime and the “Xi regime.” And the significance of Tiananmen Square then is purely symbolic. It is that there was a time going back some 30 or so years when a group of people stood against all this. They lost. But their ideals, let us hope, live on.
.BREAK
.Dinesh D’Souza: Today I’ve been talking guys about [00:07:00] China and I wanted to have on the podcast a guy who understands this topic in all its depth and detail. And I’m fortunate to have Frank Gaffney. He’s the executive chairman and founder of the Center for Security Policy. And his new book, “The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China and the World.” The website, by the way, is theindictmentbook.com, theindictmentBook.com. Frank, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it. We are, gosh, I guess this past weekend, the anniversary, what, the 37th, I believe, anniversary of Tiananmen Square. And it was a powerful, inspiring in the end heartbreaking to watch the spontaneous [00:08:00] resistance to the Chinese Communist Party. And yet they crushed it and we haven’t seen the likes of it again. So is the true significance of Tiananmen Square that it was you could almost call it China’s last, last gasp. And the Chinese have now just tightened the noose so that kind of event is now impossible.
.Frank Gaffney: [00:08:25] Well, I certainly hope not, Dinesh. And first of all, thank you for letting me talk a little bit about what’s going on there. And as a result here, the people of China, I believe, continue to be very angry with the Chinese Communist Party and desirous of liberation from its oppression. We know that because there’s an ongoing, if not actually incessant upheaval [00:09:00] taking place as a result of, you know, the collapse of the real estate market and banks and the demographic disaster of bequeathed from the one child policy and any number of other things that are creating difficulties for the people. And the Chinese Communist Party is basically indifferent to. And this gives rise to one of the first and most important of the crimes that we believe the Chinese Communist Party must be held accountable for. And those are the crimes against humanity, particularly the people of China. Tiananmen is just one example of it. By some estimates, and I think there probably conservative Dinesh, 100 million people. The vast majority of them Chinese, though [00:10:00] some are of the people they’ve enslaved, have been murdered by the Chinese Communist Party since it came to power. And that doesn’t include, by the way, 400 million that they have boasted of murdering in the womb. Infants as part of that population control exercise.
.Frank Gaffney: [00:10:19] Some say it’s 500 million. Whatever it is, there’s never been in the history of the world anything remotely like the monstrosity that this party represents. So I think that Tiananmen sadly, was suppressed and worse. We talk in the book about China’s friends. The George H.W. Bush administration made it abundantly clear to the Chinese that there would be no consequences arising from that murderous incident. And it’s probably not just the 10,000 people, by the way, who were in the square, who [00:11:00] were finished off by the Chinese, but maybe as many as 50,000 total across the country just in this one episode. But the point is this, that Biden excuse me, Biden George H.W. Bush sent his national security adviser to China shortly after the unpleasantness there and said it’s business as usual. We’re going to need to, you know. Denounce you a little bit, but it won’t interfere with our desire to bring you into the World Trade Organization and to otherwise, you know, put you on the path to great riches and along the trail, of course, enrich our elites. And do you, I think, contributed to the problem that we continue to have, that the Chinese people’s desires are not allowed to be expressed in China?
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:11:55] And do you think that that’s because George H.W. Bush was really obsessed [00:12:00] and focused with the Soviet conflict, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and didn’t see that China would over time become just as powerful, just as tyrannical and just as dangerous.
.Frank Gaffney: [00:12:13] You know, I don’t know what was his motivation. I think the Soviet Union, of course, was coming unraveled at that point. The old argument that, for example, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger used that we needed to play the China card to take on the Soviets really didn’t apply at that point. I think probably operating more was George H.W. Bush’s time as ambassador to China and his belief that, you know, we could do business with these guys and that they would get rich and they’d be more like us and other nonsense, frankly. But he was played, as was Brent Scowcroft and others [00:13:00] in their circle, Jim Baker by the Chinese, to great effect. Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, said a few years after Tiananmen that, you know, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is over. A new Cold War has begun between the United States and China. The Soviets lost. China will win. And they adopted something called the hide and bide strategy to try to persuade the Bushes and others in our elite to not only help build them up, but also to get rich themselves in the process and large numbers in our elites. Yes. In the political system, to be sure, but also the financial sector business more generally. The media, as you know, academia, Hollywood. Across the board. Basically the sports industries, they’ve been captured by the Chinese Communist Party and that has contributed, again, to a failure [00:14:00] to tell the American people the truth about the unrestricted warfare the CCP has been waging against us for decades.
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:14:08] Let’s take a pause. When we come back, more with Frank Gaffney. The book The Indictment Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China and the World.
BREAK
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:15:23] I’m back [00:15:00] with Frank Gaffney, executive chairman and founder of the Center for Security Policy. We’re talking about his new book, “The Indictment.” Frank, you mentioned this phrase about Americans believing, or American elites believing, hey, you know, we’re going to rub off on China. China is going to become more liberalized. They’re going to become more like us. Isn’t the terrifying reality that we are becoming more like them? And by that I mean, that we’re seeing increasingly elements in this country that resemble China. Now, you mentioned that there are Americans getting rich off of China, [00:16:00] but could it also be that China is, to some degree for some people almost a model totalitarian society? And I say this because China is able to offer something to its citizens that the Soviet Union never could, and that is continually improving standards of living. So the Chinese are able to say, we know how to do totalitarianism, right? We can have a high degree of social control, censorship, a digital credit system. We can tell people what where they can live and how to live. And a lot of American leaders who go, wow, we wish we were in that position.
.Frank Gaffney: [00:16:39] Well, those are two really important questions and they’re related, of course, Dinesh, I think that the true purpose of the Chinese all along was to make us more like them, not the other way around. They may have, you know, encouraged delusions [00:17:00] to the contrary. But the idea, both in terms of their external activities and what they have been doing inside our country with our friends, yes, the captured elites, but also with their front organizations, their influence operations, their–well–students, Confucius Institutes, I mean, you go right on down the list. This is all been about promoting on TikTok the idea that America and its model is fatally flawed. China and its model is the wave of the future. And look no further than how it was embraced with the help to be sure of their proxies at the World Health Organization with the adoption of the “China model,” as it was called, for responding to the China virus, the Wuhan virus, Covid [00:18:00] 19, SARS-CoV-2, whatever you want to call it. It was perfectly–you know–presented as the means that we had to adopt–the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the vaccines, the vaccine passports, the whole nine yards–as the response to that pandemic. And along the trail, we took a huge leap forward, if I can, great leap forward. If I can use most term towards becoming China with the adoption of controls that were anti-constitutional on the one hand and also, frankly, were conducive to slipstreaming behind them, the rest of the China program, specifically the social credit system, a means of exerting, as you say, [00:19:00] Dinesh, unbelievable control. And yes, there are people certainly in the World Economic Forum and in other globalist centers, Wall Street among them, who think that would be a lot more efficient if we just ran things the way the Chinese do and, you know, never mind freedom and that, you know, nasty, inefficient, messy business of democracy.
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:19:27] I mean, it seems that the Chinese, in a way, have hit upon a more effective way to buy influence around the world. I mean, America seems to go around the world telling the Ugandans and the people in Asia, hey, listen, we want you to fly the rainbow flag and we want you to we want you to ideologically align yourself with us. And hey, we think you should make a strongly worded statement about Ukraine. And the Chinese go, we don’t care about any of this. We’re going to move. We’d like to come into Uganda [00:20:00] and rebuild your parliament building. And then we also want to build some roads and we will lend you the money to do this. And we just want to to essentially have a deeper economic ties with you which make you more economically dependent on us. Haven’t the Chinese been playing this game in, honestly a more effective and sophisticated way than the United States?
.Frank Gaffney: [00:20:23] Yeah, it’s more cynical, too. As you know, Dinesh, what they have done in a number of cases and what they will be doing more of in the future is they have been foreclosing on those payday loans that financed the fixing up of your parliament or the roads and the rail networks and the ports and the airfields, the access to your mining, you know, resources and so on, all of which have in fact benefited a kind of colonial build out for the Chinese Communist Party. But more to the point, I believe their ultimate purpose [00:21:00] is to turn those nations and those assets into power projection instruments for the Chinese Communist Party’s global ambitions. And, you know, the prospect of a shooting war is now decidedly in sight. I talked about the unrestricted sort of pre kinetic form, but they’re now looking at the old-fashioned kind of shooting war. Those assets around the world would be weaponized, I believe, to turn it into a global shooting war unlike anything we’ve seen before, even World War Two.
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:21:41] Let’s take a pause. When we come back, more with Frank Gaffney, author of “The Indictment.”
BREAK
.Dinesh D’Souza: I’m back with Frank Gaffney, executive chairman and founder of the Center for Security Policy. We’re talking about his book, “The Indictment.” Frank, it seems I think you’d agree that because of its economic power, China [00:23:00] is in many ways more dangerous than the old Soviet Union ever was. And now you’ve raised the possibility that we might go from a Cold War with China to a more hot war, maybe something that is triggered by Taiwan, but then spreads much more, much more broadly. My question is, is the United States ready for this? I mean, it seems like this is coming at a time when we couldn’t be more or internally divided, when the military here has gone woke, at least to a degree, when we don’t seem to be having a lot of strategic discussion about how to handle a situation like this. Do we have the preparedness to deal with what China has in store?
.Frank Gaffney: [00:23:50] The short answer is no. And for all the reasons you’ve mentioned, among others, not least and it must be said that the [00:24:00] preeminent example of the elite capture which we spoke earlier, is the commander in chief of the United States military is a controlled asset of the Chinese Communist Party. So I think on top of these various other factors, all of which have to some degree at least I think Chinese machinations behind them, we are looking at a remarkably dangerous alignment, a perfect storm, if you will, of things that almost certainly incentivize the Chinese to believe that a shooting war will be one they can wage decisively and with essentially manageable, if not negligible, costs. And I don’t mean simply by going after Taiwan and us staying out of it. I think it almost certainly entails going after Taiwan and [00:25:00] they act against us here at home as well.
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:25:06] Frank, you’ve outlined, I mean, a sobering and bleak scenario. Talk about some things that you say in the book we can and should do. You have a pretty long list of this is what we should do and this is what we should do. Give us a few highlights of what are some things we can do.
.Frank Gaffney: [00:25:26] Well, just to share the structure a little bit further, we talk about nine different charges of crimes that should be prosecuted, at least in the court of public opinion, as they say, to ensure that the American people understand the threat we face from the Chinese Communist Party and a transnational criminal organization properly understood the greatest Mafioso operation in history and the [00:26:00] various ways in which it has already done incredible damage to us in what we call a series of eight different crimes or crimes. We also have 20 specific recommendations as to the sorts of things that need to be done now, starting with just again, understanding the nature of the threat that we are, in fact at war, not because we want to be, but because the Chinese communists are determined to take us down and have been at it for quite some time. Then we talk about the need to remove these elites that have been captured. You know, the prospect that we’re going into a shooting war with, as I say, the man in charge of our military planning for the other team is is simply intolerable. So whether it’s forced resignations, whether it’s impeachment as appropriate, whether it’s prosecution for those who are aiding and abetting [00:27:00] the Chinese communists crimes against, we need to clear out people who are not, in fact, on our side. If we are to have any chance of surviving. We need to fix a number of other things. Of course, we need to get off of supply chains that are insane for us to be dependent upon, including for medicine.
.Frank Gaffney: [00:27:22] For heaven’s sakes. We need to fix our energy security posture from one that you know. Was bequeathed to Joe Biden of energy dominance to or at least incipient energy dominance. Certainly energy independence to one in which we are now again dependent and desperately in need of reliable energy sources. These are the sorts of things that, along with defenses against biological warfare, attack, we’ve had one already. We must be better prepared for the next one. And rebuilding our military, [00:28:00] not least or just examples of these 20 that I think are the kinds of things that every American should get behind. Because at the end of the day, if the Chinese do come after us, and I think they will unless they’re deterred and that’s the key point, we need to deter them. It isn’t going to matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. You’re an independent. You’re a leftist. You’re a we’re all in mortal peril. And lastly, I would just say that, you know, we need ultimately to invoke God’s grace on our country. He has blessed this nation more than any other, I think, in history, with the possible exception of Israel. And we need his help now if we are to overcome, I think, the mistakes of the past and preserve for our posterity the freedom that was bequeathed to us and that is now in extreme jeopardy, I’m afraid.
.Dinesh D’Souza: [00:28:59] The book is [00:29:00] called “The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China and the World.” Frank, as always, thank you very much for joining me.
Frank Gaffney: [00:29:09] It’s been a privilege. Thank you.