During my time in the Senate, I’ve met with hundreds of foreign leaders. I’ve sat across from dozens of heads of state and hundreds of ambassadors, dignitaries, and emissaries from other countries. Some of these countries have terrible human rights records, or their leaders have said openly hostile things about the United States, the American people, or even me personally. Communicating with your adversaries is important, even if it is not always pleasant.
But one particular meeting, which took place in June of 2022, still haunts me to this day. Even now, writing these words, I can picture the blank, malevolent look on the face of the man I met with that afternoon.
That memory still sends a shiver down my spine.
The man was Qin Gang, who at the time was the Chinese ambassador to the United States. Today, he’s the Chinese foreign minister. He had requested this meeting, I believe, because of some… let’s just say “unkind” comments that I had been making about the Chinese Communist Party, the organization he is tasked with representing to foreign leaders all over the world.
Although I’m not sure exactly what the offending phrases were, I believe they included some candid descriptions of the “murder,” “torture,” “lies,” and “genocide” routinely carried out by the Chinese Communist Party. The phrase “communist bastards” may have also been invoked.
All true, of course.
But that didn’t mean that the ambassador would be any less offended. He certainly wasn’t going to greet me with a fruit basket at the door when he arrived. (Nor would I eat the fruit if he did.) This meeting was going to be tense; it might very well entail raised voices from both ends of the table.
For a few days, I wrestled with whether to take the meeting at all. To begin with, I didn’t think there was much to gain from it on my end. As I had been dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, I had learned a few things, chief among them that its representatives cannot be trusted. They are representatives of the largest openly Marxist nation on earth, and they have been indoctrinated in ways that most of us in the West can only imagine.
But there was at least one good reason to take the meeting. At that point the Chinese government had been holding a man from Texas named Mark Swidan in custody for nearly ten years. In many ways, his story represents nearly everything that is corrupt and evil about the Chinese Communist Party. In 2012, Mark Swidan had been traveling around China on business when he was abducted by members of China’s Public Security Bureau. They accused him of engaging in a criminal conspiracy, along with eleven other people, to manufacture and traffic drugs.
Swidan denied the charges. But the Chinese authorities attempted to elicit a false confession from him anyway. Repeatedly, he refused. When his case finally went to trial almost exactly one year later, in November of 2013, he pleaded not guilty. The prosecution did not produce any forensic evidence to back up their allegations. No drugs had been found on Mark Swidan or in his hotel room. Records, as well as Mark’s passport, showed that he wasn’t even in China at the time the alleged offenses occurred. None of the eleven men with whom Mark was supposedly engaged in a criminal conspiracy could even identify him.
Nevertheless, a Chinese court sentenced Mark to death in 2019. By the time the Chinese ambassador sent in his request to meet with me, Mark had been languishing in a Chinese prison for nearly a decade. By all accounts, he had endured deplorable conditions. The location of his cell meant that he was often exposed to extreme heat and extreme cold. The guards who kept him there regularly deprived him of sleep and withheld food. As a result, he had lost more than a hundred pounds, and his health situation was dire.1
As is often the case in diplomacy, the situation was delicate. As much as I would have liked to see President Biden send in the Navy SEALs to break Mark Swidan out of prison, starting a shooting war with China was not something anyone wanted to do. During several conversations with Mark’s mother—a wonderful, sweet woman from Luling, Texas, who has never stopped praying for and fighting for her son—we had developed a strategy to apply escalating pressure through diplomatic channels to try to secure his immediate release. A face-to-face meeting with the ambassador hadn’t been part of that plan at first, but I was glad to get the opportunity.
So I said that I would take the meeting, if only to convey the message about Mark Swidan directly.
In the weeks leading up to Qin’s arrival, I tasked my staff with finding a good place for us to meet. It could not, under any circumstances, be held in my own office—given the penchant that CCP officials seem to have for planting listening devices wherever they go in the United States. I also didn’t want to go too far from my office, considering how much other business I had to conduct that day. In the end, we settled on a small, secure conference room on a different hallway in the Russell Senate Office Building.
Now, I’m sure that there are some public officials who would have prepared for this meeting by crafting a diplomatic, prewritten apology to the Chinese ambassador for giving offense to his government. I imagine others would have figured out ways to appeal to the vanity of the Chinese ambassador or maybe thought of a way to strike some kind of a deal. Given the tense situation between our two countries at the time, perhaps that would have been the smart thing to do.
But that’s not what I did.
Short of looking up different ways to say “Piss off!” in Chinese, I didn’t see how doing any research in advance could prepare me for the meeting ahead.
I arrived at the meeting room not quite knowing what to expect. My national security advisor, Omri Ceren, a brilliant, incisive foreign policy thinker, sat alongside me. The plan was to hear whatever Ambassador Qin had to say, make my direct appeal on behalf of Mark Swidan, and see if any other business came up along the way, though I doubted it would.
From the moment Qin entered the conference room, there was a sense of foreboding. I’m not the kind of person who typically uses the word “evil” in casual conversation, but there was no mistaking it in the room that day.
Qin, who had arrived from China not long before, carried himself with the air of a man with immense authority. I got the impression that he was accustomed to taking people who had made comments like mine—about the murderous, dictatorial regime he represented—and having them thrown in a small cell to rot forever. Or worse.
At the time Qin and I began speaking, more than 1.3 million people were sitting in “reeducation camps” in the Xinjiang Province of China. The vast majority of these people were Uighur Muslims who’d been sent there because of their religion. In these camps—which were, for all intents and purposes, prisons—the rape of female (and some male) inmates is extremely common. So too is physical abuse, torture, and murder. Men and women alike are forced to do hard labor, producing many of the goods that Chinese companies (which are effectively run by the state) sell to the rest of the world.
Some of my loudest and most strident attacks on the Chinese Communist Party were attacks on this horrific concentration camp system, which I view as an abomination that should be addressed immediately.
After a few formalities, Qin got down to business. His first priority, it seemed, was to read off a few of the most offensive comments I’d made about his government and various of its leaders back home. They included quotations from speeches I had given, things I’d said in interviews, and even off-the-cuff comments from my podcast and other media appearances.
After reading the last one, he asked if I would please stop saying these things about his government.
I paused. Then I declined.
“No,” I said. “In fact, in the future, I will make sure to keep saying those things, more loudly and to as many people as possible.” I continued calmly, “When your government stops committing horrific atrocities, when you stop lying, stealing, torturing, and murdering, then I will stop calling you lying, stealing, torturing, murdering bastards.”
Qin seemed taken aback, though he maintained a tight, controlled smile as I spoke.
“Your government has over one million Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps. It’s the largest concentration of human slavery on the face of the planet,” I observed.
Qin leaned back, closed his eyes, and smiled.
“Oh, Senator,” he said. “You misunderstand. Those are not concentration camps.”
I asked what they were.
“You see, in China, we unfortunately have a great many people who suffer from mental illness. They criticize the government, and they refuse to go along with our agenda, which proves they are mentally ill. And so these are centers to help reeducate these people. To help them. To cure them of their illness.”
There was a calmness in his voice that made me think of the poignant phrase employed by the great Hannah Arendt: “the banality of evil.” Qin described the concentration camps in exactly the same tone one would use to describe a local clinic helping people with cuts and bruises and other minor medical needs.
I smelled sulfur in the air.
Nevertheless, I pressed forward with the purpose of the meeting. I demanded that China release Mark Swidan. I told Qin that Swidan was wrongfully imprisoned, that he was a Texan, and he needed to come home.
Qin said that Swidan had been convicted in a Chinese court. I told him the conviction was bullshit.
“China aspires to be a great nation,” I told him. “Great nations don’t hold political prisoners.”
Qin gave a noncommittal answer, saying only that he would bring the issue back to his superiors. I told him bluntly that, if Mark Swidan was not released, I would continue raising the issue on the global stage, calling out the horrific injustice. At the date of this writing, Swidan still has not been released, and I have continued ratcheting up the pressure. In the Senate, I authored and passed—unanimously—a resolution condemning China’s unjust imprisonment of Swidan. I worked with colleagues in the House, and the House, too, unanimously passed the very same resolution. I’ve repeatedly gone to the Senate floor, and on national TV, denouncing China’s keeping Swidan as a hostage. And I’ve pressed Secretary of State Blinken to make releasing Swidan a top priority in his negotiations with now–Foreign Minister Qin.
Walking back to my office that June afternoon, still shaking off my unease at how calmly Qin had described mass imprisonment, torture, and murder, I considered what it must be like to live in a country where men like President Xi Jinping make the rules. It’s something that most Americans who’ve never experienced communism—who don’t even know someone who’s experienced it—can never quite understand. As the great writer Ayn Rand once said during a moving speech in front of Congress, “It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.”2
In China and other communist nations, the threat of being sent to “reeducation camp” by the government isn’t hyperbolic. It is something that has happened to millions of people in China who fail to live up to the arbitrary standards of the Chinese Communist Party. Every day, citizens live with the same fear that has consumed millions of people throughout history who’ve lived under communism. They fear that today is the day the security forces will knock on the door and carry them away to a jail cell for something they didn’t even know was a crime. They fear that if they say the wrong thing, they’ll be sent to a reeducation program, where the regime will stuff all the right propaganda into their heads.
This is the world my family fled when they came to the United States in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s the world many of my relatives lived and died in during the Castro years. As of this writing, millions of people—in China, Cuba, North Korea, and other nations—continue to live with this same constant, brooding fear.
This is why I have been so strident in my condemnation of the radical Left and its neo-Marxist project of remaking this nation. It’s why I spoke out about the case of Jack Phillips, to take just one example, who was forced by the state of Colorado into what was for all intents and purposes a “reeducation program,” in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s powerful words, after he refused on religious grounds to bake a cake for a gay wedding.3 No matter what you think of this man’s religious beliefs or his personal opinions, it was beyond the purview of the state to force him to do something that went against his faith. I was extremely pleased to see that when the case finally went to the Supreme Court, the Court upheld his religious liberty.
So too with Jordan Peterson, and the “social-media communications retraining” that the Ontario College of Psychologists mandated he undertake because he had dared say out loud, among other things, that he believed that the radical gender theory behind the trans movement is a sign of civilizational collapse.4
I’ve repeatedly pointed out that this kind of “retraining”—especially when it’s mandated by the government—is as clear an example of Marxism as we’re likely to see in the United States or Canada. Of course, it seems perfectly normal in a country where Cultural Marxists have successfully infiltrated and captured our major institutions, insisting that people like Jordan Peterson or Jack Phillips be forced to learn woke beliefs as mandatory dogma from which no dissent is possible.
What many people don’t realize, however, is just how many of our institutions and key figures in the United States have become inextricably tied to China—a country that is run by actual Marxists who openly cheer for the demise of the United States and the global order we’ve upheld for decades.
Today, with the cover they’re given by Cultural Marxists in the media, they no longer make any real attempts to hide it.
Before the Covid-19 virus reached our shores, I suspect most Americans didn’t think very much about China. When they did, I’m sure it was because they’d noticed that many of the things we wear and use every day are made there; perhaps they had heard predictions that the Chinese economy would soon overtake ours, and wondered how that could be possible.
But all that faded quickly into the background when we learned that the novel coronavirus that began spreading early in 2020 had come from Wuhan, China—a place most people in the world had never heard of until it began appearing in cable news chyrons and newspaper headlines. Suddenly, the eyes of the world were on China, and they were looking at some pretty horrific things.
During the early stages of the pandemic, when it may have still been possible to prevent the virus from becoming a global pandemic, some of the top scientists in China warned their government of the danger posed by this new disease. In response, the government made these whistleblowers retract their statements and locked them up. Some of them were “disappeared” by the government. One of them, a scientist named Li Wenliang, eventually died from the disease he had been attempting to warn the world about.5
Once the virus was unleashed, the Chinese government did everything in its power to deflect blame for as long as possible. We now know that while the world was scrambling during those key first months, China was actively destroying samples from its novel coronavirus lab in Wuhan, which had been working on mutating viruses that bore a striking resemblance to the one that eventually escaped and killed millions of people.6
Even in 2020, I was making the case everywhere I could that the Covid-19 virus had almost certainly leaked from a Chinese laboratory. In March and April of 2020, I devoted four separate podcast episodes on Verdict with Ted Cruz to laying out the evidence that the Covid virus had escaped from a Chinese government lab.7 Four facts, known very early, were compelling:
First, the Chinese government ran the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV) where they studied… coronaviruses.
And not just coronaviruses, but coronaviruses… from bats.
Those bats did not occur naturally anywhere near Wuhan; the closest they could be found in China was in caves… nine hundred miles away.
Second, the first outbreak of Covid-19 occurred in the wet market in downtown Wuhan, which is… 9 miles away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. To put that into context, there are a total of 51 biosafety-level-4 labs on the planet, spread across 27 countries. The WIV is the only biosafety-level-4 lab in China. There are roughly 57,269,000 square miles of land on the planet. The odds against the outbreak of a serious contagious virus occurring naturally within 10 square miles of one of those 51 labs are—doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math—roughly 11,229 to 1. In other words, extremely unlikely.
Third, in 2018—before the pandemic—the State Department sent two official wires raising serious concerns about the risk of a coronavirus pandemic breaking out from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, due to their very poor security protocols. The wires warned that “during interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, [the U.S. scientists] noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
And fourth, in the wake of the pandemic, the Chinese government ordered the scientists at the Wuhan Institute for Virology to destroy the original samples of their research on coronaviruses. As the government-controlled South China Morning Post admitted on May 15, 2020, “China… confirmed it had ordered unauthorised laboratories to destroy samples of the new coronavirus in the early stage of the outbreak, but said it was done for biosafety reasons” [emphasis added].8 In a court of law, if somebody destroys evidence, a judge in civil trial can instruct the jury that it can draw a negative inference from that destruction of evidence, namely that the evidence destroyed would have been unfavorable to the party responsible for its spoliation.
Despite this overwhelming evidence, in 2020 the corporate media were united in trying to shut down any discussion of the origins of Covid-19 likely coming from a Chinese government lab. They insisted it was “racist” to say so, and a “conspiracy theory” to boot. Bizarrely, the media insisted it wasn’t racist to assert that the virus must have come from backwards Chinese peasants eating raw or undercooked bats from the Wuhan “wet market,” but it was definitely racist to put one iota of blame on the Chinese Communist Party.
To give just one example of this nonsense, the Washington Post ran a story in 2020 entitled “Tom Cotton Keeps Repeating a Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory That Was Already Debunked” [emphasis added]. The “conspiracy theory” Cotton kept repeating was that Covid had come from a Chinese lab. In June 2021—conveniently, after the 2020 election—the Post was forced to formally correct that story with the following explanation: “Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”9
Similarly, the Baltimore Sun in 2021 denounced former CDC director Robert Redfield as “toss[ing] viral kindling on anti-Asian fires” because he had said the virus “most likely” originated in a Chinese lab. The Sun’s editorial board sneered that “it’s probably untrue” (on the grounds that the heavily Chinese-influenced World Health Organization disagreed) and said it was “feeding the mob” and contributing to “an epidemic of hate crimes directed at Asians.”10
And it was not just the media. The Deep State—Dr. Fauci in particular—was deeply vested in silencing any discussion about Covid-19 coming from a Chinese government lab. So much so that Dr. Fauci worked hand in hand with Big Tech to help silence any inquiry into the topic. Specifically, on March 15, 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made Dr. Fauci the following offer, in an email exchange that, as we discussed in Chapter Four, was made public in June of 2021:
Tony:
I wanted to send a note of thanks for your leadership and everything you’re doing…. I also wanted to share a few ideas of ways we could help you get your message out….
This isn’t public yet, but we’re building a Coronavirus Information Hub that we’re going to put at the top of Facebook for everyone (200+ million Americans, 2.5 billion people worldwide) with two goals: (1) make sure people can get authoritative information from reliable sources and (2) encourage people to practice social distance….
As a central part of the hub, I think it would be useful to include a video from you….
I’m also doing a series of livestreamed Q&As with health experts to try to use my large following on the platform (100 million followers) to get authoritative information out as well….
Finally, [REDACTED] [Emphasis added.]11
The REDACTED portion of the final paragraph is widely assumed to be an explicit offer to censor so-called Covid “misinformation.” And that inference is reinforced by the fact that Facebook made the following public announcement ten days later, on March 25. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s VP of global affairs, explained:
We do not allow misinformation to circulate on Facebook which can lead to real-world harm. So if people say drinking bleach is going to help you vaccinate yourself against coronavirus—that is dangerous. We will not allow that to happen. We won’t even allow folk to say social distancing makes no difference in dealing with this pandemic….
What politicians say on the campaign trail about each other is not what a medic or an epidemiologist says about a pandemic. They’re completely different forms of information. One is underpinned by science and established expertise, which no one questions. [It’s easier for the company to act under the] strict expertise and guidance [from institutions like WHO and CDC]. [Emphasis added.]12
No doubt part of the reason that Big Tech, the Deep State, and the corporate media all aligned to silence discussion of the compelling evidence of a Chinese lab leak is that, in 2020, President Trump was calling Covid the “Chinese virus” and making the point (as only he could) that it was from “CHI-nah,” and all three of those powerful forces were aligned in wanting Trump to lose the 2020 election to Biden. Now, ironically, two different agencies of the Biden administration have publicly confirmed that the lab-leak theory is likely correct. Specifically, in 2023, the Biden FBI publicly concluded that Covid-19 “most likely” originated from a lab incident in Wuhan. As FBI director Chris Wray explained, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. The Chinese government, seems to me, has been doing its best to try and thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, and that’s unfortunate for everybody” [emphasis added].13
Likewise, also in 2023, the Biden Department of Energy has publicly concluded that Covid-19 “most likely” came from a lab leak, although it stated that its judgment was with “low confidence.” The FBI’s conclusion was given with “moderate confidence.”14
Not only is there strong evidence that Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese government lab, there is considerable (albeit disputed) evidence that it was created in that lab, using “gain of function” research to make existing coronaviruses more lethal and more transmissible to humans. As former CDC director Robert Redfield testified before the House on March 8, 2023, in his scientific judgment Covid-19 was “more likely… the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event. This conclusion is based primarily on the biology of the virus itself, including its rapid high infectivity for human to human transmission which would then predict rapid evolution of new variants…. In my opinion, the Covid-19 pandemic presents a case study on the potential dangers of [gain-of-function] research.”15
But leftists don’t want to hear any of this. Despite their serious dedication to analyzing and tearing down everything that they believe is wrong with the United States—a country that ended slavery, led the world to victory in two world wars, won the Cold War without firing a shot, and developed a vaccine for Covid-19 in record time, to name just a few accomplishments—they seem pathologically unable to say anything in public that might make China look bad.
On first impression, that would seem to have a certain logic to it. China is a country filled with “people of color.” So in the strange mindset of the woke neo-Marxists, saying anything bad about their country—or the totalitarian government that runs it—would be racist.
It doesn’t seem to bother the radical Left that the Chinese government, unlike the government of the United States, is itself systemically racist. Today in China it is impossible for anyone who is not Han (the dominant ethnic group) to rise to a leadership position in the government, or even to advance in society.
According to James Fallows, who covered the issue in The Atlantic, “what we would consider racism in the West is simply a deeply ingrained cultural characteristic of mainland Chinese people. White skin (the Chinese like to consider themselves white) and or being a Han (the dominant ethnic group) means a person is good. Dark skin or not being Han means a person is inferior (and more likely to be a bad guy/a thief/incompetent etc).”16
But the radical Left’s unwillingness to criticize China comes from more than just a misguided commitment to “antiracism.” Many media figures, business leaders, star athletes, and Democratic politicians have a vested financial interest in the success of China. Despite the crimes that this openly communist government has committed on the world stage—the Covid-19 pandemic being just one example—these Americans have come to believe that the rise of China is inevitable, and that they had better profit from that rise while they can.
Some of these figures have famous names. I’m sure there are very few people left in the United States, for instance, who don’t know that Joe Biden’s son Hunter has made millions of dollars in China over the years, often by using his father’s name for clout. In 2013, while his father was still vice president, Hunter flew on Air Force Two on an official trip to China with his father. At the time, Hunter was in the process of forming a Chinese private equity fund to collect massive amounts of cash from all around the world. The venture also involved Devon Archer, who had been a close adviser to John Kerry.
During that trip, Hunter Biden arranged for a photo-op in the lobby of a hotel with his father and several of the Chinese officials he wanted to work with. Shortly thereafter, Hunter’s new fund cut a deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party that would eventually come to be worth about $1.5 billion.”17
It would appear that there was virtually nothing that Hunter Biden and his associates—including Joe Biden’s brother Jim—did that did not involve the former vice president. Thanks to files that came off the Hunter Biden laptop—and to the New York Post, which, as we saw in Chapter Four, was censored by social media for reporting the contents of that laptop when other media outlets chose not to cover the story and hurt Joe Biden’s chances in the 2020 election—we know quite a few disturbing details of those business deals, including one, involving a joint venture with a Chinese energy conglomerate, in which the partners put aside “10 percent for the Big Guy,” meaning Joe Biden himself. According to a New York Post reporter, when an employee of that Chinese company was arrested at JFK airport in 2018 on a bribery charge, his first phone call was to Jim Biden “to try to track down Hunter, who he had paid a whopping $1 million legal retainer.” Despite the former vice president’s repeated denials that he knew anything about Hunter’s business deals with the Chinese, shortly after the arrest was reported in the New York Times, Joe Biden left Hunter a voice mail saying, “I think you’re clear.”18
An IRS whistleblower revealed to the public in June of 2023 that Hunter Biden, on July 30, 2017, sent the following WhatsApp encrypted text to Chinese businessman Raymond Zhao:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father. [Emphasis added.]19
Anyone interested in a detailed analysis of the Biden family’s deep, strange ties to China would do well to read Peter Schweizer’s excellent book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. This book also explores the sordid connections that other Democratic politicians and public figures have to the Chinese Communist Party.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, for instance, has benefited massively from several deals that her husband has made with Chinese companies. Not coincidentally, she often speaks about China in glowing terms. As Schweizer points out, she even said once that that “China is perhaps more Democratic than the United States.”20 That’s a ludicrous statement, even for someone who is far past her prime as a legislator.
The list of Democratic representatives with big ties to the Chinese Communist Party—who also happen to be extremely soft on the country in their public statements—is long. We have Nancy Pelosi, whose son is involved in several major funds with ties to China.21
Famously, the Chinese government attempted to recruit Representative Eric Swalwell using a Chinese spy, and it appears that he fell easily for the honey pot trap. It is almost incredible that Nancy Pelosi allowed Swalwell to remain on the House Intelligence Committee—with full access to classified information—even after his alleged intimate relationship with Chinese spy Fang Fang was revealed; thankfully, in 2023, Republican leadership corrected that misjudgment.22
It’s not just Democratic politicians who are in bed with China—sometimes literally—it is also nearly all of the Democrats’ major stakeholders. From Big Business to Big Tech to Big Universities to Big Hollywood… all earn billions from their ongoing business interests in China. As a result, the modern Democratic Party is functionally pro-China, because their most important supporters depend on China for a massive percentage of their profits.
The heads of many major American investment funds and Fortune 500 companies—who, as we saw in Chapter Six, have no problem pointing out flaws in their own country—have become very hesitant to talk about the flaws of China. Consider Ray Dalio, for instance, bestselling author and head of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the United States.
For the past few decades, Ray Dalio has been attempting to drum up interest in various Chinese investments within the United States. He views China, as he’s said often, as “the future.” The country’s rise is inevitable, in Dalio’s opinion.23
Unsurprisingly, Larry Fink, who was the leading champion for ESG investing until widespread negative attention to the concept made him “ashamed” of the term—though not of the underlying idea24—says largely the same thing. Despite lecturing American investors about the need to consider values like global warming and feminism when making their investment decisions, Fink makes no such proclamations about the Chinese companies that BlackRock invests in. Instead, he offers praise for the Chinese government and tells his Chinese counterparts that “BlackRock should be a Chinese company in China.”25
The woke CEOs pushing ESG on corporate America—and the congressional Democrats pressing the Green New Deal agenda26—are in reality working to undermine U.S. security and make America profoundly dependent on China. Consider the following.
Today the United States is the world’s leader in oil and natural gas production; we produce roughly 20 percent of all the oil and gas produced worldwide.27 As a result of the shale revolution, America now produces more energy than we consume.28 But, what do Democrats and the ESG proponents demand? That we shift our energy consumption from fossil fuels—which generate more than 75 percent of the energy we consume,29 and which we produce in massive quantities, considerably more cleanly than most of the rest of the world30—to wind and solar. And who controls wind and solar? China.
China controls refining capacity for 73 percent of the world’s cobalt, 40 percent of the copper, 59 percent of the lithium, 68 percent of the nickel, and 83 percent of rare earth metals. Every one of those is necessary for wind and solar power.31
And when it comes to the finished products that Democrats want to produce all our domestic energy, China is responsible for 80 percent of global solar panels manufacturing,32 70 percent of global wind turbine manufacturing,33 and 77 percent of global lithium-ion battery manufacturing.34
So, understand, every time you hear a Democrat saying, We must immediately have an energy transition from oil and gas to wind and solar, what they are really saying is that We should trade American energy independence for complete and total dependence on China for our energy. That would render the American economy completely defenseless to China’s cutting off our energy, and would enable the Chinese communist government to almost totally cut off energy from the American military, making us utterly powerless to stand up to Chinese aggression.35
Why would anyone who loves America want that outcome?
And it’s not just Democrats and Big Business. The executives who run Hollywood likewise appear to be thoroughly in bed with the Chinese government. In an era when nearly every big-budget Hollywood film is marketed to global audiences—including the billions of people in China—studios have shown that they are more than willing to edit, censor, and otherwise alter the final cuts of films to please the Chinese Communist Party. For years, studios have removed scenes from films and adjusted dialogue to avoid offending the sensibilities of the Chinese government.
One studio did a re-cut of the film Bohemian Rhapsody to remove any hint that Freddie Mercury was a homosexual—truly astonishing given the virtue signaling Hollywood typically does on LGBT issues, not to mention the impossibility of telling Mercury’s story without acknowledging his sexuality. Another studio cut several scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest to avoid any mention of “ghosts” or “cannibalism”—only to find that the Chinese censors rejected the film anyway. During the production of Iron Man 3, according to The Atlantic, Chinese regulators even visited the set of the film to ensure compliance with their standards.36
When a trailer for the film Top Gun: Maverick was released, people noticed that two patches Tom Cruise’s character had worn in the original Top Gun movie back in the 1980s—one from Japan, the other from Taiwan, both considered enemies of China—were mysteriously missing from his jacket. What’s curious about this, of course, is that as far as we know, no one had asked the makers of the movie to remove the patches. Apparently, they had simply done it hoping that they would be able to stop Chinese censors from getting upset. I publicly blasted the studio for their cowardice, noting that “Maverick would not be afraid of the Chinese communists!” Ultimately, the studio did the right thing and replaced the patches… but only after the movie had already been banned in China.37
While the woke neo-Marxist revolution is teaching ordinary Americans to censor themselves before speaking because they don’t want the woke mob to come for them, the old-fashioned Marxist Chinese Communist Party—the most prominent representative of the original old-fashioned brand of Marxism on the world stage—is successfully training our powerful institutions to censor themselves because they don’t want to pass up on lucrative business opportunities.
China, one of the most repressive nations on earth, which should have seen its power decline as the world grew democratic, is more powerful than ever—and the woke Left in the United States is enabling it.
Over the past few years, citizens of the United States have grown quite used to seeing people grovel in public. We’ve seen celebrities who’ve committed sins against the woke ideology issue apologies for their behavior, practically begging not to be cancelled. We’ve seen ordinary people who’ve done nothing wrong do the same thing.
In China, this isn’t a new phenomenon. It has been going on for decades. During the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, in the last ten years of the reign of Chairman Mao Zedong, it was common for mobs of revolutionaries to hold “struggle sessions” in the town square, where people who held views deemed offensive by the regime were publicly humiliated, beaten, and forced to recant their beliefs.
This era, which came to a close only with the death of Mao, ended horribly. Millions of Chinese citizens died as the result of execution or starvation (the two reliable outcomes of communism everywhere that the Marxists have succeeded in implementing it). Even as late as the early 1990s, the Chinese economy was still extremely poor. The primary method of transportation for the average Chinese citizen, even in major cities, was the bicycle.
Slowly, however, things began to change. In the 1990s, the United States led a worldwide effort to bring China into the global economy. The leaders of our country believed that if we allowed China to experience the benefits of capitalism, the Chinese Communist Party would grow less authoritarian and more democratic.38 Some of the top political scientists in the world argued that this would lead to prosperity for everyone in the world.39
That didn’t happen.
Today, the Chinese Communist Party is more brutal and authoritarian than ever. During the CCP’s celebration in 2021 to mark one hundred years since its founding, President Xi Jinping warned that anyone who stood against the rise of China on the world stage would have “their heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel.”40
There was a time when China could only exert that kind of power within the borders of its own country. Chinese citizens who spoke out against the government were jailed, or even killed. Anyone who said things that the regime deemed offensive was forced to publicly recount his views and issue a prompt apology for having expressed them in the first place. This is what happened, as you’ll recall, to the scientists and doctors who attempted to blow the whistle about Covid-19. They were forced to issue retractions, and they were jailed. At least one of them died.41
But lately, the power of the Chinese Communist Party has been extending outward. Today, largely because American corporations depend so heavily on Chinese consumers to make money, the CCP has the ability to force citizens of other countries to issue public apologies when they offend the sensibilities of the regime.
It happens all the time.
Consider what happened when John Cena, a popular WWF wrestler-turned-actor who was promoting a film, gave an interview in which he referred to Taiwan as a country.42 I’m sure that Cena didn’t think carefully about using the word “country” in reference to Taiwan. He had just been there during the promotional tour. But in China—and now, if the Chinese communists get their way, in the United States as well—using that word in reference to Taiwan is forbidden.
The controversy stems from the Chinese Civil War, which took place intermittently between 1927 and 1949. During this war, which was extremely bloody, two parties fought for control of China. The nationalists, led by the Western-supported leader Chiang Kai-shek, eventually lost to the communists, who were led by Mao Zedong. The “winning team,” so to speak, took over the Chinese mainland including the capital city, while the nationalists fled to the tiny island of Taiwan, where they established a small democratic outpost in the largely authoritarian East that is still (barely) hanging on today. Taiwan is an economic powerhouse, one of the most prosperous nations in the world. But it faces enormous military peril.
The Chinese Communist Party, of course, sees this island as a rebel territory of communist China, not a country in its own right. President Xi Jinping and other members of his party believe that one day—possibly very soon—the Chinese people will reclaim Taiwan and bring the country together again. Anyone who goes against this notion—even if that person is not a Chinese citizen—risks giving offense to the Chinese government.
And these days, giving offense to the Chinese government means losing the opportunity to show films and hold sports events in the country, which in turn means the loss of a lot of money. Which, it seems, is what Western celebrities, even those who indulge in endless moral preening about the supposed sins of the United States and other Western powers, seem to care about most.
Within days, Hollywood tough guy John Cena had recorded a message to the people of China (remarkably, he was speaking in Mandarin Chinese) in which he personally apologized for giving offense to the Chinese people43—the ones under the regime of President Xi Jinping, that is, not the Chinese in the free country of Taiwan.
All this over the use of one word that the Chinese government didn’t like.
Unfortunately, Cena is not alone in his willingness to be silenced, censored, and otherwise pushed around by the Chinese Communist Party. That totalitarian government has also exerted pressure on star athletes such as LeBron James, who in recent years has been much nicer to China than he’s ever been to the government of the country he lives in.
Late in 2019, for instance, as thousands of young pro-democracy protestors were filling the streets of Hong Kong to speak out against the CCP’s repressive policies, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets (in my parochial opinion, America’s finest basketball franchise), tweeted out a message of solidarity with the protestors.
“Fight for freedom,” he wrote. “Stand with Hong Kong.”
Again, this might seem innocuous at first glance, especially to American citizens who have long been used to being able to speak their minds without consequences. What Daryl Morey was supporting, oddly enough, was the notion that everyone in the world—not just Americans—should enjoy these same rights, or at least have the opportunity to fight for them.
LeBron James, who surely knows that NBA executives make millions of dollars every year through deals with the Chinese Communist Party (and who personally benefits from those millions), did not agree. Asked about Morey’s comments in October of 2019, James said Morey “wasn’t educated” about the subject he had tweeted about.
“So many people could have been harmed,” James said, “not only financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually, so, just be careful what we tweet, what we say, what we do. Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech, there can be a lot of negative that comes from that.”44
Clearly, these are the words of someone who has freedom of speech—who has it because he lives in the United States of America, where that right is guaranteed even for people who say things that are vile, racist, and stupid in public.
When LeBron James goes on Twitter to suggest, for instance, that he lives in a systemically racist society where Black people are routinely murdered by police officers, as he did several times in 2020,45 he is able to do so because he has freedom of speech. The same is true when he speaks about the United States’ response to the Russian detainment of WNBA star Brittney Griner, wondering aloud on a television show whether Griner would “even want to go back” to such a horrible country.46
This, apparently, is the kind of “education” (or “reeducation,” to use the term of LeBron’s preferred government) that he wishes Daryl Morey had gone through before speaking about current events. In athletics today—and in entertainment—nothing but the most rabidly neo-Marxist, anti-American sentiments will do when it comes to politics.
This kind of anti-American propaganda never fails to make the woke here at home feel good. It reinforces their belief that the world they live in is cruel and repressive, and that they’re noble for speaking out against it.
The Chinese Communist Party also loves it. In recent years, it has become extremely common for Chinese leaders and diplomats, on the increasingly infrequent occasions when they are presented with China’s horrific history of human rights abuses, to rattle off the talking points of the woke, neo-Marxist American Left to defend themselves.
When confronted with their horrific human rights record, the Chinese communists predictably respond, How can the Americans criticize anyone when they have a police force that routinely murders Black citizens with impunity?47
This is, of course, a lie. Most normal people in America know it. But as long as the lie is out there, the Chinese Communist Party will be able to use it on the world stage as a weapon against the United States.
In March of 2021, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—an African-American woman named Linda Thomas-Greenfield—got up in front of the U.N. General Assembly and said that racism “continues to be a daily challenge” in the United States, and that “for millions, it’s more than a challenge. It’s deadly.”
Later in the speech, Thomas-Greenfield made reference to the horrible human rights abuses committed by China and other nations.
When the Chinese representative to the United Nations rose shortly thereafter, she scolded the United States for daring to talk down to other nations, given its own “abuses.” The woman denied that there was a “genocide” in Xinjiang province, sporting the same creepy, Orwellian affect that I’d heard from the Chinese ambassador in Washington years earlier.
“If the U.S. truly cared about human rights, they should address the deep-seated problems of racial discrimination, social injustice and police brutality, on their own soil.”48
At some level, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear the Chinese communists repeating the U.S. ambassador’s words back at her. Before she was nominated, Thomas-Greenfield had been paid $1,500 to give a speech effusively praising China at Savannah State University’s Confucius Institute, which is controlled and funded by the Chinese Communist Party.49 I opposed her nomination on those grounds, but every single Democrat nevertheless voted to confirm her.50
Here, we can see how destructive anti-American sentiment can be—not only to students who are forced to learn it in their classrooms from the age of five, or to academics who have to waste their time studying it in American universities. This kind of talk, especially when it’s based on complete lies, is destructive to all American citizens, who may soon see our nation weakened significantly on the world stage as those lies spread.
Since I arrived in the Senate over a decade ago, I have been warning about China—which I maintain poses the single greatest geopolitical threat facing the United States for the next century.51 My first year as a senator, I gave a speech urging that we can’t deal with China “by embracing arm-in-arm and singing kumbaya.”52 At the time, that was very much a minority view; all the Democrats and most of the Republicans disagreed. When they looked to China, they saw nothing but dollar signs.
The Covid pandemic opened millions of people’s eyes to the evils of the Chinese government. As a result, mine is no longer a lonely voice in the wilderness; now, I’ve been joined by a growing number who realize just how malevolent the Chinese communists are.
For me, it’s visceral: I hate communists.
And we very much need clear vision and a detailed, systemic strategy to defeat them. Our approach should be modeled after Reagan’s strategy that won the Cold War and defeated the Soviet Union.
It should start by shining a light of truth on the communists. Reagan astonished the intellectual elites when he referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” When he said Marxism-Leninism would end up “on the ash heap of history” and when he said his strategy in the Cold War was “very simple: we win, they lose,” Democrats and the intelligentsia derided him as an ignorant philistine. But when he stood before the Brandenburg Gate and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” his words changed history.
We need to do the same with China. Speak with clarity. Call out their evil. Their murder, torture, thievery, concentration camps, oppression.
Like the Soviets, the Chinese are incredibly sensitive and vulnerable to the power of sunshine. For example, in 2016 I introduced legislation to rename the street in front of the Chinese embassy to be “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” after the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was imprisoned multiple times for standing up to Chinese oppression.53 Repeatedly, I went to the Senate floor to try to pass my bill. And repeatedly, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat from California, objected. She argued that my legislation would irritate the Chinese government. Yes, I replied, that was the point. To shame them.
In the face of Democrat obstruction, I placed a hold on every Obama State Department nominee. And the Obama White House freaked out, coming to me and asking what they could do to get me to lift my holds. “Pass my bill,” I replied. So the White House leaned on Feinstein, and she lifted her objection. And my legislation passed the Senate one hundred to zero. Unfortunately, the Republican House refused to take up the legislation (as I said, being soft on China is a bipartisan problem), and so it did not get enacted into law.54
However, there’s an epilogue to the story. In the spring of 2017, I was having breakfast with Trump’s new secretary of state Rex Tillerson at his office in Foggy Bottom. We were discussing many aspects of foreign affairs, but China was front and center. Rex told me he had recently been visiting with his counterpart, the Chinese foreign minister, who had relayed China’s “top three” foreign-policy priorities. Rex continued, “Ted, it’s the darndest thing. One of their top three priorities is stopping your legislation renaming the street in front of their embassy.”
At the time, Liu Xiaobo had just passed away. But his widow Liu Xia had been placed under house arrest and was not allowed to leave China.55 Indeed, she still had not been able to collect the $1.5 million for her husband’s Nobel Peace Prize.56 I said to Rex, “Tell China, if they release Liu Xia I will stop pushing the bill. But, if they don’t release her, tell them I will continue to push it, and I will pass it. And you can tell them I’m not bluffing. They’ve seen that we’ve already passed it through the Senate unanimously once, and next time I’ll get it through the House as well, and President Trump will sign it.”
The next year, after eight years under house arrest, China released Liu Xia.57
Why? Because communist regimes fears accountability. They fear being called out. Our strategy for Liu Xiaobo Plaza was inspired by Reagan’s strategy decades earlier, when he renamed the street in front of the Soviet embassy “Sakharov Plaza,” after the famed Soviet dissident. A street renaming may seem unimportant, but it means everyone writing the embassy must write the name of the dissident. Everyone looking up directions on Google has to see the name of the dissident. And there is power in saying his name.
Just this year, I followed the very same strategy to call out Cuba, and unanimously passed legislation out of the Senate to rename the street in front of the Cuban embassy as “Oswaldo Payá Way,” after the heroic democracy activist who was murdered by the communist regime.58 When it passes the House (and I believe it will), every day the Cuban communists at the embassy—and everyone who comes to visit them—will be forced to look upon the name of the martyred hero.
China fears its dissidents. And it fears Taiwan. And Hong Kong. The reason is simple: both Taiwan and Hong Kong show that Chinese people can live in freedom—and the result is enormous prosperity. Xi is terrified that the 1.3 billion Chinese people suffering under communist oppression will look to Taiwan and Hong Kong and say, We want what they have.
For that reason, in 2019, I traveled to Pearl Harbor, and Japan, and India, and Taiwan, and Hong Kong, on a “friends and allies” tour surrounding China. The objective was to highlight the threat of China, and to rally support from our allies in the region. In Hong Kong, millions of democracy activists were in the streets. They were risking their lives, fighting against the brutal communist crackdown. Amazingly, they were waving American flags and holding signs with words from our nation’s Founding Fathers. I met with democracy activists, including the great Jimmy Lai (who has since been wrongfully imprisoned). And I gave a satellite interview on Face the Nation from Hong Kong, dressed in all black to show solidarity with the democracy protestors. I called out the CCP’s horrific human rights abuses. And called for us to stand with Hong Kong.59
Tragically, the Chinese government continued its vicious oppression, stripping the residents of Hong Kong of the civil liberties and economic freedom that they had enjoyed for a century under British rule and for two decades under the initial terms of China’s takeover. In response, I passed legislation to make sure the United States recognized that reality (the idea being that it endangered the safety and security of Americans not to acknowledge that China was exploiting Hong Kong to undermine our national security). Specifically, I filed the Hong Kong Reevaluation Act, which mandated a determination by the president on whether Hong Kong was still independent—and, if not, imposed countermeasures ending Hong Kong’s special status. My bill was incorporated into the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, which President Trump signed into law. And, pursuant to the language of my bill, the Trump administration did indeed find that it could no longer determine Hong Kong was independent, and therefore implemented the countermeasures against China.60
We need to contest China, and not just overseas. We also need to fight against Chinese espionage and propaganda here at home. And we need to use every tool we have to fight back. In the Senate, I’ve introduced dozens of pieces of legislation fighting back against the misdeeds of the Chinese communists. In my first term in the Senate, one of the key pieces of legislation I authored and passed was to cut off Department of Defense language-program funding for any university that allowed a Chinese-controlled Confucius Institute. At the time, there were over one hundred Confucius Institutes at American universities across the country, all funded and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The centers engaged in both espionage and propaganda: directly monitoring what students and professors were saying and doing on campus (and what they were researching), and actively pushing the preferred narrative of the CCP (including suppressing discussion of human rights abuses and democratic uprisings such as Tiananmen Square). As a result of my legislation, passed in 2018, dozens of Confucius Institutes closed permanently.61
Nevertheless, China continues to flood money into our universities. To take just one notable example: the University of Pennsylvania, home of the “Biden Center,” a think tank named after the president, has accepted over $100 million from communist China.62 This was no doubt in significant part as a result of the active solicitation of then former vice president Biden; the desire of politicians to erect monuments to their own hubris is strong, and China is more than willing to exploit that vanity to try to purchase a major U.S. university.
Combatting Chinese propaganda also requires confronting the American media. When it comes to Chinese influence, the CCP seeks to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think about China. And Hollywood, as we have seen, has been more than happy to comply. In response, I filed the SCRIPT Act, which stands for Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, Protecting Talkies (as silly as it sounds, sometimes creative acronyms help legislation get traction). The SCRIPT Act doesn’t try to put a mandate on Hollywood; instead, it would prohibit the Defense Department from providing technical assistance or access to government assets for U.S. companies that censor their films for screening in China (where censoring meant altering “the content of the film in response to, or in anticipation of, a request by an official of the Government of the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party”). The federal government often allows movie producers to use government assets—think jets, ships, tanks, aircraft carriers, helicopters—to film action scenes in movies. The SCRIPT Act simply says, If you’re going to actively censor on behalf of the CCP, the U.S. government isn’t going to help you out.
When the SCRIPT Act was introduced, Big Hollywood freaked out. They launched a major lobbying campaign trying to stop it, including contacting all the other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (on which I serve) to try to kill the bill. They planned op-eds attacking the bill. And they worked with Democrats to try to gut the language. Nevertheless, last year we had a partial win: a version of SCRIPT was included in the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act and signed into law. It was, alas, watered down—subject to a waiver, and requiring “good faith” implementation. But it is in there: “None of the funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act may be used to knowingly provide active and direct support to any film, television, or other entertainment project if the Secretary of Defense has demonstrable evidence that the project has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party, or an entity under the direction of the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party, to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China.”63 And, in June of 2023, the Department of Defense issued formal guidelines implementing the SCRIPT Act and barring DOD production assistance to any movie that is likely to be complicit in CCP censorship.64 That’s a step in the right direction—and a big one.
I also filed another bill called the BEAMS Act, which was designed to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from granting a license to any America radio station controlled by China and broadcasting CCP propaganda. Specifically, the Chinese wanted to get an American license to broadcast Chinese-language radio out of Mexico and into the Southwest United States, in order to spread their propaganda directly to Americans. Here we scored another victory when, in significant part because of the legislation I had filed, the Trump FCC denied the license and stopped the Chinese effort.65
Finally, we need to act to reduce the American economy’s dependency on the Chinese supply chain. The Chinese government has systematically targeted our critical infrastructure, from advanced semiconductors to pharmaceuticals to critical minerals. During Covid, one state-controlled Chinese newspaper demanded that China cut off America’s supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals—literally putting the lives and health of millions of Americans at risk.66 The upside of their making that threat? It made obvious to anyone with any sense that America must not remain dependent on China for our vital needs.
Over the past decade, I’ve introduced multiple bills to delink our economy from China, so that the Chinese government will no longer have the ability to hold the American people hostage. One of those was the ORE Act, the Onshoring Rare Earths Act of 2020. The objective of that bill was for the United States to take control of the top of the critical minerals supply chain, which is a billion-dollar industry of mining and recycling that could be kick-started domestically. The key to doing so is to address the problem of U.S. investment capital money staying on the sidelines of the industry because of uncertainty regarding downstream domestic capacity and demand. The bill would have allowed a new tax deduction for 200 percent of the cost of purchasing or acquiring such critical minerals and metals extracted from deposits in the United States. Unfortunately, at least so far, Democrats have blocked the bill.
However, section 5 of ORE extended an existing Buy American mandate on the Defense Department to the entire supply chain: previously, the DOD had only been mandated to source critical mineral components from the United States if they were at the end of the supply chain, that is, “melted or produced.” My language expanded that mandate to the top of the whole supply chain, that is, “mined, refined, separated, melted, or produced.” And that language became law via the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. It will become effective January 1, 2026.67
Getting Democrats to stand up to China is a difficult task. That was never clearer than in 2021, when I forced a vote on the Senate floor to ban the importation of electric vehicles or EV parts manufactured using slave labor in concentration camps in China. With over one million Uighurs currently imprisoned in concentration camps in China, that should have been an easy vote. Indeed, when I tell Texans about the vote, they assume everyone agreed that America should not be actively supporting slave labor. Tragically, every single Senate Democrat except Joe Manchin voted no. When John Kerry was asked about the Biden administration buying millions of dollars of EVs and EV parts from Chinese concentration camps, he replied, “That’s not my lane.”68
My response, only slightly tongue in cheek, was to name John Kerry the concentration camp “Customer of the Year.”69
I wish that were hyperbole, but it’s not. The Democrats persistently enable the use of slave labor by the Chinese. And the corrupt corporate media, themselves fully in bed with China, say nary a word about it.
The Marxists’ long march through our institutions, commenced six decades ago, has succeeded in capturing the commanding heights of virtually every organ for the transmission of ideas. Education (K–12 and the universities), journalism, Big Tech, Big Business, science, and entertainment… all have been overtaken by the Cultural Marxists. And communist China is a central nexus intertwined with it all.
But, fortunately, Marxism survives only in darkness. The more of us who stand up, who shine the light, who speak the truth, the more readily we’ll take our country back. The Berlin Wall fell, and so will the Woke Wall of Idiocy. America remains, I believe, a center-right country. Our people continue to have a deep reservoir of common sense. That’s why the Cultural Marxists operate quietly, because they know their ideas are not widely shared. But every time another one of their abuses is exposed, more and more people wake up to the threat. More and more of us are fighting back. And, if that keeps happening—if we are smart, strategic, systemic, and relentless (just like the Marxists have been)—I fully believe we will take America back.