On the latest episode of the “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) discussed with co-host Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire the danger that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses to the world.
After stating that he hopes the United states and the world will have a “fundamental reassessment” of their relationships with China, Cruz outlined several of the reasons the communist nation is so dangerous:
I’ve been saying for a long time, China is the single most important, the most significant geopolitical competitor to the United States for the next century. They’ve got 1.3 billion people; they’re governed by a communist government that lies, that murders, that tortures its citizens; they invest billions in their military, billions in expanding their economic influence – and I think this pandemic really illustrates just how dangerous that repressive regime of lying is.
Later, Knowles asked Cruz about the CCP’s influence over Hollywood, which is vast.
Cruz replied: “Hollywood is almost entirely bought and paid for by China. It’s such a big part – if you’re making a movie, you don’t want to tick off China because it’s too big a part of your global revenues, and so the great free speech warriors of Hollywood are perfectly happy to let China edit out portions of their movie they don’t like.”
The senator offered two examples. He first cited the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which was reportedly edited for Chinese audiences to eliminate subject matter related to Mercury’s sexuality. He then talked about how the upcoming Tom Cruise film “Top Gun: Maverick” removed the Japanese and Taiwanese flags from the main character’s jacket so as not to anger China.
Cruz stated that he has introduced legislation called the Script Act, which “says if any Hollywood producer, if any movie maker lets the Chinese communist government censor or edit a film, that they can’t have access to our military, to our ships, to our planes, to everything they use to film movies like ‘Top Gun.’”
After discussing the security issues surrounding Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which “is essentially a global surveillance outfit,” according to Cruz, Knowles noted how “addicted” the United States has become to Chinese goods and services.
Senator Cruz then spoke about the “host of strategies” the CCP employs, including lying, “murder,” detainment and “torture” of more than a million Uighurs in “concentration camps,” and the mass theft of intellectual property.
They steal on a widespread level, on a military level, on a commercial level, on an academic level, they censor, and they also extort. They use access to their market – there’s a reason Hollywood’s terrified of ticking them off; there’s a reason the NBA is terrified of ticking them off … because they’ll close off their market to anyone who does.
Cruz then noted that during a tour of friendly countries Taiwan, Japan, India, and Hong Kong last fall, “every one of [the] meetings and discussions there where, what do we do about China? What do we do about the military threat? The diplomatic threat? The economic threat?”
Cruz also offered a stunning analogy:
Something I’ve said many times is Hong Kong is the new Berlin. Just as Berlin was the outpost of freedom against the Soviet Union, against communism when Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” Hong Kong is where we’re seeing the touch points of this battle against China.
He then said what he hopes will happen as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic:
I hope that Americans are waking up. I do think – for a long time, when I would lay out the harms of the Chinese communist government and the need to fight against it, the need not to be dependent on China, you would get almost crickets in the Senate from both Democrats and Republicans … their lying, their cover-up on coronavirus has now taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and cost trillions of dollars in poverty and suffering. I hope that really causes people to open their eyes to what the danger is here.
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