The Conversation America Needs To Have

Last night, President Trump gave a prime time address. On its face, the president’s speech was about election meddling.

In general, of course, he’s right. We do need to pass the SAVE America Act and secure our elections. It’s not Jim Crow 2.0 to require ID to vote or to show proof of citizenship to register to vote.

But beneath the president’s big speech last night lurked a threat far greater than the question of election interference or election security.

No one seems particularly interested in covering that threat, and it is the greatest external threat our country has ever faced.

That threat is China.

They’re a threat to America. They have many allies here in the United States. Bernie Sanders does open events with the Chinese. Hassan Piker has an actual Chinese flag in the background. Zohran Mamdani, China-friendly Democratic Socialists of America, and many big corporations that want to do business over there are all a part of this.

China must be defeated.

China is not a strategic opponent. They’re not a country with whom we should seek a conciliatory relationship.

They are an enemy, period. They are the most insidious and dangerous enemy we have ever faced.

Nazi Germany never put phones with their propaganda in the hands of your children. The Soviet Union didn’t own trillions of dollars of American bonds.

China is not only a country that has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens, that supports literally all of our enemies abroad, that unleashed a global pandemic that killed millions of people and shut down the entire Western economy, and that wants to develop artificial intelligence to take over our minds and outcompete our military; they’re a country with global ambitions, and their ambition runs right up against the United States.

President Trump stated:

Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.

The accusation is not that China hacked voting machines or changed voter tabulation outcomes; it’s that they gained access to hundreds of millions of voter records.

Some of that is public information. You or I could gain access to voter records because voter registration is, in many states, public information.

The question is why China was doing that. Answer: They were doing that in order to manipulate American citizens. They were going to do a deep dive into the registration status of Americans and then use that information in order to target Americans.

The president contended last night that there were members of the Deep State — people who are career appointees in the executive branch — who spent the year 2020 suppressing information about China meddling, essentially on behalf of Democrats.

One declassified document, which appears to be from the national intelligence wing, said, “Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, China had extensive plans to utilize potential (blacked out) and cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the U.S. government. The China plans were designed to exploit U.S. societal fissures and vulnerabilities, to influence U.S. and other audiences, and, by extension, U.S. government decision-making. The plans addressed several scenarios, including military conflict between the United States and China, as well as other potential crises.”

China was attempting to exploit U.S. fissures and vulnerabilities, perceived or real, including racial tensions. They would allege that white people hate black people, incite demonstrations and marches as evidence of racial divides, increase the level of conflict between police and anti-racism activists, and feed any sense that U.S. law enforcement resents people of color.

Did that stuff materialize in 2020? Of course it did. They wanted to ramp up political party disagreements and disagreements between Congress and the Trump administration. They wanted to ramp up international propaganda. The intelligence stated, “China had developed capabilities to project themes on these topics into social media (TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others) as well as mainstream media, through a variety of overt and hidden influencers and media contributors. One of the options included gathering information on senior U.S. government officials to influence public opinion on those officials.”

We should have suspected all of this. These subversion operations, demoralization operations, really, have been long-time communist policy dating back to the Soviet Union.

Former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge published a report in April that addressed this. She reported that the CIA, led by Director Gina Haspel, would not document the Chinese influence operations formally, out of concern that President Trump would use the intelligence to his advantage.

This, presumably, was the sort of Deep State Trump was talking about.

If you actually would like to end the threat to the United States, you have to contain and strangle Chinese power. You must. China is not a strategic opponent. They are an enemy.

Here are some things we should do.

First, we need to economically wreck them. That means, yes, tariffs. It means we need to crack down on our trade with China. But to do that, we have to strike better trade deals with our allies in the region. If you’re going to make people choose between China and us, we have to offer a carrot to our friends and a stick to our enemies.

It also means we have to radically lower our spending. We can’t just keep selling our bonds to China. We cannot make the future of the country dependent on China holding our debt, because that means any time they want to hurt us, they just sell our debt into the open market and destroy our capacity to borrow.

It means that we do have to restore important manufacturing in countries other than China. That doesn’t mean all the way back home, which is very expensive sometimes. It means you have to go to allies. Sometimes you have to manufacture in India, for example. We need to draw closer to India.

We need to go after the countries that trade in necessary valuables with China. We need to secure our supply lines for rare earth minerals.

The United States is the economic gorilla on planet Earth, and we ought to throw our weight around. With regard to China, this notion that we thrive and China thrives, China has played the markets against us. China has used a certain opening of its economy in order to maximize its own leverage and power. We need to reverse that.

Second, we must rebuild the American military. This is not optional. This is necessary. The president has called for a significant upgrade in our military capacity, including for things like Patriot missiles and THAADs. Democrats are stalling this on the basis that they’re angry about the Iran war.

We should point out that Iran does not exist as a baseline military power without Chinese and Russian help. These are people who could not construct an IKEA box, but somehow they have fairly sophisticated weaponry courtesy of the Chinese.

We need to build up our military, and that means getting sophisticated about it. China is building a massive drone capacity. We need to work with firms to develop sophisticated weaponry to stall out the Chinese threat. There is no excuse for the American government purposely handicapping and kneecapping our own military capacity.

Third, we have to crack down on China’s technological infiltration of American society. That means we need to crack down on their information operations. It also means cracking down on nonprofits that act essentially as pass-throughs for the Chinese Communist government. We need to end the practice of people dropping babies from China. We need to end student visas from China. Why are we educating hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who go back to China and bring stolen IP and knowledge back to our enemies?

There are a ton of people in positions of power who want to keep making nice with the Chinese. Bernie Sanders has been doing a full-on propaganda effort on behalf of the Chinese to undermine our AI industries. Believe me, the Chinese want nothing more than to destroy our forward capacity with AI. They want us to destroy the lead that we currently hold in AI, and they are succeeding because they are spreading a bunch of nonsense about data centers and how they’re going to wreck our industrial farmlands.

There are 875 million acres of farmland in the United States. If we were to build all of the data centers you could possibly want in the United States, four or five million acres out of 875 million acres, and it’s not all going to be built on farmland — what are we talking about here?

Some large-scale businesses are trying to do business in China. This was the problem with Apple.

Very few politicians are willing to stand up and say the truth, but President Trump is one of them. He has reoriented the political landscape regarding China. Until President Trump took office, most American politicians were still preaching the idea that China was a strategic partner. Trump largely moved them from strategic partners to strategic opponents.

In 2014, after Xi Jinping became the Chinese dictator, he wrote, “The battle for mind control happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They’ll have the initiative throughout the competition in combat. When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don’t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.”

These are our enemies, and we need to fight them using all the means at our disposal.