The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be with you. We’ve got another great show, as always, so many great guests. And remember, go to ProAmericaReport.com. You’ll see all these great interviews there as standalone segments, as a podcast. You do a search, you’ll find them all. It will be great, I promise you. I have such good guests and such great ideas from so many of you here.
In a few moments, we’ll talk. We’ll get an update from Chris Chmielenski of Numbers USA. He’s the vice president over there. Numbers USA is one of the two, I say there’s two premier entities tracking what’s happening at our border. They know what’s going on. They explain it well. The other one is Center for Immigration Studies, where Todd Bensman is. But Chris Chmielenski is great. NumbersUSA, Roy Beck’s shop NumbersUSA.com. We’ll talk with him in a few moments. But I have to be honest with you. I prerecorded the interview after we talked to Chris. It’s an interview with Chris Fenton.
Chris Fenton is the man who wrote the book FEEDING THE DRAGON: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business. He wrote that two years ago, and he put it out.
He’s a business guy. He was a business man in China. He was a guy who rolled out movies. He produced movies. I think that’s the term. He was one of the top executives at one of these studios that helped produce major movies. And he rolled them out in China, and he tells the stories in the book in China. They wanted him to come. They wanted to have these big name stars. It was a big, big deal. They had all kinds of the Marvel, the Disney and the Marvel. The NBA was there, as he’s talking about all that. And then he realized that they were learning how to do it, the Chinese. And once they figured it out, they were never going to allow the NBA or the studios or any Disney to make the money there. They’re going to do it themselves because they knew the market they had, a billion, 1.2, 1.3 billion people. And so they milked the American system, the American corporations, the American market system for what it wanted, which was access to audience, access to money.
And it worked. You can’t blame them. You can’t blame the studios or the NBA for acting rational and saying, well, I could get to a billion, three and 1.2, 1.3 billion people. I’ll do it. And then they decided to do their own thing and pull back. It’s a little bit like what’s happened. And again, I don’t think we should blame the Chinese for their business model or their model of functioning. We should describe it and we should reject it. But don’t blame them. They think it works great, whether it’s tech transfer. They forced companies to sign deals where they would share the technology, and they would steal it. They just stole it a lot of times. I mean, this was their plan. So anyway, it’s a great book. It’s an important book.
Anyway, I called him up. I said, I want to talk to you because we have this problem. Here’s what you need to know.
We have watched our leadership in this country stumble into what looks like a major international incident, and he will talk more about this. But what you need to know right now is Nancy Pelosi is so arrogant and so stupid, mostly arrogant, that she announces she’s going to Taiwan.
She forgets to say to her own team, Biden, everybody else, I’m going to Taiwan.
When they’re asked, the American government, Biden, the Pentagon says, oh, hold off on that. Not a good time to do that. Because why?
Because the Chinese don’t want it.
So the Chinese regime is protesting Pelosi’s visit, and now we’ve got every Republican from here to Newt Gingrich and back saying Pelosi has to be allowed to go. We shouldn’t kowtow to the Chinese, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t disagree, except here’s the history.
Okay, let me walk you through the history. I went back and studied this because I care about it. It really started mostly, I think, my analysis in the ’80s, when Tip O’Neill decided that he was going to have his own sort of foreign policy as speaker of the House, and he was contrast to Reagan, and Tip O’Neill cared a lot about Ireland, cared a lot about the Irish problem, all that, because he was Irish American. He also cared about Latin America. And he got himself involved, and Tip O’Neill became sort of, in my mind, the international activist.
Why? The Speaker of the House has no constitutional authority for international affairs, except, of course, that the House of Representatives controls the budget and therefore has a big say over who gets what money, right? You want to get someone’s attention, grab them by the wallet.
After that, it was Katy bar the doors.
You had Gingrich, who had his own interests in terms of international expressions. You had down through Hastert, Boehner, Ryan and of course, Pelosi. So Pelosi, she’s in charge of the House, Schumer’s in charge of the Senate. Biden’s in the White House. The Democrats, their team has control.
They should be able to put out a coherent foreign policy, vis a vis China and Taiwan.
And instead, with this coming and going and up and down, I’m going to go. I’m not going to go. You shouldn’t go. Maybe you shouldn’t go. Military says, don’t go, et cetera, et cetera. We’re now in a position where either Nancy Pelosi goes to Taiwan and proves that she can do what she wants and the Chinese are offended and the Chinese are mad, or she doesn’t go and we should be offended that we kowtowed to the Chinese. We’re in the perfect Hobson’s choice. They call it. You lose either way, lose lose situation. There’s no win win in this one.
It’s lose lose and it’s self inflicted.
And let me be clear. Nothing positive happens because Pelosi goes there. Except what? Except that the people of Taiwan get a signal that they’ll sell more weapons, they’ll sell more of the military-industrial complex’s gear. And that is what Taiwan wants. And that is what the lobbyists of Pelosi want. But that is not what’s in the interest of the American people, of we the people. We do not need at this point to be engaged in a back and forth, in a game of Pelosi chicken with the Chinese on this subject. Are you kidding me?
There’s about ten other aspects of our relationship with China that needs to be addressed. And let me be clear. I’m not saying we should walk away from Taiwan. We just don’t need to do this sort of exercise in inanity. We could address the Fentanyl problem. We could address the Huawei problem. We could address the problem we are addressing actually, some of the computer chip problems. I think there is some policy changes, but we have watched this president, this Pentagon, and Chris and I recorded this interview. We’ll play in a few moments. So you’ll hear me echoing some of this.
But what you need to know is it’s not just incompetence, it’s arrogance. The level of arrogance amongst the Democrats is a threat to peace in the world. It’s a threat to America. It’s actually against our interests.
This happened to some extent with the Ukrainian thing, where we were fed all of the Ukrainian propaganda and all the anti Putin propaganda, and we were supposed to all salute, and a lot of people did, but a lot of people said, well, let’s be careful. We don’t want to get in, war and all. And I think we dodged the war. Although there’s more and more indication that we’re giving the Ukraine weapons and drones and things that are being used. If I’m the Chinese excuse me, if I’m the Russians, I’m getting pretty sick of it. I’m saying, I thought you guys said you weren’t going to fight. It sure looks like you’re fighting. But what you need to know as to China, we have to be smarter. We have to understand what’s going on.
We have to not give the Chinese opportunities to embarrass us, to divide us, to confuse us, to put ourselves into camps. This camp, that camp, this group, that group. I’m for this, I’m for that. And it’s crazy.
It’s crazy. And the only problem worse than what we’re doing is that every day it seems like Joe Biden doesn’t have real control.
I’d like to know who is running this government.
It doesn’t look like it’s Biden. At this point, I think the burden of proof has shifted. Is it Ron Klain? Is it Susan Rice? Is it Anthony Blinkin? I mean, my own opinion, it’s Susan Rice. Because Anthony Blinken was her assistant and Lisa Monaco is her best friend. And over at the CIA, either the number one or number two, I can’t remember which, was a Susan Rice aide. It feels to me all things lead back to Susan Rice. But we have a right to ask now because this is a mess. This is a mess of a foreign policy. It’s a mess of a world, interactions, world politique.
It’s a disaster. And God help us, I hope to pray it’s not a real disaster. It’s just a mess and ugly and embarrassing. We can recover from that, but it can’t come fast enough. I want a different Speaker of the House just to reset from this embarrassment of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and everybody else. All right, that’s all we got. I got to take a break.
When we come back we will get an update fromChris Chmielenski of Numbers USA. And also then we’ll hear from Chris Fenton, our friend. So stay tuned. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. We will be back in a moment.
