EPISODE 230: “An Action Plan to Thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s Aim to Achieve Global Dominion” with Frank Gaffney

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the Bill Walton Show, featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists and thinkers, fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics and human flourishing, interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:24):

Welcome To the Bill Walton Show. I’m Bill Walton. The Chinese Communist Party has been at War with America for the past three decades. That’s the subject of a very important new book, the Indictment, which was pulled together and written by Frank Gaffney, who we all know as founder of the Center for Security Policy, and hosts a terrific radio TV show, Securing America with Frank Gaffney, on Real America’s Voice, weeknights.

(00:57):

And I think Monday night’s a special night because I appear often with Frank on Mondays, and we enjoy weekly conversations about just this topic, China and its machinations in the world. It’s maybe the biggest topic we face, because it’s not only a national security issue, a threat from abroad, but if you look at China’s strategy, it’s been to infiltrate the United States, and they’ve done that stealthily and effectively, as I mentioned, for decades. So we have a big problem here, and we need to do something about it. And Frank has put together a book, not only describing the problem, which is what most people do with books, but coming up with some terrific solutions. Frank, welcome.

Frank Gaffney (01:40):

Thank you, Bill. It’s great to be with you. And thank you for all the contributions you make to our program.

Bill Walton (01:44):

Well, we like to… We’ve got to do it together.

Frank Gaffney (01:48):

Yeah, we do for sure. Thank you for helping frame what we’re doing with this book as well. It’s a product of a lot of contributions that you, among others have made to a series of webinars that we’ve conducted under the banner of the committee on the present danger of China over the past 11 or so months, aimed at basically addressing two really important topics. One is, what’s the nature of the warfare that the Chinese communists have waged against us for decades, going back probably to the early 1990s in fact? What toll has it taken on us? How have they gotten away with it? And the costs that have been associated with it so far.

(02:34):

Point one and point two, who’s been helping them do it? Who, as you say inside America have been enablers or facilitators or apologists at least for what they’ve been doing to us. And the content was so rich as a result of the excellent inputs that we received from people like yourself, that I wanted to make sure that it was accessible to the largest possible audience.

(03:02):

And there are only certain number of people that are going to wade through 100 plus hours of video. So we’ve got the highlights of, I think the most important insights and analyses. And of course, also the recommendations that came out of all of those webinars in this book. And I’m happy to say it’s seemingly being very well received by the public, and that’s the first step. We want it to be received well by the people representing them and who are in the best position to act on the recommendations we’ve got for specific steps to correct what’s happened so far, to penalize the Chinese for doing it to us. And not least to try to deter what seems to be in the offing now, which is the next phase, not the pre-kinetic, as they say, kind of warfare they’ve waged so far, but possibly a shooting kind as well.

Bill Walton (03:58):

Well you joke with me when you’re interviewing me, you call me a recovering master of the universe, which I get a kick out of. I never was really, but maybe a little.

Frank Gaffney (04:09):

Yes, of course you were.

Bill Walton (04:11):

But the thing that’s striking is that Wall Street, multinational corporations in America, Congress, the Academy really, and Hollywood, have been working with China for decades, the three decades we’ve talked about, during which time the Chinese had a deeper plan. And we seem to be oblivious. And I only referenced my Wall Street days because I think I was part of the problem.

(04:39):

The idea was we were going to make China be a member of the World Trade Organization. We’re going to do business with them, they’re going to get rich, they’re going to become democratic, and they’ll be just like us and will have happily forever. Well, that didn’t happen because of the Chinese deeper agenda. And I guess my question for you is, you’ve been watching this for years, how did this percolate along? And when did it emerge for most of us that this is a big threat?

Frank Gaffney (05:11):

That’s an important question. So I’d say that the single most important line of attack by the Chinese Communist Party against us in this unrestricted warfare has been their elite capture, their ability to suborn, seduce, co-opt, compromise or otherwise induce to do their bidding the elites of our country. And by that we mean yes, masters of the universe on Wall Street, we mean business leaders more generally. We mean, as you said, media, academia, Hollywood, and of course not least our political elites both in the executive branch and in the Congress.

(05:58):

And in part, the answer to the question of why haven’t more of us really understood what’s been going on here is, most of us are people who are focused, as we tend to be in free societies, on our own business, our families, our businesses, literally our communities. We rely on certain people, people not least that we elect to represent us, to be looking out for our interests, protecting us-

Bill Walton (06:30):

Minding our store.

Frank Gaffney (06:31):

Minding the store. Exactly. And I think when you combine those two, our misplaced trust in people who turned out to have been co-opted or captured, as the Chinese call it, by the enemy, it’s not a surprise that so few of us really haven’t gotten it until now.

Bill Walton (06:51):

But the thing that I realized, I always thought elite capture was the pejorative. Peter Schweizer’s used it effectively in his books, but it’s right there in the Chinese Communist Party playbook.

Frank Gaffney (07:03):

It is.

Bill Walton (07:03):

It’s one of their key strategies. And it’s not only happened here in the United States, but their Belton Road initiative, which has them helping countries all over the world with infrastructure projects-

Frank Gaffney (07:15):

Capturing.

Bill Walton (07:16):

Capturing, okay, thank you. And it’s happened. If you look at what’s happened in South America, central America, Africa, parts of the Middle East now, it’s interesting, not so much right around China because the Chinese neighbors, immediate neighbors don’t trust them at all. So it’s been more in these other kinds. They’ve had an explicit strategy to go in and co-op the leadership of these countries.

Frank Gaffney (07:43):

It’s again, same playbook, it’s just using mostly money. Sometimes there’s ideological affiliation-

Bill Walton (07:50):

Sure.

Frank Gaffney (07:51):

Sometimes there’s some coercion, sexual entrapment, what have you, but mostly it’s money. They simply buy these people, whether they’re elites here, whether they’re elites in these countries developing around the world. It’s probably mostly just a question of how costly is it to the Chinese? But it’s chump change in the great scheme of things. Our colleague and friend Trevor Loudon, a member of our committee on the present danger in China is very fond of saying, “Look, when you contemplate the costs associated with a war to conquer another country to achieve your hegemonic objectives, compared to buying off their elites, it’s a trivial amount of money.”

Bill Walton (08:31):

It’s trivial. Yeah.

Frank Gaffney (08:35):

And it is highly effective, and has been. But my point is really this, you ask the question, are Americans even now actually alive to how serious the danger is? And I would say not adequately, but more than they have been, despite this effort by the elites to sort of keep them in the dark.

(08:55):

And the reason I think that’s so Bill is charge number four in this nine count indictment of ours is the biological warfare attack that the Chinese Communist party deliberately unleashed against our country, involving a virus out of a biological warfare laboratory in Wuhan, called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And this was the subject of another book that we’ve done called the CCP is At War with America. And it was a team B independent assessment that came up with this basic conclusion.

(09:36):

We don’t know how the virus got out of the laboratory. We have lots of evidence that that’s where it came from, not least because Tony Fauci was paying for and giving them technology to genetically engineer Coronaviruses in that laboratory. That’s what they call in the intelligence business a clue. And the clue takes you to the next question, which is, how did it get out? We don’t know.

Bill Walton (10:04):

Right.

Frank Gaffney (10:04):

But what we do know is once it was out, Bill, the Chinese communists deliberately sent it here. At the same time, they were not allowing people to leave Wuhan to go anyplace else in China. They were welcome to go to the United States. They were enabled to go here and to other nations around the world. And not surprisingly, in fact, quite intentionally, they spread this pandemic with them wherever they went.

Bill Walton (10:31):

Well, the problem I think America has in this is that there’s cognitive dissonance. We talk about the elites, we talk about the multinationals, Hollywood, et cetera. They have deep relationships they’ve developed in China. Steve Blackstone, or Steve-

Frank Gaffney (10:47):

Schwarzman.

Bill Walton (10:49):

Schwarzman of Blackstone Group has created something called Blackstone Scholars, which are basically road scholars with an institute he’s set up in Beijing. Scott, or let’s see who runs Apple now? Tim…

Kenny (11:04):

Cook. Tim Cook.

Bill Walton (11:07):

Tim Cook, thank you, Kenny. Tim Cook spent 20 years in China developing, sourcing and relationships in China for the iPhone. The iPhone basically can’t get built unless it’s in China. These people have developed friendships in addition to their business dealings. And so when you see something like this leveling a charge that China’s at war with this, they have a hard time accepting that. And I think one of the problems we’ve had is getting people to face up to our reality. Yeah. Now you framed this-

Frank Gaffney (11:37):

But just if I could, to tie this back up, I think that all of that was harder, Bill until the old expression that conservatives are liberals who’ve been mugged by reality. The bug, the virus, the Wuhan virus specifically, I think caused an awful lot of Americans to wake up to the reality that there’s a problem with China. They don’t fully understand it. They certainly don’t get the magnitude of it, which is really part of the point of this book is to connect a bunch of dots that explain this is not just a bad day, this is not just even a bad year or two.

(12:16):

What they have in mind for us… And we start, by the way, if I may Bill, just a quick digression. The first charge is the crimes against humanity that this transnational criminal organization is engaged in. And the reason that’s the first charge is not only because of the enormity of it, 100 million people killed, and that’s not counting the 400 million in the womb that they boast of having murdered as part of their population control.

(12:45):

But it’s also because any regime that treats its own people that horrifically, and the overwhelming number of those 100 million are Han Chinese. Yes, some Tibetans and some Uyghurs and some Southern Mongolians, but most of them are Han Chinese. They’ve killed them relentlessly for decades. They will not treat our people better if they can get their mitts on us. So we wanted to start with that as a scene setter for what we’re up against, and then talk in the other eight charges about how this unrestricted warfare has rolled out and devastated our country, our people, our freedoms, our republic.

Bill Walton (13:26):

But the key takeaway from what you just said though is that we’re at war with the Chinese Communist Party.

Frank Gaffney (13:34):

Correct.

Bill Walton (13:35):

We’re not at war necessarily with the Chinese people.

Frank Gaffney (13:38):

Do not want to be.

Bill Walton (13:39):

Because the Chinese Communist Party has been wreaking unbelievable havoc on its own people.

Frank Gaffney (13:47):

You’re absolutely right. And the key thing about that is, if we identify them as a transnational criminal organization, if we recognize that they have inflicted this unbelievable harm on the Chinese people, we have an opportunity to do what my old boss Ronald Reagan did in the Cold War. Which was to delegitimate this communist party that is horrifically mistreating its own people, even as it tries to threaten ours. That’s an essential element I think, of the strategy and the 20 recommendations we have about what needs to be done now.

Bill Walton (14:22):

Well, I love this book because it’s so logically laid out. We talk about the indictments. You mentioned some numbers of them. There are nine indictments in here. And just going down the list, we talked about the bio warfare. We talked about as fact that CCP really is at war with America, whether its kinetic warfare, what they’re doing with their navy, what they’re doing with space warfare, the whole list of things-

Frank Gaffney (14:47):

That’s all coming. Yeah.

Bill Walton (14:49):

It’s all coming. And we’ve mentioned elite capture, that’s number three. Number five is they’ve done to take down our economy. They really took advantage of the world trade situation and hauled out American manufacturing with the help of American elites.

Frank Gaffney (15:06):

Right. Economic warfare.

Bill Walton (15:08):

Energy security. I mean, somehow they’ve been very, very assiduous in pushing green climate change policies, which of course if you do wind in solar, where’s that all made?

Frank Gaffney (15:18):

China.

Bill Walton (15:19):

China. So on and on, I don’t want to look at every one of them here.

Frank Gaffney (15:23):

But, Bill, the point-

Bill Walton (15:24):

But for people who are going to read this book, this is a great way to synthesize what they’re doing.

Frank Gaffney (15:31):

And at the end of it, I’m hoping people will say, “These are criminal acts.” And the reason that’s so important is, if they’re understood as such, then those friends of China, people you used to work with, and some you’ve mentioned here, are accomplices to criminal acts against our country. And that means, I believe if we can prosecute this case against the Chinese Communist Party, this transnational criminal organization and its enablers, its co-conspirators, its accomplices, whatever you want to call them. We have a chance of actually creating conditions under which this kind of stuff stops. This helping of the take down of America by American elites is right at the top of the list of things that need to be done now if we’re to survive our country.

Bill Walton (16:33):

This is the Bill Walton Show, and I’m here with Frank Gaffney, and we’re talking about as important new book, the Indictment, which gets into great… I wouldn’t say great… It’s a great overview of what’s at stake with China, what to do about it, lines of action, and also has got a guide to, how many webinars did you do? 70?

Frank Gaffney (16:56):

Well, at the time-

Bill Walton (16:56):

Roughly 70 webinars.

Frank Gaffney (16:58):

Put that together, it’s about 70.

Bill Walton (17:01):

And the barcodes in here, so you can find them just by getting the book, and also a list of all the contributors to the webinars. So this is not a book that somebody went to the mountaintop and came down and said, “Gee, here’s the truth.” Although it is the truth, and Frank knows that, but there’s a vast number of people involved in this, and this is really, what would you say, a synthesis of the best thinking?

Frank Gaffney (17:22):

That’s our purpose. Yes, sir.

Bill Walton (17:24):

Succeeded.

Frank Gaffney (17:26):

Well, I hope. And the most important part of it was to try to not only capture these important ideas and insights and recommendations, but to make them accessible. And as you mentioned, it’s actually not a barcode. It’s a QR code. And so you could put your phone over it, and-

Bill Walton (17:43):

My technology skills are-

Frank Gaffney (17:45):

I know, we work with you, but here it is-

Bill Walton (17:47):

You’ve got to help me. A QR code, okay. I can’t even read a menu.

Frank Gaffney (17:51):

It’s meant to make it possible. If you like that quote, if you want to see the context in which it was made, take a look at the rest of the webinar. Boom. You can pull it right up on your phone. But Bill, the thing is, and I appreciate so much the chance to explore this with you, because what you demonstrate each week as we talk about China is, you’ve come to understand how wrong some of that earlier thinking was and how urgent it is that we impress upon the people you used to work with, among others, but especially them, that it’s not only wrong, but it’s perilous in the extreme for our country.

(18:30):

Because, to the extent that those, no kidding, unrecovered masters of the universe persist in putting the money of American investors, whether it’s pension fund plan money, or whether it’s mutual funds or exchange traded funds or index funds or any of those other investment vehicles, you understand better than I, into communist China. They are underwriting the war against us, the unrestricted war to date. And what I fear is next, and that is the shooting war.

Bill Walton (19:06):

We have got a problem, and you and I can talk about the dollar amount, but there’s roughly a trillion and five American dollars invested in China. Now you had a bigger number.

Frank Gaffney (19:19):

We’re using the number three to six. That’s a pretty big wag.

Bill Walton (19:24):

But anyway, it’s a lot of money. And that’s American dollars, both in the securities market with Chinese public companies, so-called public companies, but also direct investing, venture capital, Apple’s investment in China. And it’s not just the United States that has this issue. China is Volkswagen’s largest single market, or at least was until last year when-

Frank Gaffney (19:46):

Mercedes Benz, I think too.

Bill Walton (19:48):

The Chinese started moving them out. Mercedes-Benz as well. So tremendous financial investment, tremendous emotional investment. And this is not like fighting the Soviets in the fifties and sixties and seventies, where it was pretty much self-contained, where the Soviets, our world was pretty self-contained. We worried about nuclear. Here we’ve got this thorny thing of unraveling all these interrelationships. You and I talked with Rosemary Gibson about our utter dependence on China for critical pharmaceutical, not only manufacturing, but distribution. And that came up, you mentioned that in the bio warfare thing with Wuhan. They started talking about, “Well, we may not send you all the drugs that we can make if you’re not nice.”

Frank Gaffney (20:33):

Of the personal protective equipment or whatever.

Bill Walton (20:35):

Yeah, all that.

Frank Gaffney (20:36):

No, Bill Supply chains are a key piece of what has been brought about by the unrestricted economic warfare against us. But to your larger point, it’s not an accident that we are entangled. In fact, back in the early 1990s, indeed, I think right about the time that Deng Xiaoping, the then dictator of communist China was observing that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was over, and the Soviets had lost. And said to his team, “A new Cold War has begun between the United States and China, and China will win.”

(21:19):

And he propounded a strategy that came to be known colloquially as the Hide and Bide strategy. It was designed to try to assure that they did not face the same fate as the Soviets, where the United States, through Reagan’s strategy, cut them off from their cash flow, something our colleague Roger Robinson helped him do.

(21:42):

They wanted to get so integrated with us by hiding their true intentions, inducing people like the masters of the universe on Wall Street, to believe that they just wanted to be rich, and then they’d be like us and everything would be fabulous. They wanted to bide their time while they took advantage of that naivety, that misdirection, that deception to build up both their economic power and their military strength through unrestricted warfare against us. Including, interestingly enough, Bill, in a book of that title, Unrestricted Warfare, authored, as you know, by two Senior People’s Liberation Army colonels in 1999.

Bill Walton (22:26):

16 years ago. That long ago.

Frank Gaffney (22:28):

1999. They laid out, among other things that they would use as lines of attack against us, biological warfare. So they’ve done this relentlessly with great effect, and we are still, most of us not clued up about the full magnitude of the danger that represents, but the entanglement and the elite capture of which it’s a part, has been instrumental in the success of that hide and bide strategy, and helping them get away with it.

Bill Walton (23:04):

We don’t have time to go through all of your recommendations, for that, we’ll have to all buy the book. Or, it’s on Kindle as well, which is a great way to get through it. But the first one is, understand the threat, which is what we’re talking about now. And I was on a call with Scott Rasmus, the pollster earlier this week, and he said, he threw out a number I thought was stunning. Only 8% of Americans are talking about politics in any time during the week.

(23:33):

So that means 92% are not talking about American politics, but they’re certainly not talking about China, and what China might mean for us. So I think waking the people up to what the threat is seems like job one.

Frank Gaffney (23:49):

It is. Well, it’s action item one, basically. And here’s the thing, Bill, you asked about once this came, part of it came out of the work of our committee on the present danger of China, which I’m very proud to say you are a member.

Bill Walton (24:02):

Yeah.

Frank Gaffney (24:03):

Part of it came out of an earlier experience with another group of a similar name, the committee on the Present Danger, of which Ronald Reagan was a member, by the way. And as he approached the 1980 election, he went to his colleagues in the committee on the Present Danger, and he said, “Would you help me devise a strategy that would be very clearly different from Jimmy Carter’s Détente strategy. It wouldn’t even be containment, it would be rollback.

Bill Walton (24:37):

And you were working for Reagan then?

Frank Gaffney (24:39):

I was not working for Reagan at that time. He was running for office. I worked for him in 1980 through to 87. But the piece of this that’s really important is, he got a strategy and he took it to the American people as a choice in the 1980 campaign. He made it very explicit. He was in favor of putting the Soviet Communist on the ash heap of history. He got a mandate to do that, an overwhelming one from the American people, and having that mandate, he executed upon it.

(25:14):

By the way, with the help of about 30 members of the committee. Flash forward, we believe in our time, it is essential for a similar kind of adoption by political leaders who are not captured, who are not under any illusion about the nature of this threat and who will seek a mandate from the American people for a course correction that is desperately needed. And that if, please, God, we have time, that war does not spring upon us in the meantime, we have time for a course correction at last.

Bill Walton (25:52):

We need to wrap up here, because I know you and I want to talk, we’ve got another topic we want to get into beyond this one. We’re going to be talking with Ben Weingarten, who’s done a terrific bit of work on CISA, and did a recent congressional testimony on it. We want to talk, Frank and I both want to talk to him about it, but the thing that I think, Frank… I’ve actually lost my train of thought. Help me out here.

Frank Gaffney (26:18):

Well, I think you were concluding, to make the point.

Bill Walton (26:21):

I can’t conclude. I want to go on-

Frank Gaffney (26:22):

That we need to buy the book.

Bill Walton (26:24):

Buy the book, buy this book.

Frank Gaffney (26:28):

When in Doubt default to that proposition.

Bill Walton (26:31):

Anyway, I was going to make a crack about Joe Biden, which I think probably can go unremarked. I guess there was a reason why I went-

Frank Gaffney (26:40):

It went dark.

Bill Walton (26:40):

I went dark. Okay. So with that plausible explanation, this has been the Bill Walton show and I’m here with my great friend and great patriot, Frank Gaffney. We’ve been talking about his book, the Indictment, which I encourage everyone to get. It’s a great quick read, but you’re going to know a lot about China and what’s at stake if you take the time with it.

(27:02):

So anyway, thanks for joining us on the Bill Walton Show. And as you know, you can find us always on all the major podcast platforms, Rumble, YouTube. We’re on CPAC now on Monday nights, and we’re also on Substack now, which is a very interesting platform. Send us your comments about upcoming shows, upcoming guests you’d like us to get into. As you know, we like to take complicated things and try to explain them in a way that all of us can understand. So thanks Frank Gaffney for joining, this has been a-

Frank Gaffney (27:33):

Pleasure.

Bill Walton (27:34):

A short, but I think penetrating conversation. I guess I’ll see you next Monday.

Frank Gaffney (27:40):

Yes, indeed.

Bill Walton (27:41):

Okay. Anyway, thanks for joining. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Want more? Click the subscribe button or head over to the billwaltonshow.com to choose from over 100 episodes. You can also learn more about our guest on our Interesting People page, and send us your comments. We read every one, and your thoughts help us guide the show. If it’s easier for you to listen, check out our podcast page and subscribe there. In return, we’ll keep you informed about what’s true, what’s right, and what’s next. Thanks for joining.