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The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it. Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts, Sam Stone and Chuck Warren.
Fantastic guests with us again today. And thank you, our friend of the program, returning guest, Mark Joseph Mogulitz. He has been doing some fantastic writing on AI, on technology. You can get one of his... He just did a piece for us here on Breaking Battlegrounds. So go on our sub stack and make sure you read that piece talking about AI in the upcoming election and in elections going forward, Chuck. And
We're already seeing it. We're already seeing limited deep fakes. Well, you saw it with the Trump arrest, right? I was going to mention that. And some of those were pretty blatantly fake. They were. But what was revealing about them was the willingness of so many partisans essentially to want to believe them. Right. And that's, you know, the other half of any flat earth conspiracy, any Ponzi scheme is the willingness of the audience to be deceived. Right.
It's actually astounding. Social media has given such an insight into the ability of people to believe outer nonsense. Well, yeah, because you want affirmation for your beliefs. I mean, that's human nature. We both share the same hairstylist, and we like to think she's nice most of the time. We know that's not true. Guys, I'm looking at you this morning, and I have questions. Okay.
But, you know, right, we want affirmation. We do. And I've noted before that on the free speech side...
We're going to be stress tested in a lot of ways, meaning there will be times when the kind of schadenfreude instinct will kick in. You'll be happy to see someone you disagree with deplatformed, but that's actually when you need to be most chauvinistic about free speech is when someone with whom you disagree is being exactly that, deplatformed. And I think it's the same thing with a lot of these deep fakes. People are going to want to believe the worst about their –
Whoever it is they're voting against or anyone on the other side and you're gonna have to resist that because here's a perfect example a dear a dear friend who's older she does not like Barack Obama and
She's a wonderful human being. I mean, the type of person, if you broke down at 2 a.m., if you're sick... You don't have to be a bad person not to like Obama. Right. But she... One day, we got in a pretty heavy dispute because she was saying... For some reason, she was implying he probably wasn't a good father. And I just said...
There's literally no facts about that. So AI could go post do X, Y, Z to put him in a bad light, and that's going to feed what she believes. I'm probably going to get in trouble with some conservatives, but watching from the outside, he looked like he was probably the best presidential parent of my lifetime. Well, no. I mean, I just think that's a lousy argument. I think they're good parents. That's a terrible argument. I think they're good parents, right? Terrible argument. You could be a great parent and a lousy president on policy. They're not mutually exclusive. So –
His kids aren't train wrecks. Let's just start there. No, they're not. So now we have this. So I called Mark and said, Mark, can you write for us this article of what people should look for during the 2024 campaign cycle on AI? So Mark –
wrote an article, How to Prevent AI from Tricking Us in the 2024 Election. It's on the Breaking Battlegrounds sub stack. It's on our social media. It's got a lot of traffic on our Facebook and Twitter. That's been fantastic. So let's go through, Mark, the things that people should be looking for, what they can do to combat it. I would guess, if I was to sum it up in one word, but we have time to fill, so we want to go further than that, is...
Triple check your source with other people. Yeah. We're all going to have to become pretty quick at cross-referencing. We're going to be very adept at kind of triangulating truth. So, you know, I was thinking of some examples that you messaged me this morning and I was thinking of some hypotheticals as to, you know, what could actually meaningfully impact an election.
And I was imagining a scenario where, you know, maybe two hours before the East Coast polling places closed down, suddenly there's this TikTok screenshot going around of Chuck Todd standing in front of a completely blue map.
And if that's the only resource you have is TikTok, you should automatically go and check one other place at minimum. Probably two. Yeah. Hence triangulate. Yeah. It should have at least three. That's so okay. If you need at least three and you start at TikTok, you still need three. Sure. Indeed. Yeah. TikTok, maybe negative one actually. So we might need. With TikTok, you probably need four or five. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. But memes like that can maybe keep 500 people home in a district. You don't know how these things – I know there were some complaints about Fox News calling Arizona at noon or whatever it was, possibly demoralizing voters. I don't know if that's true. It was very early, quite frankly. Let me give you a perfect example. So 2004, I was in Florida.
helping President Bush's reelection on get out the vote. And that morning came out exit polling that showed Bush losing Florida. Now, Bush losing Florida means there's nothing else really matters at that time specifically. And I remember being there with sort of this war room we had, and then it showed, I think at that time it was Senator Martinez, a Republican, winning, but Bush losing Florida.
And I immediately just started yelling the alarm. This is impossible. You can't have Martinez win and Bush lose. That did not reality. So for 30 minutes when they got that exit polling, total deflation. I mean, I don't think people are going. Then I went and brought that point and yelled and yelled it and yelled it. And then they jumped on it. And so then at that time, here's all the precincts you need to go hit, drive everybody there. We'll just take our chances.
And I can see you made a perfect example of that happening on election day in some key areas, right? I think we saw it without the AI interference. I was going to say we need to not view these instincts as being unique to AI. The instinct to deceive, and we've seen deceptive editing.
by various networks, predating the Advent of Chat GPT, the Fox example, and it wasn't new. I think it was like seven, but I think there were still places on the East Coast that hadn't yet been called. And so that was kind of an odd thing
it was an odd sort of move on their part, at least in the eyes of a lot of the electorate. And if you were to do something like that using AI, using some sort of deep fake technology, it might have more credence, you know, than it would have five or six years ago. If you're suddenly showing, oh, hey, you know, it turns out,
Texas, it was purple after all. And maybe that keeps 10,000 people home. We had the AGs race here get decided by a few hundred votes. Right. Well, absolutely. The fact that certain segments are crying foul, people are being suppressed, I think kept people home. Right. Yeah. But our instincts on this, they need to be politically agnostic. Meaning if you see this is happening to someone in the
in the opposite party, you need to be as vigilant about that as you would with your own because in the absence of truth and trust, the republic itself wanes. I don't mean to be too philosophical. No, but it's very true. We can't take pleasure in falsehoods. So almost everything an AI could do or everything an AI could do, a human hacker or human technologist could do. Sure. Does AI have a greater ability to cover its tracks when it's doing it? Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know. Maybe more quickly, more efficiently, as we say about everything with AI. I think what AI will do, it will render these capabilities more pervasive. I think you won't need to have any hacking expertise to engage in bad acts. And you can create a lot of confusion with a little bit of effort.
unless you have an electorate that is a little bit more vigilant, a little bit more protective of truth in a very objective sense. I mean, the best thing I think a lot of the left could have done would be to have immediately doubted that Trump was actually trying to fist fight five New York police officers rather than giving them any credence or rather than broadcasting them aggressively like some of the networks were doing.
Not that they were buying it necessarily, but they were kind of having fun, it seemed, you know...
Yeah, it was a joke the way it was played on a lot of those networks. It was like, oh, this is a joke. But it was not a joke. For some people, it's not a joke at all. But if you actually get outside a bubble, you realize Donald Trump's not going to fight anybody, let alone five law enforcement people. The guy's like 76. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he wants that walk, right? So let's back up here. So one of your points was don't entrench yourself in the information line of a single news source. Yep.
Yeah, and that should have been true, obviously, well before the advent of chat GPT. But probably more important now. I would say more so now, and particularly if your major news sources are, or, you know, for that matter, not even news sources, but if your major online...
avenues of information are like Reddit, TikTok, whatnot. You know, those are meme repositories. TikTok or Reddit, they never lie to me. Sure, right. Well, I mean, we've obviously seen dishonesty manifesting in the most, you know, quote, credible, unquote. Yeah, we see it in New York Times all the time. Right. And so it's certainly not unique. But
I think the truth triangulation formula is going to be cross-referencing as much as possible. The other thing that I mentioned in the piece was there's a robotics term called the uncanny valley. And some of your listeners might know it, but it's about 50 years old. It's a roboticist named Mori.
I think it's a Mahihiro Mori might be off on that name, but essentially his theory was that the closer and likeness to a human face, a robot face becomes the more eerie it seems. And that there's a valley separating the you from the...
Essentially what it's supposed to be. Isn't that why they always say like in animated shows, they have to stop before it gets too human looking? Yeah, because it gets kind of creepy. And a good example, I think IndieWire did a review of that Lion King movie from 2018 and they called it like a descent into the uncanny valley or something like that. And
And it's true. When you look at those lions, they almost look real, but something's not quite right. And that's, you know... Well, there's a great link you put in your piece, Detect Deep Fakes, How to Counteract Misinformation Creepy AI. And one of the things they said is...
High-end deep fake manipulations are almost always facial transformations. Pay attention to the cheeks and forehead. Does the skin appear too smooth or too wrinkly? It's the agedness of the skin similar to the agedness of the hair and eyes. Deep fakes may be incongruent on some dimensions. Right, and these things will get better, but I don't know that they'll ever be 100%. I think our instincts for, you know, certainly for human faces, and we've evolved over millions of years to...
perceive a lot from human faces. There's another point here I want to make here. We've got about a minute left. You wrote a point number five. There's good reason for skepticism these days. Don't let hysteria dominate. So, for example, let's use the, for example, the Trump arrest, right? I'm still pretty sure most papers would have covered that on a front page if he had actually been arrested in a handcuff, right? I mean, sometimes you have to use some common sense, right?
Yeah, it's just, again, the heart-sinking aspect of that was how willing so many people were to believe it. And that's...
I'm reminded a little bit of who is the woman who testified that Trump had tried to leap over the seat on Inauguration Day. In the limousine. Correct. It never happened. It didn't happen, right? Right. The man has no ability to make that happen. Well, and that aside, just whatever you want to believe about the guy, that never sounded credible, but a lot of people really wanted to believe it. Because they hate him so much. Yeah, absolutely. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back with more from Mark Joseph Mongulitz in just a moment.
Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Morin. I'm Sam Stone. In studio with us this morning, Mark Joseph Monglet, Scottsdale-based content manager for a financial newsletter, The Haymaker. It's on Substack, right? It is, yes. And are you on Twitter also? Haymaker is on Twitter. Haymaker is on Twitter. I think I have a semi-dormant account somewhere out there of my own. Okay, but The Haymaker does have Haymaker. So you can find it there, folks. You can find it on Substack. We're talking AI, potential deep fakes, and...
Boy, the White House is clearly going to be all over this one. Indeed. Yeah. Chuck and I were just talking a moment ago. Kamala Harris, I suppose, in the same way she took on the border, is taking on AI at this juncture. And I think we spoke last time. I don't recall at what length, but we did speak briefly on the role of government in this field. And it's not so much a matter of the willingness. I think if the willingness is there, you know, Godspeed. I don't know about the capability. Right.
Well, yeah, but I do think there has to be – so the first thing that's wrong with this meeting, they had Kamala Harris, and I'm glad – look, I'm glad they released her trying to – starting something, right? Kudos to her. But it has to happen. I mean, honestly, I think it's a much bigger discussion even than they're leading into. I mean, if you listen to Elon Musk and some others, the concern over this should be a much broader discussion in society. Elon Musk, America's favorite libertarian, says the government needs to regulate this.
I mean, he's seen it. He understands it. So they had the chief executives from Alphabet, Microsoft, OpenAI. They came to the White House. They had Harris, for some reason, do this. I mean, there's like probably a dozen other people in that administration better equipped to do this. The thing that was disappointing to me, they should have had some Republican, former Republican senators and former Republican governors. Say if you want to take politics out of it, bring someone like Ducey in.
Doug Ducey would be an excellent choice. I think actually I think you bring up a great point, Chuck. I think a governor, a former governor who has some sort of tech and business background, you know, whatever you can find in that. I think that's the right kind of person to lead this. Kamala Harris, her only value to this would be if she can teach A.I. to be more transparent that it's A.I.,
with statements like today is today and like yesterday was yesterday. Yeah, exactly. So I think that they should bring on former governors and senators, sort of try to take this partisan political angle out of it. Sort of like the, what was that, the...
Lee Hamilton, right? Yeah, yeah, something like that. I mean, I think you've got to get some serious people who were recently in office. They can't be old. They've got to understand something about technology. But what do you think they should be focusing on with these meetings that the White House is now putting together? Yeah, I think some measure of accountability. So there was a—we were talking a little bit about kind of the partisan instinct on this matter, and I know a couple months ago people were running this—
experiment where they would ask the, um, they'd ask Chad GPT to write a poem about, uh, about Trump and, you know, favorable, of course. And it was like, sorry, we don't engage in politics. And then asking the same about Biden. And it was like, you know, Biden, a man of courage and it's like, right. It's, it's so, it's so clearly lopsided. Um, you know, I would say rather than going right to the legislation where I would say just appeal to the better instincts of these people and say like, look, if you're going to do this, if you're going to dump this on humanity and ask us to just adjust to it,
There's nothing democratic about technology. It's just released into the wild, and if it renders your job obsolete, sorry, here we are. So if we're being forced to contend with this, let's at least do so from something like a level playing field. We're always hearing about leveling the playing field from this administration and whatnot, so let's do it here. The interesting thing about this is AI has so much potential for good.
But at the same time, it's going to be so massively disruptive. As you were talking right there, I couldn't stop and help but think, OK, wait, government regulates this. But here's the thing. AI has the potential to erase about a third of the people who work for the government. Well, no, it is doing really simple jobs that AI could probably already do. A perfect example. So when Romney decided to run for Senate, he brought about 30, 40 of us together for a fundraising thing. You know, it's everybody maxing out. And
Somebody asked a question, what are the things you're worried about? And it was, this is 2017, right? And he said, I'm worried about China, which then, you know, we're still kid gloves of China. I'm worried about China. He goes, this debt is unsustainable. It's going to ruin us as a country. And the third thing he said, whichever he's like, he goes, I'm
This technological transformation, he didn't determine his AI, but that's what he's getting at. He goes, it's going to make a third of the jobs out of it.
obsolete. And if we don't figure out a plan to take care of those people who lose their jobs, we're going to have a real problem. Well, I think actually it has the potential to make more than that. I mean, we're already seeing, right? But no one else was talking about that 17. So a friend of mine made a bit of a mistake, I think. A few years ago, he bought four Wienerschnitzel in Southern California. He's losing his butt, right? I mean, right before the pandemic and even with all that. I haven't seen one of those forever. Yeah.
He just replaced almost all the workers in all of them with machines. So they're automated. They cook the hot dogs. They wrap it. They dress it. They do the whole thing. So he has one person in the store who stocks and keeps the machine. Yeah, and that'll probably be another year or so before you have some sort of, I don't know, advanced room by doing that.
But what's not going to be good enough as a starting point is this idea, this techno-utopian idea that for every one job destroyed, 10 new ones will be created. No. I heard David Friedberg of the All In podcast kind of making that case that we're being short-sighted now and some jobs are going to go away, but it's going to open a lot of doors. I don't know. The reason I don't know is because... I think it's a very mixed bag, right? It may open some doors, but it's going to close a lot too. Yeah, and we're...
Because now we're encroaching on mental labor, right? Right. So we saw this week, civics education, kids can't pass anything regarding history of this country. So we're expecting an education system that can't
prepare kids with the most fundamental things is going to prepare them from this AI workforce because, right, there's jobs that are going to take mental acuity. They're going to take some book smarts. We're not preparing kids for that. And, you know, because we're too busy on other things that don't matter. Well,
You're talking about history here. What about the ability of AI to rewrite history? I mean, that's... You know, Chuck, you had asked me earlier about specific examples of how the, you know, how electoral politics could be impacted by AI. And one is just simply what, you know, he was just saying there, we could have an instance where history is being rewritten on the sources people trust. Right. So people go to Wikipedia and maybe certain aspects of a candidate's
It could be the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. I mean this thing could go into their websites and rewrite old articles. Sure. Or suppress them. We've seen this on a lower grade scale with the way search results are deranked or whatever it is. Now.
Now, that's just, again, search. You talk about content being revised, and now you're creating different narratives for people to follow. And again, people are going to want to believe either the best or the worst, right?
And the affirmation impulse is very, very strong. We've seen that in recent months. And we've also seen kind of an unwillingness to seek out the better angels, I suppose, in our adversaries. This is kind of a topic, but like the Mar-a-Lago rate and whatnot, that's the sort of thing that
15 years ago would have been a source of outrage I think for almost everyone the country because it was just so over-the-top like didn't need to be that you know sort of but not now it's sort of aggressive right and so if now it gets cheered by half and cried by half and I'm an independent saying this you know I'm not I wasn't coming at this from the from the MAGA perspective I'm coming at this from why is all of this necessary and if you have people cheering it on Mark how do people find you
They can find me at opinionsandpending.substack.com. And as we said earlier, I am also the content manager for Haymaker. You can find all of our work at haymaker.substack. And that's on Twitter as well and so forth. It is, yes, sir. Fantastic. Mark, thanks for coming. And everybody go check out the article, How to Prevent AI from Trickiness in 2024. Chuck and Sam, visit us at breakingbattlegrounds.vote.
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Next up with us on the line, Jimmy Quinn, national security correspondent for National Review, previously a William F. Buckley Fellow in political journalism at the National Review Institute. And he's been covering some of the goings on in China, particularly a little bit of a censorship incident via TikTok that just came up. Jimmy, thank you for joining us and welcome to the program. It's great to be on with you. So you had a fantastic piece that I read and shared the other day.
Probably a lot of folks here in this country don't know happened. TikTok suspending libertarian think tank that posted about Hong Kong and Jimmy Lai. And then very shortly afterwards, another article where TikTok claimed it was a technical error. Can you start by telling us what happened with this incident?
So this is really par for the course where TikTok once again took down an account temporarily that had posted about something that is politically sensitive in China. The Acton Institute is a think tank based out in Michigan.
And they recently produced a documentary on Jimmy Lai, who is a Hong Kong pro-democracy icon. He led a media outlet there that was very vocally pro-democracy. And he's been imprisoned in Hong Kong by the CCP-backed authorities over that stance.
So this documentary was really getting the word out about that situation and talking about the Chinese Communist Party's takeover of the city and the crackdown against democracy there. So what happened was the Ackman Institute, they went on TikTok, they posted six videos about this documentary. So it's mostly trailers and teasers, essentially. Right.
Yeah, exactly. It was just a few teasers. And obviously, you know, they featured interviews with people who were talking about the Hong Kong pro-democracy crackdown, as well as, you know, the situation with Jimmy Lai right now. So what happened was,
Initially, I guess this would have been in late April. One of the videos was taken down and apparently it was because TikTok had flagged it as engaging in abusive behavior. But considering the content on TikTok, that's a pretty extraordinary label.
Yeah, I guess you could say that. But it featured a one minute long clip with scenes of protesters being attacked by police and the police firing tear gas. So I guess TikTok's story was that they temporarily took it down because there was violence in it. They eventually restored it after the Acton Institute appealed. But then on Tuesday, so this past Tuesday,
The Acton Institute's entire account was taken down. They were suspended and they were, at least for that time, kicked off of the platform. So the following day, the Acton Institute tweeted about it. They wanted to get the word out because they couldn't even get on TikTok to appeal the suspensions.
And that's when I reported on it. So that would have been Wednesday afternoon. Later that evening, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote an op-ed or wrote an editorial explaining the situation and the account still had not been restored. So that was over a day.
And then like two hours after the Wall Street Journal's editorial went up, TikTok said, oh, it was an error and the account has been restored. So I reached out to them the next day and they said, oh, it's a technical error. Sometimes
Things happen. We have an automated system that flags suspicious behavior. But of course, the only suspicious behavior here was posting these videos about Hong Kong and Jimmy Lai. So that's what has a lot of people up in arms right now. But it's part of a broader pattern. We've seen this before where content that's critical of the CCP gets taken down and then people notice it.
They speak up about it, and then TikTok restores it, and they say, oh, we're so sorry. That was a mistake. So this is not the first time this has happened. Sounds like a teenager explaining why they're late to their parents. We're with Jimmy Quinn. He's the national security correspondent for National Review. Jimmy, how do people find you? You can find me on Twitter at James underscore T underscore Quinn, or...
Or you can find me on nationalreview.com. Jimmy's going to be right back to us for a new segment. This is Breaking Battlegrounds. You can find us at breakingbattlegrounds.vote. This is Chuck and Sam with our honored guest, Jimmy Quinn. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. On the line with us right now, Jimmy Quinn, national security correspondent for National Review, has done some fantastic work on China, reporting recently on TikTok suspending a libertarian think tank that posted about Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai. Thank you again for joining us, Jimmy. We really appreciate having you on the program today.
One of the things when you brought that up, they responded pretty quickly. China's government responded pretty quickly after The Wall Street Journal touched it. Are they and I'm not meaning to demean National Review, which is doing some of the best work in the country. Is the Chinese government maybe more afraid of The Wall Street Journal than they are other news outlets because financial institutions are about the only thing they like in America? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think it really speaks to TikTok's sort of sneaky public relations strategy. And this is a company that's owned by ByteDance, which is a Chinese tech giant that is highly enmeshed in the CCP's military-civil fusion efforts. And they partner with all of these companies that have been labeled as official Chinese military companies by the U.S. government.
They've worked with the Chinese government on standing up an artificial intelligence institute in Beijing. So that's really the big thing that you need to know about ByteDance and TikTok. And really, they're just afraid of people exposing that. So when you look at their PR strategy, they really only try to respond when they're forced to.
and when people start pointing out these weird relationships and some of the bizarre activities that are going on. So once you sort of get a critical mass there, right? Once you have an outlet like the Wall Street Journal, there were a few members of Congress who tweeted about this and other big sort of personalities with large Twitter followings, that's when you finally get a response from TikTok and an explanation.
Because really, this account had been suspended for over a day. And it's really a very glaring case of this bizarre censorship model. There's a story today, actually, that Forbes reported. And ByteDance has a list of words that it monitors.
So whenever you're on TikTok or TikTok's Chinese equivalent, Douyin, which is also run by ByteDance or any of their other apps, they're watching for people who are talking about Hong Kong, about Taiwan, about the Chinese atrocities against Uyghurs. And they've got these lists of words that automatically trigger this sort of intensified surveillance, let's call it.
apparently. So it's just another one of these scandals that breaks almost every week now when it comes to TikTok. So, you know, for example, the New York Times had an article today why China's censors are deleting videos about poverty. A very good piece if you've not seen it. Just talking about, you know, they're scrubbing video and social media of anybody that shows pictures of people having a hard time buying food, living on $15 a day. And
Are people, do you travel to China much or Hong Kong or do you travel much out there?
So, unfortunately, I got on this beat, you know, after the downturn in the U.S.-China relationship. And I don't think, you know, due to my reporting that I'd be able to go there. So, but your contacts... You're not going to be their favorite. Yeah, yeah. You're not on the Christmas card list or the Chinese New Year list. My question for you then, with your contacts and as you researched, what do the Chinese people feel about America?
We know what the leadership does, but how do the Chinese people, the mom and pops, the people working, do you have any sense how they feel about the United States? Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that a certain segment of the population really buys into the party's stance on any number of issues, including some of the ones that we've discussed.
But I think one thing to take away is that if you look at how the party treats Taiwan and views Taiwan as an existential threat, just the very existence of a democracy, a thriving democracy filled with people who, some of whom emigrated from the mainland, right, after the Civil War, I think
I think the party is very worried that people could see Taiwan as a model for a thriving Chinese democracy. And that's why, frankly, it's so obsessed with stamping out this vibrant, free, democratic, capitalist society that deeply values human life. I was in Taiwan in May.
the fall for a quick 10-day recording trip. And it really is an amazing place. And it is kind of this counterexample of what China could be if it weren't for the totalitarian one-party state that has basically dominated the country. What do you see...
How do you see the United States and Chinese relationship going forward the next decade? What do you see with all your reporting? There was an interesting comment yesterday by Matt Pottinger, and he said, we saw a baby shark, referring to China, and thought that we could transform it into a dolphin. We kept feeding the shark, and the shark got bigger and bigger, and now we're dealing with a formidable great white shark.
Do you think that's a fair characterization he did there? What do you see in the next 10 years? I'm asking you to put on your psychic role here, but you report on it. This is your beat. Tell us about it. Yeah, I mean, so what we've seen over the past five years is a reversal of the previous engagement approach that we had. And that was the idea that we could basically cajole China into
into or the Chinese Communist Party into embracing markets and therefore embracing a form of liberal democracy. And that's sort of what Pottinger was getting at. Right. Speaking to this idea that we could make China a responsible stakeholder on the world stage. And in doing so, we sort of gave these inducements and incentives that
instead strengthened the party's most hardcore elements and allowed it to emerge as this growing military industrial powerhouse that frankly threatens
regional, if not global, security right now and is trying to promote this sort of global model of authoritarian surveillance. So over the next 10 years, I mean, yeah, you're really asking me to look into a crystal ball here. Well, of course, we're putting you on the spot. Of course we are. Of course, of course. Yeah, that's all right. Jimmy Dumbledore Quinn. Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, just look at what party leaders say. They say that they want to reunify. And I say reunify with quotes because Taiwan was never part of the government run by the Communist Party. They want to absorb Taiwan. They want to annex it potentially by force.
So the next decade is going to be defined by our ability to either deter or otherwise dissuade the party from undertaking such an invasion, because that would be such a disaster, not just for Taiwan, and it would be a humanitarian catastrophe.
catastrophe in Taiwan, but also for international security. I mean, we saw what happened when Russia went into Ukraine. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would result in consequences ten times that or many, many multiples that when you're talking about the effects on supply chains, on global technology, food security, whatever else.
Well, in their physical security, Japan, South Korea and all of East Asia would be in a panic. So let me ask you this. Absolutely. So there's a talking point. I use it. I could be totally wrong that China is watching what the world does of Ukraine. And if we push back Russia out of Ukraine, do you think they'll be less hesitant to take violent action against Taiwan?
I think that I think the important thing to note here is that Russia and China are rapidly solidifying an alliance right before the 2022 Olympics. They signed this no limits partnership, it's called. And we've seen this intensifying movement.
diplomatic process where the Chinese and the Russians are getting very close. They're partnering more and more on security-related topics. The U.S. has been trying to prevent China from providing the Russians with weapons. So far, the Biden administration says the Chinese have not efficiently
who's really armed the Russians in their war against Ukraine. So, I mean, I think it's really difficult to speak to the way that China is strategically looking at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how that might affect Taiwan. But
I think it's very clear that if Ukraine is successful and continues to be successful in repelling Russia's invasion, Russia will be all the more weaker for it. And it's going to be harder for that Sino-Russian alliance to really throw its weight around and to exert influence around the world and intimidate other countries in the orbit of Russia and China.
Yeah, as much as we're draining our coffers and our military reserves, it's much more significant drain on their end. Well, they just I mean, they're just popped up on my news feed that the Russian mercenary chief, the Wagner group, is pulling out. They just say we're going to lick our wounds.
Jimmy, not so much shift gears, but something related. You had a great piece, China hacking threat rises, yet FBI is mandated to spend millions on zero emission vehicles. I thought that piece was sort of a microcosm of the conflict right now, the state of conflict between our government and China's where one is –
laser focused on their geopolitical aims. And the other one is just filled with nonsense right now. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, the article that you're referring to, it was about this really, I think, revealing moment that happened on Capitol Hill a few days ago where Christopher Wray, the FBI director, was testifying before Congress about the FBI's budget request.
And basically, there's this one congressman who pointed out, oh, you're only asking for five million more compared with last year's request for the FBI's counterintelligence operation. But you're asking for 14 million to have this fleet of zero emission vehicles. Right.
And he asked Ray, what's going on here? Why are you asking for so much money for these when you really need a lot more money to go after Chinese intelligence threats in the U.S.? And Ray basically said, well, it's all about an executive order. We have to comply with that. And there's really nothing we can do.
The executive order says that, you know, we need to spend some money on zero emission vehicles and have a fleet of those vehicles. But he also said where we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars already on counterintelligence operations. So, I mean, it just goes to some of the competing priorities here. I think many people, especially on Capitol Hill, would be concerned.
more favorable to having every last cent possible dedicated to counterintelligence operations. Because during that hearing, Ray also said that even if all of the FBI's cybersecurity personnel were focused on China, they would still be outgunned 50 to 1. They would be outmanned 50 to 1 compared to Chinese hackers. That doesn't count up all the Russian hackers, too.
Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, a lot of our counterintelligence and cybersecurity efforts are relatively underfunded when you're looking at the scale of the threats that they need to counter. And yet the FBI is forced to spend money.
$14 million on zero-emission vehicles right now. So, yeah, I mean, I think this is something that really shows how people might need to get focused on these threats and try not to get distracted by other things. Well, you have been fantastic, and we appreciate you coming on today. Jimmy, would you please tell people again how they follow your work, where they go, how they can follow you?
Sure. Thanks for having me on. You can go to nationalreview.com or follow me on Twitter at James underscore T underscore Quinn. Jimmy, thanks a million. We hope you'll join us again soon. We loved having you. Thank you so much. Have a great day. This is Breaking Battlegrounds. We appreciate you joining us. Visit us on your local radio station that we're on or visit our podcast. Give us a good ranking. Share it with your friends. Subscribe, download, share. Do all those things that help us out, folks. Just do something. Don't be lazy. Have a great weekend, folks.
Welcome to the podcast-only segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. With your host, Chuck Moore, and I'm Sam Stone. Thank you to both of our guests today. They were fantastic. Mark Joseph Mongolitz and Jimmy Quinn. Chuck, it's been one of those weeks when all sorts of craziness keeps happening. It's very dystopian waking up now and watching the news. I feel like we mention this every week, and I don't think it's going to stop in our lifetime.
Unfortunately. I think that's where we're at now. Yeah. And I think part of it is I'm not sure the world's any crazier in some ways, like the 60s or 70s, but it's a constant flow of information. So like in the mornings you and I get up, we'll look at news for the show. I guess it's been four or five hours. Well, and I'll give you a perfect example that's tearing up the airwaves right now. This whole thing with this guy Neely who was killed on the New York subway by someone who put him in a stranglehold.
Like 20 years ago, there were no cell phones. There were no video on that train, no nothing like that. That would have been a two paragraph story at the bottom of the New York papers. Well, yeah. And so what you're hearing now, I mean, that's a great, great point to talk about. So we have this situation. Jordan Neely, he was a Michael Jackson impersonator. Probably a lot of people in New York had seen him. And so the problem is you have people protesting now. He was dead. OK, he's you know, he was he was killed. Yeah.
He was a mentally disturbed schizophrenic, right? Yeah. He was belligerently harassing passengers on the Manhattan subway. He had numerous arrests. 40. 40. And quote, he said, I want food. I'm not taking no for an answer. I'm ready to go to jail. So an unidentified Marine, former Marine, put him in chock hold.
Held him probably too long. No reason for that. But this shows the difficulty police have in these situations. It shows the difficulty police have. And you don't know that time goes. I mean, he was obviously struggling. It took three people. Right. And, you know, he's had a long history of terrorizing subway passengers. These insurgents.
idiots protest and look his death's tragic he should have been in a hospital he should have been under care it's the same way with this guy in atlanta that shot these people this week again the system failed but we're going to keep putting laws and we can't keep the laws we have from help helping people now right that's the major issue you know one of the things that came up so i actually commented on it on i forget which reporters feed on that story and i said listen
As long as we continue to enforce the law less and less, the government backs off from enforcing the law, you're going to see more and more actions like this of vigilantism across the U.S. You're already seeing it.
And the tragic consequences from not enforcing the law in the first place are endemic in society right now. That's our pandemic that we're dealing with is this violence. So two major incidences this week, that one and the shooting in Atlanta, both gentlemen should have been under care. They should have been hospitalized. They should have been. We have rules to take care of these folks. And the system failed. But what we're going to have is we're going to have this idiot brag who's
who's going to be responsible deciding whether to charge or not. He's going to charge this 24-year-old former Marine who is basically helping people who knows what Jordan would have done. Oh, look, he might have had a knife pulled. I mean, that's the problem with this situation. You don't know. And, you know, I...
This whole thing comes down to – and I got into it with someone who argued, well, the U.S. has every – this huge prison population. Well, here's one of the big differences that nobody touches on. In Europe, you can put someone who is mentally insane in treatment – in patient treatment against their will, and you can't do it here. People – I love people like to mention Europe on some things but don't realize how aggressive they are on things like this. It's like – I mean –
The abortion laws that Nancy Pelosi— In Europe are very strict. They're 15 weeks. Yeah, in some cases 12. Yeah, and so they like to do it, but there they take this type of thing very seriously. So it's a tragedy this young man's dead, but again, this is the system. This is law enforcement not being done. This is not taking care of people. We like to say the term fell through the cracks. Yes.
But that's what happened here. Well, I wouldn't I would not say 40 times. He didn't fall through the cracks. He wasn't 40 times. I think he was dropped out of the basket. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's no way. Look, all these people protesting his tragic death today don't care about him.
No. They're just full of lies. This is a left-right political issue for them that has nothing to do with the actual human outcomes from all these incidents. You have some great – you have two topics you want to discuss. I want to just bring up here the Tucker Carlson episode this week. So people, as you know, there's a bunch of –
Tucker Carlson bashing. And it seems to be backfiring. They keep releasing these text messages or videos and people are sort of like, well, yeah, so. But there's one that's been taken out of comment by the New York Times, which they suggest Tucker Carlson's racist. Here's the full text. Kylie, this is for you. Okay. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and
and started pounding the living bleep out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable, obviously. It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted him to hurt the kid.
I think we've all had this feeling of the Antifa. You've had, yeah. No, that's real. He continues, I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off. This isn't good for me. I'm becoming something I don't want to be.
The creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?
I think that's a very honest conversation. That is actually a deeply reflective, personally honest conversation that lots more people in this country need to have with themselves. I mean, and we've caught it. We've seen these rascals out there. I've had that exact reaction. And I've had to walk away and say, I don't want to be this person. Right. And I've had that exact same thought. And the fact that whoever's leaking these doesn't see that human experience, that's
The human being working through this makes them a disgusting human being. The selective leaks so far are far more indicative of the mindset of the people doing the leaking. Which goes back to Mark's point in his great article he did for us. You need to check various sources. Whenever you see a quote, I always do this. I like to go back on it. It's sort of like the lunacy thing.
of some Trump supporters saying Soros endorsed Ron DeSantis. So you know what? Actually, Chuck, this is really relevant. So I do not as consistently focus as I should, and I'm working on that time-wise, the Battlegrounds Watch reports. One of the things I've found with those is I try to find non-paywalled sources for the thing. So it may be an article that's in the New York Times, but often you can find like the
Birmingham News has it copied over, right? Right, right. But in doing that, I keep finding discrepancies, real ones. Very much so. So it's obviously source reporting, but then they're being picked and chosen over by these various news outlets when they're putting them out. So what he was talking about in terms of having multiple sources, and I have really gained a lot
when I do that from seeing how different outlets are taking the exact same material and representing it. Absolutely. Let's talk about the studies you were talking about earlier. Yeah, so it just came out. Three medical schools in North Carolina are now diagnosing toddlers who play with stereotypically opposite gender toys as having gender dysphoria and are medically transitioning them.
I, you know, you just can't do that to a child. Well, this is that this is insanity. Oh, it's weird. I mean, it's not just weird, Chuck. This is really abusive, evil action. And these hospitals are doing it clearly for profit. One hundred percent. Matter of fact, that brings me to the point. So we have this republic. Some Republicans here in the legislature and Congress want to do this.
audit of COVID, right? And you and I discussed this. I am convinced a bunch of hospitals do not want people to see those communications because they were making money on COVID. They made a fortune on COVID. They did. And no one talks about it. Well, so one of the things that I did actually in 2021, I went back and looked, there are very few hospitals anymore that are publicly traded companies.
Right. Right. There's really only like one hospital group left. That's a publicly traded company. It's in the south. So there's no disclosure. Right. For many of them. Right. They're all theoretical nonprofits and then they siphon the profits off via a related for profit businesses like prescription benefit managers. Right. Right. And so forth. This one had to report. Right. I mean, SEC. Right.
I dug in and looked at it. 2020 was their most profitable year in history. 2021 through two quarters at that point was on track to be even more profitable. All because of COVID. And folks, by the way, that brings up a point that's totally separate from this. So when a company's public, you can get information they have to disclose. If they don't disclose, that's where they get fined by the SEC. So one way they cleaned up Vegas is all those casinos became public. Yeah. Right? And so-
You know, what's happened is most of these profits, these hospitals now are nonprofits or whatever the case may be, but they're not disclosing anything. And so here in Arizona, Andy Big, some legislators want to do a thorough investigation of what happened, why were decisions made, things of that nature.
The hospitals, they're going to take this to court all the way. Yeah, absolutely. They are. You actually just brought up a tangentially related point that kind of just connected for me with this one with the disclosure. One of the things I've been talking to one of my police buddies here, he said that's going on is they know that the cartels have now invested heavily in the dispensary systems in all the Western states. Of course they have. Right. And they're they're money laundering through them.
And he's like, but because it's a Schedule I drug and it's not easily banked and all this, we can't actually track it. It's very difficult for us now. So, you know, that brings up the point. If I were a state, I would insist that these businesses be publicly traded entities. Yep, absolutely.
Absolutely. Well, folks, thanks for spending time with us this week. Yeah. And we hope you have a great weekend and we'll talk to you next week. This is Breaking Battlegrounds. You can find us at BreakingBattlegrounds.vote. Be on the watch for deep fakes. Deep fakes. Have more than one news source, folks. That's our recommendation today. Have a great week. It's the new year and time for the new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start.
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