The Meme Gurus

We have got some very very exciting news. After so long of being locked down, being kept apart, we're taking Verdict on the road. We will be at yaff's Freedom Conference in Miami Friday, February fifth, eight pm Eastern. If you're in Miami, I hope that we'll see you there. Even if you're not in Miami, we will get to speak with you. We will be taking your questions live through the YAFF YouTube channel, So if you want to submit a question and have it answered in real time,

go to YouTube dot com slash yaff TV. We have been talking about a whole lot of things, but there's so much more to get to. Senator, what are we going to talk about? Well, the best thing about Miami is that we'll be with with real, live human beings out of the COVID caves to which we've all been sent. You had to flee the state of California to actually encounter other human beings, and so it'll be good to be in Florida, an actual state that is open and

operating with with live, liberty loving human beings. And apparently I will continue my murderous rampage down in Miami. Yet you know, ever since northern California in the sixties, uh, you know, you know, I've had a proclivity to to be to mass murder, and so so we'll see if that continues. You got that again. This actually the most recent accusation of your murderous tendencies. It came in response

to this this game style wild stock market question. I know some people are a little confused by what's been going on in the markets, and by some people, I especially mean me. I'm not exactly the most financially literate person here. What exactly is going on? There's as far as I can tell, there were these guys on Reddit who decided that there was a vulnerability at some big hedge fund and Wall Street had taken out certain positions and so they were going to make a bunch of

money at Wall Street's expense, and then everything went haywire. Well, I think you actually understand it pretty well. Yeah. You had a couple of big Wall Street hedge funds that were short selling game Stop. So they were making bets in the market that game Stop was going to go down, and if the stock price went down, they made a bunch of money. And over at Reddit, at this this subreddit called Wall Street Bets, a bunch of folks got ticked off at that and said, I'll tell you what.

Let's all go buy game Stop, and number one, we'll make money and drive the stock up, but number two, we'll put those other guys out of business. And miraculously they got enough people to do it that the stock started going up and going up and going up, and it went from like four bucks a share. So I think it's been as high as as as four hundred dollars a share. I mean, it's massive increase. I checked a few minutes ago. It's trading about three eighteen right now.

That is enormous volatility. That did a number of things. Number One, for everyone that bought it four bucks, if you sold it four hundred, you made a lot of money. Number Two, the hedge funds that are betting on it going down, I mean they got caught with their shorts down, and they're really really unhappy. Because, Senator, when you when you take a short position, when when you're short selling a stock, you're betting against it, right, and so you know,

if it goes down, you make money. But if it if it goes up, it's not like you get to just hold your position in mid air forever. You've you've got to start putting cash on the table as the stock goes up. So what has happened is if you're shorting it, you have sold the stock at a really low price, and you've already executed that transaction. You've sold it, and so if the stock goes up, you have to fulfill on that promise, which means you got to buy it.

Let's say you sold it at three bucks, you might have to buy it at four hundred to be able to deliver on the stock you've sold at three. In other words, when when you're shorting a stock, you've got enormous vulnerability if there's a big delta on the upside. And so this look, this is chaotic. This is this is disconcerting. But then it took a really I got to say, screwed up step because a number of trading platforms,

most prominently robin Hood. You know, robin Hood popularized itself as democratizing stock sales that you on your phone can participate with the big boys. Well suddenly robin Hood decided, no, no, you can't. The big boys they can still buy and sell. But but but you, the ordinary schmow. They prevented you from buying game Stop. You could still sell it, you just couldn't buy it. It's unbelievable. And I gotta admit a whole lot of folks, a whole lot of folks on

the left, whole lot of folks on the right. I mean, we all said, all right, this is screwed up. If there's gonna be a rule, it ought to be a rule that applies to everyone. We shouldn't have one rule for rich, powerful connected hedge funds in Manhattan and a different rule for every other American that is trading your

own money. And what robin Hood did is basically implemented that rule and said, all right, we're gonna screw the little guy and only favor the big guy, and that does seem to be getting the whole notion of robin Hood a little bit backwards, steal from the poor to give to the rich. Because one thing that has been so nauseating about this entire issue is when apps like robin Hood came in and protected Wall Street, basically protected

these hedge funds. It was as though they were these vulnerable, innocent, poor little hedge funds, you know, and the mean old guys on Reddit were coming in, and of course that isn't the case when you've got a retail investor, an ordinary American coming in trying to play with the big guys. And then the big guys seemed to get this separate set of rules here. So the left and the right did kind of come together about this. They said, this seems a little bit rigged, guys, this seems unfair. AOC

as far left to Congressman as you can get. She came out and said, we've got to look into this. You said, you know, stopped clock twice a day. I agree with this, and it could have been this moment of unity and healing and bipartisan support. And then she called you a murderer. Yeah, so so my tweet, I took her tweet where she said, this is messed up. This needs to be investigated. Congress needs to look into

why Robin Hood shut down ordinary investors. But but hedge funds can continue to try to get out of there their short position and try to cover their rare ends. I read or tweet, and I was, you know, on my phone. I read it, and I said, huh, that's right. I'll be damned. That doesn't happen very often. And so I retweeted her, and the sum total of my tweet was two words, fully agree. And then I had a finger pointing down. And by the way, no it was

not the middle finger. It was the index finger pointing down. In an ordinary world, if someone retweets you and say they fully agree with you, that does suggest, gosh, maybe there's there's something to this. If people all across the ideological spectrum agree this is screwed up, maybe there's something to it. Her reaction was a little different. She sent a series of really unhinged tweets screaming that she's not willing to work with me. She'll work with other Republicans,

although I'm not sure who or where. But but this theoretical Republican. But because I tried to have her murdered three weeks ago, she's not willing to work with me. And it's just a look the left right now, they're angry, they're filled with hate and and and they're they're exercising a primal scream. I mean, we are seeing ID right now, leftist ID and they're expressing hate. And it's like, all right, look,

our country is really divided right now. I'd like to see us actually interact like human beings and adults and show some decency and actually address the real problems in the country. But on the other hand, you can just scream screw you, screw you, screw you, if if that's what makes you feel good. Well, this brings up a conversation that's happening right now among conservatives as as all of these kind of big powers, big big big or coming in and clamping down. It's making us rethink some things.

I think, because as you say, AOC says, I'm happy to work with Republicans, just not Ted Cruz and just not Donald Trump, and just not really any Republican who who could work with her. You know, it's just this hypothetical Republican. But but basically she's delegitimizing any Republican. You've heard this from other people on the left who say

seventy five million Americans or Nazi, white supremacist whatever. And we on the right used to say things like, well, you know, Twitter as a private company, if they want to kick people off, build your own Twitter. You know, we want private people to be able to run their business however they want. But increasingly we're finding out the left won't let us build our own Twitter. We try to do that with an app called Parlor. They kicked it out of the app store, then they kicked it

off the internet. Same thing. Here are we now if we're not allowed to invest in robin Hood or through robin Hood rather or really any of the other brokerage apps. Are we supposed to build our own broker dealer? Are we supposed to build our own stock market? Are we supposed to build our own account? You know, where is the end of this and how can we tackle the problem so that we're not totally ostracized from society. So

there's a whole bunch of substance there to unpack. Let me let me take that at several levels Number one, if you look at what happened to Parlor, Parlor was kicked out of existence by essentially every gigantic tech company acting in concerts. So it was so it was Apple and Amazon and all of them just said we're shutting down. Your servers were kicking you off. And it was it

was swift, it was brutal. It was obviously illegal, by the way, when giant competitors work together to eliminate another competitor that is on its face and antitrust violation and they're all going to be sued, they're all gonna pay big damages, and they don't care. They're so big, and they're now convinced the Biden administration are so in their pocket that they just don't care. It's an exercise of

brute power. Secondly, you know, the AOC response is typical of how the left responds to a lot of issues which they don't actually want to talk substance. They don't actually want to want to talk about the underlying merits. They want to engage. Number one, it's all politics. You know, we talked in the Last Verdict about how this is the final scene for every Godfather movie that they are playing out Michael Corleone. They are settling the debts. They want you and me and all of us to sleep

with the fishes. And so they are trying to eliminate everyone. They're trying to eliminate Donald Trump. They're trying to eliminate me, They're trying to eliminate you. They're trying to eliminate conservatives on social media. They're trying to erase the seventy five million Americans who voted for Trump. And it is completely devoid of substance. Now you talked about how does that mean we can't you know, the ordinary American can invest

saying game stop through robin Hood. Look, one important caveat game Stop is almost surely a terrible investment, right, and it's worth noting. I mean there are I mean, since they've been investments, since there's been stock markets, they've been bubbles. You know, you look at and in Holland the tulip bulbs where they bid up tulip bulbs two insane amounts. Now, anytime you have a bubble, anytime you have is going

wait wait, wait, wait, wait up. You can make a ton of money if you buy it a hundred and sell it two hundred that math works really well. So if you happen to catch something that is soaring on an artificial bubble, if you can time it right, you can make a good chunk of money. Now people get worried about bubbles because if you buy it a thousand and it drops to two, you can be devastated. And predictably with giant bubbles, these they soar high and then

they crash precipitously. So I'll be honest, I'm not buying game stock right right, I think it is fair to say GameStop is not today a seventy billion dollar company, which is where its market cap was, given that it was a tiny fraction of that a couple of weeks ago. I mean this is this is a casino. So there are people rightly saying, look, a lot of people could lose their shirt and lose all their money on this, and that's right. But the same rules ought to apply

for everyone. So if it's a casino, you know what, You or I can walk into a casino in Vegas. We can put everything we got on red spin the wheel, and if it hits, it hits. And what dismayed so many people, what I think was wrong and what so many other people think was wrong about what robin Hood did is it had differential rules. The giant hedge funds they could keep buying and selling, but ordinary Americans couldn't.

And yes, there's risk, but if you want to do some dumb ass things, you ought to have as much right to do a dumbass thing as the politically well connected are. And that differential is significant. In a final point that is not being discussed at all, and I'm sure AOC this has not occurred to her remotely, but there's a very real possibility that one of the major reasons that robin Hood halted the ability of consumers to buy Game Stop is because of Dodd Frank, because of

leftist regulation that came in. So, as a broker under Dodd Frank, robin Hood has a requirement essentially to put up funding and to borrow funding to cover the differential of their risk exposure. And it's set up in such a way. And listen, I'm a lawyer. I don't do maths, so I'm not going to purport to explain the mechanics of it, other than I think there are good discussions to be had about how much was robin Hood's actions driven by Dodd Frank and pressure from the regulators. Did

the regulators get involved directly? To Janet Yellen, the new Treasury secretary, did she get involved directly? That's a question that needs to be asked. What did the banking regulators do? And also the fear of lawsuits. I don't doubt that A reason A significant reason Robin Hood did this is they said, well, gosh, a whole bunch of people are gonna buy the stock really high. It's gonna plumb it. They're gonna lose all their money, They're gonna turn around

sue us. And they were understandably scared about being sued. And so there is if we're going to let people go to a casino and bet it does seem to me there ought to be some form of basically a liability waiver, which is, you know, you sign something saying, you know, dumb ass release. I recognize I maybe being a dumbass right now. If I am, I'm not going to sue you. Yeah, that could well make sense. And I suspect our Democratic friends will have no interest in

that because that does not conform with their ideology. Well, this, I mean, this is a very important point. That game stop itself, right. This is a brick and mortar store that sells physical video games. This is a company that's going to go the way a blockbuster. And these kind of reddit boards have also targeted BlackBerry, Nokia companies also where the technology. You know, they're not the companies they once were. That was the point. I mean, it was

kind of a joke to them. And they saw this massive short position and they saw that they could basically run the price up and force these hedge funds that they don't like to buy up the stock, and you know, it becomes a bubble. Some people are gonna make a lot of money, some people are going to get hurt,

and the establishment is going to expose itself. To me, what's so interesting about all this volatility is a political point that you've been making now for quite some time, and we're seeing it expressed the guys on these reddit boards. I don't know them personally, it seems their politics are a little more on the right than they are on the left. I've been told my whole life that the Republicans are the party of Wall Street. Republicans are the

party of the big hedge funds. Republicans are the party of these plutocrats and the establishment. And yet if you look right now, who is defending this sort of unfair set of rules that's protecting Wall Street. It's the establishment Democrats. It's not the Republicans. We're the ones who are complaining about it. Is this shift we've been talking about the difference between the Party of Paris and the Party of Pittsburgh. Is this shift settling in? And are people going to

realize it? Yes, it's settling in, and it drives Democrats crazy. You are right, Today's Democratic Party is the party of the rich. It's the party of elites. It's the party of Wall Street. It's the party of big Tech. It's the party of Hollywood. It's the party of universities. That's who big tech listens to. That that's who rather Democrats listen to. I say, I can't even tell the difference

between big tech and Democrats anymore. It's actually one of the reasons why today's Democrats are so pro China, why they're so in bed with communist China, because all of their patrons, all of the people writing them checks and funding what they're doing, are in bed with China, Big Tech, Hollywood. They're in bed with China, which means the Democrats are in bed with China. Who are the Democrats not supporting working men and women, blue collar workers, union members. You know,

you think back. You know, you and I both read in history books. Neither one of us are old enough to remember FDR. But but there was a time where FDR, we're union workers. A steel worker was the prototypical Democrat voter. Yep. And actually, you know, you look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden's whole political career has been marketing that he was the kid from Scranton, that he was the blue collar, working class kid from Scranton. And what does he do.

He gets elected and literally within minutes of being sworn in, he takes out a pen and he destroys thousands upon thousands of blue collar union jobs, just the Keystone Pipeline, which he eliminated with one executive order. That was eleven thousand jobs, eleven thousand jobs, eight thousand of those were union jobs. And with a stroke of one pen, eleven

thousand people their jobs just poof go away. And you know, I've spent the last couple of weeks in confirmation hearings for Biden cabinet appointees asking them what do you say to those eleven thousand people whose jobs you just destroyed? And the answer that they've said over and over again is essentially jump in a lake. You know, we saw

this week, John Carey. I gotta say, by the way, if you were to pick the perfect spokesperson to understand the travails of the blue collar working class, it is John Kerry with tuxedo and tails, riding his windsurfer, and he really does. He gave this this this lecture where he says, well, we're going to help them quote make

better choices. Well, with all respect, John, screw you. You don't get to sit there with eight hundred million dollars in the bank, which, by the way, you didn't learn and tell the lowly, dirty people who have to work for a living, we're going to help you make better choices, said, they all need to make solar panels. You know, I would invite you, John, come to South to Exis, to the oil patch and talk to an Hispanic guy in a FOURD F one fifty and tell him, sorry, I

don't like the choices you have. So your job has just been eliminated. Your ability to provide for your family is gone. I mean the arrogance and condescension Thurston Howell telling you I'm destroying your life. Sadly, that's where the Democrats are right now. Well, there's something that was I mean, the whole the whole carry press conference I felt was

extraordinarily condescending and typically lock jawed and disturbing. But the most disturbing aspect I felt was where he presented his political plan and the Biden administration's political plan as inevitable. And you know, just a few months ago, Joe Biden was saying, I'm not against fracking, I'm not against coal, I'm not against oil, natural gas. And then we find out, you know, the rug is pulled out from under everybody. Yes, I am. We're going to kill the coal jobs, We're

going to kill the energy sector jobs. But it's inevitable. It's inevitable. You have to move to solar, you have to move to wind. Go learn how to fix a wind turbine. You know, it reminds us a few years ago when when liberal journalists told American manufacturing workers learn to code. Sorry, and as if there were no choice here, but of course there is. You know, the last four years we had a different policy and we prioritized keeping

energy jobs in America, bringing manufacturing jobs back. When we think about the difference between populism and elitism and all these isms that are coming up, what is the future for the Republican Party and is there any way that we can stop this, this inevitable flow of progressive history. So let me make three points on that. Number One. You know, when Joe Biden was saying in the general election he wasn't going to end fracking, everyone knew he

was lying. Biden knew he was lying. Trump knew he was lying, The press knew he was lying. Everyone listening knew he was lying. And what did the press do? And this is a great illustration of how we don't have journalism anymore. The press, the fact checkers, and by the way, fact checkers among the most pernicious liars we have in our political process. The fact checkers declared it a lie if you said Biden wasn't fact in a

band fracking. Because he was lying to the American people and saying he wasn't it, we were required to accept his lies. Boom, what happens. He gets elected, and now the fact checkers are saying it's a lie that he ever said he wasn't good to band fracking. I mean

it is you. I wish George Orwell or old As Huxley were still alive to see the absolute fluidity with which CNN and The Washington Post they are able to tell the exact opposite lie on the flip of a switch, without even the hint of any recollection to what they were saying yesterday. YEA. Secondly, you know when the John Carries of the world tell these poor, dirty, little working class people learn to code, you know, one of the ironies is almost inevitably the politicians who are doing this,

they don't know how to code. Yeah, John Carry don't know how to code. You can, I guarantee you can't program his iPhone? Look like like Joe Biden doesn't know how to code. You look at it. Politicians are exercising power to destroy other people's lives. And one of the things the Left loves to virtue signal. They love to show how virtuous they are by being willing to give away your job, never their job, never a penny out of their pocket, never anything out of their life, but

your job. They are so virtuous they will obliterate your life. Look, if you actually respect people, you say you ought to be able to choose what you want to do with your right life. Listen, I'm not a steel worker. If you put me in a steel founder, I wouldn't think what the hell did it do? At probably burned my fingers off. Like I that that being a lawyer was the right call for me, that was my skill show.

But but I'm not going to presume to tell you that what you chose to do is is somehow illegitimate and should be eliminated the wrong choice. And a third point. You know you talked about inevitable and and I have to say it, it brought to mind Avengers endgame. And you know, Carrie doesn't quite have the massive Thanos hands and fingers, but you could see the inevitable in the fingers snapping. And it actually what is interesting an endgame

is curious. Have you noticed in how many movies how often rabid environmentalists are the bad guys, whether it's thought Os or Go to Watchman, you know where where the the The view of the left is people are a disease. They buy into the Malthusian line that there are too many people in the world, that people are bad and everything would be better if we had fewer people. I mean, Thanos wanted to eliminate fifty percent of the life forms

of the universe with one finger snapping. And you know, Center, I don't want people to think that you're being hyperbolic here or that you're I mean, this has been the explicit view of very prominent leftists for a long time. You're talking about the sort of Malthusian theories that people

are going to destroy the world. You saw this with the population bomb in the latter part of the twentieth century, where we were told by the top genius scientists that if we didn't have hopefully voluntary suppression of the global population, but if necessary coerced suppression of the global population, we'd inevitably have starvation famines everywhere we had to do this. You hear this with very prominent environmentalists up to and

including Al Gore and others. It is a creepy point, and it seems so radical when you say it, but it is undeniable that that has been the position of prominent leftists. And Michael I had a question for you. Do you own a private jet? Not yet unfortunately, nor do I now Listen, I would love a private jet, but but but I don't have one. You know who does own a private jet? John Fragan carry Oh my goodness, you don't say so, the same person. The hypocrisy on

the left on this is really screwed up. And you see, you know, you see Hollywood movie stars come in in their G five. They've got the carbon footprint of small towns. And are they willing to change how they travel? Oh no, no, no no, no no. John Carey is gonna fly in his jet. He's gonna have a caravan of suburbans carry him everywhere. He's perfectly happy to have a carbon footprint. Of Paul Bunyan, the rest of us. Your jobs must go to go away. I'm sorry. Learned something else to do.

And it's driven by it's driven by money, and it's driven by power. Listen, this is not about climate. You know. One of the weird things to understand. Everything that Joe Biden is doing in the name of climate will make the climate dirtier. So as the Biden administration destroys US oil and gas production, and that's what they're doing. They're trying to utterly destroy US oil and gas production. You're not going to wake up tomorrow and magically have your

car or truck in your driveway not need gasoline. You're not gonna be able to put pixie dust in your car. You're still going to go to the gas station. You're going to fill the tank. So if Biden succeeds in destroying US energy production, what does that mean? It means America is going to buy more oil and gas the Middle East from Russia. That does several things. Number One, it puts billions of dollars in countries that hate us and want to kill us. That's really bad. Why are

we sending money to people who want us dead? But number two, they produce energy much dirtier than we do. So literally, what Biden is doing and what carry is doing is screwing the environment because they want to destroy American energy jobs because since they don't have a magic solution for what's going to power your car. If you get on an airplane, and you and I we don't get on our own private jets. We get on Southwest Airlines or whatever the commercial airline is. You know, jets

don't operate on wind. It's really hard if you imagine putting, say a wind meal on the front of a jet. It just doesn't work. You know. I'm not a physicist, but they're just kind of a problem with that. We're going to continue to have energy needs. But what they're doing is hurting the environment, destroying jobs, and they're doing it for power and money. Every time you hear this, it's about power and money. The Keystone Pipeline. By the way,

Keystone pipeline Biden just stopped. Keystone pipeline would bring oil from Canada down south to the US. Without the Keystone pipeline, you know what's happening where we're still taking that oil. We're just driving it on trucks and trains, a dirtier way to transport it that's more expensive, so it doesn't Actually every step they're taking hurts the environment. Here is a data point that the listeners of Verdict will know

because y'all are engaged and educated. But it's worth underscoring because no Democrat will ever acknowledge it, which is what country had the single greatest reduction in carbon emissions last year in twenty twenty. I think I have an idea. Who, yeah, please give the answer. The United States of America by far.

It's not even close, because our energy production is so much cleaner, and so literally what the Biden folks are doing is destroying the cleanest energy in the world to shift a dirtier energy because it makes californ environmentalists billionaire donors happy, and that's that doesn't make a lot of sense. You know. The tell on this, of course, is that the solutions that the left propose, they always remain the same, and their reasoning for why we need those solutions changes

sometimes to the complete opposite. So you know, very famously, in the nineteen seventies, we were hearing about the threat of global cooling and a new ice age, and today's environmentalists try to write this off and say, well, that was just a sort of media phenomenon, not within the scientific community. That isn't true. You can go back and see major scientific institutions warning about global cooling. That's where

the media got it from. Then it changes to global warming, Then it changes to the population bomb, as we were just discussing. Then it changes to I don't know, climate crisis, and they come up with all these new terms. No matter what the argument, it's always the same answer. Give more power to the state, give more power to the state's favored corporations, takeaway choice from Americans, tell them to thrive less, live less, do less. It always seems to

be the same thing. And you know, I guess this is related to the power grab that you're seeing in the Biden administration. You see the same inevitability talk with regard to China, and China a major polluter. Let's not forget you know, we're talking about climate but you heard from Biden and the kind of establishment consensus for decades, we need to support China, arising China. It's a good thing for the world. Sure, we might lose some manufacturing jobs,

but hey, there's it's good. And even more than that, it's inevitable. Then we saw over the past few years. Well, maybe it's not necessarily inevitable. Now we're hearing this again. I know the media are not reporting on these Biden nominees. They're not really reporting on Biden's stands towards China. You happen to be in the room. What can you tell us about about that issue as it pertains to the

new administration. Well, let me make two points. Let me comment on what you just said there, because it was it was very insightful. But it's even worse than that, which is the Democrats that purport to be motivated by a climate crisis by their actions, have made clear they don't actually give a damn about the climate, right Like, Okay, if you're going to put forth that the criterion to judge success is are we protecting the environment? Then under

that criterion, the democratic policies are a train wreck. They're a disaster. And this is where media narratives are exactly opposite. To be honest, if you look at which parties care about actually clean air and clean water, the record of success every major environmental law in the past fifty years has been passed with a Republican president. The EPA was created with a Republican president. If you look at you look at states like Texas with a Republican leadership that

clean the air and clean the water substantially improved. Look all of us, we've got we breathe, we drink water. Look, we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the environment. I want the world to be cleaner and better after we've left it than when we came. If you look at separate the rhetoric of Democrats from their actions. The actions they're taking make the environment dirtier. If you're shifting from clean energy production in the US to dirty energy

production in Russia. If your criterion that matters more than anything is cleaning the environment, that is a stupid thing to do. Paris Climate Deal, and this connects to your China point. So Biden opening week rejoins the Paris Climate Deal. Paris Climate Deal is designed to destroy a whole bunch of high paying jobs in the US, and it does virtually nothing on China. China is polluting like crazy that they are using dirty coal powered production. They're dumping massive

plastics in the rivers. By the way, I joined with a bunch of other Republicans in passing legislation to clean up the seas and to get plastics out of the seas. But an enormous percentage of that is coming from China and India that are dumping in rivers enormous quantities of plastic. The Democrats don't care about any of that. Their policies make it worse. So the Paris Climate Deal makes the

environment dirtier. And the reason you can tell that they're not telling the truth is when you make this point, they don't care. They don't care, they don't actually even dispute it. It doesn't matter because it's not about cleaning up the environment. For them, it is about power. Their objective is to destroy those jobs because they want control and they want power. Now, you talked about China in terms of big policy shifts. I think over the next four years we're going to see a big, big shift

towards embracing communist China. We've had multiple confirmation here rings for Biden cabinet nominees, one after the other after the other, has been moving back towards China. So, for example, Tony Blinkin is the new Secretary of State. Blincoln was asked if he would commit to maintain the entities list the sanctioned companies in China who were participating in genocide, participating in repressing the wagers, participating in big brother control of society.

He wouldn't make that commitment. He said, no, I can't commit to that. Gina Raimondo, who's the governor Rhode Island, she was nominated to the Commerce Secretary. I asked her at her confirmation hearing. I said, all right, will you commit at least to Huawei, and we've talked about Huawei on Verdict before. Huawei is this gigantic Chinese company. It

is a global espionage company. It mass trades as a telecom company, but it's it is the Chinese communist government uses Huawei to intercept communications from other countries and to engage in espionage. Whahwei is currently listed. I asked Jenna Romando, will you commit to leaving Huahwei on the list? Nope, she can't commit to that either, She'd have to review it. Alejandro Mayorcas, who Biden is nominated to be the head

of DHS Department Homeland Security. When he was at DHS before, he personally arranged for a visa for a senior vice president at Uahwei and for other big Democratic donors because Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton's brother arranged it, and he was basically in charge of making sure there were favors for big Democratic donors, including taking care of Uahwei. There is a pattern across this, and I'll tell you This week Senate Form Relations Committee, we had a confirmation hearing for

Biden's nominee to UN Ambassador and Linda Greenfield Thomas. She is a career foreign Service officer. We've talked before on the podcast about Confucius institutes. Confucius institutes are owned and controlled and paid for by the Chinese Communist government. They have been opened up at US universities all across the country, and they serve as hubs for espionage, hubs for propaganda. There's actually been pretty wide bipartisan agreement that Confucius institutes

are really bad and really harmful. So a couple of years ago I wrote legislation that passed had big bipartisan support, passed into law clamping down on Confucius institute. The bill I wrote has ended up shutting down dozens of Confucius institutes across the country. Well, a little over a year ago, Biden's un ambassador nominee gave a paid speech at a Confucius institute. She got paid fifteen hundred dollars to give

a speech. I questioned her at the hearing about it, and it's interesting she backed away from and said, oh, it was a mistake and she was horrified, just horrified to see what the Confucian Institute was doing, to which I responded, well did you keep the money? And she was like, well, well, yeah, of course. I kept the money, but I was horrified. And I will also note the speech she gave. So she handed the speech over the

Foreign Relations Committee. It's handed over to context that it's deemed confidential, so I have a copy of the speech. She doesn't say one critical word about China. So she goes to a Confucian institute and gives this puff piece praising China, praising the Belton Road Initiative, which is billions of dollars that China is investing in infrastructure the developing world, trying to make developing countries captive economically to China. And not only that, her speech says America should be more

like communist China. We ought to have similar policies to what they have. This is who Joe Biden is picked to be the representative for the United States of America at the United Nations. We are in the midst of and getting ready to see a massive pivot back towards China, and that's really bad for the country. In a way, I'm sorry that I have to say this. It seems

like a return to normal. You know, we're talking about this kind of crooked establishment, and you see it in stories as disparate as the game stop sort of kerfuffle, and you see it all the way in foreign policy, which you're seeing a return to this old consensus. It's pretty ugly and they are exercising political power right now. We will have to discuss how we can exercise our freedom and push back against that power. We'll be discussing it in Miami on Friday at February fifth. I've got

a whole bunch of mailbag questions. Unfortunately we're out of time now. I will bring these mailbag questions with me to Miami. We will get your questions live. If you go to YouTube dot com slash yaff TV. We might see you in person there. Senator I certainly, I at least will see you in person there, very much looking forward to it, and that's just assuming that the big establishment doesn't clamp down on us before then. But hopefully, hopefully we'll at least get a week and we will

see all of you in Miami. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations and candidates across the country in twenty twenty two, Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.