Bulwark Takes - America Is About to Betray a Brave Man

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Tim Miller takes on the planned deportation of Uyghur whistleblower Heng Guan, a decision that raises deeper moral and strategic failures in America’s approach to China. Please contact your senators and representatives: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody, Tim O' from the Bullwark here. I wanted to make sure you guys saw this horrific story about the deportation we have planned for Hanguan, a Chinese whistleblower who fled China after documenting their abuses of the Uyghur Muslim minority there.

I want to explain what's happening in this story in particular because it's so nightmarish and so awful. I also just want to do a quick rapid fire at the end. We'll have a broader video later with somebody who's more of a China expert. But there have been a bunch of other stories that have caught my eye over the last couple weeks related to just the degree of Donald Trump's weakness on China, both in the category of things that he is doing and things that he isn't doing. But across the board, to the extent that there's any great power competition going on right

now and that we should have any sort of hawkish feelings towards China, like Donald Trump is maybe the most pliant and prostrate president we've had, facing a great foe or a great competitor on the world stage in memory. I mean, certainly, you know, and certainly in my lifetime. So I'll let me talk about Heng first, and then we'll do rapid fire. A couple of these other China stories. This is from New York Times. Shout out to Amy Kahn and Chris Buckley for their work on this headline is he recorded China's detention of Uighurs.

The U.S. wants to deport him to Uganda. You can read from you a little bit of the lead here to give you the context. In 2020, a Chinese citizen had heard reports about the mass detention and surveillance of Uyghurs. He wanted to see if they're true for himself. So that citizen, Hanguan, made a risky decision driving across the country from eastern China to Xinjiang, where he tracked down and secretly shot video of these re-education and detention centers, mostly holding Uyghurs a Muslim ethnic group. That footage became a rare visual piece of evidence of the scale and forcible nature of China's clamped down. At the time, well, even still Beijing's claiming that these were voluntary camps, that they hadn't done anything wrong.

In 2021, Mr. Juan fled to the U.S. reapplied for asylum, the great American tradition, that people fleeing communist countries, political dissidents fleeing communist countries, could find safe haven and safe refuge here. But this August in New York, he was detained by ICE. Again, look, we could go down through the whole annals of history. Like, what is the U.S. for, if not for, welcoming people that were political dissidents in other countries, were whistleblowing, we're providing evidence of the horrific human rights abuses in those countries and when to come to the U.S. for freedom? And what better, like, when you think about, like, the meta, like, the great, how did we win the Cold War, right? And, like, there's a lot of mistakes we made, you know, we could all go back and forth on, you know, various choices.

militarily. In the end, the victory in the Cold War was an economic one, but also a narrative one, like that in the end, people saw and believed that the U.S. model offering freedom for people, offering economic opportunity for people, was a winning one, not the model of people behind the iron curtain of repression and economic scarcity, right? Like that, fundamentally, the propaganda war, and I say that, in this case, I say propaganda in the best sense. So the propaganda war, the promotional war about the American system, free markets and free people, was a huge part of our success.

And as we look for this competing model that we have with China right now, In another world where we didn't have a wannabe authoritarian, that would be part of the process as well. We would want nothing more in our global competition with China than to say, hey, the guy that got the video and blew the whistle on their internment camps came to America and is able to live freely, is able to flee and get asylum and find opportunity here because that is what America is about where the land. of milk and honey. We're not anymore. And this is simultaneously a horrific human rights abuse that we are inflicting on this whistleblower and also just a massive rake step and cell phone in the global competition against China. Just a little more on the details when it comes to Hanguan. So he detained in August. There was a public outcry at the time, concerns they'd send back to China, at which point you are essentially, you know, submitting him to a life

in prison, war camps underneath the She's communist regime. After that outcry, the administration changed this decision, unclear with whether as a troll or what sadistic fuck in the administration decided this sort of thing to do, but instead of sending him to China, they're now planning on sending him to Uganda. Neither states, this man has no connections. in Uganda, but you know, who does, China, they share strong economic and defense ties with the country. And so, who's to say he wouldn't be in great danger in Uganda? His lawyer says here in an interview to the New York Times after the hearing, quote,

it's more than likely that for such a highly sensitive person like Mr. Gwan, that Uganda would send him back to China. It's possible that the horrific atrocity of that. happens anyway, and it's just, I guess the U.S. decides they can kind of wash their hands of it and say it wasn't their fault since they sent him to Uganda instead. I mean, just ridiculous. It should be noted that it's not as if he committed any other crimes in this country and that he ended up getting wrapped up in a raid led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations team that was targeting his landlord. So, truly just a case of bad luck. An asylum in this country trying to get legal residence has a very legitimate case where we can discuss the danger. They'll be back in his home country and we're going to send him to Uganda and maybe back to China for a life in prison or who knows what other horrors might await him. It's just it's sick. It's sick we're doing this man and I do encourage you to speak out.

And if you want to contact your representatives or senators about this, I think it's as good of an issue as any. Going broader and more meta back to, once again, this kind of great power struggle that we potentially have with China, it's truly unbelievable. And I think really underappreciated just how weak Donald Trump has been in this and just how much of an advantage he has provided to the Chinese about what. country kind of controls the future or what country has most influence on the global future. You know, we could go through kind of a broad list of meta examples.

You know, the trade wars that we have engaged in have created a lot of countries deciding that China is more reliable and that they should re-engage with them. When it comes to trade, we've seen this, many allies that, you know, had previously been with us in isolating China in various ways. economically are now re-engaging with them, our abandonment of the Global South and the cuts from USAID and others is allowing China to, you know, make friends and influence people, so to speak, in the global South and to have more control and influence, as evidenced in this one case by what's happening with Uganda and China has an economic relationship with them, what we're doing. We're just sending them people we want to deport. So, I mean, you can just imagine what, you know, the feeling is from countries in Africa and elsewhere about who they think is a more reliable partner. So those are a couple of examples. But recently, you know, we had these series of stories.

There's just, it's just alarming how weak we are with relation to China. There's the trade deal with agriculture where we essentially are giving China the most access to the most powerful AI. chips in exchange for some soybeans that is the deal and we haven't even got the soybeans yet and the china has promised us a certain barrels or bushels or whatever the fuck of soybeans and and they're not even closed to meeting what they had promised in that deal like AI chips for soybeans that's the deal soybeans that they were already buying for from us by the way before before our stupid trade war and what a cell phone that is. Then today in the bulwark, there's just a really excellent article that I would recommend that everybody check out.

And we like to do a longer video on it later. But the headline is the FBI spent a generation where we're learning how to catch spies. Then came Cash Patel. As China's spies grow more aggressive, the FBI is distracted and off balance. The article basically just lays out the way that our counterintelligence agencies with Tulsi Gabbard and Cash Patel in particular are just not up for the challenge of dealing with the Chinese. spy games and what they're doing in this country, undermining our safety and security. So that's one. There's a story.

These are more kind of right-wing cultural issues. So, you know, I think that there's, you know, may room for disagreement on both of these. I think I'm going to be pretty hawkish on them. But Trump got pushback for his plans to allow, I think it was 600,000 Chinese students into U.S. universities. It's like, it's so crazy to me. Like, we're cutting immigration everywhere. Like, the only people we're letting into the country are white South Africans.

And, and we're, and we're now, like, making, you know, prioritizing student visas for Chinese, for the Chinese people. I'm not, I'm not against letting, you know, Chinese student study here, of course. But it is pretty bizarre that, like, given, again, the, the potential competition we face with China, that is the area where Trump is deciding to liberalize his immigration policy. And I just, I could think of like 100,000 other places where I wish we had a more liberal immigration policy than then on student visas for Chinese nationals. On top of that, you have the pardons for Chinese criminals that are in business with Trump.

And this sort of in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. I mean, basically, you know, these many cases in America where you have Chinese citizens. citizens, wealthy Chinese citizens, essentially buying wounds in America, having kids be born here, be American citizens. They haven't even come here to visit their kids. Like, nannies are watching the kids. This is a crazy story. And the also journal headline the Chinese billionaires having dozens of U.S. born babies via surrogate. There's no regulation around that. Like, that's not something that we have any concerns about. I just, we are asleep at the switch when it comes to China. And let's just run down that list again.

Like we are deporting Chinese whistleblowers. We are allowing Chinese billionaires to buy American wounds by the dozens in order to get access to American citizenship. We are increasing the number of Chinese students that we are bringing to our universities. We are pardoning Chinese criminals. We are trading the Chinese are advanced AI chips in exchange for beans, a hill of beans. We are abandoning our engagement on the world stage and driving our allies into the Chinese arms. We are doing a worse job than ever at identifying CCP spies inside our country. And this is an F, like Trump's behavior and just kind of no matter what your view is on how the degree to which you see China is a threat, like at least like this is a, there is a competition.

And right now, like we are basically conceding and rolling over and the world is seeing, is looking at the options. And we have an inverse of what was happening in the Cold War. In the Cold War, people were looking at the options and saying, look, at the American model and how successful it is. Now, and look at how, you know, kind of small and controlled and backwards, the Soviet model is. And now as a lot of people looking on the world, they're seeing the inverse. They're seeing an American model that is erratic and closed and closed-minded and shrinking. And like, they're saying, seeing at least a Chinese model that might have horrific human rights abuses, and it does,

but they're at least a reliable partner. So, look, that's not my view. I find the CCP to be utterly appalling. And if the future of the world is the future that the CCP wants, I think that's a very dark place indeed. And so I want this to be a competition that the West and liberal societies, small liberal societies, win. And right now, we are losing it badly. And Donald Trump is potentially giving away the game intentionally. I don't know. He maybe has, is there a better description for what has happened in that list of events than the fact that Donald Trump is doing business with the Chinese and or with

Chinese interest? And we know he's doing business with Chinese crypto interests. So, maybe this is that. Maybe he's purposely throwing the game and hurting America to benefit himself. I don't know. But it's a series of stories that is extremely appalling and concerning. And I just, I hope and pray that somehow we can intervene on behalf of Hanguan and protect him. Because somebody that was showing a lot of bravery, encouraged, being out against the Chinese regime should be able to find a safe haven somewhere in this world and hope we can find him one. All right. Thanks, everybody. Subscribe to the feed. We will be talking to you again soon.

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is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600.

To speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.