Morning Wire - How U.S. Companies Empower China | 3.26.22

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

U.S. companies help China to create surveillance state, Covid enters flu-like stage, and California community colleges propose diversity, equity and inclusion requirements for teachers. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new report reveals the extent to which U.S. corporations are partnering with the Chinese Communist Party. From sharing technology to helping build China's surveillance state, we'll tell you which companies are the most deeply connected to Beijing. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's March 26th, and this is your Saturday edition of Morning Wire. COVID-19 infections are dwindling, even as new variants emerge. And a new study points out an increased risk of diabetes among COVID survivors. We have a COVID news roundup with Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty McCarrie. And California community colleges have proposed adding diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies to their teacher evaluations. We'll take a closer look. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. This show is sponsored by Pure Talk. If you're

with Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, you're paying too much. Switching to Pure Talk saves the average family over $800 a year. Go to PureTalk.com, find the right plan for you, and enter promo code Wire to save 50% off your first month. A new report details the role U.S. corporations played in building China's military and surveillance state. Here to break down its findings is Daily Wire reporter Ben Johnson. Thanks for joining us, Ben.

Thanks for having me. So how closely intertwined our U.S. corporations and Chinese government agencies? Too closely. And critics say they don't draw appropriate lines where human rights are at stake. Eight major corporations were covered in the victims of communism Memorial Foundation's first ever corporate complicity scorecard. Those corporations are Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook, GE, Google, Intel, and Microsoft. Of those eight corporations, half of them got an F, and another two scored a D based on their cooperation with the Chinese government.

All right, so some big names, well, the biggest names are involved here. what are some of the offenses the report catalogs? They basically break down into a few categories. Some corporations help develop technology that the Chinese Communist Party uses to spy on its population. For instance, Dell runs an artificial intelligence lab in partnership with the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation, or Cassia. That group creates facial recognition technology, biometric monitoring,

and voice recognition that enables the CCP surveillance. In fact, four companies, Amazon, Dell, GE, and Microsoft, all facilitated China's creation of the so-called smart cities, cities that are run by artificial intelligence where every public space is monitored 24-7. Some troubling stuff. And it's only the tip of the iceberg. Other U.S. corporations are also involved in producing dual-use technology, which are innovations that have a military application.

Or they partner with companies that are tied to the Chinese military. GE, for example, partners with the Harbin Electric Group, a state-owned entity, on the development of turbine technologies. But Harbin is also part of the Chinese government's military fusion program through a dedicated department that draws on turbine technologies. Okay. That's particularly troubling because GE is also a major partner of the U.S. Defense Department. So there's the potential of technology transfer.

Some are also involved in the persecution of Uighur Muslims. Dell and GE both maintain offices in China's Xinjiang province, where government officials heard approximately a million Uyghurs into an open-air prison. In addition to claims of forced labor, there have been credible allegations that China engages in systematic rape and torture. But nonprofits have identified 11 separate companies in Apple's supply chain as potentially linked to that slave labor program. The report also says that corporations have used their clout to advocate for Chinese causes, some of them in the United States. For example, Dell supports China's imperialist Belt and Road Initiative, But Apple lobbied Congress against certain provisions of the U.Gar Forced Labor Prevention Act.

U.S. corporations have due business with China now have a vested interest in opposing any U.S. sanctions that would improve human rights. Now, Big Tech obviously has a major financial incentive to invest in China. How does the U.S. government play into this? Well, the U.S. government actually encouraged this kind of investment for most of the last four decades. In the late 1990s, there was a bipartisan consensus that global engagement, with China would eventually cause the country to adopt democracy, capitalism, and respect human rights. Instead, the CCP's become more repressive of its U.Gar Muslim, Tibetan Buddhist, and unauthorized Christian communities. It's monitoring its own population to a degree the average American would find

incomprehensible and its saber-rattling against U.S. allies, often with technology that was made by U.S. corporations. All right, Ben, that's a lot to process. Thanks for the overview. Any time. That's a Daily Wire reporter, Ben Johnson. Coming up, a new study shows COVID survivors have a higher risk of developing diabetes. The market's slow decline has now worsened, and you need to make sure that your savings are protected with alternative investments. Hedge your savings today before it's too late with Birch Gold.

Text the word wire to 98989898 to claim a free info kit on physical gold and silver today. Again, text wire to 989898 to protect your savings with Birch Gold today. The number of COVID cases in the U.S. has dramatically decreased over the last few weeks, even amid reports of a new variant abroad. Meanwhile, we continue to learn more about the long-term impact of the virus. Joining us to discuss the latest on COVID is Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty McCarrie. Dr. McCarrie, thanks for coming on. Great to be with you.

Now, it's March of 2022. What is the state of COVID in the United States right now? Well, we're at record low levels across the board in terms of case numbers were at nine for 100,000. And in terms of hospitalizations and ICU utilization, the issue that we're following is that Europe just had a bit of an uptick. I wouldn't call it a true wave, but it was an increase in cases, not really an increase in hospitalizations or severe illness.

And we've been bracing for that here for about three weeks because Europe has been a pretty reliable preview of what we can expect in the United States. And for some reason, we have not seen this uptick. it may happen in the next few weeks or for some reason it may not happen here at all. Now, what can you tell us about the new sub-variant B-A-2? How contagious is it? How sick are people getting? So it's generally believed that B-A-2, which is sort of the second Omicron variant, also known as the stealth variant by some people, it's about 30 to 50 percent more contagious, not more dangerous, but when you have something that's more contagious, you're more likely to pick it up

a lot with asymptomatic screening. That is, testing people who feel fine, you're more likely to detect it. Now, do you expect that we're going to have another surge? Is this something that we will have annually? What should we do to prepare? I can almost guarantee that we're going to see an increasing cases this fall, and it's because COVID-19 is going to fold into the group of respiratory pathages that goes up every winter, every viral season. Now, it will probably join the four other coronaviruses that we've learned to accept year to year that cause about 25% of the cases of the common cold. Now, can you explain what's happening in South Korea? They have just now exceeded 10 million COVID cases due to a recent surge in infection and deaths. What's going on there?

So South Korea never really got hit hard with COVID. And when you, don't get hit hard with a virus, you sort of pen up some vulnerability. By the way, we're going to see that with influenza. We've had a couple mild flu seasons. At some point, we're going to get hit hard. Well, with COVID, South Korea is now getting hit hard. One of the mysteries of COVID is how it sort lingers. We thought when New York got hit early in the pandemic, that the rest of the country was going to quickly also get hit badly. But it was staggered. India got hit very late, almost a year and a half, later, and out of India came the Delta variant. So we're seeing it finally cause a real wave in South Korea. But to put things in context, they're still doing much better than other countries.

Their total death count is 13,000 in a country of 51 million. So yes, their hospitalizations are a bit full right now, but they also just approved Pax-Livid, the antiviral therapy, and they're just now sort of gearing up. Now, tell me about this new study by the St. Louis VA health care system that is seeming to show that COVID-19 survivors are 40% more likely to develop diabetes. That sounds really high. Can you explain that? Sure, yeah. So we know that diabetes is in part a mystery when it comes to type 1 diabetes. And it's been known that viruses may trigger type 1 diabetes. It may trigger an autoimmune response. The study out of the VA really looked at type 2 diabetes, which means people were, they already

had risk factors. The risk factors might have included obesity, and that people who had COVID had a 40% increased likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes. So it's concerning. Initially, people thought, well, these are veterans at the VA hospital. They're already at risk of diabetes. But the study was done with a good control group. And it was clear that type two diabetes was more common after the infection in every group,

young people, healthy people, people older, and people at risk. All right. Well, Dr. McCarrie, thank you so much for coming on. This is great. Good to be with you. Thank you, Georgia. That was Dr. Marty McCarrie from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. California Community Colleges have proposed a new rubric for faculty evaluations that measure competencies in diversity, equity, and inclusion. The new evaluations would require college professors to demonstrate an understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. They would also have to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to establish anti-racist goals in their professional work.

Daily Wire investigative reporter Marade Allorty is here to tell us what's going on. So, Marade, tell us about this new proposal. Yeah, so on March 11th, the California Community College's Chancellor's Office issued a formal proposal to embed DEI competencies as part of the evaluation process for employees. So this would be system-wide in California. The idea is to make DEI competencies a formal condition for faculty to get promoted or receive tenure or otherwise advance their careers. I also want to note this proposal adds an A for accessibility to DEI, so they called it DEIA or DIA. So it would be mandatory to include DEIA as part of teacher evaluations, which would affect things like employment and tenure. Yes.

and not just teachers, this would apply to administrators and other employees, too. So what would that look like in practice exactly? Well, as of now, only the proposal has been released, so we don't have specific rubric items yet. However, here are some things mentioned in the proposal. Employees would be required to submit a self-reflection relating to diversity and inclusion. Employees must also demonstrate their understanding of anti-racist principles and show how they have operationalized those principles in their jobs. The proposal also says employees would be provided with professional development opportunities for creating, quote, inclusive campus and classroom culture and equitable student outcomes. It's not clear whether those opportunities would be professional development trainings or personalized plans based on performance.

So these DEI competency criteria would be a baseline for all districts and colleges, but it looks like individual schools will have some flexibility with how they choose to incorporate them into their own local processes. presumably schools would be free to go above and beyond these recommendations as well. Now, I think some people will hear this and they'll think this sounds like an ideological litmus test. Has that concern been addressed? Well, the plan says employees will have a group of evaluators with a, quote, range of perspectives, but it's unclear how that would be enforced or how wide the range of perspectives would be. Obviously, it would be very hard to include perspectives that oppose the initiative itself or the equity agenda that it's promoting. Now, how many students is this going to affect?

So the California Community College's education system is massive. The system includes 116 community colleges, more than 2.1 million students, and nearly 58,000 academic staff members. It's the biggest community college system in the country. But right now, this is only a proposal. How likely is it that this will go into effect? Well, back in 2019, California's community college system adopted a DEI, plan that included a laundry list of ideas for how to incorporate DEI. One of the ideas was encourage diversity-focused criteria in employee evaluations and tenure review. So decision makers at

the state level already approved a plan that included this as a suggestion. So this new proposal is kind of just the next logical step to deliver on that promise. You know, this is the nation's largest community college system, and it's a really big step they're taking. It's amazing. This isn't making more headlines. I agree. Marade, thanks so much for reporting. Thanks, Georgia. That's Daily Wire investigative reporter, Marade Allorty. Another story we're tracking this week. Idaho Governor Brad Little signed a pro-life bill into law this week that bans abortions

after about six weeks. The bill is closely modeled off the Texas Heartbeat Law. Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. If you like this episode, subscribe and tell a friend about us. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back Tomorrow with the news you need to know. If you like this podcast, subscribe to our Morning Wire newsletter, available exclusively to Daily Wire members. Get the Morning Wire newsletter delivered straight to your inbox when you join at DailyWire.com slash subscribe.