The Ricochet Podcast - Seditious TikTokin'

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Much as the world benefit from a new dance craze, it would behoove us to ensure that China doesn’t use our moves against us. Our first guest Geoffrey Cain is all too familiar with what the CCP can do with surveillance technology. He sits down with Rob, James and Charles to touch on the protesters, the extraordinary police state they’re up against, and he tries to convince a skeptical Rob and James... Source

and i what did i do here it looks like i um i have a dream this nation will rise up live out the true meaning of its creed we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created tiktok is one of the most massive surveillance programs ever especially on america's young people. Not just the content you upload to TikTok, but all the data on your phone. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Charles Hickman. The Cook sitting with Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks. Today we talk to Jeffrey Cain about dystopian China and Andy McCarthy about January 6th. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome everybody.

It's the Ricochet Podcast number 620. Why don't you join us at Ricochet.com? Why don't you? Come on, what's stopping you? You can be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web if you just go there, take a look, and say, where's this been all my life? It's been waiting for you. And it'll wait forever.

No, it won't. No. Like, now, today is the day to go there and check it out. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, freshly back from Mexico, sitting in with Charles C.W. Coop and Rob Long. Everybody, how was your Thanksgiving? Nobody cares, but I just have to say that it's kind of fun to be on Thanksgiving, doing Thanksgiving in a Mexican resort, because they know that there are Yanks there, so they're going to do their best. And their conception of pecan pie has to be seen to

believe. My favorite, I i think was just an object called pumpkin cake which was nothing more than basic white cake with orange frosting but they had gravy which only had i think maybe a cup of sugar uh in each three cups of gravy and otherwise delicious i hope you guys had an american style one and it was grand and it left you all charged it up for the uh the holiday season as we love to call it you didn't put the gravy on the cake though well no i could have more of a sauce no it was sweet enough so that i could have but since i'm doing the keto thing uh i i i denied myself a cake entirely a wise right well i mean i have to say and i and i listen i wish you all the i'm glad

you had a lovely thanksgiving change but you went to a foreign country now you're complaining about thanksgiving meal that they served all right yes because i'm an american that's exactly right all right they just simply can't do it right here can they oh it's so horrible the turkey is so great you know i know no of course not i don't i don't hold it against them in the least bet that would be chauvinistic to the extreme in the true sense of the word. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to see you do a Dia de los Muertos spread, but separate. Oh, I can imagine there's lots of chorizo involved there. I'm sorry if I'm slinging that Spanish lingo, but after five days in the country, I really feel like a native.

So, yes. So here we are. We're now in that interregnum between the important holidays. What's the news? What's the thing? Is it the RNC chairman fight you guys are absolutely just jazzed and all the twitch about? Is it the freight rail strike, which we seem to have averted? Or is it perhaps the student loan forgiveness plan gets another blow, another shot in the nose? Or is it the fact that the former president of the United States had a dinner and we learned that his staff isn't good at vetting people? That's the charitable way of looking at it, isn't it? That's certainly one way of looking at it. But as I've said, when, well, look, I've said this to people who said he didn't know who Fuentes was.

Okay. But this isn't a problem that seems to befall others. I don't wake up in the morning and read that. Oh, once again, a white supremacist had dinner with Greg Abbott. Or DeSantis. Or Brian Kemp. read that oh once again a white supremacist had dinner with greg abbott or desantis or brian kemp so there's really not much of an excuse irrespective of whether or not he knew who nick fuentes was and he knew who kanye was and he knew what kanye had been saying and so no it came and went in in in uh in quick fashion it seemed it was interesting um i would have thought almost the fact that the the means maybe i just missed exactly

all the foo for all that was made of it but it's it it seemed as if there wasn't a lot of dwelling upon the fact in the mainstream media because they seem to regard trump as as as not particularly relevant to the next cycle or did i just miss something because i was i think you got it the wrong way around i think you missed something yeah okay i think what trump is discovering is that um that or what he what unfortunately he is discovering belatedly if you're trump is that he can be he can it only works if he's the only trump in the room everything's a china shop and trump is a bull right that's how he works um i don't mean he got the white house that way so it's not like that it's not that's not an

ineffective strategy it's not much of a strategy but it's not ineffective we got the white house if he's in if there's another bull in the china shop and he becomes the china shop and people like trump have to be very very careful about who they associate with because they need to be the only person there who's the outlier otherwise it just looks like a chaotic mess and they look weak it's a good point but rob but rob i have to ask how do bulls keep getting into china shops well yeah so voters vote them in of course because they let them in or because there's just some sort of exchange program but the number of bulls in china keeping them out would seem to be job number one

if you're selling china right but the problem is that trump is is not so so actually kanye west is a much better younger more nimble more energetic bull in the china shop. So, you know, Trump needs to be sitting, having dinner with the most boring people he could possibly find. That is his, that's that's how you cast yourself as the star in the show. And he just, I mean, he's old, and he forgot that.

And so, you know, among other problems, he's ancient. In the RNC fight to come, then, are we going to see Trump-friendly candidates ascend, or is that going to be a mark against them? What do you think, Charles? Well, it's an interesting one, this, because on the one hand, you have figures who have clearly made it

because of their association with Trump, who are likely to prevail. For example, Elise Stefanik is a Trump creation. But Kevin McCarthy is simultaneously someone who trump has pushed and who has been friendly to trump in return and who has become this byword for establishment so you've got both things happening at once all of a sudden you have the rebels of the 2013-14 era republican infighting the house freedom types saying no we don't want kevin mccarthy but then you also have the guy who supplanted those figures as the gadfly, Donald Trump, having elevated McCarthy at every stage and not, from what I can see, being at war with him. I find it quite difficult to discern who is who in this fight.

Back in the day, it was easy. If you remember the shutdown fight from 2013, on the one hand, you had people who said, either the shutdown is not going to work because quite obviously Barack Obama is not going to repeal his signature achievement. And they were correct. Or who said, well, we don't mind the idea of trying to force his hand, but we think it might hurt us next year in the midterms. And on the other hand, you had people who said, look at these GOPE establishment sellouts. They'll never fight.

They'll never stand up. And people sorted quite neatly into two different groups. There was the Ted Cruzites on one hand, then there was the John Boainerites on the other hand and they were mostly consistent in their approach to politics or ideology now i haven't got a clue elise stefanik is certainly trumpy but she's not very conservative if you look at her voting record kevin mccarthy is a trumpy establishment type i think in the long run, this actually makes it much more difficult for Trump to command any sort of lead within the party because the whole enterprise now has become in co-aid.

And I was not kidding the day after the election when I said, Trump is now the Republican establishment and we need some insurgents. That's what happens over time. I'm not being coy. No, you he is the establishment and the problem with becoming the establishment is that you end up ultimately becoming incomprehensible and open to challenges and so i don't really know what we're seeing in the republican internal fights at the moment because it doesn't have any of the same force or consistency that it had in 2015-16 when Trump first arrived on the scene. Yeah, I think that's very true. Also,

look, the way you get political power, no matter who you are, is that you help other candidates win. That's how you do it, especially when you're out and you're running for president. That's what people who are running for president do. They fly around the country and they make stump speeches and they collect favors from people by performing and getting votes for them and raising money for them. That's why a very unpopular vice president in the United States won a victory in 68 and 72. That's what Nixon did.

It was smart. That's what they all do. It's smart. 2022 is many things. You can interpret it many ways, but one way you can't ignore is that the Trump brand was a killer in the ballot box. So the one thing he needs to do to help,

to help himself is to help others. And he can't seem to do that. In fact, he's making a big deal about how he's not going to go to Georgia to help Herschel Walker win his race, which he probably won't. So that's a very unusual situation where you have a presidential candidate bragging that he's not going to help an important senatorial candidate win because he knows he's toxic. So it's a hard, it's a hard, I don't know how to cut a needle.

I really don't. James, what is your view? My view is that I am absolutely, completely indifferent to who gets the chairmanship. I absolutely am. Except the fact that Mike Lindell apparently is casting about for somebody to notice him. And, you know, here in Minnesota, I feel I feel

bad for Mike Mendoza. I think he's made an awful lot of stupid mistakes, just absolutely boneheaded things that that may drive his company off the face of the earth. I don't know. I have no idea where they're not. There are that many people who watch conservative television and need a pillow again to keep them afloat. But I just feel bad for him because he had this great story of coming up from absolute nothing and horrible addiction and the rest of it and building this company and the rest. And so I can't see him moving to the RNC

and pushing it in a popular and productive direction. Let's put it that way. I just wish he would stay home and sell pillows and dog beds now. I think he's making dog beds and that's great. That's what he does. They're fine pillows. Let's just leave it at that.

You know, my hope, James, is that he has, over his recent business successes, developed enough of a cushion for himself. So to speak. Exactly. I'll leave. I'll leave. You're right. Okay, right.

I had the octopus for supper. It sucked. I get it. Very, very funny. I love the droll humor. It's so British. It's so British. I understand leave. I'll leave. Right. Okay. Right. I had the octopus for supper. It sucked. I get it. Very, very funny. I love the droll humor. It's so British. It's so British. You should understand it.

But, you know, if Mike did something like that, it would probably be an act of charity, I'm sure, because he could make more money staring where he is than going to the RNC. And speaking of charity, of course. Or maybe he doesn't even, maybe he doesn't give a sheet. Oh. Oh, you're messing with me. It took me forever to come up with that one, by the way. And you're, of course, in the comic writing business, which is why it sprung so naturally and quickly to your lips.

That high quality writer's room stuff there. I can see why you were feared in the writer's room, Rob. Exactly. Anyway, when I was mentioning that charity and which brings me to which is a sort of transitional device that usually Rob would have seen and ruined. But he ruined it for a completely different reason. But he still ruined it. I get credit for ruining it. You do. We are sponsored today, as we love to be sponsored,

by Giving Ventures Podcast from Donors Trust. That's right, one podcast sponsoring another. Donors Trust is your principal charitable giving partner. Does it seem to you like a lot of charities are shifting left? Well, you're not crazy. They are. A report from The Economist showed American philanthropy is going woke and funding liberal causes more and more and more.

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journalist, technologist, and author of The Perfect Police State, an undercover odyssey into China's terrifying surveillance dystopia of the future. You can find his work at JeffreyCain.net. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Jeffrey. I was watching this morning a fire that was taking place. Some locals in China had decided to burn down the quarantine center in their neighborhood. They didn't like it. We've been watching the protests. We've been watching these, as you note in the book title, dystopian images of the people pushing back at these white-clad men with poles. And I think, oh, those poor people who are protesting because there's probably a bevy of cameras that are locking in on all of their faces and running their features and filing them away

and docking their social credit score and the rest of it. Stuff that we used to take for granted in sci-fi, we now just assume China has and is China doing. Give us a little, give us an overview of how good their police state is and what its weaknesses may be as they deal with another round of unrest. Well, China has spent the last 10 years perfecting its police state, and one could argue that it's the most sophisticated surveillance state in the world. As you mentioned, James, it is the stuff of science fiction when I was there. It reminded me of Minority Report, the Tom Cruise film and the Philip K. Dick novel, because there were people I were interviewing who were being charged with pre-crimes who had literally not done anything wrong, but an artificial intelligence system known as Skynet, like Terminator stuff, was figuring out that they might commit some kind of act of terrorism in the future simply because they're Muslim and they pray. So they were being hauled off to concentration camps. Now I'm talking about the Uyghurs in the future simply because they're Muslim and they pray. So they were being hauled off to concentration camps.

Now, I'm talking about the Uyghurs in the western part of the country. I had spent a lot of time among Uyghurs in China and refugees overseas. And these stories were absolutely prevalent. I mean, I couldn't find anyone who didn't have some major story of being hauled away to a camp or a family member being taken away so much that this has become the largest internment of an ethnic minority since the Holocaust. I mean, it's 1.8 million people, a tenth of the minority population in this particular region of China, and it's really terrifying stuff. So that's what I was covering when I was most recently there. That's the subject

of my book. And since I've written the book, I've been watching these COVID lockdowns, the recent protests. And what this signifies is that this perfect surveillance state that China has had years and years to perfect, with the help of American companies, I might add, is now spreading across the country and being used to target just regular people, students, workers, so forth, who just want to go out and make a make a claim for democracy who want change but they can't have it because there's a surveillance system watching them 24 7 well first of all congratulations for saying philip k dick most people just say minority report and do not credit the great crazy author uh but if it's if it's called skynet i mean over here we can buy a meal

replacement food called soylent literally and they're calling it skynet it's a little too i i mean they're not even pretending anymore but But when you say American companies, tell people exactly who's been helping them. We know that Google helped with a great firewall. Is it Cisco who's been helping them perfect a few things? I mean, they've got their own technology. There's a company I was just reading about the other day that is deeply embedded here as well as there in their surveillance and their cameras and their network and the rest of it. But it's appalling to learn that American companies have done this. Didn't American companies not know exactly who they were getting in bed with and what this would be used for? Oh, American companies knew exactly what they were up to. This all started about 20 years ago.

This has been an ongoing situation. One of the major companies that first started helping China build some of the surveillance state was microsoft which had set up um microsoft research asia it's it's it's a major uh artificial intelligence research laboratory and what what microsoft had done was it trained uh many of the key players who went on as alumni after leaving microsoft to to found the startups to you know found the billionaire unicorns that were that were that were being used to found the startups, to found the billionaire unicorns that were being used to build the surveillance state. So we're talking about artificial intelligence companies, facial recognition, voice recognition, just the whole gamut of just every technology you

can imagine that the Chinese Communist Party can put its hands on and use to surveil its people 24-7. So Microsoft is only one example. I mean, to my knowledge, Microsoft has never publicly challenged or criticized the governance of the Chinese Communist Party. I think that they're quite complacent and maintain a strong presence there. Another one that we've seen just today is Apple. So on Fox News, there was just a report just, I believe, a few hours ago that showed a Fox News journalist at Capitol Hill, you know, chasing down Tim Cook when he's going to a hearing, asking him, so what's your stance on, you know, on Apple fiddling with the App Store to, you know, help the Chinese Communist Party to try to block protesters from having too much access to each other? You know, what's your stance on the protests in China? And the reason Tim Cook is being targeted for this line of questioning is because in

the past he has pretty much only said great things about China and the government of China. There are all kinds of Chinese state media reports that you can find in Chinese but haven't been translated into English that allegedly show him saying that, you know, he praises the party and he praises China. This is a great place. But he never once mentions the human rights situations, the protests for democracy and the fact that Apple has been implicated for working with suppliers that have been found to use Uyghur and minority forced labor. So essentially slave labor. Now, it's been reported that Apple has cut ties with a lot of those companies. That's been reported in numerous press outlets.

Apple itself has been very quiet about that particular topic. Hey, Jeffrey, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. So I guess my question is separate from the manufacturing problem, which they've been dealing with for 20 years. I'm old. I'm older than you i can clearly see when when um sort of the web new media these kinds of communication devices were invented one of the arguments that the proponents made was that this is could can only bring freedom because a distributed communication network cannot be controlled um and you know and all

of the terrible things that we see now you this crazy stuff happening on Twitter or wherever, Facebook, all that stuff, that's really kind of a direct result of this kind of distributed system. Good with the bad. And yet, it takes one watershed moment, or one or two. In Iran, it was the death of a young woman in custody and in china it's this um you know ridiculous this absurd zero covet policy which is utterly impossible which people should recognize now it's utterly impossible um but they have no way except they do in iran and no way of actually communicating with each other right so this distributed network which is supposed to

bring freedom the world isn't so my question is is it doomed or is it just is it just a one more way that people fighting for freedom uh one more um challenge they need to overcome technologically that's actually better right easier i mean are they they're in a better shape now because they need to code their way or kind of work their get a workaround around we chat or work around around airdrop then that one guy was in tiananmen square all those years ago standing in front of a tank he had no chance but these young chinese people have a chance right they do have a chance these protests are unprecedented in many ways um i think the one of the most interesting things happening here is that a lot of these young Chinese protesters, they have VPNs, they have access to foreign apps. They're

not completely subject to the Chinese Communist Party and its demands. They're sophisticated, educated. A lot of them have been overseas and they know what's going on. But I think what's also interesting right now is that the stakes are much higher. We've never seen protests in China under this level of repression. I mean, even Tiananmen Square, that was happening at a time of liberalization and relaxation when people thought that China was going to emerge as a power that wasn't going to be this one-party state forever. Obviously, that turned out wrong. But under those circumstances, that's when Tiananmen Square happened. In this case, it was extreme repression.

It was 24-7 lockdowns. You couldn't even go and get groceries. If you sat on your balcony in Shanghai, a government drone would come by and get your face data, your facial data, and then they send you a fine just because you're sitting outside having a cigarette having a beer or something um like these are truly repressive actions by the chinese government and it's not just these lockdowns but it's it's been the past decade of just this this um this this this uh extreme repression that's been growing because of President Xi Jinping. So here's the big lesson that we're taking away from this.

Yes, go back to the days of Steve Jobs starting Apple in Silicon Valley, and there was promise that we're going to create a distributed network connected by all these terminals, these PCs, and later smartphones that are going to allow people to rebel and do what they want. But this technology is really only as good as the people who control it. You know, if we're in a modern republic such as the U.S. or Germany or somewhere, and, you know, we have checks and balances against government power, we have the idea of liberty and freedom, people will push against government power, you know, that's going to be good for the technology.

But in China, the Chinese Communist Party has written laws that allow it to do effectively whatever it wants you know all right so but for for all my china uh his story in china hands they always say that they don't they don't all but many of them say the same thing which is you know look china has a massive chaotic nervous breakdown about every 85 years, maybe every 65 years. And boy, are they due. Is this the beginning of it, or is this just the overture? I think that— Or do you reject the premise?

No, no, actually, I agree with the premise. Every 70 to 80 years, there's a major upheaval in China. There's either a new government, a new system that's set up, and very often, as in the most recent one when the Communist Party took power, it was through extreme violence and purges and executions. The past 80 years of Chinese Communist Party rule have been, we say that they've helped build the country and take people out of poverty on a massive scale. But we forget that right before that, it was disastrous.

I mean, you know, millions of people died in the purges and the Cultural Revolution and famine and, you know, Mao Zedong. It was a terrible, terrible regime for most of its history. You know, I think that this signifies that, yeah, there are changes happening because people are not afraid to go out on the streets and just tell Xi Jinping, this is, you know, we want something new. We want democracy. What's different now is that they're openly advocating for democracy across the country in major cities as opposed to before when it would be only in Hong Kong or, you know, limited protests in certain places. I wonder what the federal government can do. If you go back 50 years, Richard Nixon thought that he would improve China and the world by opening up trade. This conceit persisted through the Clinton administration, through the George W.

Bush administration, through Obama's administration. There's an argument now that actually rather than the world making China better, China's made the world worse. You see this in sports, for example, where we were going to send basketball over there and it would make the Chinese more American. In fact, it's made basketball more Chinese, unfortunately. The companies you mentioned, Apple, microsoft cisco these are american companies can we should we stop them from engaging in commerce in china especially commerce has

anything to do with either maintaining china's great Wall system, because the internet does not work there as it does here, or in any way that could be used by them, as we did recently with microchips? Well, I think that we're already doing plenty of that. We made a lot of progress since the Trump administration, which started a huge number of these sanctions. And actually, I was involved in writing a good number of these sanctions. I used to be working at one of the congressional offices involved in this.

We have done a lot, but we haven't done enough. Here is the problem of great significance. It is that the free market, the open and liberal market, it only functions when all the players have agreed to the open and liberal rules. That is a system of courts, of contract enforcement, of rule of law. And we now have erected a deeply flawed global system through these last 30 years of globalization in which there are a handful of extremely bad actors, China among them, who take advantage of liberal governments and their freedoms. And then there are liberal governments who are required

by their own rule of law to accede to what these bad governments want. And it's a flawed system. I think it has exposed a lot of the, you know, the thinking that you just explained, you know, back in the 1990s and at the end of the Cold War, that if we simply send basketball players and and peoples, they have their own histories, they have their own systems, and the people in power aren't simply going to change their mind because they got a chance to play some basketball with Dennis Rodman. I mean, they're more sophisticated than that. So, yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that there needs to be a significant decoupling more than what has already happened. I think that this doesn't just apply to slave labor, but simply the fact that Chinese companies and also U.S. companies operating in China are required to submit to Chinese law, which, by the way, requires entities in China and people in China to partake in intelligence operations upon request to hand over data. This is something that, you know, like we can't change the Chinese system, but we can get our companies away from them.

One of the companies that's got its hooks into American culture here, of course, is TikTok. Tom Cotton tweeted out the other day that if you have TikTok in your phone, you should remove it. You should wipe your phone. You should sell your phone. You should move away from your house. You should have it raised and salt the earth. And he's seemingly suggesting that TikTok is not just this thing on your talk. But is there something else that we should be worried about? We're all happy when people started paying attention to Chinese cameras, telecommunications companies. The idea that the Chinese government would have the opportunity to embed into these systems all sorts of spyware is, of course, ludicrous. Of course, they would. They'd be stupid if they weren't. They're not stupid. TikTok, of course, is not a direct product of the Red Army, but ByteDance is connected, like everything else is connected.

Is it absurd to say that we should ban it, or is it something actually we've got to be looking at? Because, you know, who knows? I think that it's not absurd to say that that it should be banned i think that the most realistic and pragmatic solution is that tiktok should be forced sold uh so a forced sale to an american company um so currently the one that the biden administration is talking about is potentially oracle oracle an american company um one of the big challenges there though is is that Oracle also has deep ties in China and markets technology directly to the Ministry of Public Security,

which is the body that has been implicated in a lot of these surveillance schemes. They're also heavily sanctioned by the U.S. government. So it's not even clear if Oracle, with its connections, will be able to keep that data separate here in America. What is this data, though? I just don't understand. That's why I thought what Senator Cotton said, somebody I sort of admire, but I thought it sounded dumb to me. What's this data?

I mean, and if you're going to sell, give up your phone and buy a new phone, that phone's going to be made in China, probably. So I'm not quite sure what this what the the fear about tiktok seems to me to be um kind of silly what what's the data they're taking from my phone that facebook amazon twitter is not also to every app isn't always already taking so the data itself is low quality data we're talking about dance videos and cat videos and people twerking right no i'm on tiktok i know yeah. I mean, I enjoy it, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a fun app. I've used it before. You know, don't blame people for enjoying it. The problem is that the Chinese Communist Party can orchestrate missions, can orchestrate operations that would use that kind of data to to to dance videos.

Like what? What data? Well, I mean, there are military officials and there are government officials. One of the biggest concerns now, South Dakota just issued an executive order banning government officials from using it in their work. Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing. TikTok is one of the biggest repositories of facial recognition data. They have your face. They have your voice. They have your movements. They have where you're going.

They also have your keystrokes. You're going around. they have the users they have that for the user that for for the people on the screen but the vast number of people do not make tiktoks they watch tiktoks it's the same you know 90 10 99 1 and the works for the whole but by dance if you look at the way that app is coded it can track pretty much everything you do. It tracks what you're scrolling, where you're clicking, what times you're on it, what your IP address is, what your geolocation is at various points. This actually gives them

a remarkable ability to track your movements and build up profiles, which is pretty useful to a foreign adversary, and which whatever problems we might have in the US is not available to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram because it's illegal. Isn't it illegal through on the app in iOS? Doesn't Apple make that illegal for them?

Make what illegal for them? That level of tracking. I mean, Apple tracks, but that level of tracking, isn't that illegal on iOS? I mean, I'm not asking legitimately. I don't know. So that level of tracking, it is used by TikTok, and it's used by ByteDance, and that that's been well documented so a number of independent researchers have found

and they're alone in that you're saying no they're not alone in that but the problem is that so they operate in china there are tiktok employees in china who are required by law if requested to hand that over to the communist party whereas facebook twitter instagram and so you know the google and so forth, they do not operate in China. They're banned in China. So the risk of that is not there. When you're dealing with Facebook, if there's an issue with your data here in the U.S.,

you can challenge them in court. You can, you know, appeal to the free press. You can do a lot to push back against Facebook. But TikTok and ByteDance, they operate in secrecy in China. And so there's no way of having any form of recourse if your data is being handed over to a foreign government. Yeah, the best way of thinking about this, Rob, is that in the United States, for all of her flaws,

and let's say I'm not a fan, Elizabeth Warren's problem with Facebook is that it's collecting too much data on you and she wishes it wouldn't. Whereas in China, the Chinese Communist Party's problem with TikTok is that it's not giving them enough information about its users. Jeffrey, thanks so much for joining us today.

We want to have you back because there's so many more questions. I hope the next time that we talk to you, we're not saying, well, we've moved 15% closer to a surveillance state. Exactly. What did we miss? What did we what was the thing that you should have told us that this was getting worse? But perhaps we won't. Perhaps we'll be lucky enough and evade the Chinese fate. Thanks for joining us on the show today, and everybody go to his

site, which would be Jeffrey Cain, that's G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y C-A-I-N dot net, and pick up The Perfect Police State, an undercover odyssey into China's terrifying surveillance dystopia of the future. Thanks, Jeffrey.

Thanks, Jeffrey. Thanks, guys. I hate to interrupt here, but since we're talking about Internet privacy, I should. I know that a lot of people just feel, eh, my information's out there. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Well, you should do something, and that is keep the information from getting out there in the first place. I use a VPN for this site and for that site and the rest because, frankly, I may be doing something that is not illegal. It's not wrong. It's not immoral.

I just don't want that piece of data going into that bucket, and then they think that I'm this and the rest of it. No, no, no. Using the Internet without ExpressVPN, ExpressVPN, that's like taking a call on a train or a bus or a speaker for everybody to hear. You don't know who has access to your most private sensitive information. So don't be that person, okay? Here's why I use ExpressVPN. Internet service providers know every single website you visit. And in the U.S., they can legally sell that information to ad companies and tech giants

who then use your data to target you. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so people cannot peep on your internet online activity. Just fire up the app and click one button. Works on phones, laptops, even routers. So everyone who shares your Wi-Fi can be protected. No wonder it's rated number one by Business Insider and The Verge. So that's what I use it for. And part of it, it's great. You can set up little networks for friends and guests and the rest of it so that they come over, they can just pop that one button and they're secure as well. And maybe they like the idea of being secure and become ExpressVPN customers themselves. All I

know is everybody knows you need a VPN and everybody knows that ExpressVPN is the best. Secure your online activity with expressvpn.com slash ricochet now and get an extra three months of expressvpn free that's expressvpn.com slash ricochet expressvpn.com slash ricochet and we thank expressvpn for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we bring to you our old friend annie mccarthy senior fellow of the national review institute contributing editor there as well served as assistant united states attorney for the Southern District of New York. He successfully prosecuted one of the few seditious conspiracy cases brought by the DOJ. The charge has been in the news since January 6th.

What happened on January 6th? Oh, right. So we wanted to bring in an expert. Andy, good to talk to you again. What happened January 6th? Yeah, I know. I'm sitting here trying to, maybe I'll Google it, but anyway. So we've got convictions, five of five, and two convictions on a big charge. Tell us how you view this and whether or not, well, just give us your opinion on the cases so far. in the Oath Keepers case should have been obstruction of a congressional proceeding, because that's clearly what happened. And they were all convicted of that, everybody across the

board. The Justice Department wants to take something that was terrible and make it even worse. So what they decided to do was invoke seditious conspiracy. It's interesting they haven't invoked insurrection, which is also a federal crime, but seditious conspiracy, probably because it's got a 20-year sentence, so it's more serious. And the charging language, the word seditious conspiracy is interesting. It's been on the book since 1862. I did a case on it against jihad it in the 90s, what got people all whipped up at the Clinton, Janet Reno Justice Department was the word sedition, which sounded it makes it a crime to do is conspire to wage war against the United States or to oppose the authority of the government by force. Force is the gravamen of the statute. If there's not an agreement to use force against the government, then there's no crime. So they want to frame the Capitol riot not as a riot, but as a broader war against the United States. And therefore, to frame Trump supporters and

Republicans more broadly, I think this is kind of tailed off over time, but this was certainly the rhetoric at the beginning, to label those people not just as, you know, as cranks who got out of control on January 6th and did what they did, but also that, you know, they're part of a broader project in time and space to make war on the country. And the problem with it is we've never in the history of the United States, going back to 1862 when the statute was first put on the books, basically to attack or to address Confederate sympathizers in Union states. But we've never had a case where people who were charged could plausibly say, not only was I not making war against the government, I was acting at the behest of the head of the government, which is the problem with this case. So by framing it this way, the Justice Department had to comically minimize Trump's participation in January 6th. So it's interesting, if you take the five-minute walk

from the Capitol to the courthouse in Washington, D.C., if you're in the Capitol, if you watch the January 6th committee hearings, what you find is Trump obsession. Trump is like the center of everything. He's the root of all evil. He causes everything to happen. And then you take the five-minute walk to the courthouse and you go into the Oath Keepers trial. He's not an unindicted co-conspirator. They basically don't mention him at all. At most, the Justice Department wants you to understand that he's a pretext. That is, he is the reason, the rationalization that these people who are attached to this loop-knit group called the Oath Keepers, he's the preization that these people who were attached to this loop knit group called the Oath Keepers, he's the pretext that they used for carrying out an attack on the government that

they were planning for years to do anyway. And I think the bottom line is what the jury found was what the defense lawyers argued, which was, yes, what happened January 6th was terrible and reprehensible, but it was not the product of a plan or a long, elaborate, drawn-out scheme, much less a plot to make war against the United States. Hey, Andy, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. Can I just, can I ask just... Can you give me some moral guidance here? Moral? Yeah, I got a moral question for you. I usually don't get asked for that, but I guess your alternative is...

I'm surprising you. It's the holidays. It's Advent, Andy. You gotta help me out. Your alternative is Charlie, so I understand why you come to me. I got what I got. As you know, I've never been, was not a Trump supporter, not a Trump fan. That's certainly caused ricochet. Wait a minute.

Hold on. Popularity. I know. But I just think it's my, but I mean, I, should I, why should I do? I don't, should I care more about this? Because I don't. Am I just more about this? Because I don't.

Am I just not being vigilant? No, no, I don't think so. I think the thing is, there's two competing, well, I'm tempted to say two competing realities, but obviously there's only one reality. But we're in a situation where we saw january 6th as it happened right right um and it's not that we didn't care about it most people were revolted by it but because we saw it and we saw the uh the stop the steal stuff that led up to it i think most sensible people in the country made up their mind what they thought about it based on their own observation and then what we've had in competition

with that is a two-year project by mainly democrats but let's broaden it to say you know people who are not just anti-trump but i think obsessed with, to see it in a different way from how we experienced it. And the fact is, they just don't have the evidence that would make you see it differently than you observed and experienced it in the beginning. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, look, if you stole a computer or the thing or you went to Nancy or the big podium or whatever it is you took um and you know you were you should be arrested and you should get punished for that that seems like that's fair right um and if you've committed violence then you should be that's fine right that's that's

all that i'm in favor of crack it down on that but sort of the larger philosophical the the country was imperiled i just i just i mean i kind of i just have to stifle a yawn it's like oh please really right now come on well it wasn't going to really they weren't going to do anything i mean even if they came into the well of the senate like it wasn't like they suddenly they'd become senators not capture the flag yeah i think this is what what rubs people the wrong way about it i know it rubs people the wrong way about it. I know it rubs me the wrong way about it. I don't know why it's not enough for me to condemn a riot at the seat of government. Yeah. Why I liz cheney get up there and talk about trump's multifaceted plot yeah you know please do what get what we heard was they you know they have this crazy meeting in the white house i think it was like december i don't know third or fourth week

in december where you know you have the whole cast of characters there um and you know they want to seize the voting machines and all the stuff and the white house council guys are there saying that uh you know sydney powell is crazy in general flynn is crazy and they're all crazy and they they almost come to blows at one point this goes on for about five hours and then trump leaves and by two o'clock in the morning he's tweeting everybody come to to Washington January 6th. It's going to be wild. So he's completely abandoned plan one where we're going to seize the voting machines.

And now we're on to the next thing, which is we're going to put pressure on Pence and Congress on January. They never had a developed plan to do anything. And they were completely incompetent. So yes, it was terrible. But the idea that these morons were actually going to overthrow the government of the United States is ridiculous. And I can't stand it when people like, and I like Liz Chain, I've known her for a number of years, but it really bothers me that people who like to talk about democracy and the constitution, our sacred Constitution, they don't have any respect for how strong the Constitution is. The Constitution was the hero of the day on January 6th.

There was never a chance that it was going to be shredded. Well, Andy, to be fair, I mean, if you go back to some of the Federalist papers, you will find that the founders were talking about whether or not somebody who enters the house with face paint and a horned helmet should actually then be given the entire government. So it's possible that they're hoping that the originalists would glom onto this and say, well, the man's got a point. I mean, he did get there, so I guess he gets the gavel. No, I know it was ridiculous. All these yeah i want to push back on one thing here hi andy hi charlie i agree with you entirely that the alexandria acasio-cortez line that we came

two minutes seven minutes away from losing the country or handing Congress over or to having Trump installed for a second term despite having lost the election. And all of that is absolute nonsense. And I agree entirely that the idea that this riot represented anything other than a riot is ridiculous. It wasn't an insurrection. It wasn't a coup. It was unable, clearly, to achieve what it wanted to achieve there is no mechanism you can't draw a line between two things and and say qed but i do think it's reasonable to say that trump tried to

stage a coup yeah yeah because trump did something that we as constitutional originalists have seen wreak havoc when successful in our system he tried to redefine terms that are ambiguous he tried to rewrite the 12th amendment so that it said that mike pence was elections dictator and could x nihilo decide who was the next president. He tried to rewrite the Electoral Count Act and have it confer powers where they don't exist. And I never for a moment thought he was going to do that precisely because the Constitution is strong, as you say, in a way that the critics do not accept but sometimes that has worked that's what roe v wade was we had that for 50 years i don't think it's unfair to say he tried is it even if he was

never likely to succeed no you know i i think what you say which is right reminds me of every single conspiracy case i was ever in in which judges instruct the jury at the end of the case that a conspiracy doesn't need to be successful or even have prospect of success in order to be a conspiracy in order for the people who committed it to be culpable and punished, which is why you make conspiracy, which is the agreement to commit the crime, a separate offense from from the crime itself, because that's that's culpable. And I think exactly along these lines, Charlie, that he should have been impeached if they had done a competent job of investigating and pleading articles of impeachment. He would have been impeached or at least would have been impeached, or at least should have been impeached. So I'm not making a case, and I'm glad you point this out because I don't want to be

understood as making a case, that what he did doesn't demonstrate that his unfitness for office and that he should not only have been condemned for that, but that they should have additionally found that he's disqualified from seeking office in the future. And the fact that they didn't do that, I think the Democrats decided because it was the end of Trump's term and they were running out of time and he was only going to be in office for two more weeks. So why not use this opportunity as a political attack on Trump supporters rather than a serious impeachment attempt. It should have been an impeachment. In fact, I've said again and again, I think the January 6th committee in the House is

an attempt to do the impeachment they should have done back in January 2017. But all that said, yes, I mean, I think what he did is condemnable. It shows his unfitness. But we can believe both things are true we can believe it's condemnable and he's unfit and at the same time uh that it didn't have any chance of success can i change the subject briefly now that i have you um uh you're my legal advisor here um in a in a legally binding sense as well whatever you say legally yeah as legally binding sense, yeah. My friend Adam Friedman, who was a commentator for a long time,

a great author and a lawyer, says, well, I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer. And that's a big distinction. So I know January 6th seems to be the issue, but I am in New York City, which is, as you know, beset by ambulatory psychotics, homeless people wandering around. And the argument has always been, well, if only we could scoop them up, put them someplace safe for them, we would do that. But we can't, thanks to civil liberties. And so Giuliani and his marriage are a bunch of kind of a interesting loop workarounds on that um but today or yesterday uh the new york city mayor's office suggested that they were looking for ways to uh to do this um within sort of the

the loopholes that already exist can this be done? I mean, I'm asking you a very specific question about my block, Andy. Can't you legally say to these people, a bunch of psychotics who may not have committed a crime yet, look, you got to go somewhere and we got to, you know, get you some medication. Is that possible or is that illegal? It's possible, but they've made it much more difficult than it was 30 years ago. Yeah, I think, you know, when we talk about New York City now, I like to point out to people that when I back in the in the bad old days when I was growing up in the Bronx and then, you know, that's the 60s and 70s when I became a prosecutor in the 80s, by 1990, 1991, we had 2,260 homicides in New York, the city. Now we're worried that we had, you know, murders are up. We had 488 last year, you know, which is up from like 270 or something that we had in about 2017. So the point is things are not as bad crime wise as they were 30 years ago.

It could get a lot worse and it could happen quick. But I think Rob, where it is worse is there's much more mental illness and disturb people who are walking the streets than there were in the bad old days of crime. So in some ways, it seems more random. You know, when we had a lot of crime, I think in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, most of it was like, you know, standard crime. And a lot of it was like, you know, standard crime and a lot of it was gang crime. And a lot of what people were very upset about was, you know, particularly how it was being fueled by crack and that sort of stuff.

But you didn't have this sort of deluge of people being thrown on the subway tracks by people who were just like mentally disturbed. Right, right, right. by people who were just like mentally disturbed right right so the the reason you have that now even though crime is generally speaking much lower than it was is they've made it very difficult from a civil liberties perspective to give people the treatment that they need but that said it can still be done you can civilly commit people and as long as you can satisfy a court that you're doing it for valid reasons and that the person is non-composementous and needs help, yes, it can be done. It's just that it's become, on the left, they're the ones who push for this. This system that we now have, they're the ones who push for it for decades, and they don't want to say it's proven to be a complete failure. It's extraordinary, really. And when you consider it, you see now, you're just nothing more than a click away in the internet of seeing interminable numbers of videos of people just having psychotic reactions or nodding off in public or streets that are given

over to tents completely. The abandonment of areas to the dissolute, the incompetent, and the people who are not suffering from some organic version of mental illness, but have driven themselves mad by the ingesting of drugs. You would think that there would be a change in the hearts and the minds of the people who have pushed for this deinstitutionalization, but you don't. Just as in the cities that are now beset by all manner of petty crime, because we have either, A, decided we're not going to enforce quality of life issues because of disparate impact, or B, we have decided that we're going to decriminalize robbing, stealing from businesses after a certain level because of disparate impact. You would think that the people pushing for these would see the results and adjust themselves accordingly, but they don't. So there's no hope whatsoever that the people in charge of these major cities are going to do the things that are necessary to make them livable again. Well, you know, James, let's talk about two different places, right? Two different reactions.

You have San Francisco, where they finally got fed up and they removed Chisa Boudin. And then you have Philadelphia, where Larry Krasner got re-elected by, what, 40 points, was it? Now he's been impeached. But, you know, it's worth pointing out that the legislature that impeached him is a statewide legislature, whereas the people of Philadelphia, where he has jurisdiction, reelected him by scores of points. So I don't know what to make of it, except that I think that unfortunately, there's a lot of ruin in the country. That's the reason that you could have 2,262 homicides before people throw up their hands and say enough. And obviously not everybody is doing it on the same pace. I think that, you know, the high point of progressive prosecutors and all the attendants of that whole bag whole bag uh entails you know i think it's past its high point whether that means it's collapsed i don't think it's collapsed i think uh you know

i think we're in for uh a lot of pain before people get sensible it took you know look we had record crime just in new york but across the country we had record crime from the late 1960s until the early 1990s when people finally said enough. And at any point along that 30-year time span, you could pick a year, and it would be still much worse than what we have now, crime-wise. And yet, it took an accumulation of 30 years for people to finally say, you know, we have to reverse this. And I wish I could sit here and say, I have a real sense that that's about to completely turn around, but I don't. Yeah. Well, there are the people who regard it as the existence of the homelessness and the crime

and the rest of it as a useful proof of the systemic failure of this entire system. So it's got to be done away with written branch. Then there are the people who are disinclined to do anything about it because that would be being a Republican. They don't want to be that. I just think the people who think, oh, no, I want to publicly profess my virtue and throw more money at these problems instead of changing anything systemically. I wish that they would say that in public, but when they get in the booth, vote like Genghis Khan. Just vote like Genghis Khan. That's all I get. Andy, we got to... And I said Genghis, not Genghis. Genghis Khan. I'm old school. The guy who went to Peking. That guy. That guy. Right. I have to interrupt you for a second because something just occurred

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No, no, because people can only be killed by Twitter. Andy, it's great as ever to talk to you um we'll see you down the road again and uh because we always know this guy who's going to be law and cases and stuff and you're our law and cases and stuff guy well you and you you know you can fight it out in the ante room to see who gets dragon rights there but but thank you for joining us andy mccarthy ladies and gentlemen great to be with you guys thanks thank you thanks you know when you walk down some of these streets, you think, oh, is my life in danger? Am I in danger?

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So David Carter's podcast is back up. It's up. It's awaiting all the ears. It was a lot of with our own Dave Carter. So David Carter's podcast is back. Oh, right. Uh, it's up. It's awaiting all the years. It was a lot of fun to talk to him. Um, and, it's a slightly lighter look.

I mean, I think, um, Dave's a polymath and knows a lot about everything. So it's, it's a really fun conversation and he's a lot of fun. So, um,

he's got a couple of them up there. So, uh, if you got, and they're, and they're only 30 minutes. So it's like, we're not asking,

you know, he's wisely, I think a wise content creator, put it that way. And a lot of fun and an OG ricochet contributor. So we'll check it out. You really are on tech talk. Yeah,

man, he's OG. But of course the thing about ricochets were more than just the avatars and our podcast heroes. We know this because our people do unplug every now and then from the TikTok matrix and meet in the real world. For instance, our own Mr. Cook just got back from the NR Cruise, where you dined with Ricochet's finest representatives. How was that? Was that fun? It absolutely was. I didn't get to dine with everyone because the night there was a Ricochet meetup,

I had the National Review staff meetup. But I did get to dine individually with various Ricochet members. Oh, that's great. That's great. James, of course, James and I, we gathered earlier this year on a rainy April day, but it was a lot of fun. A little pub crawling, which I'd like to do again soon. Oh, it was great fun.

I got COVID, and I'd do it again. It was worth it. It's absolutely worth it. I got COVID, and I'd do it again. So, look, that's why we think you should join Ricochet. We're not just on the web. We are IRL. We matter in the old- fashion way in real life. So when you join Ricochet, you have an invitation to some of our

exclusive members-only meetups, and there are some coming down the pike. Here they are. Rush Babe and Ray Kajawa are hosting their holiday open house and chili party on December 3rd. So that's actually tomorrow in Everett, Washington. She, that's her handle name, it's not her preferred pronoun, she's great, as in she's great, is hosting an extravaganza near Pittsburgh on December 10 and 11. Susan Quinn is getting a gang together in Sarasota, Florida in January,

which is on the weekend of the 14th, which is a very, very good timing to be, if you're going to be in Sarasota, be in Sarasota in January. That's going to be nice. And Quiet Pie has something in store in Vacaville, California on January 28th. Randy Wevoda

is plotting a big meetup in New Orleans for French Quarterfest. That is a... I'll be there. I'll do whatever I can to be there. Okay, so if these meetups aren't convenient for you, or they are out of reach, or they're too far, or whatever, no problem. All you got to do is join Ricochet and give us time and a place and Ricochet will

come to you. That's what we do. We travel. So for details on our Ricochet meetups, go to ricochet.com events, or you can find the module on the sidebar on the site. But as always, we want you to join because we want to see you and we want to see you in the comments and we want to see you on the posts and we want to see you IRL. Good idea. Last before we go, gentlemen, last night I was watching football and I saw a very large man, nimble and strong, carrying the pigskin and he was beset by three other gentlemen who were intent on not letting him pass. There was a great collision that I could hear practically from where I was. I mean mean the microphones picked up the crash of helmets the grunts the rest of it and eventually they stopped him and eventually this pile of flesh

was disentangled and they shrugged their shoulders and went off to the next iteration of the same thing i realized that this does not make me a very cosmopolitan man because if i were a true citizen of the world i should watch the sport in which grown men act as if they have been lanced in, you know, with, you know, with some long, sharp pole because they brushed into somebody and their eyelash fluttered against their against their skin or even their uniform. And that, of course, would be the the the greatest game in the world, soccer. And here's Charles C.W. Cook, who has done a masterful job of impressing on us his absolute acclamation to American culture,

to the fact that he is more Florida man than Florida man himself. But yet, he's going to ruin it all now, I think, with a defense of soccer. Or are you? Are you? I'd certainly defend soccer i love soccer and i had two reasons i had two reasons i'm an og soccer fan irl rob there you go all right i think you come by it honestly to be fair you're not an american we know that well this is the first reason i love soccer is because i grew up watching soccer and soccer in england is the sport it is almost a religion who are you a supporter of well my dad is from manchester and became a manchester united fan after the munich air disaster in the 1950s i didn't know

they were playing the Palestinians. And I inherited that, which was quite fortunate, because the 30 years before I became a Manchester United fan, they won nothing. And then the minute I became a Manchester United fan, not because, but perhaps in spite of my becoming a Manchester United fan, they became unbelievably successful until about 2013, at which point it all collapsed but i just have years and years and years of memories of watching soccer both league soccer and international soccer with my dad and my uncle and my friends so obviously i'm well steeped in this but and i wrote this in the piece i wrote about this. That's not really the only reason because

I love American sports, as you say. Now, there are a lot of people who love soccer, and then they move to America, and then they say American sports is stupid. And they say, why do the American football players wear Kevlar body armor? Well, because it's a brutal game. And they say baseball is boring. And it's not. I love baseball. I love football. In fact, I think football is the greatest sport in the world. I just also love soccer. And I see this a little bit like people who say, you know what?

I used to like opera and then I discovered blues. Why not both? I mean, this is the great thing about the world. And in fact, especially the modern world and in america where there's no blackouts i can of a weekend watch premier league soccer or the world cup college football the nfl and baseball if it's the right time of the year that's a basketball and as well i like all of them i don't know why it has to be a competition because it's that because because pouring scorn and contempt on soccer is a is one of the things that I use to assert my individuality and my character. That's why. Can I share?

When I was a kid, we lived in Holland. And I went to this international school. My brother was older. He went to a Dutch school. And so all my friends were English, or as they would correct me,sh but but they were english and uh i know i know but that's but you know we're american they're they're all england um and uh and so when i was a kid i was a liverpool fan because my friends were all watching liverpool i was a huge liverpool fan excuse me just let me finish my memory it's a very sweet memory and um and i love going to the games local

games um in holland they were great and uh um and then i played it when i was a little kid and then um then that was that and then the only thing i remember was like a year ago uh was in spain with my family and we were in seville and we saw we went to a soccer game and it was hugely hugely fun um and i love the fact that tunisia in the world cup beat france because i know i have friends who are tunisian they just loved it and that's the best thing about the world cup is when you know the former colonies take on their european uh oppressors and win on the field um but i i have zero interest in following it the rest of the year it's really kind of i'm a fair weather friend a situational fan um i have to actually care either about the countries involved which

gets harder and harder to do um or have to be in in in place and somehow to experience the fun of watching a live soccer game um and in that respect it's a it is a little like opera charles for me in the sense that i don't really search it out. And it's long and it's very noisy. And there seems to be wall-to-wall singing all the time. But, you know, every now and then you can, you know, I'll go and I guess cheer for the fat lady. I think American football is opera, but that's a topic for another day. Well, the thing about most Wagnerian operas, Wagner operas rarely end in a tie.

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