TRIGGERnometry - "We Let China Have Its Way With the World" - Melissa Chen

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

Melissa Chen is New York Editor for Spectator USA and MD of Ideas Beyond Borders @IdeasB2 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisten. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest is returning for her second time on the show. She is the New York editor of Spectator USA. Melissa Chen, welcome back to the show. Hi, Constantine. Hi, Francis. Thanks for having me back. Oh, it's so good to have you back. Listen, we talked to you last time. I think it was about September 2019. We talked primarily about China the way it's using it. power in the world, the impact that the CCP is having on all of us wherever we live.

Well, one or two things have happened since then that have made that even more a thing that is present in our lives. Talk to us about what you've seen over the last year and a half. I mean, needless to say at the time that we were taping it, it was not on anyone's radar, really, unless you were a China watcher or, you know, really focused on geopolitics. But, you know, somewhere around October 2019, things were already brewing in Wuhan on the ground. And our lives were about to be completely upended in ways that, you know, we just couldn't anticipate. And when 2020 hit, everything hit the fan. And, you know, it's been a really interesting year.

Coronavirus has kind of accelerated so much of the trends. So, you know, almost every trend that we've seen, whether it's a really interesting year, coronavirus has kind of accelerated so much of the trends. So, you know, almost every trend that we've seen, whether it's in work, you know, working from home, whether it's on globalization, supply chain sovereignty, or even just the concern about China and China's role in the world, all these trends have really been kind of accelerated or at least brought to the forefront in the last year or so. And China's action since then has really not been that of a responsible world actor. And so stuff that I was talking about in 2019 to both of you has really become relevant in a way that in 2020 made me seem like, you know, I was some sort of like a side gig or something. But the trends were already there and the signs were already there. And, you know, I would say like several people, you know, even in the Trump administration, had already active in ways to counter China's increasing assertiveness. But look at, you know, bipartisan agreement on China right now.

Look at popular opinion in America. I think 90% of people in America actually agree that China is a competitor and a rival. It is not, you know, a partner to the United States. We're not going to be able to develop and get rich together. We are actually geostrategic rivals. And so all these have really kind of shifted in the last year. And it's a very profound, like, paradigm shift. And you say it's a very profound paradigm shift.

And we've seen, you know, what's happened with the coronavirus. I mean, how much responsibility should China take for this? Well, I mean, it's really interesting because, you know, we're talking at a time now when the whole lab leak hypothesis has been, you know, sort of shored up again. And so it's percolating in the press, something that was completely apparently a debunked conspiracy for the last year, you know, since early on, I would say in January, February, there were people talking about this. What are the odds that, you know, in the city where there were two, not just one, there were actually two labs that housed BL4 facilities studying these bat

coronaviruses would be the source or the first place where COVID-19 shows up. The virus, SARS, OV2. And, you know, Ocum's razor, which is really, you know, a very basic principle of parsimony that the scientific method is modeled on really should have been at play, right? Because what is the most obvious guess here? And instead of kind of investigating this possible theory as a hypothesis alongside others, which was, you know, the reigning theory of the day was really about the zoonotic transmission at the Huanon seafood market from bats to some sort of mystery animal, which was surmised to be a pangolin. In the end, you know, we reflexively, the scientific community, governments, and our entire

media class dismissed the lablich hypothesis as some sort of, you know, racist or just debunked conspiracy, we shouldn't even go there. And really, it's, it's a failure on, you know, what Eric Weinstein would call our sort of communal sense-making apparatus. The institutions that run on media really decided on gating this narrative and preventing people from asking questions. If you happen to, you know, zero hedge early on was banned from Twitter, and all over Facebook was banning, you know, anyone that was posting or removing posts that even suggested it might have been a lab leak. And, and, you know, even without the lab leak, even if this, you know, China was found to be to be lying. I think that if you look back at the initial cover-up,

enough damage had been done. How we, you know, the country persecuted the whistleblowers and how it tried to kind of hamstring the investigations. I mean, on what planet does, you know, the country that the pandemic started in gets to pick who gets to sit on the so-called independent inquiry that the WHO sent? One year after the entire incident happened, more than one year actually. And also after scrubbing the alleged crime of the scene, which was supposedly the, the seafood market, which we know from interviews, you know, where the vendors did not actually sell any of the meats in question, whether it was pangolin or bat. So there were, there are just

so many questions and China's behavior ever since, ever since the pandemic broke out has just been just very, very suspect and retaliating against any country like Australia that was suggesting merely for an independent inquiry. Melissa, I'm going to jump in there because as you were listing off all the different meat, I was worried about France is getting hungry. I am. But listen, there's another aspect to all of this, which I find really interesting, which is neither you or us were particularly huge fans of Donald Trump.

But how much of the failure to react adequately, failure to investigate properly, failure to take the appropriate action in the circumstances was simply about the fact that people hated Donald. Trump so much that when he said we actually need to shut the border to Chinese people coming from China because that's where the virus is originated from, when he said we need to investigate whether this was man-made in a lab, et cetera. When all of these attempts were being made, kind of the mainstream saw it through the lens of Donald Trump and therefore failed to take action

as a result, whereas now many of the things that he was saying at the time, particularly about the origin of the virus, calling it the China virus, closing borders. This is something actually the left is now demanding. It's 80 to 90 percent, the reason why I think we've kind of dropped the ball on this, or the press has, because if you look at how a lot of the press frames these stories, anything that, you know, we're now judging whether a policy or whether something is true based on who is saying it. And this phenomenon has really been exposed during the last four years,

during the Trump administration, where if something is going to help or hurt the Trump administration, that's when the press decides to upregulate or downregulate the story. And they decide the framing. So when Trump went hard on China, the press saw this as an opportunity to present it as Trump abdicating his couple ability, which, to be fair to him, you know, I think initially he had the right instincts to shut the border, but he wavered on sort of later on kind of, you know, either downplaying the virus

or saying ridiculous things during the press conference. It didn't really help. He wasn't an excellent kind of like public health crisis kind of leader. And, you know, he's not good at science communication either. There were many comical moments during, you know, the press conference. But on the other hand, his instincts on many of these initial steps were right. It played to his kind of his biases to, you know, be to be a bit more restrictive on immigration and shutting down borders. And so, you know, he got excoriated in the press and you saw this remarkable thing, which I still think, you know, I refuse to let the press memory hold this. But people flipped, right? So initially, the Republicans were reacting very strongly. This is serious. We need to shut the borders. You had Navarro and Trump kind of insisting on this. And they were banning flights from Europe. And I remember, you know, these images at the airport, they were all showed on TV and it was chaos. And of course, the press was saying this was just racist. I think Joe Biden also said it was actually xenophobic.

And then you had this remarkable switch later on when, you know, the Trump administration realized also that shutting down lockdowns would actually hurt the economy. And the one thing that gets incumbents reelected is always a good economy. And so they started flipping their position. And now, you know, the lockdown party became the Democrats. And they wanted to basically shut the borders. And, I mean, look at today, Joe Biden's instinct was to shut down the moment that was this nasty variant that was going on in India was to actually shut down travel from

India, you know, an act that was so-called racist just one year ago. And so you see this ridiculous flipping, almost as if no one is holding any position based on principle. And it's just a sign of how this political divisiveness and partisanship is making governance during a public health crisis so completely sclerotic. It's a really good point, Mel. But isn't it also the problem as well, you know, that we've brought into this idea of the globalized world being a universal positive. You can get your goods from China, you can get this from India. But what coronavirus has actually shown is that the more interlinked we are, I mean, the more vulnerable we are as a society.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that the nature of the virus doesn't respect any borders. It's very progressive like that. Well, and the two things that really popped up was PPE, the issue. of, you know, where our PPE were coming from. And initially, China was shoring up the supply, knowing that this was happening, knowing that the West would actually have a harder time trying to react, given that most of the raw materials and the, you know, the manufacturing capacity was actually in China. And so there was this moment when, you know, we had a hard time trying to acquire these things, not to mention the confusion over communication on masks and their effectiveness

at the beginning, which obviously has caused a lot of problems. And, And later on, you know, when it came to vaccine raw materials, that's, that's become another issue where, you know, even the EU is, is, is re-looking at this issue because we've outsourced vaccine manufacturing to parts of Asia. And when, you know, this should all be seen as something that is part of, you know, national security, vaccines, PPE, in a world where pandemics can just kind of, you know, just spread like, like, like, why. fire. And, well, if you look at also, you know, what happened in the last, I would say, in the last year is that the sort of e-commerce platforms kind of grew bigger, right? So your mom and pop stores really suffered. But your Amazon's of the world, they are the ones that not only survived, but that they got their power, kind of, their market power got far more entrenched. And it did get far more entrenched. Do you think we're going to see a reversion back to people

wanting to shop local, buying American products, buying British products, or do you think that when this crisis is over, we're just going to go revert back to the status quo? I think there are really two forces. You know, it's interesting because Joe Biden has not actually rolled back any of Trump's policies vis-a-vis China. In fact, he's been kind of sticking to an America-first policy that the press often excoriated Trump for supporting.

And, you know, I mean, in fact, Biden's deputy spokesperson of the State Department said that, you know, when we were thinking of how to address the crisis in India, the pandemic has been raging there, a second wave. And he said, you know, the world has an interest in seeing Americans get vaccinated before everybody else. And that was a response that you know that if this had come from Pompeo's State Department, that that would have been like a completely. public outcry and meltdown over this terrible America First policy. But quietly, America First has been rolled forward. We are taking care of our supply chains, our needs first. And it's just interesting that, you know, when this administration is doing it, it's not receiving the same kind of pushback as the previous one. And I think so many people have become aware of Chinese influence in, you know, in this open, liberal society that we all live in.

That includes, you know, basically all throughout the West. Members of the EU have also kind of woken up to this and, you know, they're thinking of cutting back on their trade deals. And, well, I just, to be honest, like the American public has kind of like woken up to China as a geopolitical threat. And I think, you know, given the bipartisan consensus, too, that that likely not, you know, moving forward, people are going to be a lot more careful about, you know, pushing back Chinese narratives in Hollywood, Chinese influence in our university, shutting down Confucius

Institutes and even products. So, you know, I think there is potentially a bill that's going to be advanced about whether or not a product is like to label products where they come from. You start to see sanctions now on any products that might have slave labor. might have been, you know, parts of it might have been assembled in Xinjiang, which the United States, under Pompeo and Secretary Blinken, has declared as, you know, China has been committing genocide against the Uyghurs. So you're starting to see more legislative action and just more political will by people to say, no, enough. We've all woken up to the reality that it was such a terrible idea for us to engage with China for the last 40 years. Not only did they not liberalize, but

you know, we've become more like them. Their authoritarian model has been exported. Well, I was actually going to ask you about that very point, Melissa, because I know you watched our interview with Neil Ferguson, the historian, I should say, not the epidemiologist. And this is one of the questions that I put to him, which is lockdowns, he says, have never been done before in this way, and probably, because we didn't have the technology to be able to stay at home, but also for other reasons. And really, we've imported that from China. Unfortunately, copying China is a way of importing into free societies, the kind of software of the unfree society.

I dread to see any more articles of the form. We should learn from China. It's going to be the Chinese century. Look, how smart they are. because that's just an invitation to import totalitarian ways of doing things. Yes, in the past, in time of emergency, we have restricted civil liberties. We did it in both world wars, quite drastically, actually. But everybody understood in the world wars that it was a temporary state of emergency

that would be ended as soon as the war was over. The problem with doing it in a pandemic is that it's quite easy to argue that, in fact, it's never going to be over because the virus will always be out there. And this is one of the typically totalitarian sounding slogans you hear. There's no safety. It's not over until there are no cases at all anywhere in the world. Now, if you make that argument, you will be able to justify COVID restrictions forever. And I do think this has been an opportunity for a power grab by state bureaucracies.

And I know that you're someone who cares about civil. liberties a lot. How, you know, how do you feel about the fact that sort of like we look to an authoritarian communist dictatorship to decide what we do in our countries now? I think Neil's point was interesting because he said what we did in the West was kind of the worst of both worlds. He said that, you know, we, we didn't shut down and then we had this like almost lockdown in perpetuity with different weird codes. You know, I think the problem is that you can't pick China. outcomes without China's system. And at the end of the day, you know, we don't have an oppressive surveillance totalitarian state.

Not yet. Not not yet. But we just we just don't. And, you know, if you compare the other kind of liberal democracies that did lock down very hard, I would say New Zealand and Australia are very good examples. you know, is it worth it in the end, especially economically? These countries are, you need to trade, they need their tourist dollars for their economy, and it's impacting their economy in a way that we haven't really ascertained.

I think we're not good at talking about tradeoffs, and in the sense that we are still living in this moment and living in the crisis, evaluating whether or not all these policies have been worth, trade-offs. I hate this narrative that every time you try to criticize something like, you know, overhandedness by the authorities, you will get, oh, you're just trying to kill grandma. You just don't like, you know, oh, great, like two people are dead. Or it's, it's just such a terrible way to talk about, you know, on a macro level in society, whether a policy was worth it. Is it worth our kids being out of school for the last one year, more than a year now in some cities here in the

United States. You know, surely this is something that we've already known now a year of science and data have been collected and we know that this virus actually discriminates and it is by age. And so I think we're starting to at least be in a position to look back and say, well, maybe we shouldn't have done that. But these are conversations that cannot happen in a place like China. You know, I mean, they're not allowed to have conversations like that and hopefully this is something that we can be honest, look back and learn from it. I'm just not very, you know, optimistic that we will. Yeah, I share your pessimism because I'm naturally pessimistic anyway and miserable.

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and how readily they were to give up civil liberties, like in this country, the right to protest just evaporated? And we all went, yeah, what's the problem? Oh, it depends on the kind of protest, right? So I think that was the hypocrisy was kind of erred out very openly when, you know, certain policies were applied very selectively and very, very hypocritically. You know, things that were not okay under one circumstance were suddenly okay. And one of the effects of this is that I think the trust in our institutions have really crumbled.

Like the last year has seen trust in media crumble, trust in international organizations like the WHO crumble, the UN. and partly it's because of this selective application, you know, one side's narratives favor, the other sides, no, you can't protest civil liberties for me, but not for thee, that kind of attitude. And it's just, it's been very destructive. And, you know, as society continues to evolve and the trust breaks down, I just don't really know how we're going to recover from that. So I'm a lot less, I know you ended that interview with Neil on a very positive, No, because we've been in darker places before. But I'm just, I don't, I can't see a way out for us.

I mean, it's very, very succinctly put, which then begs a question, how do we row back? Can we row back? Or is this just a moment in time where it's been an unassailable rupture? And there's no going back from it? You know, people seem to have a resiliency, but, I don't know how permanent these changes are. You know, you're starting to hear people are going back to work.

They want to go back to work. They want to go back to the pub. We need our apolitical spaces back. Like, we need sports back. But sports in a way that, you know, was like before, without all the politics kind of embedded in it and all the nonsense. And I think it really depends on a lot of that, you know, whether we have these spaces to come together and sort of interact,

in ways that the more apolitical spaces and common hobbies that we can engage in, the better the chance we have to kind of get back to the way things were. But I'm kind of afraid that that ship has really sailed. You know, the wool has kind of been pulled from the eyes of most people. The media has been, the media's hypocrisy has been laid bare. You know, the idea that like silences violence and, sort of gaslighting about racial narratives and things like that have really been sort of inflamed in the last year. So I don't know if we're going to be able to come back from

something like that. And you mentioned President Biden. You mentioned that he's continuing many of the policies that Donald Trump had on China. Are you optimistic that he's now that, as I said, the media is free to agree with him when he takes action on China, let's say, and other things, now that he has a bit more room for maneuver. He is certainly less provocative with his language and the way he talks than Donald Trump, which was never going to be a challenge to achieve. With all of that put together,

do you think he will be able to manage this problem effectively? You know, he's less provocative, but he has some blind spots, which I think helps China, especially in the arena of propaganda and soft power. Biden, for example, in his first executive order, signed, you know, an anti-Asian hate crime bill. And a lot of this had been kind of posturing. And several Republicans in the Senate voted against the bill not because they were anti, you know, they supported hate crimes against Asians. They voted against it because they were concerned about very broad language that might implicate, you know, people when they're talking about COVID-19.

and things like talking about the origins of COVID-19 could be considered racially discriminating language and therefore be considered a hate incident. And so, you know, these kind of broad, overreaching language in tackling anti-Asian kind of racism has, I think, been a boon to China because they know they can soften criticism abroad. It's kind of like the same for,

you see when when people try to attenuate criticisms of Islam by saying that any criticism of Islam is Islamophobia. And it's it's playing this like bigotry race card to, to a very effective way to just silence criticism. And China's deploying it masterfully. My issue with Biden is really on this front where I think he is more amenable due to his political position. You know, he is a Democrat and I think he's more liable to that kind of influence. The point you're talking about China deflecting criticism, it's the communist playbook. The Soviet Union did this exact thing.

When America would criticize the Soviet Union, my ancestors would reply saying, well, what about African Americans in America having a rough time? And that was the deflection that justified gulags and all the rest of it. Right. It's a very classic tactic. And if you look at, you know, the wolf- diplomats. We're very active on Twitter. These are Chinese, you know, either ambassadors or

state media heads. They are very aggressive in their rhetoric and very happy to point out and weigh in on U.S. domestic issues. They weigh in on the capital riots on January 6th. They weighed in on George Floyd. They're using these domestic issues in a way to basically manipulate public opinion and it's actually very, very effective. It is very effective. And we saw an example of soft power quite literally this week with John Sina. He was in Waphaustin, if he was 938 or something like that. And he had to do a public apology. Right. And he did it in Mandarin. And it was posted on Chinese Twitter. It was so painful to watch. You know, it's, I kind of made a tweet a joke about it because his signature phrase has been this like handwave where he's like, you can't see me. I'm like, yeah, like, he can't see his balls. Like he just lost his balls, you know, just countowing like that in such a brazen way.

But, you know, could you blame him? You know, the Chinese market has long exceeded for international box office sales, has long exceeded the U.S. market. So China now is an expert in just using its economic leverage, just bullying countries to tow its Communist Party line, whether the issue is Tibet, whether the issue is Tibet, whether the issue is Taiwan or Hong Kong. If it doesn't like what you're saying,

if it doesn't like that, you know, the website, whether it's NASA, whether it's Delta Airlines or Marriott, listed Taiwan or Macau as a country and not a territory as part of China, it's able to use this economic muscle to just change that. And if you want access to the Chinese market, you have to buck up. You have to comply. If not, you're booted out.

And, you know, tech companies, our tech companies, at least, have made that stance, they are booted out, they are actually blocked from the Chinese market. But brands, consumer brands, like they're liable. Like they have to participate. If they don't, they completely lose out globally. Melissa, I was going to ask you, because we're having this conversation, and look, you know, I agree with you about Chinese sort of soft power, what you might describe as soft aggression, influence, etc.

But I don't think none of us, no one watching this, would want like another Cold War or a confrontation with China. But do you think essentially there is no way to deal with China without confronting them? Because there's no way to get them to behave, as you put it, more responsibly. Well, I think decoupling was the way to do it. You know, the Cold War, I mean, there's an argument to be had that the Cold War actually, we didn't win the Cold War. it didn't end. China is the torchbearer. But the analogy of the Cold War breaks down because we actually engaged with China economically. And we didn't do that with the USSR. You know, we let the USSR basically bleed out financially and it collapsed because of its imperialist adventures and

eventually was just financially unstable. But that's not the case for China. You know, China is empowered economically in part because we're addicted to very cheap goods. And we, and we didn't hold China either to its, you know, certain promises that it was supposed to keep when it joined the World Trade Organization. We've kind of let China have its way with the world on its terms and, and not held it accountable for things like pillaging, you know, intellectual property, corporate espionage, even these like massive cyber hacking sort of scandals, you know, stealing all the OPM data and things like that. So we just haven't really held China accountable to some sort of like international norms. We've let them have a pass because

we just wanted to trade with them. And in a way, we've really committed a terrible mistake. It's not going to go the way of the USSR because we're now entangled economically. But there's still ways to, I think, decouple. There are especially industries that we need to decouple for sure. So if you look at anything that involves, say, like making parts for the electric grid, these are things that are implicated in our national security to let China build our 5G networks. You know, that is, why would you do that, right? So there are ways to at least identify the industries that are crucial that are potentially, you know, kind of weak spots if we let China even contribute certain parts. and decouple from that. Francis, do you like biscuits?

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I think I'm eating too many biscuits. Never heard him say that. Now, we were talking about soft power grabs. Can you see in the next few years China making a hard power grab, maybe invading Taiwan? They've certainly had their eyes on it for a long time now. The U.S. Navy estimates that the chances are that China would actually try to do that in the next seven years. That's good news. Yeah, you know, and it's one of those things.

I think the U.S. appetite for intervention, military intervention after Afghanistan, and after Iraq is pretty much zero. So I don't know how, you know, U.S. public opinion would shape the sort of capacity for our government to do anything or the West to do anything in general. But an invasion of Taiwan is egregious. And if you don't stop China there, where would you stop? I mean, Taiwan is democratic. It's independent. it's been, you know, its own country for since 1949.

Yes, it was a military dictatorship for a while, but it liberalized, the nationalist liberalized in ways that makes Taiwan completely the most, actually the most vibrant liberal democracy in all of Asia, was the first Asian country to actually introduce and allow marriage, equal, gay marriage. So Taiwan is a beacon of freedom and a very important counterpoint to this narrative

that, you know, Asians kind of need a different system because they're culturally distinct. That's something that China has been repeating for a long time, the CCP, that, you know, Asian populations prefer collectivism. But the Taiwanese and the Chinese have the same DNA. And they're separated by, you know, body of water, but they have two different systems. Those two countries are thriving in different ways. And it's such an important counterpoint to China that it, and, you know, Beyond the fact that China sees it as rightfully there, so the historical baggage, all the more makes China wants to reunify and take Taiwan by force.

Xi Jinping has said this. There's just like, this is one of those issues that has like zero wiggle room for the current regime. And if they take China, if China does take Taiwan, what's next? Japan is right there. You know, it's a power in the Pacific area. You have Hawaii. It's really close to, you know, the West Coast. of the United States. So it's a direct military threat. And I mean, personally, I'm in favor of

intervening. We have to intervene to do something if China ever takes, ever takes Taiwan. I mean, you say that we have to intervene, but we haven't so far. We looked at the situation with Hong Kong. I mean, a couple of leaders came out, you know, Boris Johnson said something. I can't really remember it, but it was largely pointless. Can't you just see the West shrugging their shoulders again? Well, I think the problem with Hong Kong was the treaty that was signed. At the end of the day, you know, by 2047, Hong Kong was going to return to China no matter what. China just sped up the process and disarmament the agreement did not grant 50 years of autonomy,

one country, two systems to Hong Kong. And so it was really just a matter of like time. It just, you know, it did everything was going to do in 2047, 20 years ahead of schedule. In Taiwan's case, there would be a very agree. U.G.S. military intervention that China, you know, that there's no agreement with Taiwan. Actually, this is one of those ongoing conflicts that, just like Palestine and Israel, that have been, you know, since kind of the initial world order, really post-World War II, it just hasn't been solved. And I just don't see, I just don't see those two things as similar.

Well, speaking of things being similar and not similar in Israel and Palestine, Have you been surprised at the difference between the way, you know, people who argue that Muslim Palestinians are being oppressed by Israel don't seem to be quite as upset about Uyghurs being butchered and imprisoned by the CCP? Is that surprised you, Melissa? You know, it's funny. I actually thought of that. It's not something I ever tweeted or posted about, but that I got into an argument with

none other than Mia Khalifa, the Lebanese former porn star. An activist. And I remember thinking to myself, because she identifies as Muslim, and why is this such a big cause? But these Palestinian activists are just so silent on this one issue. And it's just so interesting how these issues map onto political tribes, because if you were consistent, if, say, caring about Muslim oppression is something across the board that, you know, is a principle you

hold. Surely you would speak up about something like that. And it's interesting because, you know, if you look at the signing of the UN, the letter to the United Nations, I think it was majority of the Muslim majority countries in the Gulf, in the Middle East, did not sign the letter. And that includes Pakistan to excoriate China for its, for its. oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. And the reason, obviously, is because China is doing a lot of business and deals and is involved with these countries in the Belt and Road Initiative, where it's, you know, building infrastructure, giving loans.

In the case of countries like Saudi Arabia, it's even exporting its technology, you know, the panopticon that it built, the techno surveillance state technology that China is using. And so because of all these deals, I mean, if you look at it. how many of these countries look to China as a model. You have two options in the world. Either you are going to liberalize and become a liberal democracy, or you're going to go down the China route and become an authoritarian, an autocratic regime.

And for many of these countries in the Middle East, it's pretty clear which model they want to pursue. Philosophically, they're far more aligned with a Chinese model, and China is paving the way. So, you know, they're going to just quiet in their, their criticisms. And that is a good point, but it's also as well, China's model, let's be honest, it's far more effective in many ways. There's not this constant turnover of leadership. You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labor. Exactly. No, this is something, I mean, I grew up in Singapore

and on the scale from, you know, China to the U.S., Singapore somewhere in the middle. It's really kind of like this interesting hybrid. And I've heard these arguments since I was, kid, you know, about the democracy is messy. Democracy is, you know, it leads to very slow, sclerotic, inefficient kinds of governments. And something like the pandemic really threw this into very sharp focus, right? We saw how effective some of these authoritarian countries were in, in clamping down, in nailing people into their apartments, and forcing social distancing, tracking. we can't even get vaccine passports because, you know, half our people will revolt. And I mean, when Bill de Blasio, you know, put out a number saying like there's this hotline,

all New Yorkers, if you see people not wearing the mask outside, not social distancing, call this number and report and snitch on your fellow New Yorkers. And people just saw that and they started sending him dig picks. I was so proud of, I was like, oh, we're kind of screwed, but also very proud of America. I mean, on one hand, that's, you know, that's bad in terms of the outcomes for the virus, but I'd rather live in a place where people don't want to snitch on each other, on each other, rather than a place where there's just so much distrust and that people are snitching on each other all the time. But the reality is that, you know, one of the,

these places is going to do a lot better. It's going to have zero deaths. And it's, again, this kind of contrast goes all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, the tradeoff between security and liberty. It's a very good point. And well made, Melissa, I think we'll leave China there for now. We've got a little bit of time left. And you talk about New York and the United States and some of the things that have been happening there, including the, certainly a wave of reporting about anti-Asian haycrumb. I don't know how accurate. Tell us, has there been a massive increase or is it just something that people have been focusing on more than before? So, you know, there's been an increase in violent crime all across the board in America.

In some cities, it's really stark. I think in Portland it's been a 1600% increase in violent crime. Well, they're reimagining public safety, aren't they? So that's good. Oh, they are. And the police, right, which is related. And, you know, the, the, the, the, the data on anti-Asian crime or, you know, that sort of like what we're observing the discourse is based on three sources. One of them is just these social media videos that keep popping up, which are terrible and heartbreaking. You know, we're seeing these like elderly Asians kind of being mugged, being assaulted on the streets, usually in urban centers like San Francisco or Los Angeles. And they kind of go viral, right? The other two sources, one of which is a,

an interesting group called Stop AAPI Hate, which really showed up at the beginning of 2020. And their statistics were thrown around in a way that made it seem really stark. There has been a 3,600% increase in Asian hate crimes, which sounds terrible. And if that were true, would just really warrant some sort of severe invention. But if you look at how they collected their data, it's very suspect. They are based on a completely self-reporting online portal. And many of the incidents that are collected don't even meet the threshold of what you would call a crime. Some of them are verbal shunning.

Some of them are simply, I didn't like the way this person looked at me at the supermarket. So it's all based on self-reporting. And then the third one, which came out, I think it was one of the University of California, was compiled sort of early 2020 crime data looked at, you know, hate crime reporting by the FBI in 16 cities across the United States and found that there's been 150% increase. That for me is the more relevant data out of all of these. And because that is actually based on FBI statistics and it's preliminary data. We don't really get all of 2020's data until November of 2021.

So we're still kind of early. But this is preliminary and they've compiled it. Again, this is from 16 progressive, most of them progressive run cities in the states. And it does look like there's an upswing. But numbers of Asian crimes actually very low in absolute numbers. So if you look at New York City, for example, in 2019, there were three anti-Asian hate incidents. Three. In 2020, there were 28.

So the percent increase from 3. to 28 is actually really high. But to put that number into sharp relief for for anti-Semitic hate crimes, that there is more than 150 just in New York. So the narrative about anti-Asian hate crimes, I think, is it seems like something is happening. We're seeing these videos. Is this meaningful in a way that is this due to racial prejudice, explicit racial animus? Or is this part of, you know, kind of Asians being part of this urban environment, elderly especially, being a very vulnerable population. They know they probably keep their cash underneath the mattresses. They're not using banking system. They live in Chinatowns. They're weak. They won't fight back. They don't

own guns. How much of this is opportunistic crime that's part of the ambient crime levels that are heightened anyway, all across the board. How much of it is actually racially targeted? And I think his name is Charles Lehman had done, he's with the Manhattan Institute, had done some interesting time series. So he took that data that I, the last data set that I described, the FBI data. And he looked at, he plotted that over time. And so what you're seeing is an interesting spike in March of 2020, just a little tiny spike, which could be attributed to things like the lockdowns and, you know, just kind of the COVID-19 related kind of crimes, potentially.

that was in 2020, but in 2021, when Biden is president, in Democratic-run cities, there has been another spike in March 2021. And so the idea that this is somehow due to white supremacy as the media has ran with this narrative is completely ridiculous because Trump is not even on social media. that no one is out there spouting Wuhan flu or, you know, Wu flu or China virus. And the idea that this is related to some sort of rhetoric is just completely bullocks. But you can make some interesting inferences. Why is there a spike again? And it's pretty significant in March of 2021. Now, if you correlate this with Google searches, with media reporting, could it be copycat crimes?

Could it be that just awareness of the crime itself makes people report the hate incidents, or the hate crimes in a way that, you know, they just wouldn't have before. So there are a lot of reasons why potentially, you know, there is this weird spike in March of 2021. But we don't really know. But it's certainly we can say that it has nothing to do with the leading media narrative, which is apparently white supremacy. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart?

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Exactly. But do you think there's an element in. terms of the way it's talked about and the way that it's covered where it's like, you know, once you introduce identity politics, then it becomes in the interest of every single group to become the victim. And so when Jews get, you know, I'm allowed to say this because I'm from a Jewish background, you'll be allowed to say this, because you're from an Asian background. Like, everyone would benefit from being in the victim group because that's what society currently values and ranks higher than the non-victum groups. Do you think a large part of it is like, well,

people are attacking us, let's, you know, let's make hay. Yeah, it's interesting because you're right. I do agree with the sort of like the victimhood kind of correlating, victim status correlating with moral status somehow in this society that we live in that, you know, has married intersectionality with critical race theory. But Asians in a way are kind of like, I call it Schroger's white people because, you know, you're white sometimes when it comes to. to when it comes to college admissions.

And so, or even like, if you, if you're, for college admissions, you're worse than why. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. It's not possible. Yeah. It is possible. Just in that one context. Well, and even like wages.

So if you look at, you know, income levels, Asians as a group are actually out-earned whites as a demographic in recent years. So, you know, under those circumstances, Asians are considered whites and therefore have to be adjusted. their populations, you know, they're overrepresented because, and they're white. So they're, you know, either you have to abolish the test or do something in a way to lessen their demographic numbers in schools or at the workplace. But on the other hand, you know, there are suddenly people of color when it comes to street

violence, when it comes to, you know, this invisibility on TV or whatever other sort of cultural elite causes that are being supported right now. And so you see this like weird bifurcation, and the cynic in me has always been, well, you know, the, they know that the AAPI group, the Asian American Pacific Island group, which is another ridiculous bureaucratic racial category that was invented, is a useful voting block. And right now it's a pawn in this political game because as CRT and sort of this narrative about discrimination in college becomes much, more obvious to Asians, they're going to rebel against that and tend to vote conservative. And so the only way you're going to bring them back into the progressive fold is to drum up this narrative that they are targeted, that they are victimized because of their race. That is my guess about the dynamics that are going on politically.

And so in a way, you know, Asian sort of elderly suffering, you know, on the streets has, has become a useful way to kind of milk this issue politically. When solving this issue is really just a matter of solving crime. If you prosecute it, if we, you know, provided mental health facilities for many of these people who are attacking these agents are actually mentally ill. But, you know, our homelessness problem has skyrocketed because of the lockdowns. Crime has skyrocketed. And we're not solving the very thing that can. actually help these people, you know, we're blaming it on this entirely different reason,

which is, you know, if you get the reasoning wrong, the root cause wrong, you're going to get the policy wrong and the prescription wrong, and it's not going to do anything. So that's kind of where my frustration is right now. And are people still thinking defund the police is a good idea of we all accepted that that was a crap idea brought on by the insanity of a lockdown? Actually, it looks like a tide has been turning. And even among African Americans, you know, the ones who actually live in these at-risk neighborhoods, the tide is turning. There is such strong data that shows that, you know, stronger policing actually correlates with lower crime. Really? Wow.

And, you know, even someone like Andrew Yang has been kind of criticized a lot by sort of Asian activists, you know, the kinds of into Ivy Leagues for suggesting, for merely suggesting that one of the solutions to prevent, to stop AAPI hate is to increase funding for the police and put more police resources in these neighborhoods. And, you know, it's just so funny how these narratives shake out because he's been targeted. He, you know, hit pieces were written against them for even suggesting that. Because somehow these Asian activists are very aligned with the BLM narrative about, you know, how police, actually brutalize communities of color and that we must stand with them. And if we don't stand with black lies, we don't stand with Asian lies, which, again,

is trying to connect these causes. And as the Palestine conflict kind of erupted as well, you start to see how George Floyd now intersects with Palestine when obviously is nothing to do with each other, right? So we live in a time of like globalization of narratives in a way where every struggle has to be connected to some original struggle and everything is collect device and we're not evaluating things independently. And that's such a good point. And it's a fantastic place to end the interview. Melissa, if people want to find you online, where is the best place to do that? Only fans.

That is how we will lead this interview and it is going to get a million views. Do you know what? There's probably about six losers on the internet. We saw that. That went great. Wasn't it? Well, the best way to find me is, um, on Twitter, which is my handle at Ms. MS, M-M-S-M-E-L-Chance, C-E-N. Or you can read my stuff on the Spectator USA website. That's probably the best way to find on my right. Before we let you go, we have one proper question for you, and then we'll do some locals-only questions as well. So, as you know, our last question for the main interview itself is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we still should be talking about?

we're one of the things that interest me that I don't see much um discourse on is how is it how did it come to be that um you know a system like in the u.s where where we have so called a free society that's kind of more in line with the a brave new world kind of utopia where you know we we optimize for pleasure and sort of hedonism and try to, you know, downregulate pain and discomfort. And how this system, the brave new will system in the U.S. and in the West and general in Europe, compared to the totalitarian 1984 China system, how these two different systems actually end up converging to look like the same thing, where we now, because of safetyism and in the, you know, of harm avoidance and not wanting to confront anything that makes us feel bad

has led us down a weirdly totalitarian path that, you know, our systems kind of end up feeling, you know, we have Yelp, for example, review systems that, that, you know, are steps removed from China's social credit system, but not unlike it. And, you know, so I find that convergence interesting that we have top down, top down versus bottom out kind of freedom, but or control, but they're meeting in the same place and it feels like we're still living in dystopia. And it feels inevitable as well, I think, to me. But it's a very good point on something that I think is going to come into sharper and sharper focus over the years to come, which is when we will have you back to talk about it some more, Melissa. Thank you so much for chatting with us.

Thank you. Cheers. And thank you, guys, for watching at home. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one, Or Or Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.