China's Control of U.S. Officials and Failed Homeless Policies

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John Bickley: A new book by bestselling author Peter Schweitzer is making explosive claims that several high-profile politicians, including President Biden, are getting rich by helping China. I think by naming names and explaining the deals, there ought to be a level of shame that's brought to these individuals. We speak to the author of Red Handed about what his extensive investigations have uncovered.

John Bickley: I'm John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, January 28th, and this is Morning Wire.

Georgia Howe: Will it be diplomacy or military intervention in Ukraine? As Russia continues to mobilize military assets, the U.S. and NATO continue to push for a diplomatic solution. And until five years ago, homelessness was on the decline. Now it's up more than 50% in some major cities. Some working on the front lines say the problem is flawed homelessness solutions.

John Bickley: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. This show is sponsored by Dwell. As we move into 2022, don't forget to carve out space and time for your spiritual life. The Dwell Bible app makes it fun and easy to get into the Bible by providing a world-class listening experience of Scripture. Dwell offers all your favorite versions of the Bible recorded by real human voices that are delightful to hear. Today, you can try Dwell for free by going to dwellapp.io slash morningwire. That's dwellapp.io slash morningwire. In this new year, invest in your spiritual life. Let God's word be read over you using Dwell.

Georgia Howe: The new top-selling book this week, Red Handed, looks at how American elites get rich helping China win, and it's uncovered what it says are some problematic ties between America's leadership and the Chinese communist government. Joining us to discuss the findings is the book's best-selling author, Peter Schweitzer, president of the Government Accountability Institute. Peter, thanks for joining us.

Peter Schweitzer: Great to be here with you.

Georgia Howe: So you've done a series of investigations into problematic connections with China among various high-profile figures in American politics and business, and actually entire industries. We talk about politics a lot on this show, so let's start there. What'd you find? What we found is that China has a strategy they call it elite capture, and the goal is to forge commercial relationships with powerful politicians to help make them rich by giving them cutout deals in China. And by doing so, they forge this bond and they turn effectively those politicians into advocates for softer positions on Beijing. They do to both Republicans and Democrats, executive branch, the Capitol Hill, and even in the diplomatic corps, they use this kind of strategy. So it's very troubling and very alarming and something we need to be in tune with.

Peter Schweitzer: So let's start at the top. You cite five deals made by the Biden family in China. Can you run through those deals for us?

Georgia Howe: Sure. There's one deal called BHR. This is a private equity deal I've written about before. But what we discovered is that that deal, which gave Hunter Biden about $20 million, was arranged by a businessman named Che Feng. Che Feng at the time was business partners with the vice minister for state security in China.

Peter Schweitzer: There's another deal that garnered $5 million. This was a Chinese business named Mr Zhao who sent million to Hunter Biden He sent that money from an account from a business he started with the daughter of the former minister of state security, who runs the entire spy apparatus of China. And then there's a series of other deals that amount to a total of $6 million. And those deals come from a guy named Mr. Yee, whose company was set up in a section of Beijing that is controlled by the Chinese military. and he has intelligence and People's Liberation Army connections that are deep and troubling. So you come to $31 million. Those are the deals we know of. And each and every one of those deals were arranged by a Chinese businessman who had ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.

Peter Schweitzer: And what about big tech? You said you found troubling behavior with some of these big tech companies, including Google and Microsoft. Is that right?

Georgia Howe: Yeah, Google and Microsoft. not only do they do commercial deals with China, they actually sponsor research in China at facilities that are controlled by the Chinese military. So you have this bizarre situation where Microsoft and Google are helping China in their battle to pass the United States in artificial intelligence research. And this is really important because President Xi himself has said, whoever controls the future in artificial intelligence will have the commanding heights his word in the competition between the powers. So you've got Microsoft and Google that are doing this. Microsoft actually accepts interns from the People's Liberation Army. There's a comfort level here that I just find so bizarre and so strange. And I think it speaks to the culture of these companies that identify themselves less as American companies and as global businesses that are basically prepared to do business with just about anybody.

Peter Schweitzer: Big picture here from the 30,000-foot view. What's at issue on a higher level? What's at issue on a higher level is that we have leadership in the United States, in Washington, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street that are wedded to Beijing, and they don't want us to take a hard line towards Beijing when it comes to our own security, when it comes to our military competition with Beijing, because they're compromised. They have conflicts of interest. They have powerful incentives in terms of their own wealth to not call out China on these issues and adopt policies that will counteract them. That's the heart and soul of the problem. So the American elite class, those that are doing these deals, in my mind, are compromised and are not capable of making disinterested decisions that have to be made, tough decisions on how we should deal with the challenge that China is posing to us.

Georgia Howe: Well, fascinating and troubling stuff. Peter, thanks for joining us. That was Peter Schweitzer, author of Red-Handed, How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.

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Georgia Howe: Concerns only continue to grow that Russia will launch a military strike against its neighbor, Ukraine, despite efforts by multiple international groups and governments to achieve a diplomatic solution. Here to give us the latest on the situation in Eastern Europe is Daily Wire's Ian Howarth. So Ian, what's the status on Ukraine?

Ian Howarth: Well, as we've been saying for a while now, tensions are only increasing by the day. Russia has continued to amass military forces along its border with Ukraine Pro Belarusian forces are also readying along the border between Belarus and Ukraine Despite the concern NATO Secretary General is still hoping an invasion can be avoided. A political solution is still possible. But then, of course, Russia has to engage in good faith. However, this week, the US embassy in Ukraine released an official statement telling Americans that, quote, the security situation in Ukraine continues to be unpredictable due to the increased threat of Russian military action and can deteriorate with little notice. The embassy is encouraging all U.S. citizens to leave the country, made worse by an announcement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Americans may be stuck in Ukraine if Russia invades. And if Russia invades, the U.S. government may not be in a position to aid individuals in these circumstances.

Ian Howarth: Now, a lot of people have been commenting on the uncanny similarity to the situation in Afghanistan. Yeah, especially since the Biden administration has also admitted that they don't know how many American citizens are still in Ukraine. And then, of course, there's the subject of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, one of several pipelines which carries natural gas from Russia to Germany. The Trump administration did oppose its development, but construction continued under the Biden administration. The pipeline is crucially important to both Russia and Germany, given that Germany is the biggest purchaser of Russian natural gas in the world. And earlier this week, the State Department tried to use the pipeline as leverage. It is leverage for us. It is leverage for Germany. It is leverage for the transatlantic community because gas is not flowing. To be clear, it is not leverage for Vladimir Putin. The State Department spokesperson also added that military action by Russia would have consequences when it comes to the pipeline. Second point, and I want to be very clear, if Russia invades Ukraine one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward. We want to be very clear about that. But there are two layers of criticism here. The first is that sanctions might be useless if Germany doesn't engage since they rely on Russia for much of their energy resources. The second is that the threat of potential sanctions will likely not intimidate Putin, who, after all, already invaded Ukraine in 2014 when Biden was vice president.

Georgia Howe: Right. Ian, thanks for bringing us the story. You got it.

John Bickley: That's Daily Wire's Ian Howarth. Over the last five years, the number of people sleeping on the streets in the U.S. is up more than 20%. In places like Los Angeles, it's almost doubled. In 2022, one out of every hundred people in the city of L.A. is homeless. Up until five years ago, the number of homeless was actually going down in America. So what changed? Here to tell us more is Judge Glock from the Cicero Institute, which focuses on homelessness, among other issues nationwide. So, Judge, what's behind this surge in homelessness?

Judge Glock: Well, thank you. According to our research, one of the biggest contributors to homelessness is actually a well-intentioned program that was originally designed to end homelessness. The program's called Housing First. And the idea behind Housing First is pretty simple. If homelessness is caused by a lack of housing, then we should just give homeless people homes, no strings attached. Several years ago, a lot of politicians, including then-mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, said that by building enough free homes, we could end homelessness entirely within a decade. And in 2013, the Obama administration mandated this strategy for the whole nation.

Judge Glock: Now, a lot of people liked the sound of that solution. So what went wrong with Housing First? Well, Housing First presupposes that lack of housing is the primary issue causing people to be homeless. However, recent studies showed that among the homeless on the streets, what most of us think of as the homeless, 75% had a severe mental illness and 75% had a drug or alcohol problem and the majority had both. A house doesn't fix that. And in many cases, it could even make it worse

Georgia Howe: And how would having a house make someone drug addiction worse I mean advocates of this program have argued that having a house would bring some stability and that might help with some of these other problems Well Housing First is based on the idea that housing alone will solve most of these other problems. So as a condition of funding the program, the program actually forbids the homeless advocacy groups running these housing units from mandating sobriety or even mental health checkups. Some studies show that these problems get worse inside these new homes. Not surprisingly, too, these free homes tend to attract more homeless people into the system, take money away from short-term shelters and other programs, which have been reduced in cities like San Francisco over the past decade. So the program diverts funds towards expensive permanent housing for the homeless and away from shelters and treatments.

Judge Glock: What other policies are contributing to this? Well, another major problem is that cities just aren't enforcing bans against street camping or street sleeping like they used to. In recent years, homeless advocates have gotten much more radical. They now say that if a city doesn't have a bed for every homeless person, that homeless person has a right to sleep out anywhere in public. There was a lawsuit filed by some homeless groups called Martin v. City of Boise, and that led the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to agree with this position in 2019. So now there's a new standard we didn't have just a few years ago. Since then, that's meant that in most of the West Coast, it's actually illegal for cities to enforce bans on public camping. And now, maybe not surprisingly, the sidewalks are full of tents and homeless people.

Judge Glock: Although some advocates would say that it's cruel to kick a person off the street, what's the alternative? Most of the time, there isn't a good alternative. What we found is when people are severely mentally ill or abusing drugs, they tend not to seek treatment on their own, perhaps not surprisingly. Especially if they can live for almost free on the streets. When a city like L.A. began cleaning its grid skid row back in 2006, it cut the number of homeless deaths in half. because more people returned to their families or went into treatment or shelters. When they stopped enforcing it after Mayor Eric Garcetti came into power in 2014, the homeless deaths almost tripled to now over four deaths per day. It's not compassionate to leave mentally ill people in the streets to die, which is what's happening in many of these cities.

Judge Glock: And how do the citizens of the cities feel about how this is being handled? Well, citizens in both San Francisco and Austin, two of the most liberal cities in America, voted to ban street camping in the past few years. So that's a good indication of how citizens feel. But the cities themselves are just refusing to enforce the bans. But now even left-wing candidates are campaigning on bringing back enforcement. For example, Kevin DeLeon in L.A. So maybe we could be turning a corner with our approach? I hope so. You can see that a lot more people are just getting fed up with the issue, and they understand now that what's happening isn't working. That should be abundantly clear to everybody.

Georgia Howe: Right. Judge, thanks so much.

John Bickley: That was Judge Glock from the Cicero Institute.

Georgia Howe: Another story we're tracking this week. In a case of reverse cancellation, Spotify has announced that it's pulling the music of rocker Neil Young off its platform at his request. Young had demanded that the streaming service cancel Joe Rogan or else lose his music. Young told his management team in a letter, quote, I want you to let Spotify know immediately today that I want all my music off their platform. They can have Rogan or Young, not both. Young has accused Rogan of spreading COVID misinformation.

John Bickley: If you liked this episode and are interested in hearing more, subscribe to Morning Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening, and give us a five-star review. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back next week with the news you need to know. If you liked this podcast, get the Morning Wire newsletter delivered straight to your inbox when you join at dailywire.com slash subscribe.