In this episode, Jenny Beth interviews Brian Kennedy, a seasoned national security expert, to discuss the critical threats posed by Communist China. Kennedy delves into America's vulnerabilities in missile defense, the potential devastation of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, and the economic dependencies highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also explains the mission of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, emphasizing the urgent need for a robust national defense strategy and domestic production of critical goods. Tune in to gain a comprehensive understanding of the national security challenges and strategic measures necessary to protect America's future.
In this episode, Jenny Beth interviews Brian Kennedy, a seasoned national security expert, to discuss the critical threats posed by Communist China. Kennedy delves into America's vulnerabilities in missile defense, the potential devastation of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, and the economic dependencies highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also explains the mission of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, emphasizing the urgent need for a robust national defense strategy and domestic production of critical goods. Tune in to gain a comprehensive understanding of the national security challenges and strategic measures necessary to protect America's future.
Twitter/X: @BrianTKennedy1 | @jennybethm
Website: www.presentdangerchina.org
Brian Kennedy (00:00:00):
They haven't woken up to communist China even after COVID-19. And part of our job, we think at the committee is to explain to Americans just what's at stake here. This is not about economic competition. This may well be about our national survival.
Narrator (00:00:17):
Keeping our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she is most proud of is Mom to Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:00:49):
Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. So you really are a national security expert.
Brian Kennedy (00:00:54):
Well, I always bristle at the term expert.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:00:58):
Well, the experts kind of ruined the country during Covid,
Brian Kennedy (00:01:01):
Right? Yeah. Experts have not been doing a great job at things. So I'm always talking to people at the level of common sense. I'm an old guy, so I say I have experience in these things, but Americans don't like Americans are rightfully concerned about experts these days.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:01:15):
That's right. So how did you get so much experience with national security?
Brian Kennedy (00:01:21):
I started at the Claremont Institute back in 1989, so a long time ago and spent many years working on California politics and American politics. And one of the issues that we got really got into was missile defense and the fact that we don't have a national defense against a ballistic missile launch from today, Russia or Communist China or Iran. We might be able to stop a limited attack from North Korea, but Americans go to bed at night thinking that they're defended from missile attack when in fact they're not. And I, and colleagues like Frank Gaffney and others have went around the country for years trying to explain to Americans that they're not defended. And it's a real indictment on Washington DC and the fact that these so-called national security experts have left us vulnerable all these years to such a horrible thing as a nuclear attack.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:02:17):
So what does the Claremont Institute do? Explain that to people who maybe haven't heard of that and then we're going to go back into the missile defense.
Brian Kennedy (00:02:24):
Yeah. Claremont Institute is a, we're never really crazy about the phrase political think tank for many years. We would often say if anybody could figure out what a think tank does, let us know. That way we can tell our mothers. But we went around educating Americans about why America is a good country and it's explicit mission and it's still around today, run brilliantly by a young man named Ryan Williams. Not so young actually anymore, but a great guy. And it has a group of scholars and its purpose is to recover the principles of the American founding and to make those principles preeminent again in our politics. Remember, you probably don't remember, but 40 years ago, the conservative movement was not focused on the American founding. It was anti-communist, it was pro western civilization. It saw problems with liberals, but it didn't really know what it was for.
Brian Kennedy (00:03:22):
And the thing it was for were the very principles or should be for were the principles of the American founding. And it was Claremont really that embraced that had been studying that for the better part of a half century and made those ideas matter again in American life. President Trump gave Claremont in 2019 the National Humanities Medal, and it was only the second research institution of its kind to ever, ever receive one. I think Hoover was the first and then Claremont was the second, and it was really because of for a half century, it defended the ideas of America that we all hold so dear.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:04:02):
That's amazing. Good work with that. Now, you just said that the national security experts have left as vulnerable when it comes to missile defense. What would missile defense look like to the average person who's not a national security expert? What does that mean exactly?
Brian Kennedy (00:04:27):
Well, look, we have enemies today and they include communist China most specifically, but there's also Russia and there's also Iran. They all three have nuclear ballistic missiles that could be launched at the United States today. If we were attacked, we couldn't do anything to stop that attack. We could respond by using our nuclear weapons against them, but we would still suffer the attack. And it could be something like an EMP attack where they explode one of these nuclear weapons over the center of the country and knock out the power of the entire country. Last week there was these solar storms and there was some disruption here and there, but it mostly didn't cause any damage. You get an electromagnetic pulse attack of the kind that both China, Russia, and Iran could launch and all power will go out in the United States not to be turned back on. Stop that. Under that scenario, 300 million Americans could die.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:05:33):
Okay? There are people who are listening to this right now, like my sister maybe, and others, and I was trying to explain this to her last summer and other people over the years because the first person who really taught me about this was former Congressman Trent Franks,
Brian Kennedy (00:05:51):
Absolutely
Jenny Beth Martin (00:05:52):
Great man. And after I listened to him for three hours, one night I went back, I was in Washington DC and I went back to my hotel room and I was awake the whole rest of the night going, oh my gosh, this is really bad. So explain first, an EMP is an electromagnetic pulse, and how can a nuclear missile knock power out? How do we know that can happen? And why would people die from that? Because I think people don't, it's hard to fathom this
Brian Kennedy (00:06:26):
All great questions. Well, when you explode a nuclear weapon, it creates something called the Compton Effect where the gamma rays are spreading and the thing that it will impact or not, it'll impact common circuitry. We won't feel it, but the large transformers throughout the country, there's about 150 of them that are absolutely key. Those would absorb the electromagnetic pulse and would destroy them. And so the very thing that distributes the power throughout the country would be destroyed. And so it's a phenomenon that was discovered when we first had nuclear weapons. And as strategic doctrine goes, it is believed, I mean, these things are not widely discussed in public, but if we ever did get into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, were they with us? They would've launched an EMP attack first. Their first missile would've been over the United States to explode an EMP weapon, knock out all of our power, and so we're left not being able to communicate with each other. Iran could do that today if they launched a ballistic missile from a ship off our coast and used it that way. China could do the same thing. You knock out power in America, the water is not running. It's pumped electrically, your refrigerator stores food, it's going to go bad
Jenny Beth Martin (00:07:58):
And insulin,
Brian Kennedy (00:08:00):
Insulin for those people who require that. But we would quickly run out of food stuffs and we could figure out ways of getting water. But between the medicines and the foodstuffs, we built a modern economy that absolutely requires electricity. There's no more podcasts and there's no more, as I say, running water refrigeration, the kind of things that a modern society absolutely needs. We're not going to be able to communicate with one another. A lot of cars won't turn on if they did, they're going to run out of gas. The gas is pumped electrically. I mean, there'll be a real disruption to the US economy. Again, this is a worst case scenario. It's kind of dystopian. There's a lot of dystopian novels where these kind of things are alluded to. New Gingrich from here in wrote a whole novel
Jenny Beth Martin (00:08:56):
One second after
Brian Kennedy (00:08:57):
Right, about these kind of things. And again, it sounds like science fiction, and so people tend to dismiss it, and it's a worst case scenario, but it's also given the weirdness we are living through today. I mean, who would've thought that we would've shut the country down over COVID-19,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:09:14):
Right? One second after it was actually written by the man who co-writes the novels with Newt, and I think Newt did a forward order or something.
Brian Kennedy (00:09:23):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:09:24):
And I read that, and I remember reading in it that the report about E mps came out on the exact same day or in the same week as the nine 11 report, and people didn't pay, it just got lost in
Brian Kennedy (00:09:37):
The shuffle. I think we portion, I think was the guy's name. Yes. And of course, the nine 11 report talked all about how it was a failure of imagination nine 11, right? Right. Okay. And so as a practical matter, we're living in a world where our enemies have an imagination, and we may have reached a point where our enemies want to destroy us, not just marginalize us as it were, but outright destroy us. And I don't think America's national security experts have adequately considered that. We've spent the better part of two decades fighting wars in the Middle East post nine 11. And so a lot of the energy went toward that, and it didn't go toward preparing this country for superpower conflict of the kind I'm describing, or simply, again, worst case scenario, a lot of what I deal with is worst case scenarios, but partly we do it just to highlight the fact that our enemies don't think in these terms.
Brian Kennedy (00:10:41):
I mean, the first time I went and talked about missile defense was in, I think it was 1998, and I went to Alaska with a group of national security experts because first of all, the Chinese ambassador had said to a US ambassador that the US ought not to interfere with Chinese Taiwanese relations because the United States values Los Angeles more than Taipei. And this was said to Ambassador Charles Seward in the United States, and many people took that to be an overt nuclear threat, and you should take it as a nuclear threat. And later Congress had issued a report saying that, oh no, every America is fine from a missile attack footnote, with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii, which could not otherwise be defended from the sort of crude missile defense we had had. And of course, the Alaskans went crazy. Of course they did. I mean, are we not part of the United States too? So we led a delegation up to Alaska and the Alaskan legislature actually issued a resolution calling on the president to defend Alaska from a nuclear attack. And again, we don't have one for the country. It seems outrageous to people. We're living in a very dangerous time. If you listen to I and my colleagues from the committee on the present Danger China, you would think that no one in Washington knows what they're doing. But as I say, there are some good people in the country, but they've been focused on in our judgment, the wrong things.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:12:31):
Well, I think that they could listen to your committee on the present danger in China or to doctors in the country or to several others. People like our group has been worried about government spending, and at some point you're like, does anyone know anything? And DC is completely disconnected from the
Brian Kennedy (00:12:50):
Country and what are they spending the money on? They're spending too much and on the wrong things, right?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:12:59):
So I think that people listening to this podcast are going to be like, oh, yeah, there's a lot that people don't understand. So you are very experienced with missile security and in defense, and now you're doing the committee on present danger on China. First, what is a committee on present danger? Is there a historical significance to it? And then what are you doing with that? Yeah,
Brian Kennedy (00:13:27):
No, it's a great question. By the way, I have no special interest in missile defense other than we need it. It's kind of like we need electricity, we need to be defended, we need to have locks on our doors. I always looked at missile defense as a way of illustrating to the American people just how misguided their government was when it came to the bleeding obvious, which is we have nuclear weapons. Why wouldn't we have a national missile defense? The Russians had a national missile defense.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:13:58):
Isn't Israel have some?
Brian Kennedy (00:13:59):
Israel has a national missile defense, much smaller in a different context, but yes, but the reason there was a committee on the present danger. There was one in the fifties, late forties, early fifties, and then one in the seventies and then one today. The reason that it happened back in the forties and fifties, and you'll appreciate this given your experience with the Tea Party Patriots, is these things in Washington don't happen by themselves. It takes someone encouraging them, pushing them, educating the public in order that people in Washington do the right thing. The committee on the Present Danger in its earlier iterations were national security experts, writers, thinkers, novelists, labor leaders, et cetera, who thought that we were inadequately understanding the Soviet threat after World War ii and that if we were going to challenge them, we needed to have an adequate military and ballistic missile force to do that.
Brian Kennedy (00:15:00):
And so that was its original purpose in the fifties. Back in the seventies, you saw the America was in a bad way. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter was president and a lot of scholars and national security experts, generals, anti-communist, let's say, they saw the Pentagon and the Carter administration inadequately understanding the Soviet threat. There were team B reports that tried to highlight this, but then someone said, why don't we get going again? The committee on the Present Danger in order as a group to illustrate to the American people in an authoritative voice exactly what the problem was. Reagan joined that committee on the present danger, not as an observer, but as an actual member. Ronald Reagan, we have to remember, it was a very smart guy who actually took national security very seriously. He gets elected president, they issue a bunch of reports, hold a bunch of meetings, he becomes president, and he takes 45 members of the committee with him to the Reagan administration.
Brian Kennedy (00:16:08):
Fast forward to today, this committee on the present Danger, China is now five years old, and it was started by myself and Steve Bannon and Frank Gaffney because we saw in the Trump administration and we were supporters of the Trump administration, but we saw that there were voices within the Trump administration that were soft on China and that they were not adequately backing President Trump's get tough policy on communist China. And so we were holding meetings and there was writings and webinars and all sorts of public seminars that people would go to simply illustrate for this generation our existential threat, which is Communist China, that people in Washington don't take seriously. And you would think they would take them seriously, but much the same way. America did not take Imperial Japan seriously before World War ii. They don't take communist China seriously. And there is this large body of business leaders, let's call them, and others simply think that, well, we trade so much with communist China, they buy our debt. We invest in their companies that we will never go to war. And so we're not going to prepare for war with communist China. And so we're not building a military to deal with communist China, even though
Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:34):
Is China preparing for war
Brian Kennedy (00:17:35):
For us? Well, it certainly appears that way.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:38):
Okay, I didn't mean to interrupt you,
Brian Kennedy (00:17:39):
But yeah, no, no, no. They are preparing for war with us. And in 2019, you might recall when President Trump was getting tough with communist China, one of the key things that he tasked his administration with, including like Robert Lighthizer, was to stop the theft of intellectual property. And they were stealing roughly 600 billion a year of intellectual property that's 6 trillion over the last decade. And Trump basically put his foot down and said, that's not going to happen anymore. Well, it was in May of 2019 that the communist China responded with, okay, you're telling us, first of all, we don't do that Communist China said, and we don't do it, and we now declare a people's war on the United States, totally under-reported in this country, but they declared in the People's Daily, their communist newspaper, a people's war where they were telling their own people that sacrifices were going to have to be made because of economic relations with the United States.
Brian Kennedy (00:18:47):
Within six months of that COVID-19 was spreading throughout the world. Within six months of that, America was in lockdown. And within six months of that, there was an American election held because of COVID-19 through mail-in balloting. And the President Trump, who was a populist president, who normally campaigned by going to all these big public rallies, couldn't do that anymore or not do it adequately. And so communist China in their people's war, in my judgment, and my colleagues not only used COVID-19 is like a bio weapon against us, but changed our politics. And today Joe Biden is president because of it.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:19:28):
Okay, go back to what you were saying. So we are not preparing. I wanted you to keep talking. I'm going to come back and ask you questions, but you were saying we were not preparing for war with China, and you were elaborating on that before I interrupted you. Yeah.
Brian Kennedy (00:19:45):
Well, we're not preparing for war with communist China because none of our generals, and this won't sound crazy to anyone, they don't want to find a land war in Asia, sort of a famous formulation. No one wants to fight a land war in Asia. We had the experience in Korea and that was not so pleasant, and that was with the Communist Chinese, of course, but communist China thinks of itself as the master race. It thinks of itself as being the ultimate rulers of this planet. And so they're going to prepare for war with us. We may not want to prepare for war with them, but they're going to build a navy that can challenge the United States. They have more ships than we do. They're building more ships than we do. They have fifth generation fighter aircraft. They have nuclear weapons of a very sophisticated variety widely.
Brian Kennedy (00:20:46):
I mean, there is this idea that America won the Cold War and have fought wars in the Middle East and today were invincible. The Chinese don't subscribe to any of that, although American generals do. They think of us like the Hegemon has tribe, the world able to do whatever it is we want to do. We've not fought a peer competitor since one could argue World War ii. And so we're not preparing for war. The Pentagon does war games where they simulate a naval war between the United States and China in the last decade. We've not won a single war game. When they do that,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:21:27):
The Pentagon
Brian Kennedy (00:21:30):
Simulate, they do war games, these tabletop war games where they use real people and computers and they figure out, okay, China invades Taiwan, we do this. There's a blockade. We do these other things in the last decade when the United States, or let's just put it on the Pentagon, when they do those war games, the United States loses. We have very sophisticated ships that run out of munitions destroying the onslaught from communist China. How many Americans know that? Nearly none, right? Because communist China is a trading partner. If you listen to the Chamber of Commerce, and our elected officials do not take this at all seriously. Joe Biden, by all accounts is compromised in a number of different ways every day that goes by, we're getting new revelations about his son Hunter's business dealings with Communist China. And I mean, the Biden family at minimum has received over $30 million from communist China over the last decade. And the news kind of dismisses that as right wing conspiracy fodder, and we don't take them as seriously as we should, and it's a bit of a national scandal that we don't.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:57):
I read the book, which I can't remember the name of, maybe it's a hundred year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury,
Brian Kennedy (00:23:05):
Michael Pillsbury a hundred year marathon.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:23:08):
My head kind of exploded when I read it, and I just was like, oh, I'm not a national security expert at all. I have gut instincts. I was a teenager in the Reagan years. So my gut instinct is to have a strong military and to defend yourself and to be stronger than others, peace three strength. And I read that, and it is a little overwhelming when you start thinking about the problems with China. And I've talked to elected officials on Capitol Hill, and I've talked to some who are part of the select subcommittee or the select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and they said, you just need to understand we have good relations with them, so we're investigating things, but we can't just completely unwind from China. And I was thinking, okay, and I understand that and there's merit to it, and I can't just say, oh, we'll throw a wrecking ball at that. You're completely wrong. So I understand they have a valid point with that. And then I'm sitting there thinking, yeah, but I read Michael Pillsbury's book and I just think we need to at least be prepared a little bit more than we are when we're dealing with China. And that's what your whole work is dedicated to right now, isn't
Brian Kennedy (00:24:27):
It? Yeah, it really is just trying to wake Americans up to the simple fact that we don't have free trade with communist China. Not at all. I think we looked at communist China as if, I mean, this is the obvious point. Pillsbury is making right? In a hundred year marathon, and I highly recommend that book, and I think Pillsbury is essentially saying, we thought if we had good economic relations with Communist China, they were going to become just like us. They were, their people would have jobs, their people would make money, they would reach middle class prosperity, and with middle class prosperity will come the desire for political freedom. Well, it turned out the first part happened. They got jobs, they made money, but the desire for political freedom wasn't there. And we essentially exported our manufacturing base to communist China over the last 30 years, and it's worked out very well for communist China.
Brian Kennedy (00:25:30):
They've become like a manufacturing platform for the United States and the world where a 70% consumer-based economy, and a lot of our goods are made in communist China, and they're made at a lower cost so that the Wall Street Journal and the economic libertarian say, look, this has worked out really well for us consumers who want to buy things. It's not worked out so well for the American worker, right? The guys on Wall Street are making a killing, figuring out how to do these things. And the big retail giants have made a killing figuring out how to sell things. Who's not made a killing is the American middle class because the kind of economic jobs they used to have back in the forties, fifties and sixties and even into the seventies where a person could work in manufacturing, make it into the middle class, buy a home, provide for their family, send their kids to college, go on a vacation, retire someday. Those jobs went to China, and the American economy did not do a very good job. And American society in general did not do a very good job in finding the kind of jobs that would substitute for the manufacturing jobs.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:26:52):
In some people who haven't been in manufacturing, look down on manufacturing. I used to work for a paper company and supported the computer systems at a paper mill. So I was in the paper mill where it smells like sulfur and I would come out smelling like sulfur, and
Brian Kennedy (00:27:12):
It was a good day's work, by the way.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:27:16):
You become very proud. First you see a tree coming in and it comes out as paper. That's pretty miraculous actually. It's an amazing process to watch. And the people who are working it are so proud of having a job and being able to take care of their family. And they may not be able to have a job where they're programming computers or where they're working on Wall Street or they're dressing up in a suit every day, but they are doing good work, honest work. They're not dependent on other people. And when you take that away from them and you say, well, we can give you a welfare program, or you can do this, or whatever else it might be, you take the pride of being able to provide for yourself away from them, and you crush. You crush towns, you crush cities, you crush their spirits.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:28:00):
And it's bothersome to me, and we didn't, I understand there's a value in having a lower product, a lower price product, but I also just think is so completely wrong to say, well, if you manufacture in America, you have to live by the OSHA rules and the EPA rules and all the other, the unemployment laws and the tax laws and everything else. And you're competing with a country that allows that doesn't do any of that. So there's not, even when you said there's no fair trade, you're not even playing on the same field at all as our companies have to play on. It's how can we compete with that? You
Brian Kennedy (00:28:43):
Can't. No, we can't. You can't. We can't. And so we've deprived Americans of the dignity of work, of the kind of work. I mean, there is this idea that America was going to become, I mean not manufacturing based, but we would be producing the kind of software designing software producing all sorts of high information kind of products that would make a whole bunch of money for Americans. As you say, not everybody can be a computer programmer. And what do you do with people? So we give people a bad education from K through 12, and then we tell them to go out into the world. But when you go out into the world, there's no manufacturing job, and we restrict people from building new homes, right? The whole anti-growth policies of the eighties and nineties even to we have this growing population partly because of just natural population growth, but also with illegal immigrants.
Brian Kennedy (00:29:50):
And yet we restrict the number of homes that get built across the country and we restrict manufacturing. Well, this is not a recipe for economic success. We incentivized the best and brightest in America to go into the financial industry. Instead of creating new things. We figured out ways of dividing up multi-trillion dollar parts of the economy so that investment banks could make money. Now, I don't mean to be too down on all of that. I mean, some of these things can be effective ways of distributing capital. People do invest in these kind of things, but there's no sensible reason. At some point, if you're trading partner in communist, China is itself going to restrict your ability to sell things to them. I don't mean to make an argument simply for fair trade, but we don't have free trade in this country. And I think one of the things President Trump was shooting for was, you're going to have fair trade. You're going to let us sell things to you, and if you don't, we're going to put tariffs on. And when he thought of tariffs, he thought, I'm going to incentivize American industry to produce the kind of things that are being made in communist China.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:31:08):
And then when covid happened and we couldn't get penicillin and we couldn't get masks, and we couldn't get whatever else, because China shut down and product wasn't being shipped, we realized how dependent we were on their manufacturing and how important really it is to be able to be somewhat self-sufficient. We teach as conservatives. We teach our children to be self-sufficient. We want to be self-sufficient. And yet our country, we aren't saying the same thing about what our country should
Brian Kennedy (00:31:34):
Be do. No, we let 80 to 90% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients get produced in communist China, and that alone is a scandal, right? Yes. And it was during the back and forth on Covid that China said, if you keep this up, we're going to drown you in a sea of coronavirus was a direct quote, drown you in a sea of coronavirus and you Americans require your medicine from us. Now to this day, have we remedied that? Rosemary Gibson, who's a member of our committee on the present Danger China, wrote a whole book about this, and she really laid out just what a scandal it is that we're not producing these obvious things that we need here in the United States. We can't build fighter aircraft here in the United States without chips made in communist China without parts made in communist China.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:32:30):
If there were an EMP, we have to get the product to restore those transformers. Is it transformers?
Brian Kennedy (00:32:37):
We won't get them in time,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:32:39):
But we don't even have that in America. It comes from overseas as well. That's
Brian Kennedy (00:32:44):
The bigger point. Some come from China, some come from South Korea and other places, but we don't have them here. I mean, again, we talk about sort of just how deeply confused this country is. We thought we could export our manufacturing to communist China, including things that are absolutely so essential, such as medicines such as these transformers. Today, if you need a new transformer here in Georgia, you're going to put one on order. You probably already have it on order. It's going to take about 18 months to get. It's going to come from China or South Korea. And South Korea is an ally and a good ally, but China is not. And so just in the course of things, if something is absolutely mission critical to our national survival, why wouldn't you make it here? Even if it costs more, why wouldn't you make it here?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:33:38):
From a national security standpoint, it makes sense to be able to do that.
Brian Kennedy (00:33:42):
Absolutely. Look, remember during Covid, we had a lot of our cars had chips in them. The cars were not being built because there weren't enough chips coming from. Some come from Taiwan, but a lot come from communist China. So we've exported things. We've exported our manufacturing base to communist China, and we've not done the common sense things in this country that a smart people would do. And look, the Chinese figured this out. They knew that if we became entirely dependent on them and intertwined our two economies together, that they would in effect on us, which is why Donald Trump was such when he was an outlier, he wasn't going to allow them to get away with it. And so they declared the people's war, and that's what we're living through today.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:34:33):
Where did they see the freeze the people's war and drown them in a sea of coronavirus?
Brian Kennedy (00:34:39):
Both of those were in People's Daily, their communist newspaper. But May of 2019 was the People's War declaration, and the coronavirus came probably May or June when people were really going back and forth about, Hey, did this come from communist China or not? And just recently we find out, yes, it came from communist China. We knew it came from communist China and our own government was lying to us about it.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:35:06):
Well, not Trump.
Brian Kennedy (00:35:07):
No, not Trump in his administration, but the part of the apparatus that lied to President Trump. And I think one of the things that I think we really have to understand is why did communist China do that, and what were they thinking and why did our government not respond the right way? Why President Trump was told we absolutely have to do this, and this is how dangerous it could be in operating purely under common sense. He did the lockdowns and he was told that we absolutely need from the best and brightest in this country within the deep state, mind you that we absolutely could get a vaccine. It would be safe and effective.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:35:47):
Don't even get us started on this when everything locked down, our organization gave grace during the 30 days, the first 30 days. And internally I was going, are we insane? What is going on? And I said this to people in other national organizations, I said, we're about to lock down the country. You understand? We're about to lock down the country based on what the Chinese Communist Party did. Were following their model and based on the field socialized healthcare system in Italy, which we were opposed to socialized healthcare, and we don't have that. So why are we responding the way that a socialized healthcare system? And the Chinese Communist Party responded, and then we copied them, and it made no sense to me at all. And after I left the paper company, I worked for a very large manufacturing company that, or not manufacturing, but one of the retail companies in programming in the imports department, programming computers for the imports department.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:36:54):
So I knew that when you placed an order in America, it went overseas and they had to load up the container ships, and it would take about 45 days for things to get here. So when China shut down, I was warning people before we were locked down. I was like, we're about to have economic problems. They're like, what are you talking about? The economy's booming and roaring. And I said, no, China's locked down. We're about to have major trouble. And they couldn't even fathom it. I'm like, you don't understand. We're downstream from China. We're going to have trouble. And I was right. And I, as soon as it was 30 days were up, I was like, we have to be up and running. Trump is right. The country needs to be open by Easter. And people just weren't listening. They bought into the fear, and it is maddening. But when you sit there and say, well, they said it's going to be a sea of coronavirus. People will die in a sea of coronavirus, and it's a people's war that makes me even angrier, right?
Brian Kennedy (00:37:52):
Yeah. And I think President Trump was being told this thing could get really serious. We're a rich country so we can tolerate the economic dislocation and that the vaccines are going to be safe, effective, and right around the corner. Now, if you're told you're going to drown in a sea of coronavirus, but you're told from our big pharma that the vaccines on the way. I think the pressure being put on the administration to keep it shut while the vaccine was coming was enormous.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:38:31):
And he had just come out of impeachment one. And of the problem with impeachment, one was that he didn't listen to the experts. Not that that's why he was impeached, but the implication was, had you just listened to, all of us, we're so much smarter, and we're now sitting here before Congress talking about how awful you are, and you should be impeached. If you'd just listened to us, everything would've been okay. And so then he listened to the experts, the experts, as we talked about in the beginning. And I don't blame him for the decisions he made. No,
Brian Kennedy (00:39:04):
I think it's important though. He doesn't, is my sincere hope. He quits talking about the vaccines mine too, in such a positive way because I talk to more people who just think a lot of people have been vaccine injured, and they know that there's been an economic dislocation in this country all caused by communist China, and that the vaccines were not a positive sign. President Trump did so many great things as president, and it was miraculous. He got the vaccine done as quickly as he did. It's just that he was lied to so much by these companies about, it wasn't really a vaccine as we know. It was experimental gene therapy. We now understand it was not safe and effective. We now understand, and if you read these Pfizer documents, that event finally come out, it's a scandal in a properly functioning political system. Someone would be going to jail for everything that happened.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:40:10):
And they've pulled the AstraZeneca vaccine just
Brian Kennedy (00:40:14):
Recently,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:40:16):
And he was right. There's several things that Trump did, right? The first 30 days, we really did give grace. And if I were in his shoes, I can't. We
Brian Kennedy (00:40:28):
Didn't know.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:40:28):
We didn't know. We didn't know. And you do the best that you can with the information you have at the time. And hindsight is 2020. But he was also right to say the country should be open by Easter. He was right to see schools needed to be open. He was right to create the system for operation warp speed so that they were moving equipment around the country as it needed to be moved, and to clear some of the regulations to allow testing of the vaccines. Those things were good decisions. It's simply that at the end of the day, the medicine didn't work the way that they said that it was working.
Brian Kennedy (00:41:11):
Right? And we put too much stock in all that. And look, I think President Trump had some very hard decisions to be made, and I don't think he was given great counsel during that period. This wasn't going to be a traditional vaccine that would protect us. It was not the nature of the virus either that viruses change. And so whatever vaccine we started with is not going to be the one that was going to be appropriate for the vaccine that was being developed. So that was bad. And lessons were learned here, but at a pretty high cost. I still think, I mean, look, America today is broken, that we have not recovered from the lockdown of COVID-19 still to this day. No. It may take Trump getting back into office to really fix the kind of things that are broken today, but you simply can't give millions of Americans money to stay home and do nothing but play video games and watch Netflix.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:42:21):
And when you do that, besides the financial impact, it also takes away the dignity of work. And it just starts to create problems with unintended consequences.
Brian Kennedy (00:42:31):
It disorients people, really, if I can just stay home for a year and someone will send me money, well, why not five years? Why not 10 years? What is money then? It destroys people's understanding of money and jobs and the dignity of work. And so we paid a very high price for that. And if you're communist China and you wanted to destroy the US economy and the US dollar and replace the US dollar with their own currency as the reserve currency of the world, doing what America's done for the last four years of Joe Biden would be a pretty effective way of doing that. I mean, our deficit now is 33, 30 $4 trillion. There's inflation. We're spending money still. There's no tomorrow. The Republicans have no appetite to check that, which is a scandal all by itself. It is. And China, in their mind, is well on track to becoming the world's preeminent power.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:43:35):
Now, when you say they're on track, they had the 2020 plan, and do they have a 2030 or 2050 plan? And what are the
Brian Kennedy (00:43:43):
Those? Well, they're communists. So they have five year and 10 year plans all the time. But no, they have a manufacturing plan. They have a, but I think, look, they've said before by 2050, they really want China to be the world's preeminent power by 2027. They've talked about the takeback of Taiwan, which is scary on itself, right? So look, they think America has become morally bankrupt.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:44:11):
I don't know why they would think that,
Brian Kennedy (00:44:12):
Right? Unless just read our newspapers, watch our watch Netflix on any given night.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:44:18):
Watch what happens on TikTok or Instagram, right? Yeah.
Brian Kennedy (00:44:21):
And of course they spread TikTok in the United States, and they don't let their own children use TikTok because they know it would corrupt their minds and they would like our children's minds corrupted but not theirs. And so is that a form of information warfare? Yes. And I said this earlier at this conference that you and I both spoke at, the Chinese spend annually in the United States, 16 billion on intelligence in influence operations, 16 billion. And what do they do with that? They buy up all sorts of influence. They hired the best law firms in Washington and New York, the best PR firms. They find ways of funneling money to journalists,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:45:13):
To colleges and universities.
Brian Kennedy (00:45:16):
There are all sorts of institutes they create. But think of $16 billion. What could that buy you? And my great concern is that one should expect with absolute certitude that they will try to influence the 2024 election. Why wouldn't they? It's not like they're spending 16 billion annually on intelligence and influence operations. They do that so that they can prepare themselves for deciding presidential elections. And we still have in place in 2024, a lot of the things that happened in 2020 when it comes to mail-in balloting and in the seven swing states that people argue decide presidential elections, there is still the use of mail-in balloting. And so I have been briefing a variety of folks and just asking as an intellectual exercise whether or not communist China could produce in those seven swing states. Could they have a factory? They have factories in all those states already, right?
Brian Kennedy (00:46:20):
Because they have factories all over the country doing a variety of things, whether it's producing things, some things here, some things in China, but just distribution warehouses, could they produce a million ballots in each of the seven swing states and insert those through the mail into the system? We know they have printing presses. We know they have access to the voter rolls. We know they have access to the PDFs of the ballots themselves. We know through artificial intelligence they can acquire the signatures. Not that there's adequate signature verification going on in the seven swing states, but they could acquire with artificial intelligence, the signatures. And if you voted low propensity voters in those seven swing states, if you're trying to steal an election, you're not going to vote. The people who vote all the time, you're going to vote the people who never vote, but whose names are still on the voter rolls.
Brian Kennedy (00:47:14):
Could China do that and decide the presidential election? And you would just as an intellectual exercise have to say yes, that is certainly possible. Okay, if that's possible, is the intelligence and national security community of the United States taking today to stop that? And the answer is nothing. Merrick Garland and Christopher Ray went before Congress yesterday, or I guess it was a press conference, and said that their great concern was the activities of people to either attack election workers or to otherwise suppress the vote. Okay? No one I've never heard of. And they were citing people doing bad things to election workers. No reasonable person would ever want that. No, of course we're going to protect our election workers. That's an obvious thing that we would do. How about making sure there aren't people who vote illegally in the country, they don't think that's their job and protecting us from a foreign power that has an interest in influencing a presidential election. They're doing nothing to stop that. Where is Congress today ostensibly controlled by a political party? Who would've an interest in this? The Republicans making sure that they stopped that. And you've heard nothing about that. You heard nothing about that from the China committee, the select committee. You hear nothing about that from the other parts of Congress
Jenny Beth Martin (00:48:47):
In defense of both parties in that China committee. I think even when there's bipartisan agreement on an issue and a problem with China, they're not getting a lot of traction anywhere outside of the committee on what's,
Brian Kennedy (00:49:04):
Because Congressman Speaker McCarthy created that committee not to have teeth. It didn't have jurisdiction and it didn't have subpoena power, important features of a congressional committee. So it was performative. It was a show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:49:22):
We even with a show, okay, I understand everything that you said. Even with the show, the things that they're highlighting, people aren't paying attention to it. The media isn't paying attention to it, the
Brian Kennedy (00:49:34):
Average because it doesn't have the teeth, they can't call people before. If you can't subpoena parts of the government to come before you and explain what you're doing to stop this, whether it's TikTok or any variety of dangerous things communist China is doing to us, if you can't call someone from the administration with Sabina Bauer to testify before you, no one in the press is going to take it seriously. If you can't really dig with subpoena power into the Biden family's potential corruption or real corruption with Communist China press is not going to take it seriously. McCarthy did that on purpose so that this would not be an issue. He didn't want to offend all of his supporters in the Chamber of Commerce and big business and Wall Street that are in bed, communist China.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:50:30):
They don't want to be disturbed. They really don'ts
Brian Kennedy (00:50:33):
What happens. No, and it shows you how corrupt American elites are that they have let the country get to this position where communist China has that much influence on us.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:50:43):
So in the work that you're doing right now with the committee, what is it? The Committee on the Clear and Present Danger, right? That's
Brian Kennedy (00:50:56):
Committee on the Present Danger. Present Danger, China. Yeah.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:51:00):
Is that a Tom Clancy novel? Clear and present Danger? So I think
Brian Kennedy (00:51:04):
It was confusing, Tom.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:51:06):
Yes. Okay, so anyway, I bungled the title there. But in that work, what are the recommendations that you guys are making? Are you making recommendations when people listen to this, what can they do? What can the average person do? Because it's really overwhelming.
Brian Kennedy (00:51:24):
Yeah, no, that's a very fair point. One, we have a great website called Present danger china.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:51:30):
You have like a hundred webinars or
Brian Kennedy (00:51:32):
Something. We've done 180 webinars now, and they're just a fascinating body of work that anybody can go and watch and a bunch of great articles and essays and books and things that have been written about this. But look, as you know, there's no silver bullets in politics. No, there's not one thing you can do to where people will say, oh, why hadn't I thought of that before? And now we got to fix everything. Politics is slugging it out every day, and it's getting people, first of all to understand this. Remember in the 1940s, it wasn't obvious to everybody that the Soviet Union was a threat. The Cold War took a lot of work to get going. Turns out that Americans really needed to focus on that and take it seriously. And it was only when we had the space race and eventually the Sputnik moment where they'd put something in space before we did that, Americans realized that may be a problem.
Brian Kennedy (00:52:33):
And Americans woke up. They haven't woken up to communist China even after COVID-19. And part of our job, we think at the committee, is to explain to Americans just what's at stake here. This is not about economic competition. This may well be about our national survival and communist China may want to not merely replace us as the world's most powerful country economically, but also militarily. And if they ever get to the point where they want to destroy the United States for some reason, again, it may not make sense to the average person, but these are communists. They've killed a hundred million of their own people. They've caused 400 million Chinese babies to die in the womb. These are not people who think like us.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:53:25):
How have they killed a hundred million of their own people?
Brian Kennedy (00:53:27):
Well, during the course of the Communist history, they starved otherwise starved and or killed during their various revolutions within communist China, that many Chinese citizens, because they are fulfilling a communist mission to become the most powerful nation on earth. And it's only a matter of time in their minds before they get there. And that's how they think. We in America, who are so busy raising our families and doing other things, don't. When we hear all this stuff, we just kind of dismiss it as, oh, that's just communist being communist. And that's just talk. Well, from their point of view, no, that's a real desire they have. We have 340 million people. They have 1.4 billion people. They're a hardworking, creative people that we entirely dismiss. They're great people. They have a lot going for them. We look down on them for some very odd reason as if they're incapable of being the most powerful nation on earth.
Brian Kennedy (00:54:38):
We think we won the Cold War. And personally I've said for many years we didn't win the Cold War because it wasn't a war to be won, if you know what I mean, that you win the Cold War. What's that mean? It means the Soviet Union reorganized into Russia. Do we disarm Russia? No. And so they're the sort of a KGB state today doing all the bad things they do. We won the Cold War. Did we disarm communist China? Did they become a liberal democracy? No. No. But we spent 20 years having won the Cold War, not building the kind of military and the kind of systems one would need to make sure that you remained through. You were marked on peace through strength. We've lost that peace through strength. If we really had peace through strength, we wouldn't have been attacked on September 11th because the other side would've been afraid of us. They weren't so afraid of us, were they? And we fought wars with them in the Middle East for 20 years.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:55:45):
I don't know many people who are saying that we won.
Brian Kennedy (00:55:47):
No, no. Not only did we not win, we have lied consistently to the American people about whether Islam is a religion of peace, which it is objectively not a religion of peace. And so we have lied to the American people, we've confused them. We have exported their manufacturing to communist China. It's only through the genius of the hardworking American that we have been able to sustain this country and become the wealthy nation we are, which is one reason everyone was so afraid of Donald Trump. All the globalists, let's just say were so afraid of Trump. He wanted to take that energy of the American people and rebuild the American economy, the ways it should have been rebuilt so that you had manufacturing, you were building new homes. Listen to President Trump's arguments about the future. He talks about building new cities, new great cities. How many people will that employ?
Brian Kennedy (00:56:49):
A lot We'll need to spread out as a country good. Reduce the kind of urban problems we have. And I think Trump's vision for America in terms of growth and expansion and the kind of American way of life that everyone enjoyed, it's wildly popular. And the American people think it's popular, the globalists who want to control our lives, including those here in this country, not so popular, which is why Trump is vilified constantly. And one reason why I think the American people have been so loyal to him is that his vision of an America that is a defense of the American way of life is something that they desperately want. They don't see it today, and they want it. They want it back
Jenny Beth Martin (00:57:43):
When he's vilified. And he's attacked for the things that he says, like defending the American way of life, defending the workers who were manufacturing workers when he's attacked. One of the things that I said from very early on, and we initially did endorse Ted Cruz, and then we endorsed Trump, and we never backed off of it even at all. Once we endorsed him, we were in. But before we endorsed him, I said, those attacks from the media, they don't understand they're going to make him president. And those attacks, it sounds like they're attacking me. I'm taking their attacks personally. And if I'm taking them personally, I know other grassroots people around the country, they don't see it as an attack on Trump. They see it as an attack on themselves and the media, and they don't understand that. And it's because they don't think the way that the rest of the country thinks.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:58:46):
So they don't understand when Trump is saying those things that he's actually defending other people in the rest of the country. But he was willing to go to the Iowa State Fair with his helicopter and let people go sit in his helicopter just so they could be in a helicopter if they'd never been in one. And he approached everything that he was listening to people. I mean, he went to tea party events even. And he listened to people in the crowd. And then in these big rallies, he's even listening to feedback there. So he really is in tune when I see the booze and the applause. He hears the immediate feedback.
Brian Kennedy (00:59:22):
These are his people. They are
Jenny Beth Martin (00:59:23):
His people, and he gets a sense of what they want and what they don't want because he's listening to
Brian Kennedy (00:59:28):
Them. Look, he's very unconventional. And look, I love Ted Cruz. I think he's a great senator. And it's just that Donald Trump, I won't say he's a better man, but Donald Trump is a guy who is a phenomenon in American politics. He's a successful businessman who's a reality TV star, who apparently never missed a WrestleMania in the last 20 years. Now think of it that way for a moment. A WrestleMania. Now, professional wrestling is entertainment. We all know it's entertainment. Trump would always go, and there are several times when he was a featured part of the show and everybody who goes to a wrestling event like that, professional wrestling knows not real, but it, it's a show. But here's Trump. He goes, and he's part of the show, which is to say, I just like you, enjoy the show. We can all have fun here because what's not, to have fun at a professional wrestling event. And I think the American people looked at that and they thought, he's just like one of us. He goes to A UFC. I've seen him at A UFC half dozen times because I'm a big UFC fan. So goes, the crowd goes crazy in part because he's one of them,
Brian Kennedy (01:00:50):
And in so many ways is an everyday American. And he also, I'm not sure if anybody's ever read, this will be controversial. Maybe he did two Playboy interviews over the years, easily available online, no pictures to be found, just the interview. But I'd highly recommend 'em to people. And if you've never read them, read them. Because they asked him in these interviews, they said, if you could be anybody in the 20th century, who would you be? And he said, well, I should say Churchill. This is in the nineties. He said, I should say Churchill. But he goes, kind of reflects. And he says, but I really love the glitz in the glamor of Hollywood. I would've loved to have been Louis B. Mayer making those movies in the thirties and forties. I love the glitz and the glamor.
Brian Kennedy (01:01:42):
So here's a guy who is a real estate developer who talks about Churchill on the one hand, and Louis B. Mayer on the other. Is that not Donald Trump? It is as so transparent that he knows and they ask him, well, would you ever run for president? He says, I'm a busy guy. But he goes, it's odd because I am a Republican, but all the Democrats like me, I have all these business projects and building and everything else. And for a billionaire, he had the common touch. And you could see it in his television show, the Apprentice, you can see it today in all these rallies that look at him as a defender of something very American, that he's a very American kind of character. And I think effectively he is the man for this time. No one has been more courageous politically. He didn't have to do all this. He did it. He loved the country and God bless him for it. I think our side doesn't even, conservatives don't quite still understand Donald Trump and the importance of Trump. We're on the precipice of losing this country. It's not like this is a close call in any way. But more than that, not merely is it not a close call that Donald Trump is the man for this time. I say it a nonpartisan way,
Jenny Beth Martin (01:03:04):
And he has a weight of the world on his shoulders right
Brian Kennedy (01:03:06):
Now. Absolutely. Absolutely. But to have that kind of courage, that makes you a good man too.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:03:12):
Yes.
Brian Kennedy (01:03:13):
Right. Our side apologizes for him too much. They shouldn't do that.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:03:17):
So many of his problems would've gone away if he had just gone away.
Brian Kennedy (01:03:21):
No, I disagree. Okay. Our colleague, Steve Bannon sometimes says this, I think the American left realized Trump woke something in the American spirit that even if Trump had not run again, they would've tried to crush him and put him in jail. They want to humiliate him. They want him in jail.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:03:46):
They need him in jail for a separate reason than for what you're saying, they need him in jail. So no other businessman who hasn't been a politician, but is highly capable of running multimillion, if not multi-billion dollar corporations ever has the audacity to think he could become president. That's my point. They have to send a message that if you try, here's what will do to you.
Brian Kennedy (01:04:11):
Right. That's my point. That even if he hadn't have run for president again, they wanted to send a signal to everybody. I'm agreeing with you, they want to send a signal to everybody. Yeah. Don't do this.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:21):
And that's what he said. I think many of his problems, but not all of the problems would've gone away. They had to do that. But I think that there are problems that he has encountered and people who support him who've been indicted have encountered that maybe some or most of those would not have happened. Those some still would've happened to Trump had he just gone away.
Brian Kennedy (01:04:44):
Yeah, no, I think that's right. It's interesting. It seems to me there's coming a point here where the American left though, and this is something that the left really should be concerned about, is they're losing legitimacy in the eyes of the American people in ways that are very unhealthy in American society. This is not the normal give and take of politics. This is something to the point where people think, and this is why the more they indict Trump, the more popular it gets. It's not merely that they think, well, he's our guy. They think there's something wrong here. There's something wrong when the justice system so-called does this to Trump, that the more popular it gets, the more they try to indict him and the more popular it gets. They think there's something unjust about the system. He
Jenny Beth Martin (01:05:33):
Wouldn't becoming more and more popular every time they continue to do more to him if others didn't think it was unjust.
Brian Kennedy (01:05:42):
Right, right. I mean, it's a weird kind of spiral. It is. Why don't they just back off and they can't help themselves. No, unfortunately. But I think I'm suggesting that with that comes a loss of legitimacy of our entire system, that at some level people think on the left and the right. I mean, not really the right today because of what they're doing to Trump, but I think people on the left in the center are looking at that and thinking, that's not right. Fundamentally not right to do what you're doing. And that should be a great concern as well as whether or not we can have a fair election in 2024. And that's really the crisis of the country right now that conservatives properly speaking should be focused on. If you don't have a fair election, you're not going to have a country.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:06:39):
I completely agree with that. And if you don't have a fair election, you certainly don't have America because the American system and the people who say they have to democracy dies in darkness or they have to defend democracy or whatever else. Well, you can't have representative democracy, which is what we have a republic. But at any rate, you can't have that if people can't actually vote for who they want to represent them, it doesn't work. And so you have to have the free and fair and transparent elections. We at t Pretty P treats action along with many other groups have been working very hard to secure elections. And we encourage people to step up and work the polls, become a poll worker, become a poll, an election official. And if you can't do that, then watch the polls at least is a first step to election integrity. Not everyone is going to be the people who go and study the voter rolls or understand all of the ins and outs of the election law, but that is something that the average citizen can do. And our election law depends on the average citizen doing that. These citizens have a role to be a check and balance on the elections.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:08:02):
And then as Ken Blackwell, the former Secretary of State from Ohio says, we just have to win by such a large margin that it's too big to rig and it's hard to fathom that when people are so worried about the elections, we have to do everything we can to secure them and then we have to get the vote out. And so overwhelmingly that no matter what the shenanigans are, they can't overcome the margin of vote difference.
Brian Kennedy (01:08:29):
Yes, I think that's right. And we say that not as a partisan kind of kind of thing. Yeah.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:08:34):
Notice they didn't say who would win, just that these
Brian Kennedy (01:08:36):
Are just from a common sense point of view. Yes. I think that's going to happen. Someone very important called the other day and asked who I thought would win the election. And I said, well, I think there's a hundred percent chance that the elections going to be, that they're going to attempt to steal the election and probably a 95% chance that they're going to succeed. But I'd still bet on the 5% that I think the American people are going to realize here what's going on and they're going to do the right thing. And that the real crisis is that the American left doesn't see this, that they really are going to gamble with the security of this country in ways that are very harmful if they allow the election to be stolen. Millions and millions of Americans will think they no longer have a republic, and we don't know where that will take us. No one wants this country to collapse. No one wants violence. No one wants any of the bad things that could happen. Everyone should be against that. And
Jenny Beth Martin (01:09:50):
I certainly am.
Brian Kennedy (01:09:51):
Yeah, I am. And everybody I know is that doesn't mean that our enemies are indifferent to this though. And our enemies will see this as an opportunity to destroy us and divide us. Who do you think China and Russia and Iran and our enemies, don't you think they would like to see us at war with ourselves? I'm trying to argue. They will create the conditions where an election gets stolen and foment the kind of civil war that people are warning against. I mean, when the popular culture, there's a new movie out about a civil war in this country, when the popular culture is portraying this, they're conditioning you in part that this is what's coming and where are the people on our side by our side, meaning the American side, making sure that doesn't happen. And I think that is the great danger that we're in today, that men of goodwill on the American left should be working to have a free and fair election, and it's good for everybody.
Brian Kennedy (01:10:59):
If Joe Biden, if he's their nominee, if he has an honest debate with Donald Trump and there's a free and fair election, and Joe Biden wins, and it's absolutely transparent, I don't think anybody in America, if it's completely transparent, people will say, well, okay, well, Joe Biden must have had better ideas. We have a lot more work to do. If Donald Trump wins, the American left's going to say, we got more work to do. We better have better ideas. This has been the back and forth of American politics. But when an election can be stolen, then that's not the case anymore. It's not about ideas. It's about stealing an election. And that's a bad place for free society to be in, especially when we have an enemy like communist China. Can you imagine during the Cold War ever having mail-in balloting with the Soviet Union? Would anybody have trusted that the election could have been conducted fairly with the Soviet Union and bail-in balloting? And the ancillary point there is if anybody on the American left genuinely believed Donald Trump was in the pocket of the Russians, they worry that Russia would steal the election for Trump.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:12:20):
Yeah, of
Brian Kennedy (01:12:20):
Course. No one, that's just, it's a narrative, right? No one on the American left really thinks Donald Trump is in the pocket of the Russians. If they did, they wouldn't allow mail-in balloting or they think they've got it rigged now. Neither of these things is healthy. In a free society, we should have free elections that are absolutely transparent, where at the end of them, everybody knows who won fair and square. Americans have a passion for fairness. And when you assault that there's problems, and you're seeing that today, that's why the country isn't, I think it's in a much more fragile place than the media would have us believe.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:13:02):
Well, I think that the country's always in a fragile place, even though, and I don't mean the country's just so fragile, it can fall apart.
Brian Kennedy (01:13:12):
No, that's a good point. No,
Jenny Beth Martin (01:13:14):
We have a republic if we can keep it. It was an answer and a challenge. And liberty requires eternal vigilance. So those sayings have remained over the years and are part of our lexicom because it is hard to keep the kind of government that we have. And if we don't work hard, we can't pass it on to the next generation. And right now, I think we're worried about passing it on to the next decade, not even the next generation. But I think that there have been other times in the history of our country where the country seemed at a tipping point and peril and America somehow comes through sometimes at the very last minute and figures out, we've got to get our act together to save our country and to do what's right. And I hope that's what happens this time. Yeah,
Brian Kennedy (01:14:11):
I think that's very well said and very observant. During those periods of crisis, we did have a free and fair electoral system or much freer than the one we have today. The worry today is the system is rigged. How many people do you know who say, yeah, I'm not going to vote because the system's just rigged, they're going to steal it again. Now, I don't buy into any of that, and we can't give into any of that.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:14:37):
No, absolutely not.
Brian Kennedy (01:14:38):
But you do hear it and it's demoralizing. The job of communism is to demoralize America, and they've done a pretty good job. And we're demoralized and we're disoriented. Donald Trump is about the Remineralization of America. Make America great. Again. That's a moralizing kind of statement, but it also implies we used to be great and now we're going to be great again. And that's the thing where you really get the political crisis we're in that it's fundamentally between one view of the world, globalist, pro-communist in so many ways, pro LGBQ, the alphabet of all those kind of things. And just a weird kind of embrace of these leftist ideas that are not at all from just from a pure polling point of view, popular with the American people. You have that point of view. And then you have this guy, this business guy, Donald Trump, who wants to alize the country, make America great again, get people working, get manufacturing back. And I think that that Trump message is a very popular message. It resonates with the American people. His core message is probably a 70 30 kind of message. Who doesn't want a job? Strong families, good education, et cetera. And so it's a wonder here, and we'll find out whether we can have a free and fair election in the fall.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:16:13):
Well, we have to do everything we can to make sure that we've done our part to secure it through legal means. And no way am I suggesting it wouldn't be legal, of course. But go be a poll worker. Go be a poll watcher and get out the vote. And then the other thing, I think that is an action item from this podcast would be to read, well, a couple of things. We mentioned a couple books I mentioned Pillsbury, you mentioned the one about the healthcare and the medicine.
Brian Kennedy (01:16:49):
Yes. Rosemary Gibson. Yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:16:51):
Rosemary's book and one second after if you want to stay up for a month, not sleep after you read it, but then also looking at your website.
Brian Kennedy (01:17:03):
Yeah, present danger china.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:17:05):
And the webinars
Brian Kennedy (01:17:07):
Has a lot of good resources on there for people who want to learn more about communist China, and many of the people we've mentioned are on there. Yeah. Look, this is still politics, and the more you're educated, the more you're involved, all the great work you're doing. I mean, to the extent that we can educate Americans, get them politically active in making sure we have a free and fair election, we can still save this country. As I say, I'm betting on the 5%. That's right. And this is still a great country field with good people. It is. And they want to do the right thing, and we just need to make sure our political system matches that.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:17:48):
That is exactly right. Well, Brian Kennedy, thank you so much for joining me today.
Brian Kennedy (01:17:52):
Thank you, Jenny Beth, it's great to be with you. And thank you again for all the good work you do.
Narrator (01:17:57):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:18:17):
If you like this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know, every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do these simple things, it will help the podcast grow, and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.