In this episode of Kash’s Corner, we discuss the impending release of the Jan. 6 committee’s final report.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) recently stated the committee will “scrub” some evidence containing personal identifiable information. But is personal identifiable information the only evidence that will be redacted?
“What the Republicans should be doing right now… is writing letters to the head of the committee, Bennie Thompson and Speaker Pelosi while she’s still speaker and say, ‘We are demanding every single document this committee has produced in its investigation to be turned over to the Republican caucus immediately,’” says Kash Patel.
We also discuss the protests in China, Elon Musk saying he will release files on Twitter censorship, and Apple allegedly threatening to remove Twitter from the App Store.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Kash Patel:
Hey everybody, and welcome back to Kash’s Corner. This week we’re coming at you from Dallas, Texas, and we got a whole bunch of topics to talk about. Jan, where would you like to start?
Jan Jekielek:
December is upon us and we have to talk about the January 6th committee in its last days now, at least in its current incarnation. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, so we’ll talk about that. We definitely have to talk about changes at Twitter, and Elon Musk’s promise to release the censorship files, for lack of a better term. We have to talk about that. And then there’s the unprecedented protests in China, the biggest in 30 years, and a connection also to Apple across Twitter.
Mr. Patel:
And Iran.
Mr. Jekielek:
And Iran. Thank you very much. Yes.
Mr. Patel:
Before we get started, I do want to remind our audience that our live chat seems to be getting very lively. For those of you that aren’t tuned in right now, go there now on either the Epoch app or on Epoch Times and Epoch TV and join Kash’s Corner live chat. Jan and I will be answering your questions in real time.
Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. And we’ve been having more and more fun on that too.
Mr. Patel:
Yes, we have. That’s good. It’s where all the cowboy boots were last seen.
Mr. Jekielek:
I read recently that in The Epoch Times that Adam Schiff has been saying that there may be some redactions related to all the evidence that’s going to be presented. He said, “We’re going to release all the evidence, but there may be some scrubbing.” What’s your reaction to that?
Mr. Patel:
I can’t help but laugh when we talk about my best friend Adam Schiff. We obviously have such a history, and what that history has borne out is that when Adam Schiff says something, he’s probably lying. When Adam Schiff says he’s going to do redactions, he’s covering up corruption or something that he doesn’t want out, and that won’t fit his political narrative.
Adam Schiff now comes out in one of what he says is the most consequential investigations in modern U.S. history on January 6th that his Select Committee ran, and he’s talking about redactions. I just remind our audience, before we get to January 6th, let’s rewind the clock a little to Russiagate. Devin Nunes at the time was Chairman, Adam Schiff was the ranking Democratic member, meaning he was the head of the Democratic Caucus on the House Intelligence Committee.
Adam Schiff has gone on TV for years and said he’s had evidence of Russia collusion, but has never proved it. Adam Schiff, I remind you, was the one who withheld the 60 or 70 some deposition transcripts of government officials and senior officers that we took during Russiagate and didn’t want it to go out to the public. Then, he said he was in the process of redacting them, which is what took him two years until we at the executive branch released that.
And what did those transcripts show? The evidence that Dev and I put forward, it’s what we were relying on, that all these government officials had said under oath that they had no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. When Adam Schiff, now fast forward the clock, and we’re talking about January 6th, when he says, “We’re going to put in redactions,” let’s remind our audience where we are at.
We’re in December. This Congress is effectively over in about a week or two because they only have eight business days or so left. They shut down for the holidays. When we come back in January, and the Republicans will have the majority. This Select Committee, just by definition, is a Select Committee. A Select Committee has to be renewed every Congress, and this Select Committee is set to expire.
It will expire unless the new speaker of the House, which is likely Kevin McCarthy for the Republicans, renews the Select Committee, and he said he won’t. This Select Committee is finished. So, what happens to their work? What happens to their data? What happens to all of the information they’ve collected? On past shows, I’ve said, “Why haven’t they released everything?” That was the deal I made with Devin during Russiagate.
At the time, I didn’t know President Trump. I had never met him. I had never met Devin Nunes. I had never worked on Capitol Hill. I was a former public defender, former federal prosecutor, a former Intel guy at JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command], and then literally stumbled upon that work. And I said, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll do this investigation if we put everything we find out, no matter what it is.” And he said, “Yes.” Why isn’t this committee and every committee in Congress running on that same platform?
Because constitutional oversight, at the end of the day, is not for the politicians. It’s not for the Democrats or the Republicans. It’s for us. You ran an investigation, show us everything. Don’t show us your summary version of it. Show us the documents. Show us the documents from the FBI, from the DOD, from the CIA, from everybody. Show us the internal documents from your investigation.
More importantly, release the transcripts of every single interrogation and deposition that the January 6th committee took, including mine. Remember, I was the first one subpoenaed by January 6th committee. I’ve been calling for its release for a year-plus now. Release them all and don’t redact them. See, this is the government tactic that they play all the time. And we fought Adam Schiff on this during Russiagate.
We would lawfully set out to release a number of government documents and Adam Schiff would come in and say, “Oh, no, no, no. We have to redact them.” And the only reason he was doing that was because the information that we were putting out, i.e. the corruption at the FISA court or the lies by the FBI or the withholding of exculpatory evidence, all of that was not beneficial to the narrative that he and the Democrats wanted to put out at the time.
He used redaction as an improper tool to shield America from the actual information that we had produced. He’s going to do that again in this instance. And of course the fake news comes in and interviews Adam Schiff and gives him all the time he wants to talk and he says, “Oh, we have to review it for Personal Identifiable Information.” I totally agree with that.
Personal Identifiable Information, as we call PII, should be redacted. Just saying like so and so’s name, and so and so’s birth date, and so and so’s social security number, and so and so’s home address. We don’t want people to be attacked. I’ve always agreed with that. But if you look back at our work, we always redacted PII.
It also adds no substantive value to any part of the investigation. It’s not like you have to know where said person lives in order to understand what they were saying under oath, or what that document says, or that you need their date of birth. It’s totally unnecessary. But he’s using that as a pretext to say, “We are going to scrub the January 6th committee’s investigative findings and then put it out.”
He has a track record of saying, “We’re just going to redact PII”, then go in there and redact voluminous amounts of information. The redaction process, Jan, is also something that is an intergovernmental process, which actually allows the deep state to manifest itself in places it shouldn’t.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is a very interesting question, because can information that the committee has gathered be destroyed? Is that lawful? Is that something that can happen? Or can it only be redacted? In which case it could be just unredacted by the incoming Congress? What’s the situation?
Mr. Patel:
Technically, what’s supposed to happen is all the information, especially on a Select Committee, is supposed to be available to every member of that Select Committee. And as we’ve gone over in the past, it’s a farce to call the January 6th committee bicameral with both parties, because the Republicans had chosen the members they wanted on that committee, Jim Jordan and others. And Nancy Pelosi for the first time in congressional history kicked them off.
Then, they brought in people who were as biased as the Democrats were in Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. The only Republicans that have had access to the data and the findings of this committee are those two Republicans who are both leaving Congress mind you. They were not reelected. One of them didn’t even seek reelection. Has the Republican Caucus seen that information under the House Rules? They have a right to see that information eventually, all of it.
But the chair, Bernie Thompson, a Democrat, can change the rules of the Select Committee. He can just go to Nancy Pelosi and say, “Hey, this is your committee and I want to change the rules X, Y, and Z. I want to change the subpoena rules. I want to change the redaction rules. I want to change who gets to see this information while the investigation is going on.” And from my understanding, the Republican Caucus has not had access to that information.
What they could do, which is what they might do, is they could just put out whatever information they want from their Select Committee and say, “These are our findings.”, and they could conceivably destroy everything else. So, if witnesses came in and submitted documents, I know I did that, I couldn’t have been the only one, if whistleblowers came in and submitted FBI or DOJ or DOD documents, or they gave testimony that maybe didn’t fit a political narrative, they could shield that from the public.
And forget redactions. They could just literally chuck it in the dust bin because that is the authority they have right now. And the Republican Caucus hasn’t seen it. The redaction game is one that I’m equally concerned about. The committee is hiding information from America, because they haven’t put it all out yet. They keep telling us they’re going to put it all out. It’s really not hard to put out. As you know, Jan, you just literally hit send, release, and put it up on a webpage for the world to see. It’s pretty easy to do, if you wanted to do it.
But the redactions are what concerns me, because as I said, what’s supposed to happen, and me as the former deputy director of National Intelligence adjudicated a lot of these, you as Congress say, “These are documents from FBI, from DOJ, from CIA, from NSA, from DOD. We want to make sure we don’t divulge any classified information. We also don’t want to divulge any information that’s harmful to United States citizens personally and directly.”
So, you submit it through a redaction process. It goes to every single agency—that document, that report, that deposition transcript, whatever it is. And that agency says, “Well, this is my CIA’s equity, as we say in this document. We want this removed or redacted.” Then it keeps going. And then, there’s a final adjudication either at Congress or at the office of Director of National Intelligence.
Now, look, Congress doesn’t have to abide by this, but that’s the interagency governmental process for redactions. But what Adam Schiff is setting up here, since the executive branch is controlled by deep state actors, as I call them, like I believe at FBI, like I believe at DOD and DOJ and everywhere else, Schiff is just saying, “I’m going to use the black magic marker wherever I want. You guys are going to be fine with it. And I’ll put it out in the fashion that I want to put it out in.”
Now that jeopardizes Americans’ faith in the institutions. Because what happens when the Republicans go in, look at some of these documents, remove the redaction, then it says the FBI or DOD lied, or the NSA or CIA provided misinformation to the committee. This is the purpose of government oversight. And when you have people like Adam Schiff come in and say, with a track record of making material risk representation and lying to the world that he’s in charge of redactions, that should concern everybody.
What the Republicans should be doing right now in December, going into January when they will take the gavels, is writing letters to the head of the committee, Bernie Thompson and Speaker Pelosi, while she’s still speaker and say, “We are demanding every single document this committee has produced in its investigation to be turned over to the Republican Caucus immediately.” And then, their staff can go into it no matter what’s put out.
Say they put out a report, which they said they will, say they put out all the documents, which they said they will, they’re going to be redacted. We know that. At least we have a backstop to say, “Okay, look what was released in December and let’s fast forward to January, February. Why did you Adam Schiff hide this information from the American public?” I think that’s what we’re going to have to get into.
Mr. Jekielek:
I for one, with the knowledge that I gained after we produced the real story of January 6th, want to see a full and thorough investigation. I’m actually of your school. I want to know the reality, the good, the bad, and the ugly, all of it. Is the only way to do that is to have to replay this whole thing? Is that even possible? What’s your take?
Mr. Patel:
For Americans, for journalists, for investigators, for anybody interested, anyone out there in the cyber world who just wants to know what happened on January 6th, it’s very simple. Release all the documents, that’s it. Then you don’t have to redo an investigation. You just say, “Okay, you guys got all of these documents. Now everyone can see all of it with very minimal personal identifiable information redactions, names, birth dates, et cetera.” That’s it. Then they can see everything.
Now, what the Republicans might find, and this is likely so, is that the committee steered this investigation in one direction or another to not uncover certain corruption. Now, if you recall, I don’t want to retread this entirely, but it took almost a year to correct the false narrative that the National Guard wasn’t ordered into the District of Columbia. What President Trump did was authorize them as the law requires two days before January 6th.
And we now know definitively that the law also requires Nancy Pelosi, the Capitol Police and Mayor Bowser to request those guards before they can be deployed. In writing, they said “No,” to the DOD where I was chief of staff. It’s that type of cat and mouse game that the Democrats on this committee have played during this entire investigation that has caused its entire investigative credibility to be called into question.
The Republicans may decide, “We’re going to look at some of those components. Why didn’t you focus on the truth and what actually happened, and what’s actually law versus a narrative? The word insurrection as has been tossed around very loosely and incorrectly by the media and also a lot of politicians on the hill. Because an insurrection literally would mean that you are hijacking the United States military, you being the President, to perform a coup of some sort.
And I would argue that is logically impossible when the orders to the Department of Defense and the transitioning government, which I led into the Biden administration, were doing just that. The DOD is to transition power from one administration to the other, and that came from the White House. Those two things can’t logically occur both at the same time. So, Republicans might focus on those two. They might just say, “We’ve had enough, the world’s had enough. We know what happened on January 6th.” We’ll put out all the information and we’re going to move forward, because as we’ve covered in past episodes, there’s a lot of other investigations they probably want to get into.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, let’s jump to the question of freedom of speech on Twitter. Before we start, let’s talk about this very contentious image that Elon Musk put up, I’m sure you’re aware of it. It appeared there were two pistols. Now here’s the funny thing. Okay, when I saw that image, guess what I noted? This was just off the cuff.
Mr. Patel:
The Diet Coke.
Mr. Jekielek:
No, but that was funny too. No, George Washington. I thought, “Oh cool, he has George Washington at his bedside. Isn’t that wonderful?” Then I thought more about all the other elements. But it’s interesting what you see in pictures.
Mr. Patel:
Yes. This picture, while the picture is interesting for me, the response was more, I don’t even want to say surprising anymore, because I’m just not surprised. But there’s one of the Hollywood limousine liberal elites, who responded to that photo and basically castigated Elon Musk and analogized him to, and I quote, “trailer park simpleton Americans,” basically hating on a large portion of America and saying that because Elon Musk put out this photo with George Washington, Diet Coke, a firearm and other knick knacks next to his bedside.
He is now destroying free speech so much that the only people that can get down to that very base level are as this liberal elite said, incorrectly of course, I believe, but he said, “because they’re trailer park simpletons”. Just how offensive is that statement? The fact that he’s allowed to just get away with it and people are glorifying him for it is a perfect example of how far we have actually come from free speech. Because what the Left wants, and what the radical Left wants is selective free speech.
Mr. Jekielek:
People often have asked me, “What do you mean by elites? Hey, you’re elite.” What are you talking about? There is this weird mindset that I think is encapsulated. I wasn’t aware of it in this tweet response, but I keep seeing those ideas floating everywhere. I know better. And these are kind of some kind of simple things that can’t really understand what this is all about. What a weird, weird mentality to be stuck in. That’s what strikes me.
Mr. Patel:
It is. It’s disgraceful that people who say they are all for free speech and everything America stands for then come in and say, “Well, not that stuff, because that runs against our narrative.” And then for them to be able to define and pigeonhole people who support that photo and degrade them and compare them to trailer park trash, that’s exactly what you’re saying.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is this trailer park trash thing? That itself is a horrible moniker.
Mr. Patel:
It has nothing to do with anything. It reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”. What does that have to do with anything? A lot of the response was, at least what I saw on Truth Social, I’m not on Twitter, but what I saw on Truth Social was a lot of people chiming and saying, “I grew up in a trailer park. Why are you attacking me? What’s wrong with this photo? What’s wrong with this free speech platform?” And that’s the response that you get. And it’s actually a similar reaction to when Hillary Clinton said that on the campaign trail.
Mr. Jekielek:
Elon looks like he’s ready to release the censorship files. I could tell you I’m very fascinated to find out what he’s going to release. I’m deeply interested in this.
Mr. Patel:
Yes. Maybe by the time the show airs, we’ll have some release materials. But look, we’ve always said, or when I say we, when I was on House Intel committee, part of our investigation was to look at Twitter and Facebook and other social media and how they had a role to play in whatever Russian conspiracies were going on, or whatever maneuvers they were using. Like did Russia pay those people; Google, Facebook, and Twitter? Did they use bots?
And what we found was, yes, monies flowed from Russia to those big companies, and they tried to change the voting landscape. But what we were not able to prove from an evidentiary standpoint, and this is in our Russiagate report, is that we couldn’t find evidence that the monies and the bots that flowed into Google, Facebook, and Twitter from Russia changed a single vote. And that’s not to say it didn’t happen. We just couldn’t find the evidence for it.
And so, we knew something was wrong at these companies way back when, and we have been saying it for years, “When the censorship started on Facebook, on Google, on YouTube, on Twitter, who’s making these decisions?” It’s not like some guy is at the multiverse station with 15 TV screens and he just pushes the button. No. These companies with tens of thousands of employees get together and they have teams and they make memorandums and they do analytics. And they say, “Oh, based on this and that and this, we’re going to censor you and this person in that group.”
There’s a conversation, there’s a decision-making process. We had always asked for those documents to be produced. And of course, they were never going to give those up, they’re internal findings of a private company. And Elon Musk is now apparently on the verge of, or is going to be providing that demand. And it’s causing a lot of people heartache.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s fascinating. And to the point where ostensibly Apple is threatening to withhold the Twitter app from the App Store, which is, almost like a kind of weird mental construct. There’s so many strings to be pulled here.
Mr. Patel:
Yes. We’ll get to Apple and our Chinese overlords in a second. But I just want to circle back to what we’re going to find when these documents come out. I will bet the form that these documents will show there was a politically-based decision making process in the internal chambers of Twitter and their front office, whether it was Jack Dorsey or whoever was running it at the time, to strategically and at specific moments in time, censor subjects, peoples, and storylines that were not beneficial to a Democratic-leaning political narrative.
And then, the Hunter Biden laptop comes into play. Now we have a story just out this week that says, the person responsible for the Hunter Biden laptop censorship decision-making process of Twitter was no longer there. They said they got it wrong. Of course you got it wrong. You didn’t research the facts, you didn’t care to, and you just wanted to establish political narrative.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s also a leaked video from Google after the 2016 presidential election where you have all these employees and you have very high level people, and they’re talking to each other saying, “How could we have let this happen?”. So, there’s this whole kind of shift, and just as a reminder audiences, I don’t know that it happened after that. It was after this kind of unbelievable shock to the system.
Mr. Patel:
Yes. And Zuckerberg put in $400 million into the election apparatus during the last election cycle. We also know that Twitter had a woke department. Literally, they had people who were their employees who were wearing woke gear and espousing woke ideology. Our audience is very familiar with that. But that basically attaches to this radical Left agenda. And they were, and that’s fine. They can have that ideology. The problem I have is they brought it into the decision-making process.
And these records that Elon is talking about and divulging are going to put these people on blast and not just for one thing, for thousands of decisions. And the Left is terrified. You already have, and this sort of sums it up for me, Jim Carrey, a very liberal actor in Hollywood, announced this week that he’s leaving Twitter. Okay, now you’re leaving Twitter now that the facts are about to come out, but you are okay being on a “free speech platform” when they buried the facts, because it favored your political narrative.
These guys are the ultimate hypocrites. It’s the reason that Elon Musk’s “destruction of Twitter” as they see it, is I an integral tool to restore free speech on these social media giants. You also just saw Facebook quietly laid off 10,000 employees. How did that happen? What happened to the monster that was Meta?
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s fascinating. I’m just going to mention this. The Truman Show is up there among my favorite films, with Jim Carrey. It’s really interesting, because The Truman Show speaks to some of the things that we’re seeing in our society these days.
Mr. Patel:
I’ll give you another example. Alyssa Milano, another very famous, very radical Left actress, says she’s going to get rid of her Tesla, and go instead and get a Volkswagen. And if we’re talking history, let’s talk history. Volkswagen was the company founded by Adolf Hitler at one point in time. So, the political messaging just doesn’t seem to be backed up by the factual play that they want to make, whether it’s Jim Carrey or Alyssa Milano.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is just a complete ignorance of history. That’s what it showed more than anything. It was just bizarre.
Mr. Patel:
But they’re using anything to justify their departure or their rejection of SpaceX or Tesla or Twitter or what have you. Good. Leave. Well, “Hey, Jim Carrey, you’re welcome on Truth Social, anytime. Same with you, Alyssa Milano.” I’ve been inviting AOC since day one, but it’s interesting to see the Democrats quickly pivot right back to Congress. They are now calling for these, and they’ll be in the minority, but they’re going to call for these investigations into what used to be their favorite allies outside of Congress, Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
Now these folks, the Democrats, are actually calling for the investigations into their monopolistic ways. And as you know, there’s all these antitrust investigations which are actually unlawful in America, now that the Democrats want to break up the tech giants. I just think that is the irony of all ironies. The tech giants that the Democrats wrote into a lot of offices and a lot of majorities are now the ones that they want to see broken up.
Mr. Jekielek:
Yes. Why do you think that is?
Mr. Patel:
Because it’s finally doing what you and I and millions of other people care about, which is allowing for a true free speech platform, a true free speech interface that is censorship free. I’ve always said, unless you’re committing a crime on one of these applications, you should post whatever you want.
I’m not saying these racist groups out there like the KKK and others, I’m not cheering for them to be posting. I’m not saying that they should espouse their hatred and their bigotry and their racism. But on a free speech platform, as long as you’re not inciting crime or committing a crime, then everybody should have access to it. That’s the whole point.
These companies were launched on that idea, but they never actually exercised it in their daily routine. They politicized it. What you’re seeing Elon Musk do at Twitter is take those actions some 15-plus years later after these companies have become behemoths. You’re going to see an implosion in the Democratic Party come next year, because they’re not going to know how to handle it. They don’t have the majority in the House of Representatives. What are they going to do, outspend Elon Musk, the richest man in the world?
Mr. Jekielek:
Here’s the problem. Until not too long ago, I would have supported some restrictions. I was thinking things like maybe the Holocaust, I don’t know. I’m just giving examples of things where I would have said, “Okay, let’s think about this.” But the thing that’s revealed itself to me over the last however many years is who decides? And whoever decides has the propensity, of course, to exercise that power and weaponize. What’s the solution? The only solution is to have true free speech.
Mr. Patel:
That’s it.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s the only way, because otherwise someone’s going to abuse it and someone’s going to use it to control information.
Mr. Patel:
And that’s what, circling back to the Apple issue that you raise, is Apple literally going to shut down the Twitter app on its Apple App Store, because they don’t like the direction that Elon Musk is taking Twitter? It’s kind of shocking that we’re even talking about this.
Mr. Jekielek:
Two things come to my mind. The first one is, I’m remembering this amazing series of commercials that Steve Jobs put out. The crazy ones. Remember those? “The people who believe that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” It’s beautiful. It even gives me the shivers remembering it. It was such a great campaign with the 1984 commercial, which was kind of unbelievable. These were the values that that Apple espoused. Today, this feels like a strong juxtaposition to those.
But the second thing, from what we’ve learned, Apple iPhones are restricted in using this AirDrop feature. In the AirDrop feature, I’ll just remind our viewers, is something that is actually been used by Chinese dissidents in these protests. We were going to talk about these mass protests that are happening in China right now.
They were using that because this is a totalitarian surveillance state. Everything is surveilled. Everything is, you try send something via a text and AI is already reading it. But with this AirDrop, you could be on a train or something and shoot information to a bunch of people. But now it’s restricted.
Mr. Patel:
Just a quick tech thing on that. So AirDrop, for those people that aren’t familiar with it, is only on Apple phones. But as you said, the CCP in China, not only do they censor it, they shut down ways and methods of communication. They can literally shut down whole factions of the country, whole TV circuits, whole internet circuits, whole cell phone circuits.
What AirDrop does is if you’re near other iPhone users, you literally hit this button and you can send them photos, you can send them videos, you can send them messages, and there’s nothing the CCP can do to stop that interface, because it’s from device to device. Now, that’s a super simplification of it.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a very good simplification.
Mr. Patel:
But what it means is you’re limiting the Chinese people’s ability to communicate, when their methods of communication have already been shut down by the CCP. So, you, Apple are participating in this nonsense of the CCP. Let’s just remember, Apple lives through the Chinese and the CCP, because the phones and everything they make. If you look on the packaging, it says designed here, or put together here, but everything’s made in China.
So they, just like Nike, will always go to bat with the Chinese government and the CCP, because their bottom line is at stake. Because the Chinese government has the wherewithal to say, “We’re going to shut down your factories. We’re going to take away your workers. We’re not going to allow you to make your iPhones and widgets here for a extremely low cost anymore.” And what does Apple do? They say, “Okay, what do you guys want us to do?” And they’re like, “Shut down the dissidents.”
Mr. Jekielek:
Yes. And there’s also this irony, of course, because it is in the Foxconn factories that some of these protests are actually happening. So, this is a bit of a challenge over time. Apple to its credit has been starting, they’ve built at least one assembly plant for iPhone 14s has already been built in India. They’re trying to diversify their supply chain somewhat.
Mr. Patel:
Look, maybe we can give them credit for that. They could have been doing this 10 years ago. Same with Nike.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to mention one more thing, though. Elon Musk is in a bit of a similar situation to Apple.
Mr. Patel:
Yes, sure. Yes, of course he is. With a lot of his empires so big, a lot of his commercial product and production occurs in China. Now he has been one of the guys that has moved that stuff actually back to the U.S. more than anyone else when it comes to all things SpaceX. He’s been shopping around different states for the best places and venues to have these factories built, whether it’s Tesla or what have you.
But the same with him. The batteries have to come from somewhere for electric cars. Those are getting mined out of Central Africa places with people dying all the time. Cobalt and lithium. That’s what happens. That’s what you have to mine to produce these batteries. And then someone’s got to put together the tech, and that’s happening in China. And so there has to be a global consensus on that. And you have to get the consumers who buy them to say, “We’re not going to buy it anymore unless you move.”
Mr. Jekielek:
This is a huge opportunity, because with these unprecedented protests from the last 30 years, if American companies need a reason to reshore, need a reason to move their supply chains out, what better reason than to stand on the side of the Chinese people instead of the regime?
Mr. Patel:
Well, that we already know. It’s a regime that supports three separate genocides, which are ongoing. And we already now know, thanks to the reporting out there that, just to give one example to our audience, if they’re not tracking, but there was a group of 10 individuals who were killed, because as the reporting states, because of the Covid lockdowns, no one could get to them. They were locked in their apartments and were not able to be saved from a building that was on fire. That is outrageous.
The covid lockdowns are an enormous cause of the current turmoil in China. And the CCP wants nothing to do with it. They want the lockdowns to stay. It’s a way to control the Chinese population. It’s a way to control how they maneuver, and how they message. And them getting Apple to shut down air play is just an additional layer of that. But at the end of the day, the CCP doesn’t want the Chinese people to move about freely. So they want the lockdowns to stay forever. And it’s now being borne out that they’re really not that successful in curtailing the covid outbreak.
Mr. Jekielek:
Oh, absolutely. What’s really interesting to me too is the juxtaposition of the U.S. response, for example, to the Iran protests.
Mr. Patel:
The administration has been vocal, not in the areas we’ve just discussed, but vocal on Iran at large, and the protest and the killing of innocent civilians, versus their deafening silence with what’s going on in China and the CCP, even though the same number, if not more civilians in China are dying on a daily or weekly basis.
But it’s still shocking to me as vocal as they’ve been on Iran, they have been silent on the nuclear deal. This is the one thing that would give the ITO in this regime that’s killing innocents billions of dollars overnight, and access to the international banking system, which is what suffocates Iran, because they don’t have access to it.
Let’s not forget what the whole nuclear deal is for. Iran wants a nuclear weapon, and if we get back in the Iran nuclear deal, we are helping them get a nuclear weapon. We are handing our, if not biggest, one of the biggest enemies that the United States has in the ITO and the IRGC, a map and roadway to a nuclear weapon.
There’s no larger threat a country can pose against the United States of America than having a nuclear arsenal that it can aim against us and our allies. And so for me, as a national security guy, that’s what’s most alarming that we haven’t seen or heard any messaging out of this White House to shut that down.
Mr. Jekielek:
Kash, I think it’s time for a shoutout.
Mr. Patel:
It is indeed, Jan. This week shout out goes to Dr. Ricky Engles of North Carolina. Dr. Engles, I’ve been told by your son, Steve, over at Brave Books, the wonderful children’s book company, that you’re the smartest man in the world, and I think he’s correct. And we’re going to be calling upon your talent soon.
But thanks so much for watching Kash’s Corner every week, and thanks for raising a great kid in Steve. We appreciate his team at Brave Books and Epoch Times certainly appreciates your viewership. And thank you everybody else who watches our show weekly, who posts on our message board, and who joins the lively chats in the live chat room every week. We look forward to seeing you next week on Kash’s Corner.