The fentanyl scourge—the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45—is a “CCP-run operation,” says investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. He’s the author of, most recently, “Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.”
Watch the video:
In this episode, he breaks down the Chinese regime’s disintegration-warfare strategies to destroy America from within—from killing young Americans with fentanyl to radicalizing protests in America so they adopt increasingly violent tactics.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Peter Schweizer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Peter Schweizer:
Thanks so much for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
Peter, fentanyl has become the number one killer of Americans under the age of 45, about 100,000 people overall per year. You make the case that it’s actually the Chinese regime, the CCP, that is deeply involved in every stage of the process leading to those deaths. Please break that down for us.
Mr. Schweizer:
People assume that the major problem here with fentanyl poisoning in America, which is now the leading cause of death for people under the age of 45, is the Mexican drug cartels. The drug cartels are certainly involved, but they are the junior partners. This is a CCP-run operation, and you can look at every link in the chain and discover that.
With the precursor chemicals that make fentanyl, 90 percent of them come from China. Those precursors mainly arrive in a single port in Mexico, the port of Manzanillo on the west coast. The international terminal at the port of Manzanillo is not run by a Mexican company. It’s not run by an American company. It’s run by a Chinese company. That is one of the reasons they have a hard time stopping this flow of precursors.
Those precursors are then moved from the port of Manzanillo up to a town in northern Mexico where they are combined to create this deadly cocktail of fentanyl. According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are some 2,000 Chinese nationals that are helping the drug cartels do this. There is CCP influence, even at this level. The vast majority of people that are dying of fentanyl overdoses don’t even know they’re taking fentanyl. It’s being laced into illegally made pills that look like Vicodin and Adderall. For the drug cartels to do that, they need pill presses and pill molds, these small molds that make these fake pills look like the real thing. The drug cartels do that, and they get those pill presses and pill molds from China.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, China is selling those to the drug cartels basically at cost. In other words, they’re not trying to make money off this part of the deal. Once they’ve created these pills, they smuggle them across the border. The Mexican drug cartels need a secure means of communication, so what do they use? They use Chinese apps and Chinese encrypted communications. They use Chinese communication devices because they know that China will not share those communications with U.S. law enforcement.
The final link in this chain is money laundering. Every drug cartel needs to launder these large cash profits. It used to be in the old days that the drug cartels used Latin American banks when they were selling heroin and cocaine. These days that has changed.
The Mexican drug cartels now use Chinese state banks to launder their money. Often they use Chinese students in the United States on education visas to do so. The cartels are involved, but they are the junior partners. Without China’s involvement, we would not be facing this scourge in America today. It’s part of this broader disintegration warfare that China is involved in.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s not commonly known that there is an unholy trinity of cooperation between Chinese state security, these wealthy Chinese business tycoons, and organized crime itself. For all this to work, all three parts are required. These relationships drive this corruption by the CCP in the West.
Mr. Schweizer:
That’s a very important point, because people will often think Chinese organized crime is similar to organized crime in the United States, that is kind of like an outsider looking in. The fact of the matter is that the CCP and the Chinese triads, the organized crime, basically made their peace in the 1980s. Deng Xiaoping sat down with triad leaders and said, “Look, as long as you are patriotic and pro-CCP and not committing major crimes within China itself, we will provide you safe harbor. We will work with you to direct your activities against the West.” Indeed, they have done so.
Today, there are numerous senior organized crime figures that are members of Chinese consulates. These are the consultative bodies that the CCP has set up. These are individuals that are known to be linked to Chinese organized crime and the CCP has brought them into the fold. We know that President Xi himself has a cousin who has been linked to organized crime.
We know that many of the Hong Kong-based billionaires have been identified in intelligence reports in Canada, in the United States and elsewhere as being both pro-CCP and linked to Chinese organized crime. One of those would be Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong investor who happens to own Hutchison Ports, which is the company that runs that port in Manzanillo, Mexico. He has been linked to Chinese triads for decades, and he’s very close to the CCP.
When you see Chinese organized crime engaged in activities in the West, whether that’s human trafficking, illegal trafficking, or drug distribution, this is part of a cooperative effort with the CCP. The CCP protects these individuals when they’re in China. There are numerous instances of this, including with President Xi when he was the head of Fujian province. He absolutely did this and he continues to do this today. It’s part of this sophisticated form of warfare that China is using against the West. It gives them plausible deniability, but it has these very damaging results on the West, nonetheless.
Mr. Jekielek:
Peter, in your book, you mention. “Unrestricted Warfare,” this infamous book written by the two Chinese colonels. This means warfare with no rules whatsoever and using all these different methods like the three warfares. You cover things that are not well known, like the CCP’s rampant use of legal warfare and psychological warfare. This is the kind of warfare that the CCP is using to influence outcomes in America. How does this disintegration warfare that the CCP is using with fentanyl fit into the picture?
Mr. Schweizer:
That’s a great question. The book, “Unrestricted Warfare,” published in 1999, essentially was about China resetting the rules of conflict. The book basically says, and this continues to be the Chinese approach, “We don’t want to have a kinetic war with the United States. We’re building aircraft carriers and military capabilities, but the U.S. has military superiority on every level. If we had a kinetic war with America, it would be severely damaging to China itself.
Unrestricted warfare broadens the definition of warfare to include everything, including drug warfare, environmental warfare, and nothing is off the table. In 2010, two senior Chinese military officers published a book called “Disintegration Warfare.” What it really does is set up their main goal. What is their main goal? The goal, as the title implies, is to disintegrate the United States.
On the cover of this book, “Disintegration Warfare,” there is the very famous quote from Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist. The quote says that the best strategist is the one who defeats his enemy without actually fighting him. That is what disintegration warfare is all about.
Essentially, it says, “We’re going to apply unrestricted warfare, and the goal is to disintegrate the United States internally. We’re going to cause deaths by fentanyl or stoke internal violence in the United States. We’re going to pit American against American, by exacerbating social divisions.”
It all fits closely together. The problem is that in Washington, DC, to the extent that people are talking about the China threat to the United States, the focus is almost exclusively on a kinetic war. The response is, “We need to build more aircraft carriers. We need more security and more power projection into the Pacific.” I’m not opposed to any of that.
But the problem is you’re preparing for a different war than China is already waging. China is already engaged in a war that is leading to casualties, social division, and chaos in America. Washington, D.C. is not even paying attention to that. They are focused on the prospect of a future war that may never happen. Because the war that China is fighting right now is successful and is yielding great results for them.
Mr. Jekielek:
They are officially fighting a war. Xi Jinping calls it the People’s War, which he announced in 2019, but most people aren’t aware of it.
Mr. Schweizer:
Yes, that’s exactly right. President Xi is a different leader than Hu Jintao and some of the other CCP leaders we’ve had. Don’t get me wrong. They all adhere to CCP doctrine—the goals, the concentration of power, and the abuse that we see from CCP leaders going all the way back. But President Xi, I would argue, is tougher and more aggressive than previous leaders.
There are really only two stories that I could tell that would illustrate that point. The first one is that President Xi is married to a very famous singer in China. After the troops in China committed the massacre at Tiananmen Square, it was President Xi’s wife who serenaded those troops right after the massacre. That tells you how these people think and where they are coming from.
The second story is that the Chinese people are not going to be able to do anything. The third story, that highlights where President Xi is coming from, is his relationship to his father. His father was a revolutionary figure. He was purged, but then was resuscitated. President Xi deeply admires his father and even built a mausoleum in his honor that celebrates and highlights his career.
One of those highlights occurred when Xi’s father was 14. His father tried to poison his teacher because his teacher was not sufficiently revolutionary. President Xi thinks this is a good and noble thing that his father tried to do. The point is, this is a political head of state who has a distinctly different view than American or European politicians. He appreciates and respects a certain hardness, and that has been demonstrated by both his wife and his father. It’s important for us to understand precisely who President Xi really is.
Mr. Jekielek:
Did you see that clip from the 3 Body Problem series on Netflix, depicting the Cultural Revolution and a struggle session from back then?
Mr. Schweizer:
Yes, I have. It is stunning.
Mr. Jekielek:
We have Xi Jinping’s father trying to poison his teacher with that revolutionary fervor that we see in the 3 Body Problem clip. Many people were shocked at the barbarity of it. The Red Guard kids were running the insane asylum at the time, so to speak, and killing someone wasn’t actually a big deal. It was something the CCP appreciated. Xi himself was part of that. His father was purged and had to go into the countryside for re-education. He was in disrepute and spent a lot of his life getting back to his original status in the party. It’s interesting that Xi ended up becoming the paramount leader after what happened to his father.
Mr. Schweizer:
Yes, it’s interesting, because most of us would recoil and reject a system that had such a devastating effect on our family. That is certainly not President Xi’s reaction. We need to understand this when talking about the fentanyl crisis in America and other things that I highlight in the book that lead to the deaths of Americans. We can’t mirror image them and say, “It’s hard for me to imagine any leader wanting to do that.”
You have to show due respect to the foreign official, meet them where they are, look at what they value, look at what they think is noble behavior, and then understand them accordingly. Certainly when you’re talking about President Xi, if you were killing 100,000 Americans through fentanyl poisoning in alliance with the Mexican drug cartels, you would do it in such a way as to avoid blame. In their strategic doctrine, they call it, “Murder with a borrowed knife.”
In other words, if you’re going to kill somebody, do it with somebody else’s knife so they get the blame. But again, it’s not a far stretch when you look at President Xi’s history, what he values, and who he admires, to see that this would be a totally legitimate strategy for him to employ against the United States.
Mr. Jekielek:
A part of this drug warfare in America is this harm reduction strategy. Effectively, you’re not allowed to prevent the addict from taking their drugs. In fact, you facilitate that for them, which has created these open-air drug markets in LA and San Francisco. Is this part of this whole system that delivers those 100,000 deaths per year, and is the CCP involved in this?
Mr. Schweizer:
It’s possible, I don’t know. But the notion of treating fentanyl like any other drug, whether it’s heroin or cocaine, completely misses the mark. Yes, you do have some people in San Francisco and other urban areas who are knowingly taking fentanyl, which is a terrible idea because it is so potent. If you get the dosage wrong, you’re dead immediately.
But the vast majority of people that are dying have no idea they’re taking fentanyl. They are college students who are studying for a final exam and a roommate says, “Here, take this Adderall because it'll help you concentrate.” They take the Adderall and they overdose because it actually wasn’t legitimate Adderall. It was something somebody bought on the street. It was made in Mexico, and they got the formula wrong, so to speak. There’s too much Adderall in it and they died.
Treating this as a drug addiction problem like heroin or cocaine completely misses the mark. It’s also extremely convenient for the Biden administration, because by treating it as a drug addiction problem, rather than what it is—poisoning—it absolves you of trying to confront the CCP on this. Essentially, you are saying this is a domestic problem in the United States.
Here’s the reality. Fentanyl overdose deaths are a massive problem in the United States and Canada. They are not much of a problem in Europe right now, but the network and the supply of pharmaceuticals there is going to rise and they’re going to face the same challenge. If you don’t believe fentanyl is a China problem, just look at what happened during the Covid crisis.
During the pandemic in 2020, fentanyl deaths actually went down because supply chain disruption precluded precursors from even getting to Mexico or the United States. That has been demonstrated in medical journals. They are completely off base in the drug addiction approach they are taking. It allows them to avoid having to confront China, who is really behind this poison that is killing so many Americans.
Mr. Jekielek:
How easily could Xi Jinping stop this supply chain?
Mr. Schweizer:
He could stop it overnight. It’s simply a question of banning the production, enforcing the ban, and throwing people into jail for producing this stuff. A lot of the research demonstrates that about half of the companies that are selling fentanyl precursors online to drug dealers or other people in the West are officially registered companies. As I highlight in the book, many of them are politically connected.
These are not people in the back room somewhere in Shanghai that are throwing this stuff together and covertly shipping it to the West. These are large, politically-connected chemical companies that are doing it. The fact is they do not cooperate with U.S. law enforcement when it comes to the people that are involved in the fentanyl trade. The fact that the CCP embraces drug pushers and brings them in as advisors to the CCP is clear evidence to me that they don’t care. If they decided to fix this, they could fix it, but they just won’t.
I'll give you one brief example from 2021. The Biden administration sanctioned a Chinese gangster that goes by the name Broken Tooth. Our Treasury Department sanctioned him in 2021 for his involvement in the fentanyl trade. Three months later, the Chinese government gave him an award for his activities. During that award ceremony, he gave a rousing speech saying that he was proud of what he did. This is all out in the open. It’s not being sanctioned. The notion that, “China is trying very hard, but they can’t fix this,” is an absolute joke.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why isn’t the U.S. government doing anything about this?
Mr. Schweizer:
There are a couple of reasons. One is once you acknowledge the reality of what China’s doing to the United States in the area of fentanyl, you realize pretty quickly you cannot have a normal, ordinary relationship with this government until these problems are fixed. That makes life very complicated for political figures in Washington. There are some that are talking about this, but a lot of them, frankly, go along to get along. They don’t want the heavy lift of having to make these hard choices. They don’t want domestic lobbies, Big Tech, and Wall Street coming at them saying, “You can’t disrupt our ties to China.” That’s part of the broader problem.
More specifically, you have figures in the United States who have deep financial entanglements. Some of them brush perilously close to the actual fentanyl trade itself. That means if you highlight this issue, it could be deeply embarrassing and damaging to them. I'll just give you two brief examples.
One would be Joe Biden and the first family of the United States. We first reported back in 2018 that commercial ties exist between the Biden family and these Chinese financiers. Back in 2017, the Biden family received a $5 million interest-free, forgivable loan from a Chinese businessman who, it turns out, was business partners with a Chinese gang leader who goes by the name White Wolf.
White Wolf and his gang are the entity that set up the Sinaloa-based trade war. They’re the ones that set up the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico in the fentanyl trade. Between the Biden family and the fentanyl trade, you literally have one degree of separation, this businessman that gave them this $5 million interest-free loan, which of course, the Bidens never repaid. Honestly, does Joe Biden want to have a conversation about the Chinese involvement in the fentanyl trade? I kind of doubt it.
The other person I would look at is Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate. His family actually does have a legitimate shipping business. But the problem is that they are wholly dependent upon the good graces of the Chinese government to function and make a profit. The Chinese government has built a lot of their ships. They finance the construction of a lot of their ships. They provide crews for those ships. Some of their clients and customers are Chinese state-owned companies.
Again, I ask you, does Mitch McConnell really want to call out the Chinese government on this? I don’t think so, because the Chinese government could destroy the family business overnight. That is the more specific problem that we have. Unfortunately, these people with entanglements are oftentimes at senior positions in our government.
Mr. Jekielek:
There was a huge push in the 2000s to get into China at any cost, including setting up these partnerships where you transfer your intellectual property, which has fueled a huge technology transfer. There are many very affluent Americans in the relationships you just described. Graham Allison, one of the paramount scholars of China from Harvard recently wrote an editorial in the Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese regime. In this interview he says that China and the U.S. are inseparable like conjoined Siamese twins. If one tries to strangle the other, it would be suicide. Overall, how would you view that statement?
Mr. Schweizer:
It is ridiculous on multiple levels. If you look at what Graham Allison has
written about the Thucydides trap, his prescription is to essentially give China what it wants. He says that the United States is this established power, and China is this rising power. His view is that inevitably conflict will result unless both powers act accordingly. His prescription for the United States is essentially to give China what it wants and everything will be fine, which is a ridiculous notion.
No, we are not conjoined twins. We have very different nervous systems, which is part of the problem. China certainly does not view the United States as somebody that they cannot abuse, that they cannot manipulate, and that they cannot do damage to. They do it all of the time.
This is straight out of the tradition of Henry Kissinger. In the 1970s Kissinger said that as we opened up to China, China would become more like us. That certainly has not happened. I don’t give a lot of credence to this establishment line at all. It has not worked out as they predicted it would. It has not mellowed China. It has emboldened China and it has put the United States in peril.
To your broader point, this is one of the challenges that we face. Because as our business community has embraced China, China has been able to turn to our business community and effectively use them as de facto lobbyists against their own government. Let’s remember that when the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and products—set aside whether one thinks that’s a good policy or not—what did China do? They didn’t go to Washington to complain about it. They went to Silicon Valley and Wall Street and said, “You go to Washington.” That’s exactly what these entities did, so it is a dangerous, perilous path.
China calls this elite capture, when you essentially get the elites to do your bidding. What they’re looking for is big help with a little bad mouth. A little bad mouth means, “If you want to talk about the Uyghurs, if you want to talk about human rights, if you want to talk about Taiwan, that’s fine. But help us on the big things, which is access to your technology, to your capital, to your capital markets, and to your commercial markets. If you give us those things, we are going to be very happy.” That is exactly what America’s elites have done over the last several decades, and Beijing must be exceedingly pleased with it.
Mr. Jekielek:
The U.S. basically financed building the world’s biggest dictatorship.
Mr. Schweizer:
It has. You think of the old John Maynard Keynes line, “If I owe you a thousand pounds, I have a problem. If I owe you 500 million pounds, you have a problem.” Our companies have invested so heavily in China, but have a very difficult, if not impossible, time pulling their assets out of that country. it creates a sense of extortion with America’s political elites. It’s the reason they don’t want to raise questions about fentanyl. They don’t want to raise questions about TikTok or many of these other problems, because if they do, China can damage them overnight.
Just look at the relationship with the American investors in ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok. I was stunned. I didn’t even realize this until I read it in Fortune magazine. The American investors in ByteDance, and there are a number of them, signed an agreement when they became shareholders of that company, which says if they disparage or criticize ByteDance publicly, their ownership stake in the company can
be seized without compensation.
Think about that for a second. That would not be legal in the United States, but that’s the agreement in China. What has happened? You now have these major investors, the Carlyle Group and Jeff Yass, who are major shareholders in ByteDance, who cannot honestly talk about the fact that ByteDance is a threat to the United States. Because if they did so, they would lose their multi-billion dollar stakes in that company. That’s just a small microcosm of the kind of leverage that China exerts over America’s financial and political elites.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about TikTok. In “Blood Money,” you do a great job of detailing all the various unconventional weapons that the CCP wields against America and the West. TikTok might actually be the most pernicious and the most effective. What is the threat posed by TikTok?
Mr. Schweizer:
I would agree with your assessment, and here’s why. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is not just a Chinese company, which is a challenge in and of itself. If you’re a Chinese company, you are going to act at the behest of the CCP and the Ministry of State Security. ByteDance is a Chinese company joined at the hip to the Chinese military/intelligence complex. What do I mean by that?
First of all, the all-important algorithm that TikTok uses to effectively addict users in the West and to give users exactly what they seem to be looking for, is certainly a company secret, but the CCP has also designated it as a state secret. This is not just a normal, proprietary thing that a company in China happens to have. This is something that is valued highly by the Chinese state itself. That should already be a red flag.
The headquarters of ByteDance in Beijing is located not far from the Ministry of State Security, which is the superspy apparatus of China. It’s the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all of those intelligence agencies rolled into one. ByteDance actually does joint research with the Ministry of State Security. One of the things they research is how to manipulate people online. My point is, it’s not just a Chinese company. It is a Chinese company that works closely with the Chinese intelligence apparatus.
There is all this debate on Capitol Hill asking, “Might China use this as a form of propaganda? Might they use it to manipulate young people?” They’re not having that debate in China. My favorite section of “Blood Money” is where I quote from Chinese military officials and propaganda officials, describing how to use online platforms and how they are using online platforms like TikTok to manipulate people in the West. I quote them extensively, because you don’t have to believe me, you can believe what they’re actually saying.
They talk about how TikTok is the perfect platform because it’s such an emotional medium, especially for young people. Their belief is that if they can get a young person emotionally wrapped up in a video, the young person embraces what they’re feeling as a sign of their own righteous indignation. As a sovereign person, they are choosing to be moved by this video, when in fact they’re being manipulated.
The propagandists say, “Once they cross that line and think they own that feeling, then we’ve got them. Because now we can steer them in the direction we want them to go.” They are already doing that. My view is that this is a highly potent weapon. We are going to allow an entity, which is joined at the hip with the Chinese Ministry of State Security, to have unfettered access to our young people.
We say, “We’re not going to worry about it. They are 13-years-old and they can figure it out on their own,” which is patently absurd. The bill that has been introduced in Congress is a good bill. Certainly there are problems with other Big Tech companies, including those in the United States. But it’s not an either-or thing. We need to be dealing with both. The CCP threat from TikTok is absolutely clear and real, and it’s already yielding results for them.
Mr. Jekielek:
That’s certainly what they’re saying in China. Many people have seen “The Social Dilemma,” an excellent documentary that explains how social media companies create detailed profiles on each of us. They also specifically present content to manipulate, to addict, to get us to use these platforms more. There is an ample body of information showing how these various social media giants manipulate people.
What ethical barriers does the CCP have here? There is a much lower level of ethical scrutiny by some of these social media companies or even our agencies in the U.S. I want to contrast that to the CCP. People get so caught up in this new and disturbing reality that you can lose the context here.
Mr. Schweizer:
Yes, the context is key. Whether it’s Meta or Microsoft or another platform, when you have the right political leadership in the United States, you can have accountability. You can have shareholder meetings where people actually raise these issues. There are ways to publicly pressure American companies. Are they doing a good job of that on Capitol Hill? Not really. I would give them a C. They’re talking about it, but they’re not doing enough.
The problem presented by a Chinese entity like ByteDance is completely different. First of all, you don’t have the ability to pressure them through shareholder action. You can have U.S. regulators bring the head of the American branch of TikTok to testify before Congress. But ultimately, if decisions are being made, he’s not the one making them. The decision makers are back in Beijing.
Then you add the fact that the Ministry of State Security is closely working with ByteDance, which adds a completely different element. To me, you can’t compare the two. Again, it’s not an either-or question. We should be dealing with both. But the ability that we have to hold American tech companies to account is 10 times greater than our ability to hold to account a foreign entity owning an algorithm that is a Chinese state government secret.
This is an entity working with a foreign spy apparatus on a massive propaganda operation to capture the hearts and minds of young people in the West. Let’s remember, they are very sophisticated about this. It’s not as if they’re going to be sending images on TikTok of Chairman Mao marching through Tiananmen Square. They’re much, much more sophisticated, and that’s what people have to be worried about. If they’re confident that they can recognize CCP propaganda and they don’t need to worry about it, that is the first indication that they are subject to it and could easily be manipulated by CCP propaganda.
Mr. Jekielek:
Based on the 2019 Chinese national intelligence law, they are required to spy for the benefit of Chinese state security. There are multiple layers to this, not to mention the doctrine of military-civil fusion, which is one of the top priorities of Xi Jinping. Whenever there’s an opportunity for a military application, it must be enacted, based on Xi Jinping’s policy directions. One more thing I wanted to mention here, TikTok isn’t actually available in China.
Mr. Schweizer:
That’s right. They have their own version pronounced Douyun. It is a domestic version of TikTok that is very different. This is what Chinese officials call cognitive warfare, this desire to dumb down the West. On TikTok, you get somebody with blue hair screaming about something. It’s basically cotton candy. Largely what you get on TikTok is entertainment, pranks, and that kind of content.
The Chinese version is very different. They lead with educational, cultural, and scientific videos that supposedly contribute to the cognitive development of young people in China. Our kids are getting cotton candy from ByteDance and children in China are getting spinach. Again, this is part of cognitive warfare, something they’ve refined. They want to match the intellectual capabilities of their young people with ours.
They are engaged in a whole host of destructive behaviors, and TikTok is just one. They are involved with massive illegal marijuana grows in the United States that are three times more potent, which they are selling illegally here in the United States. This is also part of this cognitive warfare that is a designed campaign to dumb down Americans. You can look at the results and see that it is absolutely working.
Mr. Jekielek:
I recall during the BLM-Antifa riots in 2020, there were instructional videos on TikTok.
Mr. Schweizer:
Yes, there were instructional videos on TikTok. There have been other videos on how to engage in criminal behavior. Some of these TikTok pranks that have gone viral are dangerous. One of them involved loosening the lug nuts on tires on people’s cars. Yes, this is very damaging content culturally in the United States.
It also attempts to sow division and chaos in the United States. Videos get promoted that push content that is highly divisive here in the United States. This is part of the Chinese strategy of using TikTok as a mouthpiece for China to manipulate Americans. One Chinese official said that TikTok is basically China’s Trojan horse to use against the West.
Mr. Jekielek:
I saw that headline, but didn’t realize it came from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Mr. Schweizer:
They are very bullish on TikTok. They like the fact that it’s a Trojan horse, as this one official calls it. They like the short video format because they feel like it is addictive and it’s emotive. They believe that by using that emotion they can steer the values that people have. One Chinese military official believes that TikTok is a key ingredient in basically defeating the West without firing a shot.
In other words, this is the ancient Sun Tzu strategy of trying to defeat your enemy without actually fighting him. Who knows if TikTok is that potent? But China is absolutely bullish on it and sees it as a very, very powerful tool that they are using against the United States already.
Mr. Jekielek:
One of the provisions in the legislation gives the president discretion to target a particular country or a particular app. The fear is that this discretion will be used by our own government. There’s been a lot of abuse around the issue of free speech and there are cases about this at the Supreme Court. Does this legislation give the American leaders too much discretion to force divestment on American companies, not just on Chinese-owned companies? Would TikTok under the control of U.S. actors also prove to be highly problematic.
Mr. Schweizer:
Those are legitimate questions to ask. My view is to quote Winston Churchill who said, “You can’t make perfect the enemy of the good.”
There has to be some decision making mechanism to decide if a forced divestiture needs to take place. I’m not sure where you put that authority other than the president. I understand that you might see abuses of power. We have RICO statutes, the laws were set up to deal with organized crime networks that are now being used against Donald Trump in Georgia. That certainly seems to be an abuse.
But the solution is not to say, “Then we don’t want to have RICO statutes.” What we need is a vigorous judiciary and you have to make sure that the law is specific enough to address concerns about abuse. Could the law be abused? It might be.
But the law specifically says, “A foreign media company that is owned by a foreign adversarial power.” Immediately it is saying if it’s a U.S. based media company like Donald Trump’s Truth Social, it would not fit the definition. Were a president to try and abuse that and to force a divestment of that company, it would certainly be challenged in the courts. I don’t see how that could be upheld.
It narrowly defines it enough to be foreign media companies owned by adversarial powers. That is important. Then the second question is, “If there’s a forced sale of TikTok, who would end up owning that entity?
The law also says that the purchaser acquiring those assets or that company in the United States would have to be approved and pass scrutiny with regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission. What does that mean? The first example is Mark Zuckerberg, who already controls Facebook and Instagram. There is just no way that the Federal Trade Commission would approve Mark Zuckerberg to be able to own this entity. I think there are enough constraints on this.
The question is, “How do you improve this law to make it better?” If it’s specific to TikTok itself, which some people have said, I believe that would be declared unconstitutional almost immediately. You cannot pass a bill that is related to one specific company. There are constraints in place.
We have an independent judiciary that would restrict abuses or efforts by a president to abuse the authority. But I believe that when it comes to TikTok action needs to be taken. I think that this law is a good one.
Mr. Jekielek:
These types of apps have an inordinately huge influence on their users. That ability to weaponize our psyches is the most potent in TikTok and it’s in the hands of an adversarial foreign power. The vast intelligence gathering of this particular app is above and beyond what U.S. apps take in. That absolutely makes this a national security issue, not a free speech issue, which is how it has been portrayed. There is a very real fear that freedom of speech is being systematically curtailed here in America.
Mr. Schweizer:
It is being curtailed in America,in the case of TikTok. It’s not a free speech issue. The only one that would make it a free speech issue is the CCP. They’ve essentially said, “If you force the sale of TikTok to American-based investors from our ownership in China, we’re going to shut the app down.” In other words, they have said they are going to eliminate this platform, which they have the right to do. They own it.
But to me, that’s indicative of what their true interests are. It’s not to provide a platform for commercial activity. It is to create a platform for an influence operation. Free speech is a major issue. The problem is having concentrated power in a handful of companies. In the case of ByteDance with the forced sale, you’re going to have a new company emerge that would be unique to TikTok, and that would be a good thing.
We don’t want it controlled by another Big Tech company. We want it to be a platform that further concentrates and restricts authority. What we need in Washington, D.C. is vigorous political leadership that is holding these major platforms to account. There are reforms and things that can be done on that level. But with ByteDance and TikTok this is a unique circumstance because of the Chinese ownership and the Chinese control and the manipulation that exists uniquely on this app.
Mr. Jekielek:
There were these instructional videos on TikTok from Antifa and BLM about how to stage a riot. There is a significant part of this very far-Left protest movement which you document in your book that is closely tied to the CCP. Many people don’t understand this and deny the connection. Could you detail for us how that works?
Mr. Schweizer:
That was probably one of the most surprising findings in the book. China’s strategic thought here is captured in the phrase, “Watch the fire burn from across the river.” In other words, maybe you fan the flames of the fire, but you sort of detach yourself and say we’re not involved in that. The fact of the matter is that a lot of the radical protests that we’ve seen in the United States dating back even before 2020 is the work of two very radical groups.
One is called FRSO [Freedom Road Socialist Organization]. The other one is called PSL [Party for Socialism and Liberation]. These are two organizations that have explicitly pledged their allegiance to the CCP. They view them as fraternal parties. That’s not just friends, that’s fraternal parties.
They cheer on the CCP and are supportive of the CCP. We know that some of the leaders in these groups have traveled to China. We also know that some of these groups get money from China, sometimes directly, and sometimes indirectly.
We also know that Beijing tracks these groups. I actually quote from a CCP party organization in Wuhan that tracks the activities of these groups domestically in the United States. They see that these groups have been very successful in radicalizing the conversation in America. Many of the most violent radical protests in 2020 were organized by FRSO and PSL.
You might have had people that showed up that wanted to peacefully protest about race relations in America. Maybe they wanted the police to try to handle situations slightly differently. But these organizations were all about all American cops being racist and needing to abolish the police. They shut down cities like Philadelphia, but they also showed up in small towns in America.
They were very radical groups. According to reports in China, FRSO essentially captured and took over by the late summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement and and ended up radicalizing it. That’s an important component of this. Because if the work that China is doing with TikTok in cyberspace represents the air war, this represents the ground war, the radical, boots-on-the-ground social protests in America.
Those protests have continued. They’re now under a different label. They are now pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian rights protests. If you look at a lot of the organizers, they are FRSO and PSL, these pro-China groups. When there was a large protest on this topic in November of last year, look at who the keynote speakers were. They were leaders from FRSO and PSL. There were more than half-a-million protesters that shut down Washington, D.C.
The goal here is to radicalize this movement. They don’t want peace in the Middle East, they want a Hamas victory. You can look at the emergence of the so-called trans movement. It is very surprising here, because two of the biggest funders of that movement in America are Chinese-based billionaires.
One is an American who sold his company to an investment fund partly owned by a Chinese sovereign wealth fund. He moved to China and he’s pro-CCP. He has poured tens-of-millions of dollars into the radical protest movement, including the trans movement in America.
Joe Tsai, the co-founder and now the chairman of Alibaba, has poured tens-of-millions of dollars into the trans movement in America. A big tip off is that neither of these individuals are actually supporting this movement in China itself, they only advocate it for it in America, because they know it’s divisive. They know that it sows division and distrust in America, and that is part of the social agenda they are trying to push in the United States.
Mr. Jekielek:
The first billionaire that you’re referring to is Roy Singham who funds Code Pink. I’ve seen Code Pink coming to the Select Committee on the CCP events in Congress to protest, and then they leave very quickly.
Mr. Schweizer:
Yes, that’s exactly right. In fact, Code Pink and Roy Singham fought aggressively to try to prevent that committee from even being formed. They didn’t want a select, bipartisan committee in Congress to look into what China was doing. Roy Singham has absolutely played a major role in that, as has Code Pink. Again, these are not people who are normal, regular peace activists. These are not people who want a negotiated solution.
They believe that the entire error is with the United States, as opposed to China, in the tensions between those countries. And they believe that the tensions between Hamas and Israel are totally the result of what Israel has done. This is part of the effort to radicalize and divide and sow social division in America. One Chinese official said, “This internal tumult in America is sapping America of its strength.” This is part of a broader strategy, in addition to many of the other things we’ve talked about.
Mr. Jekielek:
You cover that very well in, “Blood Money.” I wholeheartedly recommend this book to all our viewers. It is meticulously researched and a great compilation of all of the different methods that the Chinese regime has been using. Thank you for your book. Any final thoughts, Peter, as we finish up?
Mr. Schweizer:
This is such an important topic. You and The Epoch Times have been at the forefront of this. I’m encouraged that people are becoming more attentive to these details. But the problem is that the clock is ticking. China’s strategy is working. It’s causing American casualties. This is not an abstract future war. It is a war occurring right now. I encourage everybody to be vigilant and let your elected officials know what’s going on so they can take this seriously and confront it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Peter, I have one more question. I recently saw in Politico this idea that the CCP is trying to help former President Trump get reelected. How do you react to that?
Mr. Schweizer:
I don’t find that very credible and that’s an example of disinformation. Look, the bottom line is that Joe Biden has essentially given the CCP everything that they want. It’s not to say that Trump was perfect in his approach towards China, but there were so many things that he did that were disruptive to their efforts. He was able to vocalize what a lot of people feel about the threat. I don’t give that idea any credence whatsoever.
All you have to do is look at the results of what the policy prescriptions that Joe Biden has given them—he’s given them what they want. He’s given them big help with a little bad mouth. Donald Trump has certainly challenged them,in very important and significant ways.
Mr. Jekielek:
Trump made the first real challenge to this engagement with China philosophy of the Kissinger school that has dominated the whole U.S. establishment for decades now.
Mr. Schweizer:
Yes, that’s right. Now, it is the minority view. Trump’s election and his administration’s policies on that front have really changed. The conversation. The statements of Graham Allison or the worldview of Henry Kissinger are no longer the consensus view among the American general population. However, it is among American elites, because they profit from that kind of arrangement. But with the broader public, there is a lot more skepticism about the CCP. That is a good and healthy thing.
Mr. Jekielek:
Peter Schweizer, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Schweizer:
Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Peter Schweizer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
