Over the past decade, smartphones have taken over the lives of people across the world. People no longer work, play, or even leave the house without them — and at this point, many essentially live through them.

And the consequences, Richard Ryan, co-founder of Black Rifle Coffee Company, says, may be disastrous in more ways than one.

Those who live through their phones, often as content creators, base their worth off of the feedback from others through some distant screen. But your worth is then contingent on whether or not the platform you use to post agrees with your content.

“You’re getting hundreds of millions of views, and then all of a sudden a social platform, because they disagree with you on the type of content you create, turns that off,” Ryan tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan on “Back to the People.”

“Your distribution is completely shut off and then all of a sudden your self-worth feels like, ‘Oh, OK,’ and you take this kind of psychological hit,” he says, noting that the youth largely makes up the content-creating portion of the population.

“I think about how many younger people work on creating content for these platforms, and there’s something to be said for when you have a large audience and you lose it in any capacity. You’re trying to chase the dragon in that it’s kind of tragic and when that social capital goes away,” he explains.

“Yeah, you hear of these really sad stories of social media TikTokers that have serious mental health issues. Some commit suicide, and they’re very young. And if you think about how much of their lives they’ve spent creating content,” Shanahan agrees solemnly.

And it’s not just that their content is subject to censorship or criticism that can prove dangerous to their psyche, but “being present in the moment.”

“You look at how many people have their phones out at every aspect of their life to record this thing,” Ryan says, noting that there “are a few studies” that broke down the way the brain stores memories.

“The event of you recording something, your brain is logging it as the phone recording the thing, not the thing itself,” he says.

“So say you’re watching fireworks or whatever, which nobody ever rewatches their Fourth of July fireworks videos after they share them to social media, but your brain’s logging it as remembering recording the fireworks and not the fireworks themselves,” he explains.

An example he uses is driving to work via the same route every single day, which your brain will not separate into different experiences unless there is variability in your commute.

“It’s the same thing with your lived experience. If your phone is always the focus of this thing, you’re kind of losing the long-term effects of storing that memory,” he says, noting that the end result could spell disaster.

“The downstream effects I think we’ll find that a lot of this will have some type of implications for memory or cognitive decline, definitely emotional atrophy and different neurological processes for sure,” he says.

Want more from Nicole Shanahan?

To enjoy more of Nicole’s compelling blend of empathy, curiosity, and enlightenment, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Camera phone, Video phone, Free, Sharing, Video, Upload, Youtube.com, Back to the people with nicole shanahan, Back to the people, Nicole shanahan, Richard ryan, Black rifle coffee, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Censorship, Smartphones, Content creators, Iphone, Iphone addiction 

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who survived a politically motivated assassination attempt, reacted to the murderous fantasies of a high-profile Democrat in an exclusive sit-down interview with Blaze News.

Scalise recounted his brush with death in 2017 when a leftist shooter opened fire during a Republican practice for the Congressional Baseball Game in Virginia. Scalise and three others were wounded in the politically motivated shooting, but all victims miraculously survived.

‘I know firsthand just what can happen.’

“I should not have made it through the day,” Scalise told Blaze News. “God was on that ball field, and there were miracles that were performed.”

“Turned out it was a left-wing nut who was motivated to go kill every Republican,” Scalise added. “He just wanted to do that. And again, we’ve seen this over and over again. … It’s insanity. But unfortunately, it’s become too prevalent.”

RELATED: Democrat Jay Jones’ scandals pile up: Criminal investigation emerges on the heels of violent texts

As Scalise noted, these ideologically motivated acts of violence have become commonplace in American political life. Just in the months leading up to the 2024 election, President Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts, with one would-be assassin getting within an inch of fatally shooting him.

Although these acts of violence sent shock waves across the country, these attacks are not limited to politicians.

In September, hundreds of students watched Charlie Kirk get assassinated on the Utah Valley University campus at the kickoff event of his college tour. In the days after the murder, law enforcement found bullet casings with various politically suggestive slogans written on them, including the phrase, “Hey, fascist! Catch!”

While these attacks were a sobering moment for many, some have insisted that political violence is a both-sides issue. Scalise knows “firsthand” this is not the case.

“Wherever it comes from, if somebody’s advocating for or committing violence, we should all call it out. Doesn’t matter where it’s coming from,” Scalise told Blaze News. “But it just seems like more and more we’re seeing it come from the left.”

“They just think if they tag you a Nazi, then that makes it okay to kill you,” Scalise added. “That is telling certain people — it’s like a dog whistle to say, ‘Go kill that person.’ And it’s just what they say about their political opponents. It’s insanity.”

RELATED: Vance points to the leaked texts Americans really should care about: ‘I refuse to join the pearl clutching’

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

“It’s alarming. It’s disturbing,” Scalise told Blaze News. “Because I know firsthand just what can happen when people say certain things.”

One of the most alarming instances of violent rhetoric coming from the left came when now-infamous texts from Jay Jones, the Democrat candidate for Virginia attorney general, were revealed earlier this month. In those texts, Jones fantasized about giving his political adversary “two bullets,” insinuated that the man was worse than Hitler, and even wished death upon his kids.

“Do you really want to elect that person as a law enforcement officer in your state?” Scalise asked in response to the texts. “Should other elected officials be accepting and condoning and endorsing that, or should they denounce it, which I did? Everybody should denounce it, and yet some won’t for political reasons.”

“I think it’s a gut-check for people’s integrity,” Scalise added. “If you’re willing to accept a call to violence because you’re more worried about a political party advancing than you are worried about civility in this country, that’s a real big concern for alarm.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Steve scalise, Jay jones, Donald trump, Charlie kirk, Trump assassination attempt, Kirk assassination, Nazi, Fascist, Political violence, Leftist violence, Politically motivated violvence, No kings, Scalise shooting, Politics 

“I’ve taught people a lot about China,” says President Donald Trump. “China and the threat it poses to America.”

The president is guiding me on a brief tour of his Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago.

“China has been ripping us off for many, many years, and nobody ever did anything about it,” says Trump. He went on:

Whether it was because they were intimidated, or whether it was for other reasons, China has taken advantage of us, and we, through corruption or incompetence, have allowed that to happen. We have been losing hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars to China over a period of many years. A steady stream of $500 billion a year and more in the trade deficit alone. Our wealth has been shattered.

Secret Service agents follow the president as he checks in with aides. I meet one woman who unfurls a 30-yard-long printout of all the emails sent to Trump in the last 24 hours. “They’re all Americans writing President Trump to thank him for what he’s done,” she says.

Americans chose him, among other reasons, to defend them from China and a predatory U.S. ruling class whose ties to the Chinese Communist Party had become the source of its wealth, power, and prestige. Trump had identified the problem decades before his 2016 run for president.

“Though we have the upper hand, we’re way too eager to please the Chinese,” he wrote in his 2000 book “The America We Deserve.” The book continues:

We see them as a potential market, and we tend to curry favor with them even at the expense of our own national interests. Our China policy under Presidents Clinton and [George H. W.] Bush has been aimed at changing the Chinese regime by incentives both economic and political. The intention has been good, but it’s clear to me that the Chinese have been getting far too easy a ride.

What it looked like on the ground for working Americans was ruin and misery. But according to the men and women Americans elected to protect their peace and advance their prosperity, there was nothing to be done about it. Even the president of hope and change said he was helpless when it came to China.

President Barack Obama was referring to Trump when he said, “When somebody says […] that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal. Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have?”

Returning the jobs to America that the ruling class had exported to China was the core promise of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The truth was plain to see: Beijing hadn’t outplayed the top lawyers that White House after White House sent out to negotiate against the Chinese; the U.S. establishment had just sold out America. It was to the advantage of the movers and shakers from Capitol Hill and Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, media and the fashion industry, and they didn’t care how it hurt their countrymen and elevated foreigners.

So middle-class Americans hired an outsider who promised to take on China. Trump moved quickly. He invited Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China and the general secretary of the CCP, to meet him here at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017.

“Until the China virus came, I liked and greatly respected Xi,” Trump says. “I got along with him very well. But they had this slogan, ‘China 2025,’ and I said to him that it’s a very unfriendly term. I said, ‘I really don’t like that term because you’re basically saying that you’re going to dominate us by 2025, and I don’t believe that’s going to happen.’”

Half a year after their U.S. meeting, Trump visited Xi in Beijing and described it in a speech he gave a few days later in Vietnam:

I recently had an excellent trip to China, where I spoke openly and directly with President Xi about China’s unfair trade practices and the enormous trade deficits they have produced with the United States. I expressed our strong desire to work with China to achieve a trading relationship that is conducted on a truly fair and equal basis.

He continued:

The current trade imbalance is not acceptable. I do not blame China or any other country — of which there are many — for taking advantage of the United States on trade. If their representatives are able to get away with it, they are just doing their jobs. I wish previous administrations in my country saw what was happening and did something about it. They did not, but I will.

From this day forward, we will compete on a fair and equal basis. We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of any more. I am always going to put America first the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries first.

“We had 164 million people working,” Trump tells me. He considers it one of his greatest achievements as president — to get Americans jobs.

“We had everybody from every segment doing well — poor, rich, middle class, it didn’t matter. African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, women, men, people with degrees from MIT and the Wharton School of Finance, people [who] didn’t have a high school diploma. There wasn’t one group that wasn’t doing great. Welfare was way down. Everything was going good. Food stamps were down because people had great jobs and they were happy; they were thrilled.”

It was evidence that Trump had kept his word. Returning the jobs to America that the ruling class had exported to China was the core promise of his 2016 campaign.

Kissinger and the globalist age

In office Trump and his aides came to understand that this meant taking on a vast network of American elites keen to protect their relations with China, a multigenerational matrix of public- and private-sector interests from the political, corporate, and cultural establishments that occupied the space carved out more than a half-century ago by Henry Kissinger when he served as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. With his secret trip in 1971 to prepare for Nixon’s historic visit, he opened China to the world again — Kissinger was the Marco Polo of the globalism era.

“Henry Kissinger was a smart man,” says Trump. In October 2017, he visited Trump in the Oval Office. “Mr. President, I didn’t expect this opportunity,” said Kissinger. “It’s always a great honor to be in this office, and I’m here at a moment when the opportunity to build a constructive, peaceful world order is very great.”

“He wasn’t helpful or unhelpful,” Trump says of Kissinger, who died in November 2023, revered as one of the “wise men” of Washington. “But he loved China. He loved China for a reason.”

Kissinger became the model for the new American establishment, a network of political, corporate, academic, cultural, and media elites that profited personally from the US-China relationship.

The opening to China was celebrated by the foreign policy elite as well as the cultural establishment, high and low, from sports to high art, including an opera called “Nixon in China” and a famous series of Andy Warhol paintings of Mao Zedong. Nixon later came to reconsider the wisdom of the opening to China. But for Kissinger, it became the cornerstone of his historical legacy as a statesman and then as a corporate leader.

His post-government career coincided with the rise of globalism, the new world order that saw national borders and even national sovereignty as hindrances to free trade. China, with an enormous pool of cheap labor, often slave labor, was seen as the centerpiece of the new system. And as the statesman who opened China to the West, Kissinger became the model for the new American establishment, a network of political, corporate, academic, cultural, and media elites that profited personally from the U.S.-China relationship.

RELATED: Chinese SIM farms are radicalizing Americans and destabilizing society, intel experts say

Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images

They made money by doing business with China, by opening doors for others to profit there, too, and by paving the way for China to enter what they euphemistically called the rules-based international system. The result, according to forecasts delivered by U.S. policymakers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, would be China’s eventual democratic evolution.

Instead, Beijing’s techno-autocracy rubbed off on American elites. Thus, what they meant by “international system” was just a series of political and economic arrangements through which communist elites became further entrenched, thanks to the money they and their U.S. partners accumulated on the back of Chinese labor and at the expense of the American workforce.

Kissinger became the role model for a networked U.S. elite regularly scrambling to hide China’s depredations from plain view and thereby protect their riches while avoiding blame themselves. Whether it was after the People’s Liberation Army air force brought down American planes in the South China Sea, or Trump declared a trade war with the PRC, or the PLA lied about its role in a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, turned millions more into paupers, and left the U.S. economy in ruins, the former top diplomat stepped forward to make Beijing’s case.

He built communist China the biggest and costliest lobby in world history, consisting of the ruling establishment of the most powerful country in world history. Everyone on the inside was in on it. All they had to do was make sure China stayed open for business.

In the early 1980s, Kissinger started Kissinger Associates, a consultancy whose roster over the years included former secretaries of state, treasury, and energy, national security advisers, ambassadors, and CIA officers.

Kissinger managed to avoid having to register as a foreign agent because even though he lobbied openly on behalf of China for 40 years, he wasn’t paid directly by the Chinese. Rather, he drew his income from the major U.S. industries that he vouched for in Beijing, under the tacit agreement that in return for access to China, they would make the calls and demand the meetings with D.C. lawmakers and the White House to lobby for China. It’s a loophole that serving U.S. officials never dreamed of closing, since they saw it as a useful paradigm to pursue their own post-government ambitions.

The list of former officials from Democratic and Republican administrations who have run strategic advisory firms, managed think tanks, or otherwise emulated Kissinger to profit from promoting U.S. ties with China reads like a “Who’s Who” in Washington of the last half-century, comprising both Democrats and Republicans. The list includes President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a former Kissinger aide; President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, also both former Kissinger aides and then employees; Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright, his Defense Sec. William Cohen, and his national security adviser Sandy Berger; George W. Bush’s Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick; and former President Barack Obama aide and President Joe Biden aide Kurt Campbell; as well as Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and CIA Director William Burns.

RELATED: China rules the resources we need to build the future. Now what?

Photo by liu mingzhu via Getty Images

To support the industry he built to advance the U.S.-China relationship, Kissinger curated the intellectual apparatus to ensure that his heroic version of the opening and all that came after dominated the narrative as the mainstream account. Centers and institutes were named after him, like the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States and the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University; chairs bear his name at the Library of Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as fellowships given at Johns Hopkins and Yale.

Kissinger’s central role as éminence grise of the U.S.-China relationship made him something like a dark-mirror version of Gandalf, the sage wizard in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, who guides a band of searchers on their quest. Except, where Gandalf’s charges were tasked with destroying a ring of absolute power that corrupted all who touched it, Kissinger’s charges — corporate titans, Wall Street bankers, leading politicians, university presidents, sports stars, and Hollywood moguls — wanted the ring of power forged in the Middle Kingdom for themselves.

Naturally, they became corrupted by it and brought devastation and ruin to their own country. Because Trump’s mission was to break the spell Kissinger had cast, the forces from every sector of the political and corporate establishment that over two generations had coalesced around it fought back. They joined China’s long war against America.

China class fights Trump

It’s not surprising that China turned its weapons on Americans immediately after the revolution. Washington had supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces against Mao, and Mao won. To contain the spread of communism, the U.S. fought PRC allies in Asia, where the Chinese killed and aided in the killing of 37,000 Americans during the Korean War and more than 58,000 in the Vietnam War.

The long war against America continues, through subtler means. The Chinese are responsible for the manufacture and distribution of fentanyl, which is illegally pushed across our southern and northern borders and typically kills as many as 75,000 Americans yearly. More than 1 million Americans died during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated with a leak from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, where the PLA runs biowarfare programs.

Leaders from the political, corporate, cultural, academic, and media establishments have gotten rich by making China rich.

Though no evidence confirms that the pathogen was leaked intentionally, China’s lies about COVID’s origins, lethality, and transmission are evidence that Beijing opportunistically used it as an instrument in an information warfare campaign to weaken its Western rivals, primarily America.

China’s depredations are typically ignored thanks to the efforts of a well-funded propaganda machine. Beijing pours money into various American intellectual institutions, including universities, think tanks, and media. It also pays U.S. academics directly, as well as social media influencers on all the major platforms, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, to smear America and dismiss reports of China’s human rights abuses of its own population, particularly minority groups such as the Tibetans and Uyghurs. The CCP also cultivates ties with subnational actors, including American minorities, mostly but not exclusively African-American, as well as state and local governments, to undermine U.S. interests.

But far and away the most powerful asset deployed by the PRC is what I call the China class, leaders from the political, corporate, cultural, academic, and media establishments that have gotten rich by making China rich. Virtually all of what the PRC now makes, from state-of-the-art high tech to advanced military hardware, has either been stolen by them or transferred to them by American elites in exchange for future favors.

China’s leaders, from Mao to Xi Jinping, are typically credited with raising hundreds of millions of peasants out of poverty — an economic miracle like nothing before it, say admirers. But the reality is that it was the policies of the Chinese Communist Party that plunged the Chinese into misery and poverty in the first place.

RELATED: Trump’s tariffs are a tool, not a temper tantrum

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It wasn’t Beijing that built China’s prosperous new middle class. The Chinese are hardworking and intelligent people, but the type of people who have risen to the top of the communist regime have crawled over corpses to get there — over 70 million Chinese killed under Mao alone. It was America’s political and corporate elite, the China class, who, largely through trade and financial instruments, made this murderous regime what it is today — a peer adversary of the country they call home. And they did it to augment their own wealth, power, and prestige at the expense of impoverishing the American middle class.

The China class appeared at first to be a random assortment of personalities from various industries and institutions who seemed to have little in common, outside the fact that the newly elected president excoriated them. But Trump’s resolve to take on China, and his relentless attacks on them, gave the elites collective self-awareness, or what Marxists call class “consciousness.” Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public- and private-sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes, and consumer habits, but also the same center of gravity, the U.S.-China relationship.

Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn and the reciprocal scorn of the elite who loathed him and the Americans who elected him to fight on their behalf.

A decade ago, for example, no one would have put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album. But there they are, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing. Miramax Films and Harvard’s Kennedy School? They both produced propaganda that assisted the PRC’s rise to global primacy. The Black Panthers and Goldman Sachs? Both hitched their fortunes to Beijing’s ascendancy.

Some did warn about the dangers of China. Labor unions were against admitting China to the World Trade Organization. In 2000, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called “the fevered rush to admit China to the WTO a grave mistake.” And four years later, the AFL-CIO submitted a petition, arguing that China’s labor practices, including the suppression of workers’ rights, were unfair trade practices that harmed American workers.

Human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and pro-Tibet activists swam against the tide of pro-China sentiment. Sometimes they were joined by famous celebrities, like actor Richard Gere, and even U.S. policymakers, like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who, as a young California congresswoman, attended a rally at Tiananmen Square two years after the 1989 massacre there and waved a banner in support of the victims of the PLA’s depredations.

The type of people who have risen to the top of the communist regime have crawled over corpses to get there — over 70 million Chinese killed under Mao alone.

U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), who ran for president in 1988 and 2004, opposed granting China permanent normal trade relations status, also known as most favored nation status, because it would hurt American workers, while ignoring China’s human rights abuses. “Only when there is real progress that addresses our concerns,” he said, “PNTR should be granted.”

One of the most vocal critics of U.S. trade policy was Ronald Reagan’s onetime deputy U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer. “Giving China most-favored-nation treatment for trade,” Lighthizer said, “was a tragic mistake.” Lighthizer served as U.S. trade representative during Trump’s first term and provided perhaps the most critical piece in Trump’s China policy.

And there was Trump himself. “I think we need to take a much harder look at China,” he wrote in 2000. He was critical not only of China’s trade practices but also its human rights abuses — and he knew the corporate establishment was protecting China:

There are major problems that too many at the highest reaches of business want to overlook. There is, as I mentioned, the human-rights situation. Abuses included torture and mistreatment of prisoners, forced confessions, and arbitrary and lengthy incommunicado detention. Prison conditions remain harsh. The government continues severe restrictions on freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, privacy, and worker rights. All public dissent against the party and government was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention, or house arrest.

He had pinpointed the source of corruption in our elite, the reason for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats to our peace. But even he was surprised to find how bad it was when he first came to office.

“They’re partners with China on virtually everything,” Trump tells me. “I mean, they just drop to their knees when China speaks. I’ve never seen anything like it. And they may be afraid of China. It’s not just business. It seems like they’re afraid of China.”

Among other things, they’re afraid of forfeiting the financial benefits. “I know one man who was very opposed to China,” Trump says. “All of a sudden, he comes in and he’s talking to me, and I said, ‘Whoa! What happened?’ He’s talking so positively about China. I said, ‘I’ve never seen anybody go from being so brilliantly against something to being so brilliantly in favor of it.’ I said, ‘They’re paying you, aren’t they?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they paid me a ton of money.’ They pay people a fortune.”

Even if it wanted to, the China class can’t cut itself off from its life source. “It’s like a fix,” says Trump. “And China knew that I was willing to get off the fix. It’s like drugs.”

So they fought Trump on China. They fought him on trade and the tariffs he imposed on Chinese goods during his first term and again when he tariffed China at the start of his second term. And they fought him on national security issues related to China. They fought him when he ordered restrictions on travel from China after a virus swept out of a city hosting a Chinese government lab funded by America’s biodefense czar, Anthony Fauci, in the fall of 2019.

America poisoned

COVID was the real-world manifestation of a decades-long truth; the metaphor employed to describe the relationship merging U.S. and Chinese elites had come to life: China’s communist party had poisoned America. The pandemic dramatized just how profoundly the relationship had transformed the country’s ruling class, now employing the same tactics as the CCP and mirroring its cruelty.

COVID became an instrument to demoralize Americans and imprison them in their homes; lay waste to small business; leave them vulnerable to rioters free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans deserved the hell that the elite’s private-sector militias like Black Lives Matter and Antifa and the FBI and other intelligence services had prepared for them.

U.S. political and corporate elites used the pandemic to disintegrate American norms, including election laws that were unconstitutionally altered to favor a candidate whose financial ties to CCP elites were uncovered a month before the election. But like Communist Party censors, dozens of U.S. intelligence officers arranged with social media platforms and prestige press outfits to block reports of Joe and Hunter Biden’s corrupt relations with Chinese officials.

The election of Biden represented the hegemony of an American ruling class that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against its own countrymen. To those most dispirited and demoralized, it resembled the installation of an occupation government ruling on behalf of a hostile power. With Trump gone, there was nothing impeding the political and business establishment from restoring its cozy relations with Beijing and accelerating the betrayal of American sovereignty.

RELATED: China imposes COVID-like quarantine over new breakout of viral disease

Photo by Lang Bingbing/Xinhua via Getty Images

During a trip to Vietnam in September 2023, Biden explained: “I don’t want to contain China.” He continued: “I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”

It was a far cry from Trump’s Vietnam speech nearly six years earlier, when he asserted he would pursue the interests of the voters who made him president. Biden was most concerned to soothe Chinese anxieties — and U.S. donors with a portfolio staked to China’s success. “It’s not about isolating China. I want to see China succeed economically,” he said. “We’re not looking to hurt China. … We’re all better off if China does well. … We’re not looking to decouple from China.”

He immediately began rolling back Trump initiatives to keep China in check. For instance, he ended the Trump Justice Department’s China Initiative to root out CCP espionage. After the PRC’s foreign ministry complained that it was racist, Biden compliantly shut it down.

And he made Americans more vulnerable to China. When Biden reversed Trump’s border policy, among the millions who entered illegally were large numbers of PRC nationals who, according to a former U.S. intelligence official, are attached to a special PLA unit.

With America’s borders open, fatal overdoses of fentanyl peaked at over 112,000 deaths. Other drug problems got worse, too. Chinese gangs with ties to the PRC government are responsible for much of America’s illicit marijuana trade. Chinese organized crime, say Oklahoma law enforcement authorities, has “taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States.” According to one report, Chinese mobsters “illegally [move] money overseas for the Communist Party elite and spy on and intimidate Chinese immigrant communities.”

And the Biden administration failed to secure the drugs that keep Americans alive. The pandemic showed how reliant America had become on Chinese-made pharmaceuticals, with the United States importing $2.1 billion in pharmaceutical products. After Biden had three years to reshore pharmaceuticals, by 2024 imports had more than tripled, with the U.S. spending more than $7.8 billion on drugs manufactured in China.

In the early winter of 2023, a PRC spy balloon entered U.S. territory over Alaska. After a week during which it traversed the continental United States, it was shot down off the South Carolina coast. The fact that it was carrying U.S.-made technology, including a satellite communication module, sensors, and other sophisticated surveillance equipment, only underscores how American corporations prioritize profits over national security. It also showed how China controlled an administration led by a president whose family had clear ties to Beijing.

America’s political and corporate elite, largely through trade and financial instruments, made this murderous regime what it is today — a peer adversary of the country they call home.

As president, Biden continued to make the Chinese richer and Americans poorer. He revoked tariffs worth $8.5 billion that Trump imposed on Chinese solar panel manufacturers. One study showed that Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — legislation pushing the climate agenda — showed that Chinese manufacturers could earn up to $125 billion in tax credits. Further, by hiking energy prices to satisfy climate ideologues and lobbyists, Biden made the United States less competitive and China stronger by comparison.

On the national security front, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan gave China Bagram Air Base, a listening post where the United States kept tabs on Beijing’s military activities. “We would have kept Bagram because of China, not because of Afghanistan,” says Trump. “This is one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.” Biden, says Trump, damaged the U.S. alliance system to help China.

“Their stupidity with Saudi Arabia was unbelievable,” he says of his predecessor’s White House. Trump had defended the Saudis when he was pressured to relinquish the decades-long relationship with the world’s top oil producer. But he fought back: Saudi Arabia kept oil prices low, which is good for global markets, and invested in the United States, which is good for American workers.

“They treated Saudi terribly,” Trump says of the Biden team. “They pushed them right into the hands of China.”

While Riyadh flirted briefly with Beijing, Saudi Arabia did not realign with the Chinese — or else it would have risked not only the long-standing alliance but also one of the pillars of the post-World War II order that has made the United States the wealthiest, most powerful country in world history.

Undoing Kissinger’s spell

Because of the Biden administration’s recklessness, many began to wonder if the United States was on the verge of losing its dominant position. After all, the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is owing among other things to the arrangement Washington policymakers made with the Saudis at the end of World War II: The world buys American bonds and invests in U.S. real estate because the United States is the chief guarantor of security around the world, a large component of which is making sure that Persian Gulf oil gets safely to market.

Among other dangers in that strategically vital region is the anti-U.S. terror regime in Iran, which has joined forces with China and Russia. “Biden forced China and Russia together, and now they have Iran,” Trump tells me. In March 2024, the three conducted joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman. “How could Biden have let so many things get so bad?”

From Trump’s perspective, the long line of American presidents dating back over half a century are all responsible for the carnage.

When Trump first took office in 2017, he was hopeful that his administration could force some distance between Beijing and Moscow, but Trump’s domestic opponents made that impossible. The Hillary Clinton campaign’s dirty trick, smearing the 2016 GOP candidate as a Russian agent, was retooled by Obama’s spy chiefs and turned into a weapon to undermine Trump’s presidency.

With false allegations of Trump’s ties to Moscow, the “Russia collusion” narrative had effectively become an instrument to redirect the public’s attention away from China, Trump’s priority. Russiagate protected China and its U.S. partners from scrutiny and prevented Trump from shaping a more comprehensive foreign policy to deal with the threat from Beijing. Instead, says Trump, Russiagate “put us into a hostile environment with a powerful country.”

Who knows if the Trump team would have succeeded in isolating China with a U.S.-Russia partnership, but the Russia collusion narrative obstructed the policy of the man elected to conduct U.S. foreign relations.

“We might have had a good relationship with Russia,” he says. “Russia has very valuable land with minerals and things that we could have used, and we have things that they were desperate to have. And I said to Putin, ‘You probably know.’ And he said, ‘I do know without you even saying it.’ He said, ‘It’s virtually impossible for you to do anything with us.’”

From Trump’s perspective, Russiagate was a geopolitical disaster with the final bill yet to come. “One of the things that I learned very early on from a lot of very smart people is don’t let Russia and China get together,” Trump says. But the Americans fighting Trump helped force them together. “They pushed Russia to China.”

That formula is an inversion of how the U.S.-China relationship began more than 50 years ago, with Kissinger’s secret July 1971 trip to Beijing to prepare the ground for Nixon’s state visit. Nixon and Kissinger set about leveraging China against the Soviet Union. They called it “playing the China card,” but it was among the worst bets American leaders ever made, for their strategic gambit evolved into the devastation that Trump was elected to repair.

From Trump’s perspective, the long line of American presidents dating back over half a century are all responsible for the carnage.

“They were all really bad,” Trump says of his predecessors’ records on China. “But Richard Nixon is the one who opened up China. It was a terrible mistake. A lot of people praise him for opening up China. But I think they’re stupid people, too. It was a very bad day for the United States. He let them in, and other people let China take advantage of us.” There were other presidents who followed and other presidents who allowed the rape of the United States to go on and on. But it was Nixon and Kissinger who initiated it.

“The worst thing Nixon did wasn’t Watergate,” says Trump. “It was allowing China to take advantage of this country. He and Kissinger are the ones who opened up China. And it was a terrible mistake. It didn’t have to be this way.”

This is the story of the U.S. ruling class’ deadly pact with China. It shows how the career of one man, Henry Kissinger, shaped the world as well as the country we live in today. And it’s the story of the man twice elected to undo Kissinger’s spell. Trump and Kissinger, antagonist and protagonist, are the two poles around which this epic account of the last 50 years of American politics, culture, and society revolves.

Editor’s note: This essay has been adapted from Lee Smith’s new book, “The China Matrix: The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact” (Center Street).

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, China, Chinese communist party, Chinese communists, Chinese concentration camps, Xi jinping, President xi, Mao, Mao zedong, China class, China spy balloon, Chinese espionage, Henry kissinger, Trump, Trump xi, Trump china, Trump china trade war, Richard nixon, Zhao enlai, Corruption, Sellouts, America first, Tariffs, Free trade myth, Weekend long read 

Robert Sigg is a quiet man with a big voice.

His company, Real America’s Voice, is the platform for “The Charlie Kirk Show” and other populist voices leading the “dare not ignore” charts. I met Robert not long after a mutual friend shared a column I wrote — “Prove Charlie right.”

The commanding heights of government, advertising, and traffic went full Orwellian on RAV and did their best to starve it of vital ad dollars.

When we spoke, his son Parker — his right-hand man and a rising star in the industry who effectively manages all of RAV’s programming — was by his side. Parker is just four years younger than Charlie Kirk. He was working in the family business at just 15 years old, chasing hurricanes for another Sigg property, WeatherNation — a politics-free outlet. As Sigg described it, “A take-an-umbrella or wear-sunscreen business.”

Fighting through censorship

I wanted to talk to Sigg about the behind-the-scenes war against his business — a campaign that includes a pernicious form of censorship through shadow-advertising bans and Big Tech algorithm manipulation that leads to traffic starvation.

RAV seeks to bring a unique voice to the marketplace of ideas. It’s one of the sources RealClearMedia’s properties draw from when presenting our across-the-spectrum report each day. Charlie Kirk, in fact, was published on RealClearPolitics the day of his assassination.

My firsthand experience is that RAV’s approach is not welcomed by those who control access to advertising and traffic. RealClear’s advertising score, in turn, gets dinged for aggregating RAV content — even though we usually pair its offerings with liberal counterprogramming.

RealClear has been dealing with this attitude for a decade, but when Sigg launched RAV, he was surprised by the “You can’t do that” reception he received.

“This,” he thought, “is not the American way.”

The commanding heights of government, advertising, and traffic went full Orwellian on RAV and did their best to starve it of vital ad dollars. How bad did it get for Sigg and RAV? Here’s how bad: The devious advertising boycotts were extended to the apolitical WeatherNation.

The political sins of RAV — as perceived by the media and political establishment that Matt Taibbi has dubbed “the Blob” — were carried over to WeatherNation. And so the “do not buy” word went out, to be heeded by the smug self-appointed guardians of the status quo. So much for the purported objectivity of the media and advertising business minders. If you are doing your level best to impoverish one business and it just won’t die because it’s connected to another business that is thriving, then just destroy its access to revenue. That’s the treacherous game the Blob is playing.

Yet instead of discussing the reality of de facto censorship and other threats to free speech in America, the national conversation was derailed by Jimmy Kimmel’s boorishness and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s interloping. (As fate would have it, Carr’s problematic, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” comment happened on a RAV-sponsored show.)

Sigg’s response: “RAV has only known the hard way — and the hard way is still the norm for Real America’s Voice, and I would gather the same for RealClear.”

We both agreed that things are getting better, but slowly. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) are putting in the work to extirpate the censorship industrial complex from advertising and web traffic. Still, the roots and prejudices run deep, and RAV is still being blacklisted by advertisers.

Never surrender

But Robert and Parker Sigg don’t roll over for anyone. They run a never-surrender, blood, toil, tears, and sweat, prayerful, “we will prove you wrong” family business. They are an interesting blend of spirituality and spite. Sigg made it clear to me that “The Charlie Kirk Show” will go on.

“I came into the media space on the disruptor side,” he said, recalling the launch of Real America’s Voice. “Cable — the new disestablishment market actor — was taking mind and market share from the media trads. But it was clear … that their days too were numbered. Dish was built for a streaming world with no cords, where everything was floating in a cloud.”

RELATED: Did the FBI shadow ban Charlie Kirk?

Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images

In Sigg’s telling, the Internet was the greatest cord-cutting, cancel-your-subscription force in human history.

“Everything RAV builds has a cordless future in mind. We are successful in the present and built for the future that is fast approaching, if not already here,” he said. “With RAV, I wanted to provide popular programming for underserved and hungry audiences. My insight was no different from Roger Ailes’ at Fox. Fox’s growing audience demonstrated that half of America was being underserved.”

His goal was not to compete with Fox but to rise up and serve up talent that would make Fox — and others in the new ecosphere — better:

Our attitude is that a rising tide lifts all boats, but it is up to the consumers, not the guardians of media, to determine the winners and losers. Not the government and their regulators, the advertiser guardians, or the traffic controllers, but the American consumer, voting with their ears and eyeballs.

Continuing the fight

As I said, our approach at RealClear is viewpoint diversity. We offer a place for the pluribus of America’s voices — his included — to make their case and for readers to decide for themselves. Come to our site, and you’ll find a balanced pairing of rival perspectives, one after another. And we have suffered for the past 10 years for doing so.

Both of our boats ought to be rising, but we operate in a world that is trying to sink us both. RealClear’s sin is that we create a dialogue in a media scape that is more interested in monologues.

“The marketplace has not been friendly,” Sigg said. “But for the few who should be starting to put job above ideology and see the value of our audiences and their purchasing power — and move on an underpriced value with an upside return — they will lead the way to a better future.”

Let’s hope so — and let’s put in the needed work to make it so.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, Real voice of america, Charlie kirk, Charlie kirk show, Charlie kirk assasination, Censorship, First amendment, Shadow banning, Robert sigg, Orwellian, Real america’s voice, Realclearpolitics 

Aaron Roesch opened his new ice cream shop in south St. Louis a month ago — and it’s quickly become a favorite gathering place for kids in the neighborhood.

Roesch told KTVI-TV in its video report that youngsters often will come into his shop — Aunt Jamie’s Frozen Custard and Waffles, named after his aunt and godmother — and “just hang out and do their homework and draw.”

‘Help people. Be nice to all your adults and peers. Be nice to your elders, and be respectful to your elders.’

Of course, there’s always the prospect of sweet treats as well.

“Like, he give us everything,” 9-year-old Adonis Pickens told KSDK-TV. “He give us free stuff.”

Pickens’ cousin, 11-year-old Jayceon Cooper, added to KSDK that he and Adonis are regulars and come to Aunt Jamie’s “almost every day, if he open.”

But Roesch also noted to KSDK that the boys “immediately were trying to help me … and they would work for ice cream and snow cones.”

“These fellows have become my friends,” the shop owner told KTVI, with Jayceon adding, “We’re like his little buddies.”

Well, the camaraderie the trio share deepened last week when Jayceon and Adonis noticed something disturbing as they approached their favorite ice cream shop on South Broadway and Krauss Street.

RELATED: Blaze News original: 10 inspiring examples of Good Samaritans who ran toward danger to help others, often defeating bad guys

“We came out here to try to buy some ice cream, and his window was just shattered,” Adonis told KTVI. “So we just started hearing noise, so I just said, ‘Who’s in here?'”

A male inside the shop told them he was bleeding, KSDK reported — but it turned out to be red syrup on his clothes.

The boys said the alleged burglar was stuck in the shop, KTVI added, and Adonis called Roesch’s number — but when he didn’t answer, Adonis called police.

The cousins kept the guy in the shop talking until officers arrived, KSDK said.

The 42-year-old male suspect told police he broke into the ice cream shop because he thought people were following him, KSDK reported, adding that the suspect was taken into custody.

Ephraim Hayes. Image source: St. Louis Police

St. Louis Police told Blaze News that the St. Louis City Circuit Attorney’s Office charged Ephraim Hayes with second-degree burglary and first-degree property damage. Police added to Blaze News that court documents appear to indicate that a judge released Hayes on personal recognizance.

“If I didn’t have a friendship with these kids, that guy would have walked away scot-free,” Roesch later remarked to KTVI.

Jayceon added to KTVI that his friend Roesch doesn’t deserve what happened to his shop after all he does for him and Adonis and the whole neighborhood: “I don’t know why people do this to him. Like, he’s a nice guy. He shouldn’t be treated how people treat him.”

RELATED: Lone man who stepped up and stopped brutal beating of elderly worker at rap concert tells why he intervened: ‘Had to be done’

“I want this to be a lasting experience guiding their future in a positive direction,” Roesch told Blaze News in regard to Jayceon and Adonis.

The good news is ramping up, as Roesch added to Blaze News that St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer is coming to Aunt Jamie’s on Nov. 8 to present an award — and, of course, to “have an ice cream party.”

Roesch told KSDK that the community also is growing: “The properties are coming back. The values increased over the past year, and the businesses are coming back.”

But he added to KSDK that Jayceon and Adonis are the real story — and that their actions represent valuable lessons for everybody: “Help people. Be nice to all your adults and peers. Be nice to your elders, and be respectful to your elders.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Crime thwarted, Good news, Good kids, St. louis, Break-in, Burglary, Ice cream shop, Aaron roesch, Aunt jamie’s frozen custard and waffles, Stepping up, Children doing the right thing, Arrest, Helping others, Crime