Bill Gertz on China's Tactics and John Stossel Investigates Privacy, Food Insecurity, and Climate Change
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Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battleground with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Our first guest up today, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times, national security correspondent for The Washington Times. He is also the author of eight books, his most recent one, Deceiving the Sky, Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy, reveals details about the growing threat posed by the People's Republic of China. Thank you so much, Bill Gertz, for joining us this morning on Breaking Battlegrounds.

Great to be on the show. Bill, so what is the growing threat of China? What do the American voters need to understand about the threat? Well, I think it's the existential threat facing the United States. And it comes in many forms, but underlying the threat is what...

what the Chinese leader Xi Jinping is calling Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. So in other words, this is not something that's dreamed up by the personal dictator of Xi Jinping. This is all going according to ideology. And according to that ideology, the Chinese ideology, and this is in their writings, and I've documented this in a lot of my reporting, they make clear that they are on the march

as part of this inexorable historical materialism, which is part of Marxism, which says struggle is going to lead to the ideal worker's paradise. And the intermediate stage before reaching that is socialism. So the Chinese socialism is being developed, and that's where they're developing their military. They're developing a draconian, what I call,

technological technology totalitarianism of surveillance, mass surveillance. And the main target for them is the United States. They see the United States as the world leader of capitalism. And of course, under Marxism-Leninism, capitalism is the main enemy. So they're working very diligently. And unfortunately,

For 40 years, most of our leaders and specialists in government and out have failed to recognize this, that this is really an existential ideological threat. They want to take over the world and...

I mean, no one who was raised in freedom and democracy in the United States would want to live in a world dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. You have an article out today in The Washington Times about the 2024 Defense Authorization Act. And in that report, Congress is ordering the Pentagon to conduct a major study of a U.S. war with China around 2030.

My two questions are this. Is 2030 too late? Do they need to be preparing earlier? And two, what are the specific things in the report based on your reporting that our listeners need to know about? Well, yeah, this is some legislation that was just passed, and it's bipartisan. So they've been working on what they call the National Defense Authorization Act,

since last summer or even before. But it went to what they call a House-Senate conference. The conference concluded. And this is where they do puts and takes and fight over which provisions will stay in, which ones get cut out. And there are many related to China. I characterize it in my story as this is

really solidifying a bipartisan representation of what I call the China threat. And the need for a study on a potential war with China in the coming years is because it's a very, very dangerous situation now. Basically, we've seen a number of indicators that the Chinese are getting ready to use force to take back Taiwan.

They're doing the cost-benefit analysis. They're trying to figure out, is it worth the cost? What will we lose if we take it back? What kinds of things? And right now, the global situation is really advantageous to Beijing. You have a war in Ukraine, which is siphoning off both

attention and resources from the United States. And we now have a war in Israel against Hamas, which is also taking resources and attention. And so the Chinese calculation regarding Taiwan, first of all, Xi Jinping, the supreme leader of China, has told his military to be ready to take military action against

Taiwan by 2027. Another date that has been mentioned is 2035. So somewhere in that time period. Now, they often say we're going to we want to resolve this peacefully, but we won't renounce the use of force. And of course, that's the real danger. The whole

cross-strait balance and this very what they call the status quo that has been in place since the U.S. recognized Beijing and de-recognized Taipei on Taiwan has been this idea that they have to resolve this peacefully. And yet the Chinese are making clear they're not going to resolve it peacefully, that they are planning to use force. They are building up their forces. They are encircling the island with

both aircraft and warships in order to coerce Taiwan. So it's a very dangerous... They could calculate that if, say, Donald Trump were to be reelected, it would be very disadvantageous for them regarding a Taiwan military operation. So between now and the next election, I think it's one of the most dangerous times. And of course,

President Biden, to his credit, has said on several occasions that

that if China uses military force, the U.S. will respond with military action. So he's been very clear on that. He's done that to try and deter them. Now, the White House has not really walked back, as many people say in the press, but what they've said that this is not a new policy. And that's correct. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which Congress passed

to really protect our former really close ally and now partner in Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act says that any response to a crisis in Taiwan will be decided by the president with support of Congress.

Yeah.

But one of the things that has really changed in recent years that makes this possible, at least from China's perspective, makes it possible for them to effectively have a very good chance of taking Taiwan if they choose to do so.

Is there buildup in the South China Sea? You recently had a piece on Chinese claims to the South China Sea shoal, which the Pentagon said are illegal. Can you tell us a little bit about what's going on there and what the security implications of what China is doing in the South China Sea are? Sure. It's what I would call a second military flashpoint in U.S.-China relations, the first being Taiwan.

Back in 2012, the Chinese took over a disputed reef called Mischief Reef, appropriately named, which is in the same island chain as this other reef called Second Thomas Shoal, which is these are very small islands. So what happened back in 2012 was Barack Obama made no response, even though the Philippines government, in which we have a mutual defense treaty, asked for U.S. support. Obama ignored it.

It gave a green light to the Chinese to begin building up islands in the South China Sea, which they see as...

military bases. By the way, Xi Jinping came here and said, oh, we're not going to militarize those bases. Well, by 2018, they had built as many as 3,200 acres of new islands, and they began placing missiles on these islands. Let me stop you there. How many acres again?

3,200 acres of islands. So for our audience, give us an example of how big that is. What size of a city is that?

Well, they're all different islands. There's many different islands. In the Spratly, there's two sections. One is the Paracels in the northern part of the South China Sea. And then the Spratlys is, again, the flashpoint in the south part. And China has built a trio of military bases on three islands, Suvi Reef, Fiery Reef, and Mischief Reef. And on Mischief Reef, they have 1,000...

runway, which can handle all of their military jets, and they've been placed anti-ship missiles and anti-aircraft missiles. And what this effectively means is that the South China Sea, which is international waters, you know, by the way, the Romans, when they were dominated the world, never claimed that the Mediterranean Sea was their territory. So

The Chinese claim that the South China Sea, which sees an estimated $5 trillion in trade annually, pass through its waters. They've declared it their lake, in other words. And the U.S. has been pushing back. And what's happened is on Second Thomas Shoal is Philippines outpost. It's a rusty old Navy ship that's grounded and has a detachment of Filipino Marines. And they're ones that are...

basically holding the line and saying this is international waters they had a ruling that went in their favor at the international tribunal in the egg and the chinese have been trying to basically block uh supply ships from going to that uh grounded ship base and uh this thing and the

Indo-Pacific Command, which is responsible for it, just issued a legal opinion fairly recently which said any Chinese claim to 2nd Thomas Shoal, where the Philippine ship is located, are illegal. And so, again, the Chinese are claiming that it's their territory. So this is another potential flashpoint. There have been incidents of the Chinese firing water cannon. They've bumped one of the Chinese Coast Guard ships, bumped a Filipino thing.

Then also a Chinese Coast Guard ship fired a laser at one of the Philippines resupply ships, and it damaged the eyes of the crew. So this is an area where tensions remain pretty high.

How much – we have about a minute and a half before we go to break. We're going to be coming right back after that with more from Bill Gertz of The Washington Times. Real quick, Bill, before we go, how much in a Taiwan conflict would the Philippines, South Korea, those other countries potentially get involved? I know that's kind of a long answer, so maybe it's something we come back to more later.

in the second segment here. But it seems like this conflict, China has more than one potential adversary there, but how active they're going to be given the dynamics is a pretty good question.

Yeah, real quick before the break is that there is a major effort by the U.S. government under the Indo-Pacific plan to garner support from the allies. Two key allies in this regard are Japan and Australia. Both governments have signaled informally that they would join a military defense of Taiwan-India.

They would join a U.S. military defense of Taiwan. They haven't stated it clearly as the U.S. wants, but they want to do that. Fantastic. Folks, we're going to be coming back with more from Bill Gertz here in just a moment, so stay tuned. Also, you're not going to want to miss our second couple of segments today. We have John Stossel coming on the program. Very excited to talk to him. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back in just a moment.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Morin. I'm Sam Stone. Folks, you've been hearing us talk about YRefi for a long time now. If you haven't checked them out, you need to go to their website, investyrefi.com. That's invest, the letter Y, then refi.com. You can learn how you can earn up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return that's not correlated to the stock market. You can turn your income on or off, compound it, whatever you choose.

There are no fees and there's no attack on principle. If you ever need your money back, you'll get your monthly statement each month with no surprises. So check them out. That's invest the letter Y then refy.com or give them a call at 888-Y-REFY24. We were talking about in the previous segment about the alliances in Southeast Asia. What should the United States be doing to strengthen these alliances? Because that seems to be a real key to somehow preventing China and their aggressive desires.

Yes, good question. The key right now is, again, to deter China to influence their decision calculus about when to take military action, when to bully regional states like Philippines. And the best way to do that, my recommendation, if I were a king, if I were the head of policy at the Pentagon, I would

start deploying THAAD missile defense batteries in our regional allies, Australia, Philippines, more in Japan. I think we have one in northern Japan and South Korea. We saw the Chinese reaction to the deployment of this very effective anti-missile system in South Korea. They basically waged economic warfare on South Korea for a number of months. And the reason is that they

These missile defense systems can negate one of their key advantages, which is China's missile force. They have a massive...

of all different types of missiles with various ranges, short, medium, intermediate range. They even have hypersonic missiles. They have an air-launched ballistic missile. And, of course, they have their maneuvering warhead anti-ship ballistic missiles. So that would be my initial response. The second thing that they're already doing is –

increasing the number of Tomahawk cruise missiles in the region.

We have four Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines that have been converted to cruise missile shooters. Each of those submarines can launch 154 missiles. The Chinese fear this system more than anything because these are low-flying, ground-hugging cruise missiles, have very good range, they can maneuver, and the Chinese fear that. In addition,

Japan has announced they're buying 400 tomahawks, and Australia is buying 200 tomahawks. And the general in charge of the Pacific Army, General Charles Flynn, he's announced that they're planning to build ground-based tomahawks.

missiles. So rather than just defense, we have this offensive fence, if you will, of Tomahawk, very effective, precision guided Tomahawk cruise missiles. And that is a signal to the Chinese. And in, in,

Conflict, you always go after the center of gravity. In the case of China, the center of gravity is the Chinese Communist Party. And those missiles could threaten the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, which Beijing fears more than anything else. They don't care about the population, the 1.4 billion people. They care about the 93 million members of the ruling Communist Party of China, which is really hated throughout China.

What should the United States do about our manufacturing base? Tomahawk missiles got to be built, right? And everything you're hearing is that we're just not prepared to replenish our supplies quickly. And Ukraine has put an exclamation point on that. Or to gear up for a major conflict. What needs to happen there, Bill?

Definitely need to focus on reestablishing secure supply lines. A lot of our supply lines are vulnerable to disruption, whether by cyber or other means. And we need to focus on bolstering the manufacturing base. Yeah, we are vulnerable today.

with the ability to rapidly resupply our forces. Could we do it in more time? I think we could, but it's better to do it now to be ready than to do it when the balloon actually goes up. Does our support of Ukraine send a message to China or not? Is this something that's being blown out of proportion, or is Ukraine defeating Russia a critical message to China regarding Taiwan, and just the United States will?

Yeah, I think Ukraine is – we learned in the last century that when you don't counter military aggression, it leads to worse things. So –

Helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia is important, but strategically or geostrategically, the real threat, again, is China. China wants to see the U.S. waste a lot of money and a lot of munitions and a lot of support by helping Ukraine. I think we need to help China.

figure out a solution to this, whether either win the war, again, helping them win the war, getting the Europeans to do more to help them win the war. But to me, the most serious threat, again, is China. China is

is learning lessons about how the U.S. would respond to a Taiwan conflict by looking at how we're helping Ukraine. And also China is working to, my view is that I have this theory, I don't have any real evidence for this, but I think Xi Jinping wants to re-communize Russia under Vladimir Putin, who is a former political police and intelligence officer.

who are not formally communists, but obviously they're pro-Soviet in a lot of respects, and that

Putin has said that that was the worst disaster to befall Russia, was the fall of the Soviet Union, which ended a key element of the Cold War. So I think Xi Jinping, again, he wants to dominate the world. The main impediment to that is the United States. So he's working through various means, mostly covert, what the military calls gray zone warfare, to undermine and defeat the United States, fentanyl being a clear case of it.

of their using precursor chemicals to support Mexican drug cartels and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Yeah. Bill, before we end up today, we've got just two minutes left, and I want to make sure you have time to tell folks how to get your book and follow you and all that kind of thing. But real quick before we go, one of the things that's changed is

has been China's ability to surveil their own population and others. And they seem to be trying to export that technology to other countries, including Russia. How much does this technology give the dictators of the world hope that they can finally achieve their dreams of total population control throughout most of the globe?

Yeah, high-tech totalitarianism, as I call it in my book, Deceiving the Sky. It's very effective, and it gives them the ability to say that the democratic system doesn't work. They play on our divisions within our system, but they try to show that they have a model which can actually –

uh... control populations you know the chinese are into total control and uh... it's it's very dangerous from my standpoint from my viewpoint i think we need to do more to get information about the dictatorial system the communist system the ideological tenants of it and uh...

And in that way, I think we can ultimately defeat the Chinese Communist Party as we did the Soviet Communist Party back under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Bill, how do folks follow you and how do they get your book?

My website is the Gertz file. That's Gertz file dot com. And I'm on at at Bill Gertz. And you can also look for my book at deceiving the sky dot com. Fantastic. Bill Gertz, correspondent for The Washington Times. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time. We'd look forward to having you back in the future. Folks, Breaking Battlegrounds back with John Stossel in just a moment.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with yours, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Next up, a guest I'm very excited to speak to, someone I've watched on TV. Many of you have probably done the same for many, many years. John Stossel. He's been a reporter for over 50 years with Good Morning America on ABC, Fox News. And he recently left Fox News to start Stossel TV to reach more young people, which I think Chuck and I both agree is one of the most critical things anyone can be doing right now. He is a 19-time Emmy winner.

And right now, 10 million students a year discuss liberty and free markets in class via Stossel in the Classroom, which is another fantastic program. So thank you so much for joining us, John Stossel. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. Good to be here. One of the things that you've talked about that I've really – this was one of my pet peeves when I worked at the City of Phoenix is how many of these federal welfare and spending programs, how many of these safety net programs are really built on fallacious foundations. The numbers and the reasoning behind them are kind of ridiculous. One of those is the food insecurity lie.

Talk a little bit about the food insecurity myth, because you're one of the only people in the country that's been isolating on that. And it is a ridiculous claim that they make. And the program that comes from it is just riddled with waste. Yet it's convincing. And by saying what I say, I'm accused of being indifferent to the suffering of the poor. But.

They get this food insecure number by the Agriculture Department, asks a bunch of people, "Have you ever during the year had to substitute foods because you were insecure about having enough money at the end of the week?"

And we asked people that way. And you certainly find 20 percent of the people who I guess it's lower than that. It's 24 million Americans who say yes. Sure. I mean, I've had a week where, you know, I had to look at it and go, I can't go out and get to go get a steak. I got to get some chicken tonight. I mean, but that's that's how open ended this question is. And then it leads to this massive federal program.

and see a SNAP and WIC and all these programs, and those people think they're doing their job when they're giving people stuff. And look, if you run a food kitchen, you feel good because you certainly want to believe that these people would be hungry without you. But the evil part is the teaching dependency. Yeah.

And we've spent trillions now on this war on poverty, and I was there at the start, I'm ashamed to admit, and cheered it on. It just made sense. People are poor in a rich country. We need wise people in government who can set up programs that will help them.

But what nobody reports is how the opposite almost happened. That before the war began, people were lifting themselves out of poverty every year. The poverty level was going down and down and down. And then they passed welfare. And it continued to go down, as you'd expect, since we were now spending all that money. But after about seven years, that progress stopped. We

We taught people to be dependent. We created a permanent group of semi-helpless people who just think the way to live is to live off the state. And it kills the taxpayer, and it makes these people miserable.

Yeah, and we're seeing that. So I remember very clearly when I moved back to Phoenix, I had two neighbors. I rented an apartment online. It ended up being a little bit of a rougher location than I expected. I had two neighbors. One were working poor. One were dependent poor. Two families. That working poor family have since gotten ahead. The dependent poor family continues to wallow in dependency. They've reached three generations. How impossible is it now to get out of this trap that the government has built when you have no role model?

I wouldn't use the word impossible because people do it, but it sure makes it harder. And you look around, well, that's just how people live. I guess I should. Before we go to our segment, we're with John Stossel, Stossel TV. You can find him at johnstossel.com. John, tell us a little bit about what you're doing at Stossel TV that's different from Fox News and elsewhere.

Well, it's different from cable because I edit. I'm not smart enough when they ask people stuff on TV about answers. I need at least a week to research things and to edit it down to some answer that's comprehensible and ideally fun, which is what I used to do in 2020. And so now I'm doing that on my own, supported by viewers, and every Tuesday we release a new video.

Fantastic. We're going to be coming back with more in just a moment from John Stossel. As Chuck mentioned, you can catch him at John Stossel TV, Stossel TV, John Stossel dot com. He has been an advocate for consumers, an advocate for citizens, and now, frankly, an advocate for freedom that this country very much needs. So, folks, stay tuned. We're coming back with a much longer segment here in just a moment. Breaking Battlegrounds. We'll be back momentarily.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Folks, you've been hearing us talk about why refi for a while now. You need to check them out.

You can earn up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return that's not correlated to the stock market. You can turn your income on or off, compound it, whatever you choose. There are absolutely no fees and no attack on principle. If you ever need your money back, you'll get your statement each month with no surprises. So check them out. Invest the letter Y, then refy.com, or give them a call at 888-Y-REFY24 and tell them Chuck and Sam sent you. Great. We're with John Stossel. Today on Stossel TV on December 6th, you wrote an article or column, How Private is Private?,

Can you talk a little bit about what tech companies are doing and why consumers should be concerned about that? I think people know now that they spy on us. It took Edward Snowden to tell me about

putting tape on my computer to hide the cameras. I don't really think they want to look at me, but I now know that they could. And occasionally, some of these usually young creeps do. But the other one is that they always know where you are, who your friends are.

It creeps me out when I get these advertisements and I think, do they just listen to me? But probably not. They just saw what my friend was interested in, what I was probably talking about, and offered me a product close to what I was talking about.

I interviewed Naomi Brockwell, who has a popular YouTube channel, who is furious about this. I'm maybe stupid, but I'm not so freaked out. I like it that they spy on me because it helps me get restaurants near me and recommendations for products that, oh, yeah, I might want this thing. And that's nice.

Now, she points out that the government, probably illegally against the Fourth Amendment, collects this data about us. And should laws change, say they make cryptocurrency illegal or make marijuana more illegal again, or who knows what, they could have data on you that they use to prosecute you. I just don't think that in America it's that likely.

They used it in Hong Kong, which Chinese did, to crack down on the protesters when they cracked down on Hong Kong. And that's horrible. But I don't think even Donald Trump would do that. You had a video out called Are We Doomed? about climate change, and it received 24 million views. And then a fact checker got to Facebook.

And they cut it off. And you posted on Stossel TV a rebuttal to this. Can you tell us a little bit about the video, where people can find it, and just some of the mistakes that this pushback came that they're just not being honest about?

You can find it just by Googling John Stossel, Are We Doomed? And most of what you introduced, I would agree with. We did get 24 million views, which was a lot. And I think it was popular because it was three climate scientists who said, we don't think this is a crisis. Yeah, the

We play a role, and the climate's warming, but it's not a crisis. And we'd like to debate you alarmists. And the alarmists wouldn't come. We had three empty seats. And they went down the points about how Holland, years ago, with crummy equipment, built dikes to keep the rising water out. And a third of Holland is below sea level. And yet Holland thrives. We can adjust to a warmer climate. Climate.

We have more people who freeze to death every year than die of heat. So we're still a long way from the crisis. Many more. That kills far more people.

But you use the word fact-checkers as if they check facts. And what Facebook did was partner with a lefty group called the Poynter Institute and empowered them as fact-checkers. And they partnered with a group of climate alarmists and gave them the power to censor on Facebook. So...

This video, which got 23 million of its views on Facebook, you barely can find it on Facebook now because they just won't show it to people. And what did I get wrong that they...

censored it, I called their reviewers. And the reviewers, too, agreed to be interviewed. And during the interview, I was surprised to hear them say, when I said, well, what's wrong here? And when you watch, what bothers you? Well, we didn't watch

If you think we watched this thing, we were just told that you interviewed this one guy and we disagree with him. And actually, now that we've watched it, you're very balanced. You tell both sides of the story. And they put the fact checker, put stuff in quotes that I didn't say that was on a related story. You have to have to get.

Facebook to dunya twice before it really kills your reach and it's really killed my reach. The other one was the claim that the California wildfires were caused by climate change. And the climate change did play a part, but

temperature is warmer in California, but most of it was bad forest management, and they don't clear away the underbrush. They don't want to spend the money on that or take the risk of doing a controlled burn like the Indians did or we used to do long ago. So it's man-made California fires, and so between the two of them,

I'm off the point. I'm on the sense of it.

That to me just says your position is unbelievably weak to begin with. The position you're defending is almost indefensible or you wouldn't have to do that. Am I wrong? I think you're right.

And, you know, Facebook doesn't really want to censor stuff like this. If I could get Mark Zuckerberg's attention, he'd probably say, well, that's wrong. But the climate activists are upset that I got 24 million views and that people like the video. And these are the people who are panicked that we're not doing more to protect

pretend to stop climate change. And some of them, their livelihoods are at stake because they want government continued government grants or subsidies for their windmill boondoggles. But some of it are just so many of them are just genuinely scared and they're upset already that we aren't spending more and doing more. And here is Stossel out there and we can stop it.

We can stop him, but we don't actually have to stop to listen to what he has to say before we do that. Or debate it. Yeah. They won't debate. Have you noticed the climate alarmists will not give credence to the skeptics by debating? Which, again, just strikes me as that's an incredibly weak position. I want to move on really quick to one of your other pieces because Chuck knows this has been a pet peeve of mine for many years. You wrote a piece called Shut It Down.

And one of the things that's driven me crazy about Republicans in Congress, in the Senate, is every time it comes to we've got to cut the budget, they capitulate, they fold because they're afraid to shut it down and be blamed for it. And every time it's not the right time politically, we have an election coming. Well, it's never the right time and we always have an election coming.

How much of that is just an excuse and these people are just content to continue to spend us into potentially our national grave? Most of it. Let me go from this here. So you've been a leader in the industry. You're well respected. Has suppression become a bigger factor now than it was, say, 10, 20, 30 years ago in your view?

So has what become a bigger... Suppression of facts, suppression of debate. Has it become a bigger issue now than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? Well, yes, in that there is organized suppression now, even involving the government. But on the other hand, 30 years ago, we weren't having these ideas either because there were only three TV networks and a few newspapers.

And when Walter Cronkite said, oh, that's the way it is, people believed that. Then at least we got Fox TV and weirdo sites and many alternatives, and that's good. But I see why some people want to suppress that. How much – I just don't understand this effort to – returning to one of your other pieces, smearing capitalism.

You look around the world empirically, capitalism is nowhere near perfect, but it's by far the best economic system that's ever been invented. What is this push and why are they pushing so hard to basically tear down capitalism? It's in their hearts. It just seems greedy and bad. Rich people making money off and some people being so poor.

And they're stupid, and then they have stupid professors at those stupid colleges teaching them this stuff. And it is hard to get your brain around the concept that capitalism creates wealth. It's natural to think that if...

Elon Musk has a billion dollars that somebody else has a billion less. It's hard to grasp the idea that every transaction that's voluntary adds value to the world, and we're all getting richer.

And if you can't see that, then capitalism is just greed. And what my video was about that just ran recently was that they even claim it makes people lonely. And it's just we found endless headlines, Los Angeles Times. There's a mass loneliness crisis going on.

Jacobin Magazine, capitalism makes you lonely, makes us feel empty inside, says Vox. And there's just no data that shows anybody's more lonely now than they were in the past. And in fact, researchers sometimes ask people of the same age and life in previous generations, they've asked them years ago and they ask them now, they don't find increases, which is odd because more people live alone now.

But the people who live alone and spend less time surrounded by other people also say they're more happy with the relationships they have, and they're not lonely. And finally, in the less capitalist countries, many more people say, if you need help, do you have someone to count on? More of them say no. In capitalist countries, it's in the low single digits.

One of the things, you know, people always, the left and particularly the communist socialist left, always likes to talk about the pie. We're dividing up the pie. And they completely miss the concept that capitalism is planting another field of pumpkins so you can bake that many more pies. Absolutely true. But, you know, it's not intuitive. You have to really think about it or be taught about it. And that's why I put myself in classrooms. Yeah.

Which I think is like one of the most valuable things that a lot of leaders and thought leaders can be doing today is trying to do a better job of reaching out to young people because we're seeing, you know, in so many ways that universities and the K-12 system underneath them has become ideologically homogenous institutions.

How many interactions have you had with kids who just say, hey, I never knew any of that stuff you were telling me before? And what do we need to do to expand the reach of people like yourself doing this work? How to expand it? I don't know.

Don't know. Leave me alone. I'm doing all that I can. Any idea I have. We're counting on you. You're like the only one who gets this stuff. It's you and PragerU. Very hard to convince people. I could convince my wife, like, for a minute. And then a month later, she'll pick up a New York Times article and she'll say, what about this? This is why government has to fix this. Yeah.

For some people, a lot of people, this just goes against the grain. It's very easy for folks, I think, Chuck, to fall into a trap where, you know, if your government says we'll help you with everything, then you just sit back and hope for the best that they will. And that's not working out very well for many people.

John Stossel, we thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate having you on the program. Folks, check him out, StosselTV, JohnStossel.com. Obviously, it doesn't sound like Facebook's going to be the best way to follow you going forward, but stay in tune with his work. YouTube is better. YouTube. Sign up for our email list. Perfect. There you go, folks. Go to JohnStossel.com. You can't cut us off.

And get that direct from the man. John Stossel, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate having you on the program. Folks, stay tuned. If you are a downloader, we do have a podcast segment coming up for you today. So stay tuned for that. Otherwise, Breaking Battlegrounds back on the air next week.

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Welcome to the podcast segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. Folks, if you're not already, make sure you are signed up on our sub stack. Sign up on our website. Get all the pieces that are coming out. Chuck's been doing some fantastic writing. We're going to have more and more content coming out there. So make sure you're subscribed. BreakingBattlegrounds.vote.com.

get all your, all your news is getting aggregated right there, folks. All the good stuff. Absolutely. Is it, is it time for, do we have crime news? Well, today's, uh, it's, I mean, it's a crime to me. It should be a crime. It should be a crime, but yeah, wait till you listen to this one. So it happened in Jefferson County school districts, which is in Colorado. Um, there was an 11 year old girl who went on a school trip to Philadelphia, DC and DC. And so, um,

The parents were made aware that if the kids went on this trip, all the females would stay on one floor. The male students would stay on another. They're in fifth grade. So they're not to be even on the same floor. Yeah, we did this trip when I was about in fourth, fifth grade, somewhere in there. And they were very careful to keep us all totally separated because otherwise you have a disability.

disaster on their hands. Probably didn't have this problem. But there was an 11-year-old girl who was assigned a room with three other students. Two of the girls in her room went to her school. And then there was a third student in her room that was a boy who identified as a girl that went to a different school. So they didn't know who this person was. They were just assigned to the same room. And the school had repeatedly told them and the chaperones not to allow boys on floors and girls on floors. And when the parents clarified this, they had said this wasn't even a topic that they

or a thing that even came to their mind that could be a possibility. So the 11 year old girl did not know she would be sharing a bed with this transgender boy until she was already in the room. All four students were in the room. The chaperone said, you'll be sharing a room with this person, whatever. They didn't know it was a boy at this time because the hair was long dressing as a girl. And I guess when after the chaperone left, then the

transgender male had disclosed that he was transgender and it I think the 11 year old girl the mom described as like didn't really know what was going on just knew like it like he was a boy yeah like there's a she would be sharing a bed with me yes she would be sharing a bed so she went to the bathroom locked herself in there called her mom her mom was on the trip but staying but was not a chaperone so was not allowed to like interact with the students until she ended up going into the lobby and

The student just left the room, completely went into the lobby, and then her mom then went and met her. And so when they called one of the principal that was there, and when he called the parents of the transgender student, they confirmed that he was transgender and that he was supposed to be in stealth mode. So that he was not supposed to... Stealth mode? Yeah, so like, supposed to be on the DL, don't be telling anyone what's going on. So they wanted to keep it a secret. They then went on, after this was all...

going on in D.C., they moved the transgender student to then room with other girls. And they were told, the three girls that knew he was transgender were told not to tell anyone else that he was a boy. You know, I'm really worn out

with this transitioning transgender issue. I don't know anybody who didn't talk, no one talked about it two years ago, right? I mean, I have one in my office space, a transgender woman in my office space, not in my office, but in my building, everybody's nice, no one's even questioned it, it is what it is, right? But now they're just forcing it. This is not right, what this school was doing. Because they're purposely keeping it a secret. Yes, yes. And what I don't like, many things I don't like about this is

I'm really concerned about the schools trying to tell these kids to keep quiet on things. This is dangerous. And this is happening more and more and more on many issues where schools are trying to create this relationship between

Hidden from parents with these students. Right. Right. And so many levels. It's just it's just wrong. And I don't understand how anybody with common sense views this as being right. No, I don't understand it at all, because, look, at the end of the day, there are really good reasons because kids don't have a lot of good judgment.

They don't have a lot of self-control. They don't have – I mean – That's why we don't let them drink underage. That's why we don't let them do a lot of things underage, right? Or we try to not. Which is why we keep the two genders separate when they're at those ages because you get a lot of ridiculously bad things that happen when you don't. Yeah. Again, I'm really – many issues are concerning about this story. But the fact that these schools keep telling these kids don't tell anyone –

It is horrible. This ties to so much else that's going on because this is the rot that the fish has rotted from the head all the way to the tail. Now, the head is the universities. Right. The tail is is your grade school, local grade school. It has been rotten from head to tail.

Because of this crazy ideology that's overtaken campuses. And we saw it on perfect display in Washington, D.C. Well, we saw it in Washington, D.C. this week. The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania testified in front of Congress. It was a complete...

A disaster. Matter of fact, for schools to tell people to prep for finals, they would have failed miserably, right? They did not do their homework. Basically, it was kill all Jews does not violate Harvard's vibe policy, right? And Representative Elise Stefanik said, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate the school's code of conduct or policies on bullying and harassment? For a moment,

Just think about this on college campuses. Think about how many we talk about protecting all these other fat phobia, all these other things. And you can't say anything. You misgender someone. They throw you out of the school. So the president of Penn, who needs to be fired. All three of them need to be fired. She wrote, replied back, if the speech becomes conduct, it can't be harassment. Yes.

So if we go out and violently attack a Jewish student— When you're killing a Jew, that's harassment. It could—well, it can be harassment. It could be. Yeah, yeah. It's not that it is, right? Well, they might be a dirty Zionist and deserved it, right? And the Harvard president, Claudine Gay, who should also be fired, said it can't be depending on the context. Everybody, you need to Google this and watch this testimony.

Sam and I were discussing earlier this week that 80% of Yale undergraduates now get A's. These Ivy League schools, why anybody would spend money sending any of their kids there at this moment is beyond me. But Kylie and I were talking this morning. Kylie, talk about a little bit. I think part of the problem in this too is DEI. Talk about a little bit what we spend on this. Well, so this morning I was trying to figure out how much universities spend on DEI. And the University of Michigan is one of the top,

spending universities. They spend $18.1 million, which is about $0.64 of their budget. Well,

The person that runs the program gets paid upwards of $431,000 annually. So it's actually quite a bit more because I've dug into this a little bit. So those are the numbers they'll give you. But then every department has DEI monitors that are part of that department. So they're not counting the people in. The hard part was trying to find a real number. There's supposedly 163 DEI personnel in Michigan. Right. Right.

The average university has 45.1 people tasked with this. That is an undercount by far. But huge. There's no way that's many. Huge. And the average salaries are $329,000 to $430,000. And you know how many of them should be employed? Zero. On Indeed right now, on Indeed, there are 409 university diversion inclusion jobs open. So the University of Michigan spends $32 million of their budget on...

Yeah, well, one of the things that all these DEI officers have done in lowering standards is

is they've actually really, really damaged. So the worst thing, it's one thing if you go through school and you end up with all this debt, but you have a degree that's a marketable degree, right? It's another thing if you have a degree that's a garbage degree like a lot of these DEI. But the worst thing that can happen to you is you go to a school that you can't get through, that's too tough for you, and you walk out of that school two, three years later with a mountain of debt and no degree.

And that is happening to more and more people as a direct result of these type of folks and their initiatives. I would submit to you, based on what they're doing at these prestigious universities, which they once really were, and for example, the story about Yale, 80% get A's, that

someone having an associate degree at Scottsdale Junior College or Paradise Junior College here are probably more educated than anybody going to Yale right now after two years. They're certainly more likely to be a good employee. Probably just a good human being, too. I want to go on to another subject I found very interesting. Two law professors, Robert Jackson of New York University and Joshua Mitz of Columbia, released a draft of a paper that makes a case for

There was a significant spike in short selling in principal Israeli company EFT. Exchange traded funding days before the October 7th Hamas attack. Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack and dozens of Israeli companies traded until Aviv. Translation, there were people who, knowing the attack was coming, bet the stocks of Israeli companies would fail. Wow.

There's just some evil people in this world. And that's like a villain movie that James Bond would be called in to solve the problem, right? Well, it also, yeah, it's that. But I hadn't seen that piece, and now that I'm thinking it through, I mean, part of the problem with this is

All of those folks knew, but the intelligence services missed it. Oh, 100%. One of the issues is, and, you know, kind of one of the funny things, the story of Jack Ryan, if you read the books, they don't really do a good job in the movies and the video. Yeah.

But his value to the CIA was that he had made a ton of money on the stock market and he understood it inside and out. And so he could follow international financial transactions in a way no one else in their house could. How big a hole does this expose in the intelligence services that they don't have those people because nobody who makes money goes into that type of career? Well, it used to be a very prestigious career. Most of them came from Ivy League schools. Right. Ivy League schools aren't producing this type of intellect anymore. They still come from Ivy League schools. They're just not coming with the intellect because –

Of all the things we've been talking about. Another interesting thing I saw today, a couple more points here before we turn off. Rasmussen reports found that 40% of Democrats, New York City Democrats, support tearing down statues of George Washington. 40%. And while 82% of U.S. voters have a favorable impression of George Washington, only 49% have a very favorable opinion. That's insanity. There is just a real rotten society right now that...

Well, it's the fish head. Yes, it is. The universities. All this comes from the universities. They have started – what was – and I really – people get mad when I say this, but I blame Obama because when he came to his reelect and he realized how unpopular his legislation was, both Obamacare and the other things he was doing –

He unleashed the forces of racial strife to win reelection. He unleashed the darkest corners of academia, elevated them, gave them grants, gave them – I mean government weighed in and elevated these dark and frankly to my mind evil elements that were breeding in the darkest, dankest corners of our universities. They're doing nothing any different.

than the Chinese providing fentanyl to be sent in the United States. It's all about creating division, contention, and you cannot survive as a society without it. One final note here. The four biggest government unions spent $700 million in 2022 on Democrat campaigns. Think about that, folks. The National Education Association,

American Federation of Teachers, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which you've dealt with, Sam, and Service Employees International Union spent $708 million on politics, with 95.7% of that going to Democrats. Remember, folks, these Democrat unions are the same people who turn around and negotiate their salaries with the same people they have elected. That they have elected. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, look, this is why government pay and benefits is ridiculously bloated, why every government agency is ridiculously bloated. And it is – I mean one of the problems is you can go pass an infrastructure bill, but you're not going to get any actual infrastructure out of it because the money all just gets sucked down by these government employees. They never deliver anything. It's time –

Frankly, if you basically played eeny, meeny, miny, moe and fired half of the government workers in this country, nobody would notice the difference the next day except those people. Exactly. Well, folks, we hope you had a great week. We appreciate our guests today, wonderful guests today. Yeah, Bill Gertz, John Stossel, thank you so much for joining us. Fantastic. We appreciate Kylie's Corner again about a very depressing news. Next week, let's do something happy. Next week, we'll be happy.

The holiday season's coming. Let's get some spice on it. Folks, we hope you have a great weekend. Follow us at BreakingBattlegrounds.vote or wherever you download your podcasts or any of our stations. Have a great week and we'll talk to you soon.