Host Steve Bannon interviewed Peter Navarro at the Freedom Summit about America-China relations amid the coronavirus pandemic that was started by the Chinese.
Bannon: We are at the Freedom Summit here to talk about defending ourselves from all enemies foreign and domestic. As you know if you listen to War Room Pandemic over the past couple of months we think we’ve identified the number existential threat to the United States and that is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). My guest is for the opening and I only came off sea duty to be here at the summit.
Navarro: How are you today commodore?
Bannon: Thank you. Good. And I’m glad to be back ashore. I want to thank Dave Brad. Charlie Kirk. Jerry Falwell, Jr. for everything they’ve done to stand up and to put this summit on under very trying conditions given the CCP virus and what it’s done to our country.
I want to start off with something today to reinforce the power that the Falkirk Center is having. That this fight for freedom is having. Throughout the last couple of days, there are protests throughout the world by Chinese citizens that have defected and gone to the West. We have a whole series that I want to open up before we turn to Peter Navarro.
(Live protests clip plays)
Bannon: First off, how powerful does it feel to have the meme that you started? I don’t know if it was on Maria or Jake Tapper. It was about a month ago. You said the CCP lied and Americans died. I tell you who it really resonated with initially were people who were expatriates and defected to the West because they understand that everything the Chinese Communist Party says is a lie. How did you come up with it first and how do you now feel that it’s now going throughout the world.
Navarro: Steve, first of all, it’s great to be here. And I want to say to you that it was the genius of you Raheem and Jack to figure out long before the World Health Organization would admit it that there was a pandemic coming from the Chinese Communist Party. Your show War Room Pandemic was named that long before this was officially declared.
Bannon: We would love to take credit but that was the citizens of China that told us hey when you shut down Hubei Province the size of France and Wuhan it’s something big.
Navarro: When I see people around the world carrying that sign CCP lied Americans died, French people died. Whatever. It grieves me that I don’t see these same signs in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, and New York and everywhere because Americans have died. We’re approaching 140,000 deaths now from the virus. This is not just a slogan. Let me walk everybody through the history right now.
Bannon: You wrote a book and one of the ways we came to know you on the Trump campaign and really came to know you. You’ve written a couple of books. One is Crouching Tiger. The one you wrote in 2006. The Coming China Wars. And in this book, you pick up two topics we are going to talk about.
You talk about pandemics because of your experience with SARS. And you talk about flooding. I want to go to the point of what you said in 2006. Did you understand the seriousness of this? You understand how this stuff can explode. So walk us through that and how you got the idea of calling this the CCP virus.
Navarro: Page 150 in The Coming China Wars Steve doesn’t just talk about this possibility it says basically because of the way the Chinese Communist Party runs that country there was a high likelihood, this is 2006, there is a high likelihood that China would create a viral pandemic that could possibly kill millions. 2006.
And the reason why I made that prediction was because of a close study of how China operates. And back then the big concern there was the animal husbandry. The way they did their fisheries. The filthiness with which they created what I called a viral soup. And this was a couple of years after SARS and I looked at it and said wow this is coming again. The other thing is this Three Gorges Dam.
I don’t know if it’s going to collapse today, tomorrow, or next week but I do know that at some point and I said it in the book that Three Gorges Dam is a disaster waiting to happen. The Chinese officials themselves have talked about the corruption in the construction of that dam that made it comprised of what they call tofu rather than concrete.
Bannon: I just want to make sure because I think this is important for the Freedom Summit and important for the Falkirk Center and Liberty. When this book came out in 2006 if you read it, it’s chilling because Navarro goes through in detail how a viral pandemic can start in China. He also goes through how the Communist Party is weaponizing water coming from the Himalayas through all of Asia to have control of Asia.
He talks about the potential of all these dams breaking. This book was not greeted with five-star reviews in The New York Times. This is like Rosemary Gibson and her IX and about the supply chains. The Falkirk Center, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Charlie Kirk, and all the people at Liberty University. You are going to get the same blowback that President Trump’s got and the administration. you were dismissed as a crank, right?
The China wars were coming together. China is getting more liberal. The citizens are benefiting more from this and all the stuff about the pandemic and the dams. That’s all at the beginning of these kinds of right-wing cooks tat are looking for bogeymen all the time.
Navarro: Don’t forget I was in a university environment out in California at the time. Like many universities, my own was bringing in Chinese Communist Party money hand over fist to support it. When you do a book like that pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their back. That book reads today like a government report.
What we have in front of us is the greatest existential challenge of our lifetime. It’s not just the pandemic its a lot of other things. If I may, I’d love to talk through why CCP lied and Americans died is a sign that should be up in the hands of protesters in Seattle and Portland. And elsewhere.
So lets if I may let me walk you through the timeline as I see it. We had in November, the first confirmed cases of the China virus and the people involved in that were very close proximity to the infamous Wuhan wet market. But also there were two biological virology labs there that some have I can correctly call P4 Labs or perhaps P4 weapons labs.
If you take Occam’s razor approach to figure out where did this virus comes from and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. There’s a lot of evidence that points to that virus escaping from one of those two labs. But even if that’s not true what transpired after that is a history of shame by the Chinese Communist Party because in December and January what the party did was hide the virus from the world.
They used the World Health Organization as a shield to disguise human to human transmission and they almost certainty of a pandemic. And during that time they did several things. First, China is usually a net exporter of personal protective equipment (PPE). The masks, the gloves, the goggles.
All the things that our healthcare workers need on the front lines to fight the virus. What China did during that time was vacuum up all of the PPE all around the world. They effectively hoarded that. So when shortages popped up everywhere from Milan to New York and people got infected or died because of that that tracks right back to the CCP.
Bannon: How did you find that out? You actually could go back and watch as they were doing this because they have to do some reporting, correct?
Navarro: Actually those statistics come right from a release by the Chinese Communist Party. The data. The data in China almost always lies but in this case, they let that one slip out including the fact that it was two billion masks. After the break, I want to go on a talk about the other thing that happened which effectively guaranteed that Americans would die because the CCP lied.
Bannon: We know that the Taiwan CDC notified WHO on the 31st of December in 2019 that there was a SARS type outbreak in Hubei Province in Central China that had human transmission and community spread. We know for a fact that they had this.
(Tex in New Zealand live feed plays)
Navarro: You have the great firewall of China and you have like over 50,000 cybercops in uniform listening to everything that everybody says. So let me see here. I’m sitting at home and some pollster calls me and asks do you love the Chinese Communist Party? Hmm, what am I going to say? As for those seven percent they are in Shang Shing now making Nike’s.
Bannon: They are in prison somewhere. You’ve seen these major Ivy League universities they are business partners with the Chinese Communist Party.
Navarro: And a lot of these CCP officials went to Harvard. We head of the Chinese trade delegation that came here on January 15 to sign that trade deal forgot to tell us there was a virus and he attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. During the critical December, January, February time when China was hiding the virus from the world Steve what they did was they shut down their own domestic travel.
They wouldn’t let people go anywhere. You know why? Because they thought people would get infected and that it would spread throughout the country. Do you know what they also did? They let international flights go around the world with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals. You know some of them were infected. You know the Chinese Communist Party knew that there was a likelihood that some of them were infected.
What was the thinking there when they lock down their own country but sent that virus out throughout the world. They didn’t have a strategy. All I know now is we have a pandemic that came from China. The CCP lied and Americans are dying.
Bannon: Now it’s catching throughout the world that the CCP lied and Americans died. CCP lied, Canadians died. I keep saying that even if it’s not from a bio-weapons plan or from the Wuhan lab and it inadvertently escaped on some sort of failed gain of function experiment that they should not have been doing.
If you go back, the chain of title of their decisions from at least mid-December of 2019 has now been documented. Dr. Navarro, you said you are shocked every day when you look at Seattle. When you look at the protesters in Portland. You never see a sign CCP lied, Americans died.
Navarro: Disappointed not shocked.
Bannon: I want to talk about the medical supply chains. But in the timeline that you lay out, the Chinese came over here and signed a trade deal in mid-January. I think it was the 15th. They brought a whole contingent. Which is kind of shocking looking back over it is we knew for a fact that they knew at the time they had a massive epidemic if not pandemic in central China. It’s pretty stunning to people and the mainstream media never wants to talk about it because they really take kid gloves when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party.
Navarro: Several weeks earlier before that January 15 signing Xi Jinping actually had a high-level meeting with the Chinese Communist officials and basically warned them about the demon virus. So we knew that those top officials new this. You know the historical parallel. Cordell Hull December 5.
Two Japanse diplomats come to the state department and basically talk to Secretary of State Hull and ask for some more time so that they can negotiate a peaceful end. And meanwhile, Admiral Yamamoto was carrying in place a strike group for that day of infamy. And you tell me, Steve.
Bannon: What is so shocking about it is that the mainstream media never goes through the timeline and connects the dots.
Navarro: The worst part is they shook the president’s hand.
Bannon: Shook his hand knowingly.
Navarro: They shook our hands and smiled. They broke bread with us. It would have been nice to tell us that there was a China virus with human to human transmission raging through China. They had to of known that.
Bannon: His title is actually General Secretary Xi. We don’t refer to him as President Xi. He’s general secretary of the Communist Party. Just like Gorbachov was the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Xi is the general secretary of the Communist Party.
I’m not sure he is the president because I don’t believe that is a legitimate regime. I think its totally illegitimate. We know from a fact because under pressure of how out of control it was getting in Wuhan and Hubei that he had a conversation in the first week of January and talked to a senior level cadre saying we got to get on top of this.
Navarro: Let me tell you something else that really should disturb the American people about this. The January 15 phase one deal was about a lot of things. But most of all what it was about was China promising as it had back in 2015 to stop stealing America’s intellectual property. This is the seed corn of American prosperity. The Chinese Communist Party steals up to half a million dollars of wealth from America every single year. They promised again in this deal.
But you know what? After they spawned the virus, hid the virus, and sent it around the world what did they try to do next, Steve? Steal the virus. They are actively hacking the computer systems of the people who are trying to develop a vaccine to protect the American people from the CCP virus. You can’t make this stuff up Steve. You can’t make it up.
Bannon: One of the reasons in Houston they shut down the consulate was because of the hacking.
Navarro: This is what bothers me about the protesters in places like in Seattle and Portland. This is what bothers me every day about the so-called mainstream media on TV. They refuse to acknowledge these truths we hold to be self-evident that the CCP has lied throughout this and was directly responsible for what’s going on here in America. It’s not just that we are approaching 140,000 Americans that have been killed.
We’ve put over 40 million people on the unemployment lines because of the CCP virus. And we’ve spent literally trillions and trillions of dollars. We’re doing a stress test in real time of our financial markets and our monetary system. And this will not end well unless we have people who are competent to handle this in this country. And politically, it scares the hell out of me to think that this country could be turned over to Biden and company.
Bannon: I think it’s undisputed that no administration has ever stood up to the Chinese Communist Party like the Trump administration. And President Trump I’ve said from the beginning has been very statesmanlike in this. He has an advisor and people on the outside that are super or ultra hawks and he’s been tough.
Navarro: He’s been tough. But he’s also bent over backward to give the Chinese Communist Party the chance to do the right thing. And they’ve exposed themselves now as not wanting to do that. For me, the fact that they would try to steal the intellectual property behind the vaccine after they signed a deal in January to stop stealing our intellectual property. For me, that’s full circle.
Bannon: Well, it doesn’t surprise me because I think what they want to do is come up therapeutically or have a vaccine and force the West to kowtow. This is all about kowtowing. That’s all they understand. They don’t understand win-win. It’s always they win. Remember the only reason they exist is because of Western technology that they’ve either stolen forced technology transfers. And in some cases, we’ve sold it to them or given it to them. And American capital. And access to the American market.
Navarro: You’re the political guru or strategist. Why hasn’t the American been able to draw a straight line from all of the chaos and problems that we are experiencing now straight to the CCP?
Bannon: Because I think now and that’s one of the reasons that the Falkirk Center and others are in an education process. I don’t even think this is about politics. If you look at the Pew Center study the American people understand that the rise of the CCP is not for the benefit of the world or the Chinese people. That’s why I think it’s so powerful because we’ve been able to understand or target what the problem is. The problem is not China. The problem is not the country of China.
You look throughout the world where the Chinese people have rule of law. They have democracy. They have freedom of speech. Freedom of assembly. Whether it’s in Taiwan or Hong Kong. Throughout the world. They are thriving active great members of society and the countries. So we know that there are lies about, oh if the CCP didn’t keep a firm hand on China it would devolve into warlordism and chaos and anarchy is a bold face lie.
And the reason that the media doesn’t do it is that they are in business with them. Hollywood is in business with them. The major media companies are in business with them. The other day they had an editorial in The Washington Post. The Jeff Bezos Washington Post. Not an op-ed and editorial page and what they said after Pompeo’s speech is that the Trump administration is taking us on a dangerous path.
If you see what O’Brien said and FBI Director Wray. Bill Barr’s magnificent speech in Michigan and then capped by Pompeo’s at the Nixon Library. This is a dangerous path of confrontation, right? What the business community and capital markets want is that they’ve always wanted to kowtow to China. And here’s the reason.
The party of Davos’ business model is predicated upon slave labor in China and serfs and workers throughout the world. Nothing more than Russian serfs. That’s the business model. They are relentless. This administration is the first to stand up and say hey look we can’t do this.
We have to have an organized approach to integrate you into the American economy. That is why the Lighthizer, Navarro, Trump deal that the Chinese walked away from after 18 months of negotiation was the deal that would have integrated them into the world’s economy with fairness, equality and allowed the Chinese people environmental protection. And they walked away from it.
Navarro: Let me say briefly some of the experiences that I’ve had and why I think ultimately we are going to win economically. Today for example I’m heading down with the president to North Carolina. What we are going to do is visit a company FUJIFILM Diosynth.
It’s a subcontractor to NovaVax. Now NovaVax is one of five companies that’s developing a vaccine in half or a third of the time that it normally takes. But what FUJI is going to be able to do is actually produce that vaccine to help us produce it in the hundreds of millions of doses by January 2021. If it works. Now here’s the difference.
In the past when you do vaccines you do them in stages, right? You try to find out what works and then the next stage is phase one, two three trials. You do safety and efficacy. Then at the end of that only if you got something then you can get the investment to make it happen at a manufacturing scale. The genius of President Trump is no-no-no. We’ve got to be ready. So instead of having this sequential process, we’re going to do it simultaneously.
Bannon: Concurrently.
Navarro: So FUJI as we speak is getting ready to mass up the manufacturing along with a lot of other companies around the world. I’ve seen that. Working with the president we stood up a ventilator factory Steve in 17 days using the Defense Production Act. 17 days and within three more days we had ventilators going to Gary, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. We are re-purposing our factories. We are learning to do this.
Bannon: A net exporter of ventilators.
Navarro: And the CCP is teaching us under duress how beautiful the American manufacturing machine can be. And tomorrow we’re going to be making another major announcement about bringing some of our pharmaceuticals back onshore. We were able to stand up N95 respirators in Arizona and Rhode Island in five weeks.
It usually takes at least nine months to build that. My point is Steve. We are at war. This is a wartime president. We are engaged in the most rapid industrial mobilization of our time. And the president is using the Defense Production Act to do miraculous things in therapeutics, vaccines, PPE as the China virus attacks us.
Bannon: Your entire time you came on the campaign. The entire reason that you kind of rose to prominence was your focus on this thing called supply chains. Seventy thousand factories are left. It really shocked people because you are the first guy to go relentlessly day after day after day.
The Chinese Communist Party with Wall Street and corporate America have taken the manufacturing base of the country over to China with the slave labor there. You also argued that hey, a fourth industrial revolution is a-coming. We have to be at the vanguard of that.
We pay for the research. We have high tech companies. Walk us through. Where do we stand today as being at the tip of the spear of the fourth industrial revolution and not just as the research center but bringing back those high needed manufacturing jobs?
Navarro: Steve, let me talk to you about why we lost our pharmaceutical supply chain. We were dangerously dependent on the rest of the world for our essential medicines. And guess what? Over 75 countries around the world during this pandemic have issued restrictions on what they export to us in order to help Americans deal with this deadly CCP virus.
But what’s really going on here is the standard reason Steve of why we lost our manufacturing, to begin with to China in all our factories. So you have three different stages of pharmaceutical production. You have what’s called the key starter materials.
The advanced pharmaceutical ingredients. And from those you the finished dosage form pills and injectables. And the problem we have with the key starter materials is its environmentally intensive heavy chemical kind of thing. So what we’ve done is we’ve offshored those materials to places like China and India where they have lax environmental regulation rather and they basically throw everything into their rivers and streams rather than treat it.
So we lost that. Then API the advanced pharmaceutical ingredients. The problem there is it’s very labor-intensive to make so you have the sweatshops of Asia and take those over. Then the finished dosage form interestingly enough is partly a tax haven problem. Places like Ireland which is about the size of Rhode Island or Delaware.
A very small place and because of the tax system there we buy a tremendous amount of finished doses from pharmaceuticals. What we’ve learned from this crisis is we have to bring those pharmaceuticals back. We have to bring our medical equipment back like ventilators which we’ve done.
And we have to bring our medical supplies like face masks, goggles, and the like. In the Trump administration, there is a full-scale effort and whole government effort to do that. Every day we are issuing new contracts and we’ve revived the textile industry in this country to make some of our masks and gowns and things like that.
And Steve this is the focus that we have to have if we are going to succeed in fighting this deadly virus as well as creating the kind of good manufacturing jobs that we’re going to need in a post-pandemic world. Because of this China virus, this CCP virus is a direct attack on some of the key sectors of our economy.
Airlines, hospitality, leisure, and sports. There’s going to be fundamental structural changes that we’re going to have to deal with. We’re going to have service sector refugees from our major metropolitan areas. And the only way we are going to succeed is with an economy. And President Trump is leading the way on this is by creating more and more manufacturing jobs and that requires on shoring our supply chains.
Bannon: You are going to North Carolina with the president today and why is this important?
Navarro: The end goal Steve is to have a vaccine and to have the time normally done. We are hoping by January 2021 that we’ll have at least 300 million doses of the vaccine.
Bannon: Phase three has already started. They are looking for volunteers. It’s the Manhattan Project.
Navarro: It’s called Operation Warpspeed. Rember the genius of Donald Trump who is the greatest jobs president in history has turned the whole CDC, HHS paradigm on its head. In the old days, it was stages. Sequence. Discovery. Clinical trials. Manufacture. Two years. Three years. Four years. What the president has let to be done is that we do this simultaneously while we are developing our vaccines and developing the manufacturing capabilities. Not just for the vaccines but for the pipe heads and the needles and everything we need.
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Photo “Steve Bannon” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
