Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has warned that enemies of the U.S. from the Chinese Communist Party are now “inside the gates,” during an address to lawmakers on Friday.
Pompeo told Republican lawmakers that he is aware of the threat posed by China, but he did not appreciate “the scope and the scale and the nature” of the close proximity of the threat until he became director of the CIA.
“This fight is inside the gates today … Containing where they are today, leave them in our institutions of higher learning,” Pompeo said.
“It leaves them in our high schools; it leaves them in our PTA groups. It leaves them inside our city councils and our state legislatures all across America,” he continued.
“This is a deep effort that has been going on for 50 years,” he added.
“Republicans and Democrats alike refuse to deal with it, and we started to and did.”
“We not only got it right, and frankly, I think there is some bipartisan basis, I hope, that we can continue to get this right,” he said.
Thebl.com reports: In order to offset the CCP threat, the Trump administration had worked tirelessly to build an “enormous coalition” with the Indians, Australians, Japanese, South Koreans, and some areas in Europe.
This amounts to 120 international telecommunications companies refusing to have any Chinese technology in their system.
“This is about the West and our ideas. This is not the United States versus China, and we have to get this right, and we need partners and friends to do it,” he said.
Pompeo continued, “A substantial number of international businesses have seen the political risk in China as different from what they thought it was three or four years ago. … This is a place that has fundamentally shifted under Xi Jinping in a way that is different from the Chinese Communist Party of even 20 years ago.”
Pompeo explained that to resist the CCP takeover comes at a cost, but it is worth it.
“You all need to remind everyone that if your kids and grandkids desire to live in a Western society, one that is not dominated by Chinese telecommunications infrastructure, and Chinese ideas and philosophies that come from the East, that are very different from the rule of law and basic human dignity that we have, then there’s going to be some cost attached to that,” he said.
“It’s not free to push back. There’s a reason we didn’t push back for 50 years,” he said. “For 50 years we told people, ‘You could have it all. You can get cheap stuff. You can outsource our jobs to these other places. We can allow them to do this; don’t worry [about] the leverage they gain from having these enormous supply chains. By the way, put TikTok on your phone, no worries.’”
That proved to be a dangerous mistake, as the information is then stored by the CCP to be used in the future however they see fit.
“We didn’t articulate for them that you put TikTok on your phone and your children’s most private personal information is in the hands of some really really bad actors that mean really ill for America. They may just store it in the cloud or the hard drive for a while, may not put it to use, but collectively, the data set that they develop will be used in a way that puts our young men and women at risk and puts American freedom at risk,” he said.
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