Chris Fenton
speaker
150 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 9 Jul
Chris Fenton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's terrible. It's something that has affected me personally. I've been a lifelong Democrat my whole life. I did come out and vote for Trump in the last election. But I can say when my book came out, There was a lot of hesitancy from the left side of the aisle to allow me on those shows to talk about things that I experienced over 20 years working between the US and China.
I have lots of Chinese friends. I love that country. I have a problem with Beijing. But for some reason, the narrative was, oh, he's preaching Asian hate. or he's being tough on China or ally. And, you know, that's something that the right mega side of the aisle only deals with. So it was really disheartening.
I mean, I could do Tucker Carlson's and Laura and Bartiromo as much as possible, but CNN would never have me on. And it was really it was quite shocking to me to realize how bifurcated we were in terms of messaging and how powerful that bifurcation of messaging is.
Because as we're seeing, if you happen to just watch one side of the aisles media versus another, you're going to get completely programmed in one particular way. So a lot of times people ask me, well, how... powerful is the Ministry of Propaganda in China for influencing people in that country. I'm sure they want to uprise and overthrow the government someday, and we should help them do that.
And I said, well, have you ever told somebody that just watches Fox all day or just watches MSNBC all day long about the other side of the equation? They won't listen to it. And that's the same thing in China. That's right.
Well, the bigger issue is that we just, without having civil discourse and the ability to look at things from different perspectives and to hear and talk about those different perspectives in a constructive environment, we're never going to be able to solve problems, needlessly say, even be able to prevent them down the road.
I fear the fact that because of the way we've bifurcated everything and closed off other dissension or dissenting opinions in terms of the pandemic, We're actually never really going to figure out exactly what happened, sort of the way the FAA might look at the black box.
Well, we rely on so many complex components of things like iPhones that it would be hard to believe that there isn't some sort of manipulation that they're able to do. I mean, I've been heavy on lobbying to get rid of TikTok for that very reason. Obviously, that's a platform that heavily skews one side of a narrative versus another.
We did ban it, at least in its form that it's in now, although it seems to still have some sort of
clingy tissue that keeps it alive um but yes i look beijing plays a game of chess they play a long-term game um you know if if israel can figure out how to let uh allah hezbollah hang on to these phones for as long as they did and then use it at the right moment when it creates that great chess move um you can guarantee beijing can do the same thing and they probably have been planning for that moment and that scares me it really does oh yeah
Yeah, I thought that was an interesting one, though, because in a way you could argue like showing calorie count at a restaurant. You know, if you knew all this stuff was made in China, given all the issues that we have, it might start to influence people to buy more American product. So I don't know if it was something we should have shied away from.
I think we should have embraced it and said the American people should know where these things are made.
Well, you know, there's a lot of... So say it's Chris. You know... Chris's opinion here. I think the conspiracy to me is in the, I guess, incompetency of different levels of government in China that allowed it to spread. I think there's a lot of incompetency all over the world. We've all seen it in multiple facets.
The idea that this was some planned attack on the world and it still affected their own people, which, by the way, we have no idea the real numbers. I can tell you there's a lot of anecdotal evidence I have from people that have seen, you know, large crematoriums and lots of different sort of cults coffins ordered for certain areas of that country.
And there's a lot of speculation that the numbers were massively bigger than anything that we heard of. But to kill your own people just to get this thing out, it seems like there's probably a better way to do it. But the incompetency around it really allowed it to spread.
And the fact that no one here came straight with the American public saying what we were actually doing over there and why we were doing it and The problem with what we were doing, if it ever got out in the public, which it did, that was really just disheartening to a lot of us.
All right, well, I'm not an economist, but for my book, I did study quite a bit of macroeconomics in terms of our industrial revolution, how we built it in the 1800s, and the fact that Alexander Hamilton really led that charge and created all kinds of trade protectionist policies to build our infant industries. A lot of that included
tech and IP theft that we did to Europe to help build our own domestic competitors to theirs, the cotton gin, various other things that we did a lot of what China's playbook today is based on. Right. So if you look at how we built our middle class, our industrial revolution, it was on the back of massive trade protectionist policies, which tariffs are a big part of.
China over the last 40 years has taken 700 million people out of extreme poverty and put them into a middle class using that exact playbook. So if you're a case study historian, you know that A hundred something years ago or 150 years ago, we did it. It worked over the last 40 years. China has done it and it worked on a much grander scale. We can do it again because it's a proven concept.
But we have to stick to very strong strategies and make sure that we stick with it, even with markets falling. fluctuating and various other volatility that occurs because we do need time to onshore and bring back some of that manufacturing that's important to not just national security issues, but also as manufacturing here in the US tries to rebuild itself.
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