Cliff Sims

Up until just a few years ago, the Thrift Savings Plan was investing in Chinese state-owned companies.

I was ahead of my time.

All right.

So you knew not to sign up before it was cool not to sign up for it.

So they had to pass a law to basically say, we shouldn't be doing this.

That's just one example.

And certainly, members of the military didn't do anything wrong.

And the people that are managing those investments on their behalf.

But we've got to be willing to say to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, we've got to call these people out and say, it's wrong what you are doing.

And I'm very hesitant ever to draw comparisons to the Nazis.

But it's analogous to like, would you have been wanting to be invested in German state-owned companies in the lead up to World War II?

Would you have ever invested at the height of the Cold War in Russian companies or Soviet companies in the lead up to the Cold War, in the middle of the Cold War?

I mean, there's some real parallels here.

But that's not popular to do that.

especially for politicians, because those same people that are making a bunch of money off of that are the people that are donating the most money to campaigns in this country.

So being willing to take very difficult political stands is another thing that I think is very, very important.

And I could go on about this all day, but the other thing that we have to understand is

from a principle standpoint.

We didn't get here overnight, and we're not going to get out of it overnight.

The difference between the Chinese threat that we're facing today and what happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War is that our economies were not intertwined the way that ours are with China.