Natalie Winters

And they're always sort of carried out through these shady euphemistic terms.

Like I said, it's these weird memorandums of understanding.

It was under Fauci, I believe in the early 2010s, that they signed an agreement with the National Natural Science Foundation.

of China, which has collaborated, like I said, with the PLA.

I mean, it's military leadership, even leaving aside the whole military-civil fusion.

There's no such thing as a civil scientific laboratory over there.

But the highest levels of the National Institutes of Health are signing official memorandums to increase research capabilities with arms of the PLA.

So this is sort of customary use.

And Steve, I think the other broader answer to your question is it's not even just about the rare earth science or this lab.

How did Washington DC ever outsource ROK, whether it was CFIUS or any of these companies, outsourcing any of these materials to China?

How did we get to a point where they own nearly 100% of the production capabilities?

Even Mountain Pass, right?

because there's several companies, there's several case studies where CFIUS green-lighted the sale of U.S.

Mountain Pass before they did what they're doing now with the magnets, where they were sold to Chinese companies, and they were lobbied, and CFIUS approved it.

So I don't know whoever would let that happen, so that's why I find a lot of this talk about the Chinese rare earth domination a little performative, like most things on China are.

It's always a justification to broaden out the defense budget, like we're seeing happen now, but...

Well, and I also think that it intensified dramatically in sort of the interregnum period between both Trump administrations under Joe Biden.

And I don't just mean that because they had a bunch of free shots on goal.

But after the first trade war, though I hate that term, I think China also realized that that was where their key vulnerability was.

And if they could bolster that and buttress their ability to control both the rare earths, critical minerals, magnets, all that stuff themselves, but also, like I was saying, the refinement and the production capabilities...