American Majority founder Ned Ryun joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to preview his upcoming bipartisan panel discussion at the University of Chicago about social media and democracy, and his latest articles for Breitbart News warning of China’s economic colonization and calling for an end to the Financial Stability Oversight Council.
Ryun said his own view is that social media has been “really refreshing” for political debate.
“It’s allowed greater accountability, greater transparency, greater connection with constituents and politicians, et cetera,” he said. “But I’m sure there’s going to be people from the left screaming bloody murder, Russian bots, media manipulation, et cetera. So it’s going to be interesting. I’m looking forward to it.”
Kassam suggested the answer to complaints about Russian media manipulation is to remind the left that they should have listened to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s warning about Russia in the 2012 election, instead of mocking him.
“Mocked him!” Ryun agreed. “I mean, Obama said the 1980s called back for your conventional approach to Russia. The other thing, too, that people forget – Politico reported earlier this year that the Obama administration was warned, I believe it was in either 2014 or 2015, be on the alert, Russia is looking to up its efforts to meddle in the U.S. elections. Which, by the way, we know they’ve been doing this for decades. But the Obama administration was warned. Quite frankly, from everything I’ve seen, they did nothing.”
Kassam noted that the United States has interfered in the elections of other countries as well.
“It’s kind of what you’re supposed to do, Raheem, to be completely, brutally honest,” Ryun said with a chuckle. “If you are a world superpower, you’re supposed to be meddling in elections to impact and promote your interests. Is it right or wrong? I don’t know. We can have that conversation. Is it something that a lot of the superpowers have done for decades? Absolutely.”
Turning to his new pieces for Breitbart News, Ryun said his thoughts on China’s economic colonization crystallized during the recent election for prime minister of the Bahamas.
“President Trump has been talking about currency manipulation. Bannon has been talking about how China has been tearing out the beating heart of American innovation with its intellectual theft. But this story in the Bahamas is kind of interesting because it is the first time that I can see, that I’ve been able to track down, that China has gotten involved in a private construction project in which it has really screwed American interests to benefit itself,” he explained.
“I’m talking about the Baha Mar development, three and a half billion, that was supposed to be about 12 percent of the GDP for the Bahamas. It’s really an interesting story, Raheem, that people should be aware of. Again, it’s in our backyard. This is only a couple of hundred miles off the Florida coast. To see this economic colonization of the Bahamas by the Chinese state through its auxiliaries is a really interesting story that I wanted people to be aware of,” he said.
Ryun’s article on the Bahamas will be published at Breitbart News on Wednesday. On Tuesday, his article on the Financial Stability Oversight Council was published.
“This is a holdover from the Obama administration and really from the 2008 fallout,” he said. “It’s an oversight committee in which they came, the Obama administration essentially said to non-banking entities, ‘You’re too big to fail.’ Well, of course, that brings in a massive regulatory burden, up to $8 billion a year. Some of these, including MetLife, have sued to get out of it saying, ‘We are financially stable. We don’t need this regulatory burden.’”
“The issue is right now, Raheem, we’re in a new administration. Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Department can deal with it. They have not dealt with this. They have not pushed it aside and said, ‘We’re moving on. We do not need this. We do not need this regulatory oversight.’ And so MetLife has sued and gotten out from underneath it, but there are three other entities that are still fighting it and trying to get out from underneath it,” he said.
Ryun held up FSOC as an example of the “Obama holdover” problem plaguing the Trump administration.
“We don’t need this regulatory burden on these companies,” he argued. “They want to get out from underneath them. And yet, Steve Mnuchin has not done this yet, and we’re in November of 2017.”
“What I want people to understand, again it’s something they should read: unelected regulators is what the left wants,” he warned. “This is one of the prime examples of unelected regulators going into our private industry and over-regulating and causing significant problems – again, massive, billions and billions a year. This is always what the left wants. They want the expansion of the state, even into private corporations.”
“That’s the one theme if people are looking at that piece and understanding it: we do not want unelected bureaucrats and regulators anymore. It is a holdover from the Obama administration. Steve Mnuchin should have already moved on this, hasn’t moved on it, and I hope that he will in the next few weeks before the end of the year. We’ll see,” said Ryun.
Kassam likened FSOC to the bureaucratic mechanisms employed by the European Union to wield power without having to worry about elections and worried that multilateral trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could bring portions of the U.S. economy under the control of transnational bureaucracies.
“TTIP, by the way, is the complete diametric opposite of economic nationalism. It basically says to every other nation that is a part of it – which would have been every European Union member state – ‘hey, by the way, you can come into our country, undercut our prices, take our labor, move our manufacturing jobs.’ And by the way, it would have nullified the Buy American Act as well, which is a massive thing when you consider government spending and American manufacturing. If you think America is ruined in its manufacturing sector now, which many people believe it is, it would have absolutely, totally annihilated it,” said Kassam.
“That’s right,” Ryun agreed. “I have these conversations: ‘Trump’s into isolationism.’ No, he’s not. Trump is interested in actually putting our interests first and protecting our economic interests. Where he thinks it’s best in our interests, he will make those deals. At the same time, a lot of what has been happening has not put our interests first. Not the interests of our businesses, it’s not put the interests of American workers.”
“And so when you see him trying to renegotiate these deals, you know what? I’m all for it, because we have been screwed, and these globalists, these people in the previous administration – quite frankly too many in this administration – have put the interests of other people in front of ours. This is about America First. That’s one of the things we should never forget,” he urged.
Ryun agreed with Kassam’s point that the libertarian ideal of “free trade” is impossible when every other country in the world is using protectionist measures to shield and subsidize their key industries.
“We are saying, Trump is saying, we are not going to play this game by the rules that you have laid out anymore. We’re going to play the game by the rules that we are going to lay out, and the rules that we are going to lay out are going to benefit Americans – our economic interests, our businesses, our workers,” Ryun said.
He summed up the approach as telling America’s trading partners, “We’re going to do what you have been doing for decades, and in the meantime undercutting us and our country.”
“We’ve been sitting here watching it happen underneath our noses. All of a sudden Trump comes up and says we shouldn’t do this anymore, and people lose their minds,” he said. “It really highlights the fact that, you know what? This is about America. This is about putting our interests first. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s not jingoistic, Raheem. It’s just saying we love this country, we think this country has been one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to the world, and we think it’s time that we actually prioritized our interests. There’s nothing jingoistic about it. It’s just saying enough is enough. We are putting a marker down and saying we will now play by our own rules, not by yours,” Ryun contended.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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