yeah. i mean, one thing to say that you have to remember china is very different from japan because there are so many chinese. they don t have to be as productive as we are to become the world s largest economy. so by some measures they already are. but they are also having a lot of problems. the chinese model, it really does seem to be coming apart at the seams right now. and the u.s., look, america has been, at least it is a very i think our openness, our openness to different people, to different ideas, our creativity that comes out of that has been our underlying strength. and i mean, if you think about how did america do so well in high-tech. there are a lot of reasons. a lot of that is in silicon valley, the claim is, the anecdote is that venture capitalists won t back a company unless it has a few east asians involved because we need the diversity of ideas and diversity and our openness, our openness to new ideas has been our huge strength. i do worry given everyth
were stonewalling the investigation. i think it is safe, what the hell is going on at dhs? and the story going on to note this only became to light because of two whistleblowers who went forward with the information that the inspector general had been notified as early as february. yeah, no, it raises even more questions about just how irresponsible and careless, and i m being kind, the secret service was or if indeed there was a nefarious cover-up here. we ve been through thetimeline repeatedly the last couple of days but it is worth repeating. there was a request to preserve the cell phone records as early as december 2020. that request repeated in january of 2021. and in the days after january 5th and 6th, the dates missing where texts were deleted, there was another question saying, hey, you need to keep from congress, telling secret service
here? that is a good question. and you re right because i don t answer that question in the story, joe. there is a lot of context and back story to the inspector general for the dhs. first off, he was appointed by donald trump. second off, he has been trying to hold on to his job under joe biden. but also sort of stay underneath the radar. he s been criticized for failing to properly investigate a lot of things that happened during the trump administration. and i think about a year ago i wrote a story in which his staff had gone as whistleblowers to congress complaining that he had blocked them from investigating secret service role in helping trump forcibly remove protesters from lafayette square in june. you know the black lives matter george floyd protesters, a
their president. jake, thank you. i don t think we could understate that enough. that so many people that were there, were there because they ve been hearing from donald trump for a year that the election was rigged. that the election was stolen. donald trump would spread conspiracy theories inside of the white house, the same conspiracy theories that we talked about people would spread on websites run by chinese religious cults. and it would be bizarre conspiracy theories, but he spread those conspiracy theories and it would be coming again from the president of the united states. so you if followed the president of the united states and he was telling you all of these things, at least 20% were there, 40% were there because they believed the election was stolen. if you look at those numbers. it is a cruel abuse of power. yeah. well let s go back for a minute, mika, to secret service story. i wasabt, on the
and our openness, our openness to new ideas has been our huge strength. i do worry given everything else that is going on that we might undermine that. and you talk about the china model here coming apart at the seams. yeah. i think it is a story that we haven t talked about enough. that people haven t talked about enough. the miscalculations that president xi has made, whether you look at hong kong or the continuing human rights abuses, you look at him going after jack ma and other entrepreneurs. just the quality of life there. even if you just talk about how horrible the environment is there, this is a story, again, that we aren t discussing enough. but talk about the missteps china has made over the past five years. well i think the most striking is the inability to change course when something isn t working.