How We Should View The Situation In China With Senator Sam Brownback – How should we view the situation in China? Are we in an unspoken Cold War with the Communist Party in China? How does this involve the Ukraine, and should we help them? Tune in to learn the answers to these questions and more with our guest, Senator, Ambassador and more, Sam Brownback.

Air Date: 03/14/2022

Guest: Senator Sam Brownback

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

 

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live. And we’re taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. Be sure to visit our website today at wallbuilderslive.com, where you can get archives of the program, make your one-time or monthly contribution, and also, just get some great links to great information where you can begin to help us restore America’s constitutional republic.

My name is Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. And I have the privilege of being here with David Barton. He’s America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders. And we just have a great, great honor of helping our fellow Americans rediscover the truth that made America the greatest nation in the history of the world. We’ve been losing a lot of that greatness because we’ve moved away from those principles.

But here’s the good news. The timeless principles of liberty, God’s laws, the laws of nature, and nature’s God, if you say the way the founding fathers did, none of that changes. God set these things in motion. So if we do the right things, if we put the right principles in place, we get good results; if we put the wrong principles in place, we get bad results. So we don’t have to despair when we see bad results out there. We trace it back to the bad leaders and the bad principles being infused into the culture. We change those leaders, we change those principles, and we can get back to some good results.

Alright, David, coming up here in a little bit is Senator, Governor, Ambassador Sam Brownback, he’s done it all. I mean, you’ve known him throughout this whole thing and been a great friend to WallBuilders, but real treat to have Sam Brownback with us today.

David:

Well, I want to take you back earlier. How about Ag Commissioner Sam Brownback?

Rick:

I didn’t know that.

David:

Yeah, that’s what he was in Kansas, he was the Ag Commissioner. And he had agricultural background. And he is US Congressman Sam Brownback, he’s US Senator Sam Brownback. He’s Governor Sam Brownback. He is Ambassador Sam Brownback. He’s presidential candidate Sam Brownback. He is such a good guy. We’ve known him for a number of years. And he is such a guy that puts his faith and really lets it work in his life. I’ve watched him do things across the years are just absolutely amazing. For example, Kansas, do you know why Kansas is called Kansas?

Rick:

No, I don’t actually.

David:

It’s named after the Kansas Indians. Do you know where the Kansas Indians live?

Rick:

In Kansas?

David:

No, they don’t. They were chased out of Kansas. Sam Brownback goes as governor and advised them back end and had a special reconciliation ceremony, he said you guys are treated so bad in previous generations. And we want to make that up to you. And he got a white buffalo for the tribes and gave a white buffalo, a very high honor symbol, holy symbol. And he wanted to work reconciliation with those tribes.

And he actually had people driving the borders of Kansas and praying around the borders of Kansas, and praying for God to forgive them for things they had done in the past that shouldn’t have been done. Actually, in the US Senate, he’s the guy who introduced a resolution in US Senate to apologize that America never pass an anti-lynching law, if you can imagine that, 200 attempts to pass an anti-lynching law. We have about 4,800 people who were lynched, and we never passed a law on it.

Now, I will point out that those 200 attempts were all killed by Democrats. And that’s just a historical record. But Sam went on record and got the US Senate to apologize, issue an apology for never having passed an anti-lynching law. He has always been in reconciliation and doing the right thing, acknowledging wrong that exist. And boy, there’s not a better defender of America than he is. So he’s not just trying to be woke and headed in a direction saying how bad America is. He’s just got a really good balanced view. And he’s just always been a straight up guy with just so much strong character.

I love the fact that he was religious liberty ambassador because unlike a lot of the religious liberty ambassadors we had before, and they weren’t very religious, and they weren’t very good ambassadors. Sam understands faith, and he understands cooperation of faith. So he did a great job. He was really, really good in so many areas.

So, we saw an article he did on China. And from the religious liberty standpoint, he was the religious liberty Ambassador under Trump, and knows very much what’s going on in the world with religious violations or religious attacks. And he’s got a lot to say about China. In particular, after we just went through the Olympics, and we saw how bad China wasn’t so many things, we thought it’d be good to get his perspective on what can we do with China? How do we kind of try to help get them turned around? Because they really are terrible on a lot of human rights areas including religious liberties.

Rick:

Real treat today to have Sam Brownback with us. Stay with us, folks, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

AMERICAN HISTORY

This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American History. Too often today history education excludes great black heroes from the American founding, such as Lemuel Haynes. Haynes, abandoned as a baby, pioneered churches across upper New England. He became the first black American to pastor a white congregation, to receive an honorary master’s degree, and to be ordained by a mainstream Christian denomination, the Congregationalists. He was a soldier during the American Revolution.

And in his churches on George Washington’s Birthday, he regularly preached sermons honoring George Washington. Even late in his life, he expressed his willingness to go back to battle if necessary to protect America, which he called a Sacred Ark. American history is filled with numerous examples of black heroes who are largely ignored by mainstream education today.

For more information about Pastor Lemuel Haynes and other colonial patriots, go to wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

Welcome back WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Always good to have Sam Brownback with us. I don’t know whether to call you Senator, Ambassador or just friend, but Senator, Ambassador, friend, love you, brother, appreciate you coming on the show again.

Sam:

Happy to be on your show. Delighted for you guys, this work and I really appreciated it. You continue to push strong what you’re talking about. You’re the basis for so much of what we need to know about in this country and push. And I’m glad you’re out there.

Rick:

Well, we appreciate always getting to team up with you, so many years of doing the pastor’s briefings with you and working on other projects and just appreciate what you continue to do and enjoyed your interview on Epic Times, and just talking about basically that we need a new Cold War to deal with this Chinese regime. And David said, man, we got to get Sam on and talk about this. So thanks for coming on and sharing with us. You know, I think people are beginning to see China as the problem. They really didn’t even as Trump let people know that over the last four or five years. But they’re beginning to see that. I loved your interview. And I wish we had done more with the Olympics to highlight the atrocities in China. But it doesn’t seem like they did; it seemed like they got a pass.

Sam:

Well, I didn’t think they got a pass at all. Anytime in politics that you can get sports interest in something political, it’s a win for the political side. And there was a lot of interest in the human rights and the human oppression story that was taking place in China. Most of it was in the lead up. But some of it was during when players were having to buy burner phones because they didn’t know if they’d be tracked and different reporters couldn’t go to certain places because the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t let them there. That all seeds itself into the global public.

So I think China was expecting a PR coup, and I thought they had a PR disaster in this Olympics. I was pleased. And then a number of companies are having to really tow a line. They can’t say I’m the proud sponsor of the Beijing genocide Olympics, like, which is what they would normally be doing, proud sponsor of this. They were having to kind of really high and then the NBC coverage of it for as far as the viewership was terrible. I thought, oh, and all, that worked out well of telling the public about the Uyghurs, the forced labor situation, the concentration camps that are taking place, and breaking into a consciousness in a broader cross section of people that need to know about it.

Rick:

Well, that is a good perspective. I appreciate you sharing that. I was going to ask you about the corporations, just the advertising part of because it was something you had mentioned in the interview. And clearly, the numbers were horrible for people watching it. So that does show that people did say, hey, I’m not going to participate in this. What did you think about the advertising and the companies themselves? It sounds like you felt like they really kind of had to almost hide from this one?

Sam:

I think they did. They were locked into long term contracts. I still think they could have pulled back on it and should have done that. But Western companies right now are what’s propping up the regime in China. And what we’ve got to do is put pressure on our own companies not to be the ones that propped up this communist regime that’s persecuting people of faith all over their country, and is the model persecutor and is developing the high tech systems for religious persecution that they’re going to spread around the world that we want to stop from spreading.

So we’ve got to go really at our own companies that say, no, get out of there, pick your economy, you’re either going to be associated with the US economy or the Chinese economy, the Western economy, or the one that’s in the China, Russia, Iran sphere, and make them pick. And I think we just increasingly have to put pressure on our own companies that you’re not going to be able to play both sides of this any longer. This isn’t cold war. Xi Jinping picked it. Russia’s now in a hot war. And the Chinese are backing the Russians. We don’t want any part of that, what this disgraceful, aggressive action civilian killing in Ukraine that the Russians and President Putin are doing, it’s disgraceful to be having taken place in 2022.

Rick:

Yeah, I want to come back to that back. Back to those businesses real quick, though, because it does seem like there are those who are just man, they’re going to go for the profit no matter what in the global ramifications and principles and all that means nothing to them. But then there are those who they’re realizing the bad actors that China will be in business and they’ve been messed over by the negotiations of different things. And then there are those who are, I think, answering the call that you just mentioned, and that is to basically say out of patriotic duty, I’m not going to prop up this regime that ultimately can destroy everything about the free enterprise system. Is that a fair assessment of kind of the lay of the land of the businesses out there?

Sam:

I think so. But much of the businesses are pragmatic. They are so hyper critical of anything in the US. They’re pulling out of Georgia because of the Voting Rights Act. And yet they won’t criticize China for having a million Uyghurs in concentration camp because they’re Muslims. I mean, okay, come on, guys, have a standard here in this. But they don’t get any pushback on not criticizing China, and they do get pushback if they do criticize China. So I just think we’ve got to raise the cost ourselves and say, okay, you got to pick.

I thought that the Forced Labor Act that Congress passed regarding the Uyghurs was a real watershed piece. It was saying if you’re a company that’s buying products out of forced labor, you’ve got to break that out of your supply chain, or we’re going to punish your products in the western marketplace. Boom, a number of companies had to start picking. I think we’ve just got to keep that pressure.

These companies, their objective is to maximize income for their shareholders. That’s their role. They see that they can pick sides in a US spy, and it still is good for their shareholder interest. But it’s harmful to them if they pick sighs against the Chinese, we’re going to have to make some pain on the other side of this so that they pick right and they pick the US economy.

Rick:

It makes perfect sense. Okay, back to your comments about the hot war and what Russia is doing right now. How does, in your opinion, China, watch this happening and be more encouraged to do something with Taiwan, to be more aggressive all around the world? I mean, how do you discourage that part?

Sam:

You know, I thought, President Biden’s going out of Afghanistan was disastrous, and it was disastrous in more ways than just for the Afghan people; it encourage the Russians and the Chinese to move. And so you see then President Putin, it takes a while to get your military all lined up. And he moves in this incredible way, the biggest land war in Europe in 70 years against a country that’s not hostile to you whatsoever. It’s even your own cannon blood that you’re going into. But his assessment was that the United States wouldn’t respond.

And praise be to God, the Ukrainian people are responding and making this expensive. And so I think the Chinese were probably just watching what happens in Ukraine. If it seems like it goes pretty good, then we’ll just go on Taiwan. Well, now they’re seeing well, the US may not have responded much. We’ve responded some, but not near like what they thought. But the Ukrainian people did, and a Taiwanese people will. And so my hope is that well, they may have read that the United States won’t do much. They’re seeing the fierce resistance by people that are just proud to have their own country and they’re willing to stand up and fight for it. God bless this Ukrainian patriots for what they’re doing.

Rick:

Amen. Amen. Well, let me ask you this. If you ran for president, if you were in this position right now, and I think we all agree it’s Biden’s weakness that allowed this to happen, no doubt and the bungling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and literally handing over that Bagram base to China at this point. I mean, all these things that he did over the last year, set the stage for Putin to do this.

But if you were handed the situation right now, how far should we go with regard to aid to Ukraine and stepping in there? And where does it become mission creep and now we’ve got our boots on the ground? Or should we do that? I mean, what would you recommend at this point?

Sam:

You know, whatever a man sows that will read. And when President Biden pulls out of Afghanistan, that sowed a big seed of attack. And when he goes to the UN, and he says, I’ll do endless diplomacy. Well, Putin and Xi Jinping hear that and say, okay, you won’t use your military, I’m moving. I would not have done either of those moves. I would have also put in a lot more military high tech equipment into Ukraine ahead of time.

And if we could have bolstered and supported some of the Eastern European troops that are part of NATO to be in their hole helping the Ukrainian people early on with equipment, particularly aircraft, we could have been in the air with drones, and on early basis to where you disarm those guys to the gills, make this a very expensive thing, just blister those convoys. I think that raises the price tag for Putin a great deal without putting US boots on the ground. That is a problem. And who knows what President Putin’s actual mental state is now on, whether he would actually be willing to use nuclear weapons, which is a scary thought that who had these around they haven’t been used for 60 years, 70 years. And thank goodness, we don’t want to see that happen. And yet, Putin is obviously threatening to do that to keep us and others at bay.

Rick:

It seems like Reagan’s phrase continues to be the real answer “peace through strength”, and when we show weakness, we don’t get pieces. Is it really that simple?

Sam:

Well, it is, but there’s a twist to it. The world knows we have the strength to do it. They just don’t know if we have the will. They know we’ve got a big gun. They just don’t know if we’ll shoot it. And the thing about President Trump was he was unpredictable enough that they were willing to think, you know, God might actually use him. And that’s what we’ve got to do is to show is its peace through strength, but we’ve got also show a willingness to fight; you actually have the courage to do this and to stand up for the guy that’s being attacked.

Rick:

Last thing, Senator, the Cold War, just the terminology, even I immediately think of sufficient investment in the intelligence community. And we’re at this place right now where it seems like we don’t do that enough. And we also now have concerns about how much of our national apparatus has just moved to the Left. We know China’s doing that, right. We know they’re spying here and there. They’ve got their machine working, for sure. Are we doing enough of that in knowing that this could be an extended cold war with China?

Sam:

I don’t have a good knowledge right now to be able to say one way or the other on that. I do know we’ve just got to adapt ourselves to a cold war footing and force our economy to pick between China and the United States. And they’re going to pick the United States. This economy is much larger. You have the rule of law here. You’ve got stability. And in China, in any single day, Xi Jinping can wake up in the morning decide to take your company. And so they’re going to come here.

I just think we’ve got to make people and make companies make investments start choosing. And China pick this fight, we didn’t. But we’re going to see it on through. And I also think we’ve really got to stand up a lot more on this concept of religious freedom. This was one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union, is what they wouldn’t let the Jews emigrate to Israel, and they picked on the evangelicals, and that became a global issue. China is horrible on religious freedom.

You can’t name your child, Mohammed, if you’re there. We need to take that all throughout the Muslim world and say, do you want China to lead the world? And if so, this is what they say and do to Muslims. And they need to know that. Just like what they’re doing to Christians in fallen gong, Buddhist. I think we’ve really got to get out there and trumpet a lot more about what an autocratic led world looks like. And it looks like what Putin is doing in Ukraine. And it looks like what the Chinese are doing to their own people.

Rick:

Isn’t it interesting that fundamental freedom of conscience and freedom of religion that made America so popular and made us grow, and become the greatest nation in the history of the world, it’s still back to that principle, exporting that principle, and defending that principle for other nations is exactly what you’re talking about. That’s what you did as ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom. So you know, that’s a rallying cry that people will; if we raise that banner, people will rally, right?

Sam:

They will, because 80% of the world moves by their faith, not as much in the Western world, it is in the United States, but not as much in Europe. But most of the world moves by what they believe. And we’ve got to tell them you are free to believe whatever you want to believe as long as you practice it peacefully. And the Chinese say no, you can’t believe, you cannot believe in a higher power than the government. The government is the highest power and the authority. And that is a fundamental difference in people’s daily lives that we need to show around the world. This is the difference between freedom and autocracy, and it applies to your very personal existence in the views of your own soul.

Rick:

So appreciate your expertise. Senator Brownback, serve in the House, the Senate and Governor and Ambassador, we need your wisdom right now. And I appreciate your input. I appreciate you spending time with us. How can people follow you right now and keep up with what you’re doing these days?

Sam:

I’m on a Twitter account. So they could go on that and follow me on that, Sam.Brownback. I’ve got a Facebook page that people can go there as well. And so they want to pick us up with, we’d love to have them and people listening in and looking at it.

Rick:

Sounds great. We’ll have those links today at wallbuilderslive.com. Thank you so much, sir. Appreciate your time today.

Sam:

Take care. God bless you all.

Rick:

Stay with us, folks. We’ll be right back with David and Tim Barton.

THIS PRECARIOUS MOMENT

Hi, this is David Barton. I want to let you know about a brand new book we have out called “This Precarious Moment: Six Urgent Steps that Will Save You, Your Family, and Our Country”. Jim Garlow and I have coauthored this book. And we take six issues that are hot in the culture right now, issues that we’re dealing with, issues such as immigration, and race relations, and our relationship with Israel and the rising generation millennials and the absence of the church and the culture wars, and where American heritage is, our godly heritage.

We look at all six of those issues right now that are under attack and we give you both biblical and historical perspective on those issues that provide solutions on what each of us can do right now to make a difference. These are all problems that are solvable if we’ll get involved. So you can grab the book, “This Precarious Moment” and find out what you can do to make a difference. “This Precarious Moment” is available at wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Sam Brownback for joining us as well. Back with David Barton. David, you know, even the story you told at the top of the program about what he did with the Indians, they’re respecting their faith, listening to him in the interview, being able to rally people around the world to respect freedom of religion. I just love the fact that as a Christian guy, he’s respecting other people’s faith and not trying to force things on anybody but saying he wants the free market and allow people to live their faith and allow people to debate faith. I just love that, what a great example.

David:

Well, that was a biblical position as well. Because if you look at Joshua, when Joshua got the children of Israel to the Promised Land, a lot of us have in our home hanging those plaques from Joshua 24:15, that says, as for me and my house, we choose to serve the Lord. Well, that’s great. But look at the first part of what he said. He had the children of Israel in the plain, he said, now the guys, you got a choice. You can choose the God of the Egyptians whose land you left, or you can choose the God of the Amorites under whose land you’re about to go, the Promised Land. But as for me, and my house, we choose the Lord, we’re going to serve the Lord.

So even back then you had a free market approach, God did not coercively say, here’s the only faith you can have. Now, He makes clear in the Bible, what true faith is, but it’s up to you, whether you choose that or not. And so Sam has that understanding, you don’t get things done by coercion with faith. When you do, you turn people into tyrants and hypocrites and bigots, etc. So he’s really been good on that.

And even as he understands that, I mean, talking about how that the free market can change what businesses do with China. Just pointing out that look, the free market, we need to make businesses choose between China and the United States. And if you make them choose one of the other, and they’re going to go with the freedom the United States. Now if we let them have the freedom of the United States and also support all the persecution, and death and stuff that’s going on in China, well, they’re going to do both. But if you make them choose one or the other, they’re going to go with freedom. And so that’s a free market choice, and having that choice. And so I thought he was really, really good in the way he set that up.

And I thought he was really good in talking about even the Olympics out that it really went better than I would have thought because I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that the ratings were super low, I knew that. But that advertisers really didn’t want to be seen with that. And that it really was good from that standpoint, and that a lot of people learned a whole lot about how bad China was. And as he pointed out, this was not a good world preview or world presentation for China in the Olympics.

Rick:

Yeah, I agree. I thought that they had not taken much. Because I didn’t watch any of it and I only saw a couple of headlines on the reduced rating. So I was really glad to hear him correct me on that and say no, no, it was actually a victory in terms of exposing a lot of what they’re doing and having the reduced ratings and people not want to do business with them, that was actually good to hear.

David:

You know, I thought it was really important too, where he pointed Afghanistan, and he said Biden pulling out of Afghanistan is what encouraged Russia and China to do more aggression. And I go back to what George Washington said, one of the best ways to preserve peace is to be prepared for war. I mean, just walk around with a baseball bat in your hands and people know you might use it, you’re going to leave the folks alone.

And what we see with Biden’s he’s not willing to use that, he was not willing to leave 2500 troops behind. And Bagram and military said, if you leave 2,500 troops behind, you can secure the nation and keep it stable. He didn’t do that. And last week, the report came out that the number one nation in the world for persecution of Christians is now Afghanistan. It is abominable what’s happening.

You know, we did a lot of humanitarian stuff back when it was going on, we’re still having to do that now. But now we can’t be there. We just happen to find doctors to help with all the chopped off arms and chopped off hands and all the butchery that the Taliban is doing to kids who are kids of Christian parents and whatnot, it is really bad. And Biden did encourage that aggression by not being willing to stand up at any point, even with 2,500 troops. And now we’re seeing what Russia is doing. And so that’s not a good position for America to be in. But Sam has great insight and what’s happening around the world. And I think he’s put his finger on the right things in so many areas.

Rick:

Well, we’re out of time for today, folks, what a treat to have Sam Brownback with us. You can get more of our programming on our website wallbuilderslive.com. Be sure to check it out. Make your one-time or monthly donation there and help us reach even more people with truth as we restore America’s constitutional republic. Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders Live.