All right, The Wall Street Journal reporting that the West
is struggling to break
China's dominance of the rare earth minerals that are critical
for defense and green technologies.
Iowa Congresswoman Ashley Hinson joins us now.
So congresswoman, China is mining like crazy.
They're mining all the stuff we need for our high
technology and all this green push,
and they're fueling all the mining with coal
while we walk away from coal.
This sounds like a national security issue to me.
Is that how you view it?
Absolutely. Not only a national security issue,
but this is about the livelihood of our economy here
in the United States.
And if we continue to rely on China,
our adversary for these critical minerals instead of mining for
them ourselves,
we are basically seating our authority and supply chain for
defense products,
for innovation in the energy sector as you mentioned.
And again, as we just heard that report about our
vulnerabilities in this country,
we need a lot of those materials to help keep
our critical infrastructure on the mend and and safe for
our consumers as well.
So I see this as a huge national security vulnerability.
How much of that vulnerability is also connected to the
large amount of Chinese nationals flooding our southern border?
Oh, absolutely. These two things are interconnected,
right? So the Chinese are subsidizing their critical mineral mining
to the tune of billions of dollars every year to
try to undercut the United States.
And then they're sending their single military aged men across
our southern border in droves that we just had someone
arrested in Iowa,
a Chinese national, who had come across the border.
So we know that this is happening on every state
as a border state.
And in fact, we've seen an
8000% increase in Chinese nationals from
2021 through 2024. So this is totally President Biden's doing.
President Biden is the illegal immigration president.
He is ceding authority to China,
both on our southern border and with his economic policies.
Look what he's done on E VS,
that's completely incentivizes Chinese companies,
not American companies. So again,
we're seeing that authority. China could really flip the
switch at any moment. You heard the mention of Volt
Typhoon.
So we have those vulnerabilities where we know they've hacked
into our systems and now we know that they have
thousands and thousands of people here in the United States.
I am so glad you brought up hacking the system,
Congresswoman, because the raw materials are one issue.
The plants that they're sending across the border are another
issue,
but we're talking about AI in so many different realms
now,
and the vulnerability potentially of our grids and how China
may be using or harnessing the power of AI for
nefarious purposes.
What do you think?
Oh, absolutely. They are going to weaponize this technology against
us.
It's why it's so important that
our China Select Committee is doing the work to kind
of dig on where investments are actually going in China.
It's why we've made the effort to get Hayside delisted
from the NASDAQ because they did an IPO here in
the United States,
a Chinese owned company that has a huge market stake
on LIDAR.
Where do we think all those American taxpayer American dollars
are going?
They're going right over to China to then fund technologies
and development not only of LIDAR,
but of a Rai to be used against us.
So these things are all interconnected.
And I think here in Congress,
we certainly are aware of it and we're trying to
put pressure on the administration.
It's why we've pushed back against this EV mandate that
again incentivizes Chinese critical mineral manufacturing.
And I think it's, it's a little ironic here,
you know, this this climate agenda coming out of this
administration,
they want clean energy. China is not producing clean energy
at all.
They mine with slave labor.
So they're putting kids to work and then they're burning
more and more coal every single day.
So I just think it's a little short sighted and
frankly,
the wrong policy. They power our infatuation with green,
with the dirtiest coal in the world.
And somehow the left cheers about that.
Congresswoman, we got to leave it there.
Great stuff. Thank you. Thanks for having me.