 We'll also talk to Wei Yu. She's the coordinator of a CodePink's China Is Not Our Enemy campaign, and we have a special guest host tonight. Medea is on her book tour. We have Jodi Evans, the other co-founder of CodePink. Yay. So we're going to start off. Oh, and we have a couple of actions tonight. So do stick around for those. We have a petition to Biden and to Congress stop all this fear mongering and move towards war with China. And then later, we are going to get on the phone for our capital calling party and tell our senators not to pass the restrict act, which would, if you can imagine this, usher in even more mass surveillance and appoint some sort of all-powerful panel to censor and ban certain social media platforms. We'll be talking about that tonight as we talk to Lee Kamp and Wei Yu and we'll also include a Q&A. So we'll ask you to put your questions in the chat so we can pose them to our guests. So with that, let's start off with some news updates from Jodi. Welcome, Jodi. Well, I think Jodi. Jodi, yeah. You're on with some news updates. It's so much fun to be here co-hosting with Marcy, the awesome Marcy Winograd. And thank you all for being here. I love CodePink Congress, and I'm super excited. We're gonna talk about China's Not Our Enemy, which is a three-year-old campaign here at CodePink. And it's when we saw that the same tools to drive war with Iraq were playing out on China, making them an enemy. The talking points were the same, exactly the same across main street media and platforms and hate was rising. These stories were funded by the NED and not available in any other sources. So it's super clear that they were gonna weaponize the hearts and minds of progressives to drive the war on China. And if you want more resources to learn about that campaign there at CodePink China, we've done a lot of teaching over the last couple of years and you'll hear more from our awesome campaign your way later. But first I wanna point out some interesting things in the media from this last week. First, UN human rights vote a couple of days ago that split the West and the rest of the world. It has never been this clear. The post Ukraine war and US sanction on Russia have moved the rest of the world back from US hegemony and they're creating a new world order. I saw in Iraq how the US strategy is to divide and conquer. We see it in Ukraine, with Iran, with Iraq, et cetera. But this new world order is unite and build peace. So it's separate divide and warmonger for unite and build peace. Developing countries are much closer to the needs of the people and the consequences of global warming. And as we know, war is the greatest contributor to climate change. So they are leading with peace. They're connecting around peace and the US becomes an even uglier warmonger if that is possible in this mirror. It was also wild yesterday to say Senator Rubio doing a political education on sanctions, seeing that trade is now happening in other currencies with other countries and recognizing that without US hegemony, sanctions will no longer be available as a tool of war. He gives it five years. At the rate things are moving, I think it's going to be less. And it was sanctions and the violation of human rights of sanctions that was the point of the UN human rights vote this week. So I think we all need to be aware since mainstream media is not going to make you aware that the world is changing and the US, the Ukraine war is horrific. The rest of the world sees it. Citizens of the United States and members of Congress are still in the fog of war. And it is our task as peace activists to make peace the safe place for people to live and the only place to be if you're a thinking person who understands that we're all connected. So I'm super excited to introduce you to our guest. Before we do that, I'm just going to give a quick update myself and then we'll go back to you, Jodi. So in terms of the headlines tonight, we see that Trump has pled not guilty on 34 counts involving falsifying documents to win the 2016 election. So that's the headline across the news spectrum tonight. But there are other, of course, very important events. Finland has joined NATO. Sweden is waiting to join NATO. Recently we just, many of you were involved, hosted a March 18th event that called for the abolition of NATO because we see it not as a defense of alliance but as an offense of alliance. We also hear in the news that the United States and its allies are considering an interim Iran deal. So we'll see what develops on that front. And I just wanted to invite all of you to our peace and Ukraine coalition meeting, which is tomorrow, 1230 Pacific, 330 Eastern. And at that time, we're going to look at an ad that we'll be placing or we're talking about placing in the hill, calling for a ceasefire and diplomacy in Ukraine. We will also take a look at the media, map the media. Who owns it? Where is the most traffic? What are opportunities that await us for op-eds and where can we have a voice? So do join us tomorrow if you can. And for now, I'll go back to Jodi to introduce our first guest. Thank you. All right, yay. Thank you for joining us, Lee Kemp. Thank you for also just making us laugh when sometimes we just wanna cry. So Lee Kemp is a writer, comedian, podcaster, news journalist and news commentator. As a television host, he presented the show redacted tonight for several years on the Russian state-funded network RT America until it was removed from the US Airwaves with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. Lee has just returned from the People's Republic of China and will share highlights from his trip and his thoughts about the role of the media in manufacturing consent for endless war. Thank you so much for joining us, Lee. Thanks so much for having me, Jodi and to all the amazing people I consider to be the best people are here right now. So thank you for being here and you all look amazing. Have you lost weight? You look great. But no, it really is great to be here. I did just get back from China. It was my first trip. I was there for only four days. So you can imagine I spoke to all 1.4 billion people in those four days. But, and I was there to speak at the Second International Democracy Forum they had there and I know that some people in the West may go, oh, that's hilarious for China to have a democracy forum. However, I think George Galloway, who was also there and also spoke, put it best. He said on stage, and he actually said he got this from someone said this on Chinese television that in China, you can't change the party but you can change the policies. And in the US, you can change the parties all you want. You can't change the policies are and further, as George Galloway further put it, the two parties in America are two cheeks of the same backside. And I think that's absolutely true. And there's examples of people actually voting and standing up in China and changing policies very dramatically in China. Whereas, you know, can't change the party but changing the policies. That sounds like actually a step up from the faux democracy we have here in the United States, the only country that votes on black box mystery machines that can never be actually seen to have counted your vote because it's patented coding. So there's many ways that our democracy is laughable but then the following week, this week or was it, I guess it was last week, Joe Biden had his democracy summit that invited a who's who of authoritarians and puppet regimes that the US has in power. You know, Netanyahu Zalinsky, just a few of them. And of course, Macron who is clearly listening to his people at the moment. So I think the American democracy summit was far more laughable than anything that came out of the Chinese summit or forum, which I thought was actually very meaningful. Had a lot of nations represented from around the world. I talked with senators from Pakistan. They had speeches from the former Prime Minister of Japan, former Prime Minister of Thailand. The head of the, one of the most memorable speeches was a speech from Frank Mimembe from the president of the Socialist Party in Zambia. And he gave an amazing speech saying that America, because Kamala Harris is in Africa or was just in Africa teaching them about democracy. And he of course pointed out how hilarious it is for the country that has coups, assassinated, sanctioned, gone to war with so many democratically elected governments. And then they come to Africa and want to talk down to them to tell them how to have democracy is of course, laughable if it weren't so sad. Other thoughts I, and you know, Jody you can jump in if I'm talking too long, but other thoughts I had was just how kind and understanding and informed the Chinese people that I spoke to of the 1.4 billion. Of course I spoke, I only got to like 1.1 billion I think I spoke to. No, I obviously only spoke to, you know, probably 30 to 50 people within Beijing, which is where I was. So I don't claim to know everything about China, but of what I saw, it was amazing. And also what I thought was really important, which is also my take on Cuba when I was there is that the people understand the difference between the American people and the American ruling elite that are in our government. And yet we're told in our propaganda that is pushed on us to conflate a people of a country with their government. You know, let's say you hate the Saudi Arabian government, which is understandable. Does that mean every Saudi Arabian is a horrible person? Yet we're told to behave like that when it comes to Iran or Russia or China that the propaganda tells us to hate that country and all of the people within it because we're supposed to hate their leadership. And I find that in these other countries, that's not the case that almost all the Chinese people that I spoke to like Americans and have so many of them had been to America and had an enjoyable time. So they see the difference between our militaristic leaders and the actual people in this country. And I think that's really an important difference. And that xenophobia, that hatred that is created from the US propaganda is really powerful and dangerous. And of course we're seeing it now more than ever against China, against Russia, against several other countries. And I think that is one of the most important things that we have to break out of. Oh, and one more point I wanted to make, you mentioned Marco Rubio talking about the fact that countries are getting outside the petrodollar. And I think I'm gonna say something that probably a lot of you may not have heard because I didn't even think about it or hear about it until very recently is that America gets a lot of our power right from the petrodollar. That's why we can print unlimited amount of money and our dollar still has power. The moment that fossil fuels is no longer sold and bought in dollars, our currency lacks power. We can't spend a trillion dollars on military and our military around the world, the windows, it's hugely impactful. But the part I hadn't thought of is you notice what else is in the name of the petrodollar. The word petro, meaning in the middle of a climate crisis, it is every motivation in the world for America to not get off fossil fuels, for the world to not get off fossil fuels and for America to, yes, despite the rhetoric, continue to make sure that fossil fuels are used all the time aggressively because that is where our power comes from, the petrodollar. So the moment that, so one, two ways that can dwindle the American empire or hurt the American empire is to have countries go outside of it, start using their own currency as many countries are doing. And the other is to stop the use of fossil fuels because the petrodollar will use its value if fossil fuels aren't being used. But, you know, so as we are sitting here in the middle of a climate crisis and people are in drought floods, tornadoes just killed a bunch of people, I'm sure their level of strength was increased by climate crisis. As we sit in the middle of that, no one on mainstream media, almost no one even in most activist circles is talking about the fact that America will never push to get outside of fossil fuels because that is where the American empire's power comes from. So I think that's an important point and that's another reason that China is pivotal because China is helping other countries to stand up and get outside the petrodollar. Thank you, Lee Kamp, podcaster, former host of RT, comedian who just came back from China. Thank you for making that connection. A lot of us may have not made that connection before that we have to burn fossil fuels in order to keep the petrodollar strong. So all the more reason to work for an end to the use of fossil fuels and for a multi-polar world. All right, I'm gonna introduce our next guest who is Wei Yu. She and I just wrote an article which should be posted in the chat. US war planners, court China's neighbors. Did you know that Nepal spurned William Burns? He was not allowed to land there. Read all about it. Okay, Wei Yu is the Code Pink coordinator of the China Is Not Our Enemy campaign. Wei was born in Tijian, China. She has lived in the United States since her high school years while in university pursuing her degree in sociology and international studies. Wei conducted an independent research project on neocolonial bias in global North academia. Wei has worked with several non-profit organizations serving women, racial minorities and other progressive causes. She is passionate about anti-imperialism and peace building. Wei Yu, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Marcy. And I just wanna say it was a wonderful experience working on that article with you. I did want to briefly mention, just talk about our article here. So I guess I'll just start with that. So recently, Victoria Newland, who we remember played a very important role in Ukraine back in 2014. She recently visited South Asian countries, Sri Lanka and Nepal to court these neighbors from China to in preparation for war. The State Department is offering Nepal $500 million in economic assistance, but we all know these austerity programs, they are hardly meant for the people, but we see the imperialism just like edging, just extending its claws closer to these countries that are geographically close to China. At the same time, the U.S. is also looking to militarize Sri Lanka, signing a new agreement that would effectively turn all of Sri Lanka's military bases into U.S. ones. So we talk a lot about this article and I encourage you all to read more about it, but that just goes to show this war on China, really it already started. We have our campaign in Guam about the militarization in Guam, but now we're seeing the same thing being played out in the Pacific as well. So yeah, and I'm also here to talk about TikTok. So here we go. So TikTok has been under a lot of scrutiny recently. The scrutiny of TikTok as a social media platform itself citing security reasons as these warmongers call it. This investigation, this scrutiny itself is hypocritical. We also saw the hearing where the TikTok CEO, Shou Sichiu, a Singaporean, who was grilled by Congress for five hours. And from that hearing, we saw how just blatantly, how blatant racism and also ignorance is in our hearts of Congress. And as a result of all of this fear surrounding TikTok, we're seeing these new invasive legislations, such as the Restrict Act being advanced and moved to the Congress floor. So these are the three main things I want to talk about regarding TikTok. So these warmongers are going after TikTok because of security reasons. They're worried that these social media, TikTok as a social media platform is collecting user data and sharing that data with China, who is our enemy according to the warmongers. But really, U.S. federal agencies have long used social media to perform surveillance on American people themselves. These surveillance also targets communities that have historically been marginalized. For example, the State Department used social media screening to discriminate against Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian communities under the Trump administration's Muslim ban. The DHS and ICE have used social media to monitor the activities of immigrants right activists. And back in 2020, we also remember that FBI have used Facebook as well as other social media platforms to monitor protesters who are protesting against racial injustice. In 2020, an FBI agent apparently was really fed up with all of these mass surveillance that he told the intercept. Men, I don't even know what's legal anymore. So we see already the U.S. government performing surveillance on its own people with social media as well as phone calls, text messages after 9-11. So we know this scrutiny on TikTok is really just hypocrisy. The U.S. is projecting its own invasive policies, blaming it all on this one social media company. Now, as this scrutiny is building up, there was a hearing in Congress with the House Energy and Commerce Committee a couple of weeks ago on March 23rd where TikTok CEO, Shou Zichu, again, Singaporean, was grilled in front of Congress for five hours. The Congress members repeatedly referred to him as Chinese, despite of a constant corrections and also assumed that he had ties with the Chinese government, despite constant corrections. We just see that this jumping to a conclusion and also categorizing all Asians, putting all Asians under the same category, this erasure of the diversity among Asians and Asian Americans. We also see this pageantry to target TikTok really made the Congress members force out of themselves. There was one instance I remember where a Congress member questioned how Wi-Fi works. And it's just kind of scary to see that these people who barely understand anything about technology is making laws for all of us about technology. And finally, moving on to the Restrict Act. We already shared an article about the Restrict Act in the chat and I think that article does a really good job talking about it, calling it Patriot Act on steroids, which I just love that expression because Patriot Act itself essentially gives the Secretary of Commerce the ability, the power to take down any social media, any online platform that is perceived as a threat to the US as a threat to US interest. And this will include China. So going under the disguise of a TikTok ban, they are actually placing this massive censorship for all American people. And we can see that's actually a cost of war for this war on China is that in creating an enemy and targeting this enemy, we are also losing our First Amendment rights. So these are the three things surrounding TikTok. The scrutiny itself is hypocritical. The hearing only showed how racist and ignorant some of our Congress members are and the Restrict Act is not just targeting TikTok but hurting all of our First Amendment rights. And thank you all for inviting me here. I don't know whose idea it was to have me talk right after the end. I hope I did okay. Oh, come on. Looking forward to the Q&A. That's great. Thank you, Wei. Thank you, Wei. You were killing me. You were wonderful. You were great. Both of you are great. Telling some of the problems with the Restrict Act, it also restricts any opportunities to litigate around the shutdown of social media platforms. So it's really a serious effort to censor all of us. We need to oppose it and we are going to call our house, or rather, our Senate. It's in the Senate at the end of this Zoom and say, hey, vote no on the Restrict Act. Make sure it doesn't see the light of day. Tell everybody you're going to vote no. So do we want to... So the other thing I think that's greatly is that you brought up this thing that's so important. We see it across the world when we go there is that the world sees people as people and they understand power. When we were in Iraq, it says you're not Bush, we're not Saddam. I think another piece of that is that research shows that people in China and people in Russia understand state-sponsored media as propaganda, but in the United States, people don't understand state-sponsored media, which is all of mainstream media is propaganda. They take it as fact. And that's what makes everyone so stupid. And also just the narcissism and individualism that drives the U.S. has everyone forgetting that we are all connected and that we are human beings. So thank you so much for bringing that connectivity back with you from China. Yeah, I'm glad you say that our mainstream media is state-sponsored media because they love to point to others and say, no, it's state media. But no, we have a corporate governance of a country here. This is, we are run and owned by corporate America and they also own the media. So it is all our mainstream media is state-sponsored media. They just don't admit it. Yeah, we closed the war economy. Yeah. Yeah, I was just looking at who owns the media and who owns the owners of the media. And I kept coming across two companies, BlackRock and the Vanguard Group. We'll talk about that at the Peace and Ukraine Coalition meeting tomorrow. You're all invited, 1230 Pacific, 330 Eastern. For now, Jodi's gonna tell us about a petition that we have up on the Code Pink website. So great, thanks Marcy. Yeah, so now that you've learned about TikTok and how it's being used as a tool for hate and war, it's just been added to the chat. If you could all just please click on it now and act so that we can tell Congress to stop using TikTok to drive fear and war towards China. And it doesn't even mention the fact that the members of the Senate that are pushing this own stock in Apple and Google and Facebook. And they will profit from this because it looks like the way out of this is going to be selling TikTok, which will be a for sale. And so everybody is yet again in this war economy making out out of the war on another country and their creativity. Yeah, and a footnote to what you just said, Jodi. In researching the media, I learned, I kept hearing, well, the Pew Research Group did a poll, a survey to find out where most people in the United States obtained their news. And this was a couple of years ago. And what they learned was that about half of the public gets their news from social media. One third from Facebook, not too many from TikTok, but one third from Facebook. And I thought, well, how is that possible? Because every time I post something that's newsworthy, political on Facebook, I'm sure that the algorithms are just burying it. But if I post a picture of myself with a cat, then I get like 150 likes. So I was wondering, how does this work? Well, the way it works is Facebook pays the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Wall Street Journal, and a whole host of very corporate, traditional media outlets to run their news, not out of the goodness of Facebook's heart, but because they're siphoning a lot of the advertising that those corporations wouldn't ordinarily get. So the bottom line is they're just giving us what we would ordinarily get in the corporate media world. So we're not hearing anything alternative, for the most part, on Facebook or reading anything alternative. When it comes to the news here. Everybody raise their hands who's taking the action. Let's see a raise of hands. Yeah, yeah, back to the petition. Please note in the chat if you've signed. If we can look at the gallery and see some hand raising. Everybody hand raise your hands. It's just a click away. Come on, let's see some hand raises. Yay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Let's stop the hate. And let's do a Q&A. Let's have Lee back. And Wei Yu. And we will take questions from the chat. If you want to ask a question, I have a question for Lee. First of all, thank you so much for joining us tonight, Lee. I want to know about RT. Now you hosted a show for RT. What happened with that? What is RT still being broadcast in the United States? So what was banned? What wasn't banned? Can you please clarify for us? Yeah, a lot of people have gotten this confused or wrong. So well, first of all, I want to start out by saying, yeah, as mentioned at the top, yes, so I had this show that I wrote and hosted called Redacted Tonight for eight years, weekly show, yes, it was on RT America. However, in that entirety of those eight years, I was never told what to say, what not to say. I had complete freedom, which was why I knew that I would never find anything like that on American media or at least American-owned media. So that's why I was there is because I had the freedom I could not get and would not have gotten anywhere else and had never been offered anywhere else. So anyway, I just want to throw that out there. So there had already been a lot of restrictions taken on RT America, part of it. This is several years before. This is basically after Trump got elected. This is several years before the invasion. So they basically made it so difficult for RT America to operate, the managers had to register as foreign agents and everything that they had separated from RT International, created their own company, an American company called T&R. So RT America was technically a separate entity, now still funded by RT International. So I don't want to act like the funding was coming from somewhere else, but it was its own entity. So RT International obviously still exists. Some of the other RTs exist. But when they basically, from what I can gather, and they didn't tell us any of this, but from what I can gather, they made it, and I will say this, the shutdown happened so instantaneously. One day we're acting like everything's fine and we're just going about work as usual. The next day they say, hey, 100 employees, thank you for your time. See you later. We're shutting down. And so it was so instantaneous, but I think that the US government made it basically impossible for them to operate. So you may say that they technically decided to shut down, but I think that it was done because, and I could tell, I knew some of the top managers in RT America, and there were tears in their eyes. Like they didn't want to shut it down. So it basically just made it impossible to operate. There would have been no funding, et cetera. So that's what happened. And on top of that, within that same week, and this show is how corporate America is one big, messy entity, one big octopus with a bunch of tentacles, in that same week, my Redacted Tonight YouTube channel with a quarter million subscribers got banned globally, over 2,000 videos banned globally. It's basically a digital book burning. My Spotify podcast was banned, deleted. And of course, I continued to be shadow banned on Facebook and other platforms, but all of that happened within a week, showing coordination, showing a literal conspiracy to shut down voices that dare question US propaganda. And I've tried to continue, obviously I have leakamp.net where I do my work. I've been working with Mint Press and some others, but it was amazing to see, this is supposedly the United States. Supposedly we have this freedom of speech and freedom of media that other countries don't have, and we're supposed to be different. And it just showed, we are not different. When push comes to shove, we are not different. We don't have that freedom of speech. We don't have that freedom of press. And it just became very evident, yeah. Well, thank you for clearing that up. Rather involved, but I appreciate the explanation. Thank you, Lee. So Jodi, a question from you, please. So yeah, Lee, I would just, what were some ideas that you had about China before going to China that really changed as you came back? Like, is there anything just personally where you were like, oh, that's surprising, or I thought it would be different? Well, one thing is, and again, I'm just speaking anecdotally. These are the people I talked to, but people seemed open to criticize their government, to criticize the network that they were working for CGTN. I don't know that they would do it on air, but I've seen people who were afraid to criticize their government. This was not that. Like, I was talking to a young person who was working with CGTN, and I said, how do you like it there? And she said, oh, I don't like it. I think there's censorship. And I was surprised with the honesty. I was like, oh, this is, so clearly she's not afraid to speak. The other thing is people, a lot of websites are banned in China. I think there's some understandability to it. It's understandable that a country would not want CIA connected entities like Google and Facebook, which had in-qtel, CIA venture capital arm from their early days, would not want them data mining their citizens. There's some understandable, it's somewhat understandable, but everybody there that I spoke to had a VPN in order to get around that. And they weren't worried that they were gonna get caught for the VPN. Like, there was a lot less fear than we had been told that I thought I'd see. And the other thing is I think there is a cultural difference. I'm sure many of you have been to Asian countries and you've probably seen some of this in various Asian countries and I'd never been to a single Asian country. But there is a real kind of respect for elders, respect for authority, even in like a manager and a lower employee at a hotel. And so I think that people see that there aren't a lot of people on the streets in Beijing setting things on fire or breaking store windows. And they say, oh, that's clearly just endless repression. And it's like, I think a lot of it is probably, there's a respect for like, maybe even police, maybe even these various groups of authority that the US doesn't have. I'm not saying they're, I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong. Like I'm proud of my disrespect of police in the United States, but I just don't think it's the type. I think the so-called repression is very much mischaracterized as I saw. Thank you, Lee. Question for a way. Actually, this is a two-part question. So the first part is Faisal posted it in the chat, a question about the military agreement between the United States and Sri Lanka. What's the status of that? The SOFA agreement. And then with the Restrict Act, just wondering what the chances are that the Senate would pass this. I saw that it had 25 co-sponsors. So I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on that too. I just want to clarify that the military agreement, I believe it was signed a few years back, but this year it's come, time has come for a renewal of this past agreement. And in this renewal of the agreement, there is, on the US side, there is idea to expand that previous agreement to allow US to have access to the basis, et cetera. And Marcy, maybe as the co-author, you could offer yourself. Oh yeah, and also, yeah, exactly. That they could have access anytime to any military base as opposed to having some troops there, which I believe was part of the old SOFA agreement. And also that they would have diplomatic immunity if anyone from the United States military committed any problem, they would have to, so then the president of Sri Lanka. Okay, what about the restrict act? What do you think? Do you think it has a chance of passing? I think it is definitely too scary to see that the bill currently does have bipartisan support. We talk, I think like people generally think that there is a lot of political divide in this country, how the left and the right don't ever agree on anything. But the one thing we can tell they agree on is to bash China. It looks like they're almost in a competition to see who can out bash China. Just tomorrow, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is having a meeting with Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen as she's having a quote unquote transit in the US. And this is kind of like echoing Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan last year, right? So it's definitely too scary to see that both parties, I guess like also echoing to what Lee mentioned earlier, there are two parties in the US, but they're always seem to agree on things that will profit, were profiteers or giant corporations. I don't want to be too confident to say like how much I think the bill will be passed. Just like I want to be careful here, but yeah, I do want to acknowledge that this is definitely this ramp in aggression to China is scary. And as peace activists, we are doing everything we can to really expose that. Oh, thank you for doing that. And I read recently that Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs was testifying before the House Armed Services Committee about China. Well, the headline, I think it was in one of those papers the Washington Post of the New York Times. Mark Milley says, war with China is not inevitable. And then further in the article, it said that he believes we must prepare for war with China in order to prevent war with China. I mean, it's really, it's frightening. We have to do everything we can to stop this madness. So thank you, Wei, for your leadership. Jody? Oh, it looks like Lee has a question. Okay, can I just add, because I see someone commented that Taiwan is not a country. Can we keep in mind that there are exactly 12 countries around the world that have considered Taiwan a country, their own country, separate from China. So out of roughly 200 countries, 12 say Taiwan is a separate country from China. And one of them is not the United States. We continue to technically say Taiwan is part of China. Thank you. So it looks like we have two questions. Do we want to hear from John? John. John, you need to unmute. No? It doesn't look like one. Maybe we'll move to Sarah. All right. I'm not sure they can, can they unmute, Maha? I just made it so that they can, but I think their hands might be up from the action. Okay. All right. Okay, so Leah, I'm interested in hearing what your take is on the war in Ukraine. I think, oh, there we go. Sorry. I think it's a proxy war, as most of you probably know between the US and Russia. And I always think it's important to point out that there are many top officials in the US government that have actually said that publicly, including Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, has said it is a proxy war, whether we call it that or not. So I think that's an important point. I'm only making the points that I don't... There's a million points that everyone's heard. I'm gonna make the points that I think people have not heard. Another one is that, so the US wanted this proxy war because they wanted to achieve certain aims, sanctioning Russia to death was one of them that has largely failed. They wanted to blow up the North Stream pipeline. Don't know how that happened. And they wanted to try and divide Russia and China. That hasn't worked, but they have divided Russia from most of Europe, which has been pushed back into a vassal state situation underneath the United States. So a Rand report that, Rand sets a lot of the kind of Beltway thought that often becomes US foreign policy. And a month ago, the Rand report came out saying that basically, to summarize it and simplify it too much, that of the things the US wanted to achieve with this proxy war, some of them they've achieved blowing up the North Stream pipeline, some of them they haven't, but the things they haven't, they're not going to achieve. Like the situation is not changing. And so in the Rand report, it says the US should begin to quote unquote socialize, which I think is a nice term for social engineer, the understanding that this war is coming to an end soon and that we should start pushing for a peace table. Now, you haven't seen US officials saying anything about a peace table, but you have seen some floating of like, for example, Biden told Zelinsky that Ukraine needs to make great gains in the next month. And then after that, we don't know how much the US can supply. So long story short, I think the US is beginning to show signs, some test balloons of wrapping this thing up and allowing Zelinsky to go to a peace table, which is what all of us said should have happened from day one and was actually stopped back in April of last year by Boris Johnson, but he was acting as basically a emissary of the United States, telling Zelinsky to stop all peace talks. And of course he did. So, you know, there's a little bit of hope that this great monstrosity of this war may be wrapping up because the US is not going to achieve anything else with it. Thank you for that analysis, Lee. Well, I just wanna just say on the not achieve anything else from it. I mean, when we look at how much is lost with this war, they have achieved already a lot. Weapons manufacturers have achieved a lot in the divide and conquer and create distress. The US has managed to cause a lot of distress. And I think one of the things we need to look at is that the US was very worried about the Euro-Russia relationship that it was looking like that was getting to buddy, buddy and close and where this hasn't even been able to divide it because it is so close, that that has been frayed and therefore other competitors, Germany and France have been really undermined in horrific ways that the United States will not be held responsible for. One more fun fact though, 80% of the world population over 80% is in countries that have either sided with Russia or not signed on to US sanctions, which is kind of a stark reminder that countries are standing up to US hegemony. I mean, 80% of the world's population is not a part of this proxy war. And that was sanctions on Russia. That was like, that was a step too far. That because then that means everyone would be sanctioned. So that, that's... To put it in the climate context, one of the COP meetings, the conference of the parties, the nations of the world, the Western nations, the nations that have been responsible for a disproportionate amount of the climate crisis on the global South, they pledged to spend over $100 billion a year. That was back in 2009. Well, we have spent over $115 billion in this last year alone on Ukraine. So hopefully this will be ending soon. And of course we're calling for a ceasefire and no more weapons to Ukraine and not one more penny to fan the flames of war. So I hope you'll join us in our peace and Ukraine coalition and let's thank our guests. Well, we have another, just a couple more questions here that have been... So from David Molinix, Aloha Lee, you are the best. Can you share media sources you trust to get real non-propaganda news? Thanks for asking and thanks for the kind words. Actually, me and Eleanor Goldfield created a whole website just for this called radindemedia.com. I will put it in the chat. It is certainly not exhaustive. In fact, there are many sources that we like that just the RSS feed is not working properly or various things like that. So it doesn't mean, if you don't see something on there that you think is great, it doesn't mean that we hate it. It just means there's often other problems. But anyway, it's got a lot of the sources that I find really important. Another great resource equally important to me is popularresistance.org. They grab articles from around the web that are against US propaganda and they put them out every week and they do an amazing job. So yeah, it's a radindemedia.com and popular resistance. And then of course, all the ones you thought I would say are on there. So, you know, mint press and gray zone and all that stuff. All right. And so there's one other question which is are we wrapping up the war with Russia in order to more effectively rage war with China? Let's not forget that this war with Russia is part of the war on China. So... Yeah, I'd say that is part of it and that is mentioned in the RAN reports that we need to focus on China. China is the biggest threat and things like that. I think an important stat in that regard is Russia's economy is either 13th or 15th I think in the world, whereas China is obviously number two or number one, depending on how you measure it. So we view China as a far, far greater risk than we do Russia. But we were in a better position to create a proxy war with Russia than with China. But as you've talked about in other regards, we're putting more military bases around China. We're sending also, I just saw today we're sending javelin missiles to Taiwan. And all of this puts us closer to nuclear war. I mean, honestly, it seems like the US just goes running towards nuclear war and hopes one of the other countries will be the adult in the room that doesn't do it. Like it seems like we're led by sociopaths who just hope Russia and China will be the adults in the room who don't fire a nuke when they're threatened. Yeah, I thought it was telling that Victoria Nuland what about a month ago or so she went not to Ukraine again, she went to Sri Lanka and Nepal. And then William Burns followed her to or I can't remember the order but he went to Sri Lanka as well but then was banned or not allowed to land in Nepal. So that says something about the direction they're going in. All right, well, let's unmute and thank our guests. Thank you so much. Lee Kamp and Wei Yu for joining us tonight on Codepin Congress. Thank you everybody. Please come say hi at leekamp.net. Love you, Lee. Thank you the best. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Wei. Great. All right. Thank you, Wei. Yeah. Thank you, Lee. Great. That's a great information. Okay. And please just stay with us. We are going to take it. Thank you, everybody. We're going to be calling Capitol Hill. Maha will put the action in the chat. Basically the script goes something like this and you agree of course to put it in your own words. Hi, and we're calling our senators, our US senators. Hi, my name is Marcy Winograd and I am calling from zip code da da da to urge you to vote no on the restrict act. Yes, period 686, which opens the door to massive digital surveillance and appoints an executive panel to censor the internet just for starters. So let's see, do we have that in the chat? Put that in the chat. All right, let's go. Let's call. And Maha, if you can put on some maybe some soft music from John Douglas, our favorite. That would be wonderful. I think we can come back. Thank you all for sticking around and making those phone calls. If your senator did not pick up, if they weren't taking comments, you know, you can always call their local offices, their district offices and they usually do take the comments or call them tomorrow. But anyway, it's so important that they hear from us because as we know, this is all part of preparing for something that could be really horrific if there is a war with China. We've got to do everything we can to stop that. So thank you. And any announcements that you want to make Jodi your way? Not, I thank you all for coming tonight and do join us the first and third Tuesday of the month coming up next month. We'll be talking about Palestine. And we expect to hear from Tim Reiser who has been a long time aide to Senator Patrick Leahy about their trip to Vietnam and all the work they did in terms of reparations, paying reparations to Vietnam in one form or another. So have a great night and look forward to seeing you next time. Okay, bye-bye. Thank you ma.