Senator Tom Cotton on Google and Facebook, and with a Warning for the PRC re Hong Kong

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show

Hugh Hewitt

Aug. 6 2019

Audio

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HH: I want to read to you three tweets the President just put out and then talk with you about it. He wrote Sunday Pichai of Google was in the Oval Office working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the administration is doing, that Google was not involved with China’s military, that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 election, and that they are not planning to illegally subvert the 2020 election, despite all that has been said to the contrary. It all sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016, and they want to “make sure that Trump loses in 2020.” Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public. Peter Schweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely. Senator Cotton, what do you make of President Trump’s tweets?

TC: First off, Hugh, let me just quote Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook in his Congressional testimony, in which he said that Silicon Valley is an extremely left-wing place. Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, was one of Hillary Clinton’s strongest backers, and also helped provide her with some of the data analytics that her campaign used. So I don’t think you can gainsay the fact that Google is almost monolithically in support of liberal Democrats, and certainly opposed to Donald Trump. Let me go back, though, to the very first and more important point, Hugh, that the President made in that tweet, saying when Sunday Pichai said that Google is not helping China. That is simply false. Google continues to work with China on artificial intelligence, which could be as vital to the 21st Century way of warfare as tanks and aircraft carriers and aviation was to 20th Century warfare. And that’s at a time, Hugh, when they have ceased all cooperation on such projects with our military. As Barack Obama’s own secretary of Defense Ash Carter has said, when you’re working in China, there’s no way to know if you’re working in the private sector, of if you’re working for the People’s Liberation Army. And when you’re Google working on artificial intelligence, it’s almost certainly the PLA.

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HH: I want to close by asking you about Hong Kong. China has issued some ominous warnings today. What is your message to President Xi and his lower level officials about the demonstrators in Hong Kong? I want to be on the record before another Tiananmen Square happens.

TC: Hugh, it’s appropriate that you cite Tiananmen Square. Many of your listeners have seen the photographs and videos of thousands of PAP, the People’s Armed Police, who are mounted the border of Hong Kong and Shenzhen. If Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party were to impose martial law on Hong Kong or take other kind of dramatic action to crack down and violate their obligations under the 1984 joint declaration with Great Britain, it would be an irreparable breach in the relationship between the United States and China. If that were to happen, I would suggest we take the kind of actions that we ought to have taken 30 years ago after the Tiananmen Square massacre – halting trade negotiations, sanctioning senior Community Party officials, revoking their visas, kicking them out of international organizations, and reconsidering the Hong Kong Policy Act.

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