Hey, this is Buck Sexton, and you're listening to the Tudor Dixon Podcast, part of the Clay Travers and Buck Sexton Podcasts Network.

Welcome to the Tudor Dixon Podcast. You may have heard about this United Auto Workers Strike.

Well, now Ford has decided to halt moving forward with their battery plant, and my guest today would tell you this is a good thing because of the connection to the Chinese Communist Party.

Congressman Mike Gallagher, who represents Wisconsin's eighth district, and serves as chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, joins me today. Welcome, Congressman.

It's great to be with you.

It's great to have you here in the midst of this. I mean, we've been talking about this for a while. This is called cattle.

It came to Michigan, even Governor Youngkin said, I won't have this in Virginia because I don't want the connection to the Chinese Communist Party.

But Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan said, no, no, we welcome them here. We want Ford to be able to partner with them.

But now this snafu with the auto workers striking seems to have caused Ford a little pause on moving forward with plants in the state of Michigan.

But you would say this is a good thing. Can you explain to us what your concern is with cattle?

Well, quickly, I think it's important to understand where cattle emerged from because I think it kind of provides a microcosm into our entire fraught economic relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.

The original technology was actually developed in America at the University of Texas and then at MIT. And it was a company called A123 that received massive state and federal subsidies.

Obama administration gave it millions and millions of dollars and yet it still found its way into bankruptcy.

You're talking about battery technology?

Yeah, battery technology company, A123. And then cattle purchased the company and then cattle because it has even more generous subsidies from the state, from the Chinese Communist Party, about $400 million in 2022, was able to survive and become really a dominant battery company globally.

So this kind of tells you everything you need to know about what China has done to our economy, specifically the industrial Midwest, like states like yours and mine over the last two decades, which is because of a mix of aggressive practices like intellectual property theft because of subsidies from the state.

It's able to compete on an unlevel playing field with American companies, steal our best technology and then dominate critical supply chains and critical industries.

So now fast forward to the present day and the risk and I went to Detroit and I met with Ford and I met with a variety of automakers there to express my concern.

The risk in my opinion is taking cattle's dominant position in the global battery market and making it even more dominant and you have to understand that with that dominance, the Chinese Communist Party could weaponize it going forward.

Imagine if we found ourselves in a confrontation with China over Taiwan and they threatened to cut off the export of batteries or shut down certain facilities that could bring us to our knees.

They threatened to do that in the early parts of the pandemic with advanced pharmaceutical ingredients. So for that and many other reasons, I thought the deal was very risky.

I think that was our big shock when we hit the pandemic, all of the things that we are reliant on from China, but I think pharmaceuticals were the biggest eye opener for people because I come from the manufacturing world.

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