NEW IRS Chief: Trust Me, Agents “Armed Only With Calculators”

Today on Sekulow and on Tax Day, the new IRS chief says to trust him.

His agents are only armed with calculators. We'll talk about that more today on Sekulow. Welcome to Sekulow. We are taking calls on Tax Day. The ballast of the IRS is trending and I totally understand why.

We've called for that before. We believe the IRS is just an agency that is just incapable of fully self-correcting, that we need major reform. That would include, of course, major reform to the out of control IRC, the Internal Revenue Code, the tax code as well. And when you look at some of the news coming in the IRS, you know it doesn't always get a lot of attention when we get a new IRS commissioner sometimes. Obviously when we were fighting with the IRS on behalf of the Tea Party groups, they were going through commissioners like every two weeks. Remember there was like a new commissioner coming in, another new commissioner coming in. And the new IRS commissioner for the Biden administration has been sworn in.

He was the last commissioner for Obama, Danny Werfel, who really came in to try and clean up the mess after we had taken apart the entire tax-exempt division on behalf of those Tea Party groups, the ACLJ. I mean the Washington Post called it, we bludgeoned the IRS. But you know every decade or so you've got to re-bludgeon them because they come back.

That's very medieval. But we know they're trying to do that. We have to re-bludgeon them. That sounds like, you know, it's out of... I didn't use that word, the Washington Post did. I know, it's hilarious. It sounds like it's out of the Monty Python. And now they want to add their 80,000 staff. I want to play this soundbite from you because this is just, it's gaslighting.

We talked about it in our meeting. This is totally gaslighting the American people about what the IRS actually is. So take a listen to the commissioner at his, I guess, second time he's been sworn in for this position. Let me note something about our civil side compliance employees. Despite what some might think or say, these public servants within the IRS are armed only with calculators and their skills to help us address complex issues. Their work will give people confidence that all taxpayers, regardless of means, are being treated fairly under the tax laws.

It's true, but that's gaslighting because he's acting like the IRS doesn't have a division with armed law enforcement officials. In fact, they're a criminal enforcement division where they have special agents. Remember they put up that... I don't know if we can put it on the screen, but they put up the employee when they were looking to fill their new 80,000 jobs.

They said, hey, we're looking for people. You got to have a high level of fitness. You have to carry a firearm and be even willing to use deadly force if necessary. And this is the IRS. Yes, and you have to be willing and able to participate in arrests and execution of search warrants and other dangerous assignments because they do go in as part of raids, especially corporate raids. Yes, the FBI might be there and other federal law enforcement agencies.

You will see they have the jackets too. It says IRS, just like the FBI. How he slips in to make it not a for Pinocchio statement is he says our civil division is armed only with calculators. Well, yeah, Logan, no one ever said that the dudes and women who used to be at their desk with their calculators, guess what? They're at home now with their calculators and your tax returns and documents.

Leaving empty buildings to rot. Right. So you've got your confidential returns are at their house. Of course, if you tried to send it in that way, you'd be violating some federal tax law. You've got to fax it to them and it'll be rerouted to their home. You're like, why is this going to this area code?

Oh, it's my house. Where they'll print it out, use a typewriter. I guess they have the special typewriters there because they have to have those for the forms.

We've just got one of those. Still out there with a classic typewriter. I'm not against a typewriter if you're an author. I mean, yeah, you're going old school. But if you need it to like focus.

Sure. They have it because, again, they don't use the 80 million dollars to update their systems to make it better for matrix printers. But then they just I don't want to say lie. It's the gaslighting as if the IRS, he acts like the IRS that he is going to be the head of again, that he's not in charge of a law enforcement agency. It is, in fact, a law enforcement agency with a full criminal division of armed agents. And they're looking to hire more on this tax day to come after middle America to get more money from you. We'll go back and talk about their latest audit of the IRS by the GAO.

You will not believe what they found. Very bad. Welcome back to secular. So it gets actually worse, though, than just the gaslighting like, oh, we don't have anybody except for, you know, our little nerds with calculators.

All right. Nothing gets nerds with calculators. You need them. Got to have them. And but that's not the same calculator.

It's got to have both. He does oversee a civil division that is nerds with calculators at their desk. Well, they used to be at a desk.

Now they're at home. So they're really geeking out because they can just watch their galactic starship every day. What is that show? Galactic Starship? Galactic something?

I don't know. Star Trek Mandalorian? All those shows. I watched them all.

But now they watch them during the day. I watched three episodes of Star Trek last night. That was my fun evening.

I watched Elon Musk. Oh, yeah. How was that? Awesome.

We'll talk about it in the podcast later. But scary. Very scary with the A.I.

It freaks me out. He wasn't scary. He just, well. Well, what he says and you believe him because he knows it well. He invested in it. I didn't know he came up with the term chat GPT. I didn't know that either. And he funded it when it was open source. I knew that part.

He got very angry when they took it inside. And he's going to start his own again. But he doesn't know if it's too far behind. Oh.

I mean, that's wild when you start hearing that kind of thing. The learning. We'll get to that later. So the G.A.O., the Government Accountability Office, they don't always do great work, but sometimes they actually do. So they looked at the I.R.S. because the I.R.S. actually suspended and reviewed 35 million returns with errors.

And you might remember this. During the COVID, during 2021 specifically, it was taking forever. You would file on time, even if you asked for the extension.

Or if you filed early, before today. And you weren't getting your return. And you weren't even getting a letter back saying they thought that there was an error or something. Now we know why.

The G.A.O. actually paused it and said, we're going to do a study about why there are 35 million tax returns with errors. What's wrong with your forms?

It must be you. It's not the taxpayer. You must be putting together such a complicated form that this many people, that's probably about a third of people that actually file taxes. Because, you know, there's a lot of wage earners that don't even meet the threshold. Like joint filing. The retired people.

Like your wife, your family, you file one. Right. A lot of this is double. You can count it as two people. So, I mean, that's almost like 70 million people probably assume that.

So, again, about half, even that's getting close to like half the taxpayer base. And the G.A.O. audit found that the agency, this is the I.R.S., does not have a process to identify and analyze the causes of these errors.

And they have no ability to reduce instances of recurring errors. So, when the I.R.S. was asked by the G.A.O. to look into this and to come up with a plan so that they would better serve the public by responding quicker, so they wouldn't have to do a pause, again, on why there were 35 million tax returns with errors.

Yeah, that's insane. What's wrong with your reporting? What's wrong with the filing? What's wrong with the forms? You know what the I.R.S. Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement, Douglas O'Donnell, rejected the recommendation and just said, we're not going to study frequently occurring tax errors.

That was it. So, you have one government agency. This is the auditors of the federal government. It's probably the biggest complaint of the American people. Yes, it's not even just paying your taxes.

I know that's a bummer. People don't like paying taxes, but they would like it a lot more if they didn't have to do the accounting of the way that you have to do it. You always are scared. Yes, I use accountants and I'm sure a lot of you do. And you're always still, you go through it, you use accountants, you got pages and pages of things. I've had accountants mess it up.

I mean, people, it's still a lot of human error. I got something from the I.R.S. a few weeks ago that said, you did not pay your taxes. Like it was like for the last year from a business account. And then if you kept reading, it's like, oh, no, it's like a receipt. And I call my accountant and they're like, yeah, the I.R.S.

sends that out. It's a weird headline. And we're like, what?

Don't start with that. You know, it's in bold text. They're like, there's use an old letterhead. You know, it's very odd that these are the kind of things that make you uncomfortable, makes people nervous. The problem is, how do you fix it?

And that's the discussion that we've had is how do you fix it without the government getting way too involved in your business? I think they spent a lot of time with their Battlestar Galactica. Battlestar Galactica. I think it's been on the air for quite a while. I think they're into the reruns. Oh, yeah.

It takes the I.R.S. a lot longer. Whatever you watched 10 years ago, they're maybe getting caught up on. Yeah, it probably ended 2008, 2009.

It's been 15, 20 years now. Yeah, they're still on VHS probably. OK, that's true. Like the I.R.S. So they've got to get like a DVD player, not even a Blu-ray. Not even like a retro, like some of my friends are in the VHS community.

No, not like a cool cassette tape that you're, you know, you know. But now here's the scary second part is, OK, what's the solution? Now, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren put forward a solution. It actually, if you just look at it in general, you might say, eh, if I actually trusted these people, I wouldn't mind this. Their solution was to let the federal government handle all of it and basically just come to you and say, this is what you owe.

Now, here's the problem with that. Do you think the federal government is ever going to come back and say you get a refund if they're in charge of the process? So they wouldn't come back and say, like we've talked about, like a flat tax, like here's the percent, you apply that, boom. Here's the standard deduction.

Here's if you want to file deductions, the threshold above that, and here's the percent of what you pay in taxes. No, they're just going to send you a blanket bill. A bill?

Yeah. So would that remove all deductions? Likely, because that would get too messy. But what they, I think, want to do, Logan, is they want to make it so difficult, and they'll make it so difficult for the taxpayer, that they get desperate and think that maybe they'll give them the power just to bill me.

Just bill me. Just out of convenience. Right. And that's dangerous because it is.

It is dangerous. And I understand the appeal. Trust me, every year I understand the appeal, because every time around January or February, when you start seeing all the ads for every sort of tax filing company, you're like, oh no, here it comes. And you know that there's going to be a few weeks there where you're trying to gather together, especially if you're, I mean, I own a couple different small businesses that I run.

That plus, you know, obviously your regular job. States, maybe they're registered. Yeah, some are registered in different areas, and it's a pain to figure this all out and make sure you're doing it right. Kentucky popped up on by this year, and I did some business that kind of had crossed over to Kentucky.

I was like, where's Tennessee on here? Oh, you'd have to do, well, why do we do Kentucky? Like, they don't, the income tax, it was just, it was just, even that was from accountants. Right.

After I had submitted, here's everything you guys need, everything you're requesting of me, I got it, here it is. Over months they've had it. And again, I'm not attacking them because they're trying to comply with a form that obviously doesn't work. It's not that there's 35 million errors, it's that there's 35 million problems with the IRS filing system. Are we too far down a road, though, where these things get fixed?

That's the problem. Well, I think what we have to do is either have a massive reform, you abolish this IRS as we know it, and you make it simple. So you either have a simple tax, a flat tax, or you go to a VAT tax kind of system. It's a debate where we need to have and decide what we're, we can't have three options. We need to have one option that we all agree on as conservatives and push it hard to, and we need to sell it to the American people.

It's going to take time, but you've got to sell it to the American people because everybody has conservatives. Oh, that's going to punish me more because if you do a higher sales tax, that punishes more people, obviously. But that also takes care of the people who pay no taxes who are the wealthiest because of all their losses and things. They wouldn't be able to get around it because if they purchase items which are expensive, they have to pay a tax, but no income tax. And really, though, to make this work, you've also got to get it to the states because they've got their own. We live in a state with no taxes, so it sounds even more simple. More states would have to adopt that to make it truly workable for the American people. I'd like to get your thoughts on it, 1-800-684-3110. You know, our federal government needs funding.

There's ways to do it. We need good roads. We need these services that are provided.

Unfortunately, we're not getting them right now. It feels like we're paying into a system that isn't paying back. Or with the entitlement programs that we're paying in without a good insight into how this is going to work for us, how this is going to work for me as a 42-year-old down the road because it just doesn't add up. The math, you have to be great at math to figure out that there's less of us than the people we're paying for now. So how are we going to pay for all of us? All these issues.

So I take your calls, 1-800-684-3110. I think, again, senators, the left is seizing on the same data, though, Logan. So what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are saying, listen, this is not… We agree. We can't accept this for the American people.

So here's the very liberal version. The federal government takes over everything, but they send you the bill. So it's not a flat percentage that you have agreed to through legislation. And then you handle that percentage and handle your losses and things like that for the year. It's a bill from the federal government.

Listen, I don't want that. I don't want the federal government having full control down this system. I think if you want to simplify, give me a percent and that's it, or you want to do this… We figured out a VAT system that worked. A lot of countries do that. And then abolish the basic income tax. Because there's so many Americans also who don't meet the threshold to pay any taxes. If you had a value-added tax kind of system, they also would be paying it a little bit. They're not going to be paying it as much as the wealthy because they're not buying as much. They're not spending as much money. So it shouldn't be as much of a punishment on them. But then it's not like the middle class paying for everybody. Because we know our top 1% is using mega losses to offset any income. And rightfully so, by the way, they utilize the tax code legally to their advantage. I think Donald Trump was the one who came out and said, yeah, because I follow the rules. No one's saying you didn't follow the rules.

But when you follow the rules and if you've got a lot of buildings going up, guess what you're doing? You're spending everything so it balances out to where you're not technically profiting that year. I'm sure Elon Musk, same thing with all the valuations of Twitter going up.

What do you think? He's got a $20 billion loss this year. Yeah, I'm sure he's doing fine. Let's give me a call, though. 1-800-684-3110. We'd like to hear you on the air today on Tax Day.

1-800-684-3110. Welcome back to Secio. If you watched the broadcast, I want to explain what you just saw. You just saw at the UN, and for those of you who aren't listening, I'm just explaining what we played during our break on the people watching the show. By the way, if you're on Rumble, follow us there. Same with YouTube and Facebook as well.

But we've got new people all the time coming into Rumble these days. It's our preferred place to be because no censorship there. But you saw at the UN Human Rights Council a speaker. That's Christophe from the European Center for Law and Justice, our office in Strasbourg, France. He was in Geneva, and it's back to in person now, the Human Rights Council. He was presenting on the situation in Nigeria and involving Christians, specifically in a persecution of Christians, not just by non-government actors, but now by government actors who are certainly failing to protect Christians, if not even kind of giving a green light to bad actors to continue to persecute Christians at the local, even tribal level in these more remote areas of Nigeria. We see almost yearly, multiple times throughout the year, on major Christian holidays, major atrocities in Nigeria. And Nigeria was on the countries of particular concern list by the State Department.

And I'll go to CC House CC. The Biden administration, a day before meeting, I guess, with the President of Nigeria, removed Nigeria without explanation from that list. And we filed a FOIA to find out, did they really think there was some shift at the State Department into the reason why they got put on the list in the first place? And what we found out through our FOIA is, no, they did not. They knew that the persecution was ongoing.

Right. So the countries of particular concern, that list, the U.S. puts countries on when there is Christian persecution, religious persecution, and countries that are engaged in or actually tolerate this kind of persecution. So it was really a shock when the Biden administration removed Nigeria. Nigeria, a place where 90 percent of all Christian deaths that happen every year across the world, 90 percent of them happen in Nigeria.

Every two hours, a Christian is killed for their faith in Nigeria. And yet the Biden administration, like you said, Jordan, a day before Secretary Blinken met with the President, all of a sudden Nigeria is pulled off the countries of particular concern list. So we indeed did file a FOIA because we wanted to get to the bottom of this. Obviously, Nigeria deserves to be on that list and stay on that list because they're a country that's really at the top of that list.

And the response was really no response at all. We're going to continue on with our FOIA request. But what was interesting is what they did give us, we at least know that they were completely aware of the atrocities. Like you said, the burnings, the killings, the kidnappings, the destruction of property that happens on a massive level in Nigeria against Christians. We know that the State Department was well aware of that when they pulled Nigeria off that list. So I mean, again, we found through our FOIA, they have no, again, the only thing we can kind of see is that this also occurred at a time when the Biden administration, Sisi, started looking for oil.

Nigeria is a major producer of oil. And we talked about, not the cleanest, by the way, which is interesting because they talk, you know, the reason why we're not doing it here is because of the environment. But when we go to these other countries who do it, they don't do it at the levels of protections we do.

We're the best at doing it in the cleanest way. But this was a time when we started cutting off our own American energy and then Russian energy from the world. Our relationship with Saudi Arabia crumbled under the Biden administration.

It was great under the Trump administration. So it crumbles under the Biden administration and they now had to go look to places to buy oil. So it seems like that day before the meeting with the President, the only justification that they could come up with is that it was more important to get oil than it was the human rights of Nigerians.

Right. So there was definitely, there had to be a political reason for this. Obviously, again, even from the small FOIA response that we've gotten, we know that the State Department was well aware of these atrocities happening in Nigeria.

And just like you said, them being pulled off a day before Blinken meets with the President and while we were in the crisis and we were trying to get oil from everywhere else, it certainly seems like there is another reason for them being pulled off this country's of particular concern list. And that's what our FOIA is going after. And we will continue to push and file a lawsuit, if we have to, to get this information to find out what was really the reason that Nigeria was removed. You know, again, this just underscores the work we're doing at the ACLJ and then through the ECLJ as well. I don't know if we have it to play for the, do we have the video to play for the radio audience or the audio to play from Kristof doing that intervention?

So we can pull that for you. So we have the ECLJ going right to the U.N. speaking on this issue in front of all the countries and their ambassadors to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Then we file the FOIA in the U.S. on our own government to say, why did you make this move? So we're exposing it at the international level, but we're also trying to figure out and put attention on the U.S. deciding to do this because this is why so many countries around the world don't take us seriously when it comes to actually protecting the human rights and religious liberty. When we preach religious freedom and tolerance around the world and then we make decisions always based off of, well, guess what, don't worry about those folks, those Christians. Usually it's Christians.

If it was anybody else, you know, they'd be much tougher. But when it's the Christian minority, and in Nigeria's case about half the country, it's like a 50-50 split, they just kind of look the other way when it's beneficial to look the other way. And it makes it more difficult as Americans for anybody to take us seriously. It's why the Chinese say, you guys are absurd, you preach all of this, you don't do it in your own country, you don't promote it abroad. So, again, I think, again, what we're trying to do here is expose it because we know that the people at the State Department know that nothing changed, it's only getting worse.

They don't get to override, though, of course, the administration and the executive branch decisions. So we'll continue to work on that issue. We've got information up at aclj.org. And if you care about the persecution of our Christian brothers and sisters, a great reason why to support the work of the ACLJ and our international work that we do around the world. All of that, again, through our matching challenge, the funding of the ACLJ goes to that work as well.

The work here in the United States, but also abroad. And you can double the impact of your donation right now at aclj.org. You have that throughout the month of April if you make a donation online at aclj.org. We do have a call in Texas. All right.

We have time to take it. Okay, let's go to Joanne in Ohio on Line 1. Hey, Joanne. Hi, guys. No, we're you were talking about the IRS.

Yes. My 2020 tax return that was filed in 2021 had an error. And we caught it right away. I paid my 20. I paid that original tax return.

We filed an amended return. October rolls around. I still don't have any word from the IRS. I call. They call back in a month.

I call back maybe six weeks later. And they said we don't understand what the problem is. I had to explain to the people at the IRS. Look at this return. Look at the amended return that tells you what the difference is and figure it out.

This is reading and arithmetic. Yeah, this is their job. But now we've learned, Joanne, what was happening right around that was that they put on pause 35 million returns. Could have definitely impacted yours because they could not figure it out. Exactly what they told you. They lost track of many forms, including 1099s and W-2s. They actually said they had to destroy them because it got so out of order that they just started putting them away and not even trying to refer to them. So they were waiting on you to come back with a correction, then waiting for you to call and tell them what to correct.

Again, why are we paying them with our taxes if they can't even do their job with the thousands and thousands of people they have? Support the work of the ACLJ, ACLJ.org. Second half hour coming up. Keeping you informed and engaged. Now more than ever, this is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. Welcome back to Sekulow. We are taking phone calls to 1-800-684-3112. That's 1-800-684-3110. Next segment, Rick Rinnell, former acting director of national intelligence, member of the ACLJ team and senior advisor to us.

It's going to be Jordan. Talk about that arrest we talked about yesterday of these Chinese nationals at the police station. Actually, it was on our podcast because it came out after we were on the air. That's why you should subscribe always to our podcast.

Sekulow Brothers podcast is three days a week. It's not always breaking news, sometimes more commentary and discussion. But if something breaks after our Sekulow broadcast, which we're locked into noon to 1 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday. If something breaks after that, three days a week or more, whenever we want to, we can come.

If we feel it's worthy to have a discussion of our own for you to explain what's going on and get you up to speed. That happened yesterday. So there's breaking news. They had teased this big national security arrest. Now, I think they teased a little over the top because it ended up being a story that we had been covering for over a year. And that was these Chinese police stations.

That's pretty hardcore stuff. There are over a hundred that have been identified around the world. We knew one of those was in New York City. It was shut down, but there was no other discussion about what happened to the people who were arrested there. Two individuals have now been arrested by the FBI, by the federal government, by the feds and charged. The charge is obstruction of justice.

And what is the main charge there? And the reason why is because these police stations, which we know are operating, in fact, other countries, Canada and the Netherlands have just asked the Chinese to please shut them down. They're not willing because of the reliance on Chinese goods and the economy. They're not willing to actually even shut them down themselves. I think by making the arrest, we've actually taken it to an escalation.

We'll talk about that with Rick Grenell, about kind of the ramifications of a move like that to not just deport them and send them back or use them as kind of a bargaining chip for something else, but to actually bring federal charges against them. And so they were operating in this nonprofit setting. I think it was the Chinese. It was like the Changle.

Yeah, it was something that no one would understand what it was. But it was right in Chinatown in New York, like on the third floor of a building, nondescript. And the allegation was not that this was about spying on Americans in the sense of the American government, but more about pressuring Chinese Americans to do that. It was more of a threat against people who either had just moved or had family still in China.

Which most do. As far as we know, the American Changle Association. If you live in Chinatown areas of major cities, you likely have family still in China.

Very close family. And so they have a police force essentially there to make sure you're staying in line and keeping Chinese values. And if you have a job at a place they'd like to steal the intellectual property from, they go to you and say, you better give us this info or else this is going to happen. So it's a way for them to wield their domestic power overseas. Their intimidation of their own people that they do with their lack of basic human rights in their own country, exporting it here.

So it's a good thing that it was shut down. The fact that we've arrested them is interesting because usually in those diplomatic settings, it's kind of like that Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia. Russia now is saying, we're going to keep arresting Americans and you're going to trade us bad actors for them. You're going to give us the arms dealer, the merchant of death for a basketball player.

What would you give for a Wall Street Journal reporter? We should rightfully do whatever we can to get them home. But they now know that the stakes are very high and they can get a lot out of them. They can keep doing it, yeah.

Because we might not have any more merchants of death in prison, but we certainly have other bad Russian actors. Yeah, for sure. All right, we're back in 45 seconds. Rick Grenell is going to join us about this, but I wanted to update you on that story if you missed our podcast.

It's the reason why I check out the Secular Brothers podcast. Yeah, we'll be back today. 4 o'clock Eastern time, we put it up and it's available across platforms. We're on Rumble primarily, but you can find us on your favorite podcast players as well and on YouTube and on Facebook.

But stick with the Rumble ones, great. Go subscribe there. SecularBrothers.com, easy way to do it. Like you said, we'll be joined next by Rick Grenell. We'll also be taking your calls coming up a little bit later. So if you're on hold, stay on hold, and we have some open lines at 1-800-684-3110.

Also, middle of the matching challenge here at ACLJ, go to ACLJ.org. Right now, all of donations are effectively doubled, so we appreciate all the support. We'll be right back. All right, welcome back to Secular. I'm joined by Rick Grenell, who's our Senior Advisor for Foreign Policy, National Security, and former Acting Director of National Intelligence. But I want to play this first. This is from the U.S. Attorney in Southern District of New York, and we talked about it on our podcast yesterday.

We just kind of briefly went over it for you in the first five minutes of our second half hour. This is Breon Peace. He is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and made this announcement yesterday by six. Two miles from our office, just across the Brooklyn Bridge, this nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in lower Manhattan has a dark secret. Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building hosted an undeclared police station of the Chinese National Police. Now, just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing.

Now, Rick, I'll go to you right away. I can't even imagine that ever happening in Beijing, but I can't imagine them letting it even happen for a year. We found out about this, it seemed like, sometime around the last year that this was ongoing and a problem around the world.

So it's not a conspiracy, now it's clear it's not, because we have the U.S. Attorney's taking action on it. That there's about a hundred of these Chinese official police stations operating all over the world. Most countries are not willing to shut them down. They're actually asking the Chinese government to please shut them down, but they won't do it on their own. They're too afraid.

We heard that they were shut down and now there have been charges filed. But just first, to explain to our folks what China was doing here. Well, they're spying.

What they're doing is collecting information and they're very good at it. They use the leverage that they have against any country that they can use it against. They're really good at it and it's one of the reasons why I think there is bipartisan support, a very rare instance of bipartisan support, to bring home the supply chain, to do everything that we can to not rely economically on China. But look, we've got countries like Germany, for instance, they sell a lot of cars inside China. And they have a relationship, a trade relationship with China, that is fundamental to their economy. And so we've got to begin to peel this back. The Western alliance should be leading the way and unfortunately they haven't been, including us. We've got to get much more vigilant and much more aggressive about shutting down their spying activity, limiting their ability to leverage against our businesses and our politicians, and we've got to do it fast.

You said that they're good at it. You can imagine the scenario very easily that if you're someone who's a recent immigrant to the United States from China and you end up in these Chinatowns in these major cities, you have family back in China. If they find out that you've got any kind of connection here to the government or to a company that they want to steal IP from, they could utilize these offices hypothetically just to come to you and say, listen, we're going to do this to your family back at home in China if you don't do this. And again, these could be people that came here legally to the United States.

They're in the process. They might be American citizens or in the process to become American citizens, and they're still being threatened from the country that they fled. Look, Chinese Americans here in the United States are some of the most vigilant people against China because they know the tactics. They know the tactics really well, and many of them are like the canaries in the coal mine warning us of just how bad it is. Remember, if you are an American company that wants to do business in China, you've got to have a JV partner, a joint venture partnership with a Chinese company. And that is how the Communist Party of China demands that all of the information, anything that they want, will absolutely change hands from a private company into the Communist Party's apparatus. And they do that because they can.

They get away with it. And so the American companies have to be very clear-eyed when they're working in China as to what the implications are. One thing I wanted to ask you about was the arrest. Oftentimes these situations, we do see that the bad actors, their operation is shut down. But I think it kind of shows us where we are relationship-wise with China that we've decided to actually arrest and prosecute these Chinese nationals who were part of the police station rather than getting some kind of diplomatic discussion with them about maybe returning them in favor for something else or for some other purpose to continue a more friendly relationship. So for good or for ill, we've now escalated even inside the United States. You're saying we need to do that to an extent. Does it also, though, show that the relationship has just turned that adversarial, I guess?

It's a good question. And really the answer is during the Trump administration, we were doing a lot of defensive briefings, meaning going to politicians who didn't know that they were getting wrapped in with a Chinese spy or a strategy from the Communist Party. And we've had to dial politicians back.

We need to get more aggressive in doing that with businesses because it's been growing over the years. It's been getting worse. And ever since the Biden administration came into power, remember, they came in very early on saying that all of that Biden family corruption on Hunter Biden's laptop was not real. Joe Biden said it himself.

That's not real. That's Russian disinformation. We had 52 former intel officials say, don't look at that laptop or any of the information about the Biden family's ties with China. Beijing loved that. Beijing loved the fact that we had Democratic leaders saying, don't look at this relationship because it's just Russian disinformation. Look over there at Russia.

That problem that the Biden family and the Biden administration has had in not being able to stand up to China from the very beginning has allowed China to really take advantage of us and grow their operation inside America. I think law enforcement agencies now, they no longer can turn away. It's getting really bad when you have a police station in New York City, but they need the DOJ and FBI needs to get much more aggressive about San Francisco and what's happening there.

I'll just say that. Yeah, I mean, it sounds, at first when this story broke about sometime last year, it almost sounded like a conspiracy theory that this was operating inside Chinatown. I thought of it as like, you know, it's operating like a one booth, little police, you know, like nothing crazy. Like I didn't realize the floor of a- Or something like a consulate. Yeah, exactly.

That's how, in my head, how it looked. Not a floor of a building, you know, in a major part of the city. Right, done covertly.

Right. It's like a real official, like, consulate where we know they have a lot of problems with those two. I want to turn a little bit to politics too, Rick, because we saw, again, over the weekend, there was a big RNC meeting where we are actually in Nashville. And out of that weekend, both of our senators who are good friends of ours, ACLJ, re-endorsed President Trump.

It was both Senator Hagerty and Senator Blackburn. And what I want to talk about, I kind of see the moderates in the party. It's not all the other people who necessarily put their hat in the race yet, it's a lot of people who haven't yet who are more of the mainstream, we'd say. And they're freaking out these last few days. And the Never Trump group. And what I think that they realize is that it's at least another five years, they have been pretty much excluded from Republican politics. And it's like the party doesn't want to back. Yeah, look, I think Donald Trump is the leader of the party. There's no question people in Washington, D.C. who are politicians are recognizing that.

Because they see when they go home the massive crowds and the grassroots. You know, I'm really proud of the fact that the party today, the Republican Party today, is a party of first and second generation Americans, working class people, minorities. It's not your father's Republican Party.

It's really changed. And there's a lot of people who don't like that. There's a lot of people who want the traditional, you know, let's have Republicans just talk about cutting taxes on corporate America and celebrating corporate America. My problem is that corporate America has become so woke and anti-common sense, anti-conservative, that I'm not sure that we should be shilling for corporate America anymore. I think the workers of America need a voice and that has been traditionally an outsider. So I'm really pleased to see that so many politicians are rising up and supporting that message. But I will say this, Jordan, I think that that tent is expanding.

When you add those first and second generation Americans who see the breakdown of common sense, people are coming around and saying, you know, hey, I may not like mean tweets, but he's got a lot of common sense. Yeah, and I think that what you said, too, about the party, a lot of us who have been working here for decades, we wanted to see it get to this point. We knew that it had the potential to be the big tent party. We believed in it, but we had to work through to get to the leadership positions.

And there's people always getting angry and not always agreeing on everything. But the idea that we've taken from the left some of their core bases is how we go and compete in the Midwest. Yeah, I think the tough part will be the media saturation, making sure you actually get your voice out there.

And that's why there's broadcasts like ours and and others, because that becomes the big concern is where do people tune? You know, when they turn to watch the news to, like I said, big corporate media seems to be against you. Yeah, we got to make sure there's other voices out there and other people talking about it, whether you're a conservative, whether you're independent, honestly, at this point, whether you find yourself somewhere in the middle, because it feels like the media is certainly one sided to the extreme. So now finding even alternative voices that even aren't as far right is harder and harder. But thankfully, people are starting to wake up to that.

We obviously see that a rumble in other places. Yep. Rick, we always appreciate it. You know, it's going to be great to have Rick through this whole process.

It's a very interesting primary to see coming together, but also the big issues coming about. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. We are taking your calls to 1-800-684-3110. That's 1-800-684-3110.

We got some more calls coming in on the IRS and I want to get to those. Some of them on hold for a long time. And we talked about China. There's another story with China, of course, in the news as well. They're trying to threaten, of course, members of Congress because they held another hearing on the origins of COVID. And it's interesting that Chinese Embassy officials then start emailing members of Congress and committees to say, we don't want this discussion. What are you worried about? If you didn't have anything to do with the outbreak, and it wasn't your fault, and it was just some animal, then what are you worried about the investigation?

Because the investigation should come to the conclusion that they're right, but they're freaking out about it. Because I think that would maybe the pandemic showed the world how much of a pariah they are, that they don't even seem to care. I think so.

I think people saw what they would do to their own people and much less what they would do if they could actually get a control of what's going on in America. Yeah. Let's go to the phones, though. First, 1-800-684-3110. Sam, you've been on hold in Tennessee for the last half hour. We appreciate it.

You're on the air. Well, you know, I'd wait for forever for you guys. So as someone who lived in England for a while, went to school there, and also worked there, but was still a U.S. citizen, I paid the bad taxes, and then I had to deal with when I returned to the States to try and get that money back. But the other part is, do we actually believe that states like California and others that live off of their state income, heavy, heavy state income, are going to give that up for a bad tax? I don't know that they would, but the federal government doesn't have to follow that. And then people would have to make decisions about where they live. So if you want to live in a state like we do, Tim, like you do, that has no state income tax, then you will have to decide.

Well, the federal government could change the way it taxes income, and the state could keep it the same. And then it will, like people have already been making that decision, do they want to live in those states? Do they want to really start a business in those states? It's not like California is.

It has lost citizens for the first time in decades, but it's still huge. And there are some reasons companies still go there, because they do get incentives. So even with their higher taxes, there are corporate incentives to be there and do work there. But I think you could still do it without the states doing full reform. I think it would be much easier if you are a citizen of a state that had no income tax and you went to a more simple either flat tax system, where this is the percent, we all pay that same percent, and that's that. Or even if it was a few tiers, but so basic that you don't need an IRS that already has 80,000 that wants to add another 80,000, so it would be one of the biggest government agencies outside the Department of Defense in our military, you wouldn't need that. So it would save a lot of money as well, and the revenue that would then come into the federal government could be used more effectively to benefit the American people and our military and our roads and our services that we provide, because we're paying taxes. So then you really push those blue states and you push people making decisions.

Do I really want to live in a state where, on top of the simple tax system, I've got to still go through this complicated tax system? And I think it would just continue the growth and bring more people onto our side, like Rick was talking about, expands the tent of what it might mean to be a Republican or a conservative. And if that tent gets bigger and bigger, we could then be really replaced, currently right now in America, just for some little statistics, nerdy statistics, there are way more registered Democrats than Republicans. That's why they didn't want to abolish the Electoral College.

It's always tougher for us. But we don't play in that system. We play by the rules. The system is we have an Electoral College, so states have this representation. Still in most states, including red states, there are a lot more registered, sometimes more registered Democrats, even in red states. People just haven't changed their registration. Historically, things have changed, yeah. Now we are becoming that party, though.

That used to be the case overwhelmingly. More and more people are either signing up as independent or because they still want to be in a, maybe their state has a closed primary, so it's better to choose a side so you have a say in the nominee. And if we continue to grow and with these big ideas, like reforming the tax system, first we have to agree on how we want to reform it, though. We can't have three options. We need to agree on one.

We can debate the options, say what is going to be in our platform, the one that we're going to go push, and then we're going to have to go for years to sell that to the American people and then to move it through Congress. Let's take quickly this call. Bill from Wyoming on Line 1. Bill, you're on the air. Yeah, thanks for taking my call.

I've got a question. I heard that the House is supposed to prevent the IRS from obtaining these agents, and yet they're still hiring them. Can you explain that for me? Yeah, let me just say, the House, so the IRS has now put forward their plan on how they would like to utilize the funding they're supposed to receive under the Inflation Reduction Act. The House can continue to claw back, not forever, but through this next couple of years, I think maybe until this next Presidential election, with a Republican majority, though it's slim, it would have been a lot easier if we had the House and Senate. But the House still has that power of the purse. The IRS has said this is what we want to do with the money. They don't have all the money.

So we have to continue to fight every way possible, either to divert it or to prevent them from receiving it for as long as possible. And I think the holdout there is probably an election cycle, because a lot of people are predicting the electoral map for Republicans is more difficult to keep the House, easier to get back to the Senate next cycle. And it's just the way things work out, what senators are up.

But we also saw less midterm elections where everyone was wrong. But I think they can keep a lot of this funding from actually getting to the IRS. What the IRS is doing right now, Logan, is making the case on what they would do with it. They're trying to say it's not about improving your experience with the IRS. That's a small part of what they do with it.

The majority is how to find more money from people. Yeah, and we just need to figure out a way to make this better, certainly. Hey, we only got two minutes left. I did want to bring something up really quickly, because it just came across our desk. And if you're a longtime secular listener, maybe you come from the Christian Talk stations, which I know a lot of you are on. Dr. Charles Stanley, who was an Atlanta pastor and really an innovator in terms of televangelism and the pastor of First Baptist Church in Atlanta and In Touch Ministry, has passed away at the age of 90. They say he passed away peacefully in his home, but they're just making that announcement now. I just want to say, obviously, our condolences to the family, to Andy and to the entire Stanley family. They have had an amazing legacy to leave behind and also just an influential leader in the world of not only just the church, but in media and someone who is still innovating, building.

I mean, their studios now are phenomenal, so someone who never stopped. So I just wanted to share that news with you, sad news, but certainly a life well lived. And I'm sure the In Touch Ministries will continue on. But I wanted to let you know, I saw a lot of people in the comments start talking about it.

I know this was an important figure. So we grew up in Atlanta, so it was something we wanted to bring up here as we wrap up the show. We will be back later on today with the Secular Brothers podcast. Those will join us later today. Click that to subscribe.

Go to secularbrothers.com. You can click on our Rumble link or all the other links to find us there. And also check out the amazing work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org, rapidly expanding, doing some amazing stuff. You should go there not just to support the work, which is obviously a great thing to do as we are in the middle of our matching challenge, but also just to read and get educated and look at some of the great content every day, providing incredible content all across our social media platforms. Yeah, I think on the Secular Brothers, we might want to get some of the Disney discussions going on. Yeah, happy to talk about it.

And President Trump has made some interesting statements. I don't want to give it away on the show. Hey, come to the Secular Brothers podcast if you want to learn more about that, because you might be surprised what's going on. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. As Logan said, we have a matching challenge right now. And if you check out our website too, you'll see the extent of the amount of work. We talked about our work that we're doing in Geneva on behalf of Christians in Nigeria, tax issues, board policy issues with Rick Riddell. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. Talk to you tomorrow.