In this second half of our interview with, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Thomas and Aaryan ask about his thoughts on the failed Ford electric vehicle plant, the threat of white supremacy in society and the military, and how China's biggest threat to the US is economic, rather than physical--and how we might just want to have more faith in America's ability to compete in the market.

Episode Transcript

Aaryan Balu  

I'm Aaryan Balu. And this is Pod Virginia, a podcast with so much good content that we split it into two episodes. This week, our esteemed host, Thomas Bowman, and I are back with the second part of our interview with Colonel Larry Wilkerson. He's the former Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and is currently a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary. Colonel Wilkerson had a lot of great stuff to say this week; we covered his comments on the Ford EV plant that was potentially going to be in Virginia and is no longer. As well as how we should view our relationship with China and external threats, we should probably focus more on the internal threats like white supremacy and anti-semitism that originate right here within our borders. So without further ado, let's jump into our interview with Colonel Larry Wilkerson. Virginia is pretty reliant on a lot of energy resources, especially natural gas. So on the state level, what steps can policymakers take to mitigate some of these potential threats?

Col. Larry Wilkerson  

One of the things we could have done if we were talking about an interim fuel, and that the only way I'll talk about natural gas is as an interim fuel because natural gas pollutes too. But one of the things we could have done was not canceled the East Coast pipeline that Dominion was working on and was going to spend some $12 billion on ostensibly, the Congress says, because Dominion was going to sell that natural gas to Europe, and not to US customers. So the Congress didn't like that. Well, I'm sorry, you need that gas, and you need that gas for both of Europe. And we're seeing why you need it now for your the gas is coming from the Permian Basin; the fracked gas is dirty, gas going to Germany, they're not going to tolerate that for very much longer. They're tolerating it now because of the war. But they're not going to tolerate it for much longer. And it's also costing the Germans about nine to ten times as much as the gas that was coming through Nord Stream from Russia. So we're really setting up a real break with our allies, particularly the most important one I've in Germany, in the future because of what we're doing. And that started with the cancellation of the East Coast pipeline. But I'm not trying to defend Dominion or Duke Power, the two big giants on the East Coast, because I'm a shareholder in Dominion, and I go to the board meetings, and I can tell you, they make me angry at some of the things they're doing, too. Let's look at that plant that was going to go down around Danville. I've been there, I fish down there, I hunt down there, I know that area. That is an extremely poor region. I would compare it in some respects to Southern Mississippi and places that are truly prostrate economically in this country; they needed those Ford plants down there badly, 2,500 to 3,000 jobs, $2 to $3 billion worth of investment. That would have been terrific. Now, let me tell you what I did. I went and did a little research with Ford Motor Company. I think this is probably accurate. Ford Motor Company had said to Governor Youngkin to the state of Virginia they'd said you're on our list. There are several other places on our list. We are going to pick that place at the end of the day we think is the best. They then narrowed the list to a shortlist and let Virginia know they were on that shortlist. I think there were three different locations on the shortlist. Well, Virginia did not make the kind of offer that Ford wanted to the extent that they wanted it. Michigan, I think it was done. And so Ford made a sound economic decision to keep the plant in Michigan; by the way, that area where the plants kind of be is also deprived. Guess what Governor Youngkin did? He then announces that? No, it wasn't Ford that decided not to put it here. It was him because it was connected with the Chinese. This battery plant was connected to the Chinese. Well, that's the kind of duplicitous Republicans we have in office all across this country now. It was not based on that. It was based on economic considerations that Ford made and then alerted Virginia to in the first place. So let's just say Virginia's deal offering was not sweet enough. I don't know what it was not sweet enough and tax breaks whatever Ford elected to go elsewhere. And then Youngkin comes out and makes it a national security issue. That's just stupid. Maybe politically profitable for him, but it's just stupid. He wants to run for president, so that's probably why he did it. That's not what we need to be doing. We need to be doing the kinds of things that are necessary to get off even the transmission system if you will, the interim fuel the shell calls natural gas, and get into other things like solar wind, and whatever else is coming down the road. I suspect there's something big coming down the road eventually because I never really Is faith in America's ability to produce the technologies that are necessary to meet the crisis on time and with great flair and probably profitability, too. So I think something like cold fusion or some other thing we don't even know right now will be the ultimate end of this century, if you will, an energy source that we turn to. Maybe it'll be a more sophisticated version of solar; I don't know. I'm not an expert, but there are all kinds of possibilities out there. Europe right now, particularly Britain, is going to hydrogen, green hydrogen. They're making huge investments in green hydrogen all over Britain right now. They're converting their service stations, converting their transmission pipelines, converting the plants that have to make this safe, and so forth. And as they're doing this, they're developing more and more types of green hydrogen that are more efficient, more effective, and less dangerous. So these are the kinds of things that need to be happening in Virginia, too, and Youngkin pushing forward away by not offering them a sweet enough deal is not the way to do business.

Thomas Bowman  

Colonel Wilkerson, I'd love to hear your thoughts about not just this EV plant possibility but, specifically, what should Virginians be concerned about? Relating to China doing business in the United States? And what campaign BS that the governor or other politicians just make up to look good?

Col. Larry Wilkerson  

That's a good question. And I'm not an expert on the economic aspects of this. But I've heard enough experts that think I have some good views, some sound views. China is more than anything else. Certainly more than a physical threat, an economic threat, maybe a physical threat if we push Taiwan too hard on them. And that worries me. But it's more of an economic threat. And I go back to George Bush and Colin Powell and George HW Bush, and Jim Baker and a host of others who might be heard at one time or another say things like this; this is almost a direct quote, one of them. If we can't compete with China on a strategic basis, in an area of expertise, where we are the real world power, economics, and especially capitalism, we should retreat from the battlefield in shame. That's about what I feel too. This is crazy that we can compete in this area. Now, there are ways to compete and ways to protect that competition that we are good at and that we often deride because we want to make political hay out of it. We want to appear to be interested in China's threat to our economy and so forth, and we make a hyperbolic statement about it. And Biden is especially guilty of that; Trump was due for that matter. But Trump was an anomaly, I hope. Is China a threat to Virginia or to any other aspect of the United States economically? Yes, it is; it's stealing stuff. I used to have Chinese students in my seminar, William & Mary. And I would say to them, are you a spy, and they would smile at me? Yeah, of course, they get debriefed when they go back, one of them actually gave me a little insight into how they get debriefed. I suspect, though, that we have a program; I know that we have a program for key students who are overseas, then we debrief too. So it's, it's things that people do. China's a little more insidious about it. And you have to be a little more careful about giving up secrets and so forth. Ultimately, if you're an open society like we are, the plethora, the very volume of data that flows to another country, and I've had other country's intelligence services actually say this, to me, it is so overwhelming, that just sorting through it on a timely basis, and in a way that gives them something concrete is extremely difficult. That said, we do lose technological data; we do lose data that we should have protected to Chinese assets. That's a liability of being in an open society. I think I wouldn't trade the Open Society, though, for protection against that. That'd be draconian. So we just have to be on our guard, and we have to watch what's happening. Let's take a specific example. If you had had that plant down in Danville, the idea that the Chinese would be incorporated in the processes in that plant with the blessing of Bill Ford or anybody else at Ford and stealing things that would be detrimental to US security. It is not total poppycock, but it almost is because I trust Ford to have at least the kinds of relationships that would exist there that would detect that if it were happening. If we don't trust our industry, I don't know what we're going to do because that's our greatest strength in the world. That's our greatest profit maker in the world. That's our job, producer. And I don't think they would be sacrificing things like they did, for example, when they moved things to China. And many of them have moved out of China now because they've realized what China did to them when they were in China stealing technology. Much easier to do it in China than it is in the US, stealing technology and essentially creating their own apparatus over here on the side that makes things exactly as the factory from the US had been making things, and then saying to the factory from the US, okay, now, you can either get out or pay these exorbitant rates for your staying, knowing they're gonna get out which they have been doing. That's something the Chinese did, but we did it to ourselves by relocating everything in China and causing all those jobs too. So it's a two-way street. I think you can guard against it; I think you can make yourself more secure rather than less secure; you are going to lose some things. But let's face it, we're going to steal some things from them, too. We started doing that with a vengeance; take my word for it. And it's a two-way street. And you got to be able to operate on that street, and you got to be a big guy; you can't be an immature idiot and go out there and scream and holler that somebody's doing it to you all the time when you're damn well doing it back to them. There's a happy medium in there somewhere. And most of it should be good capitalism, good commerce, good market-based economics. We talk about fair trade all the time, free trade, and fair trade. And yet were some of the biggest violators of that very mantra. China certainly is to no one as easing paying; I think it was said the other day, or maybe it was one year. No one abides by the rules of the WTO. That's true. No one does anymore. We violate them routinely. So does every other country in the world, from Britain to Zambia. But it's still there, and it's still a regime that's usable from time to time to punish the more egregious violations. I wouldn't take it away. But those are the kinds of things that we built in the world. Those are the kinds of things that we should adhere to, and we should try to make others adhere to such as we can. But I wouldn't be fearful of it; I just don't think it's worth being fearful of. You just have to be cautious, prudent, and careful.

Aaryan Balu  

Turning away from the sort of foreign concerns to some of the domestic threats. Since Charlottesville, back in 2017. There's been a pretty significant increase in hate-motivated crimes in the US, racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-semitic, all of that stuff, according to the FBI. Which I think has marked white supremacy as one of the largest, if not the largest, sort of domestic terror threat. Just some more numbers throw to throw at you. In 2022 instances of anti-semitic violence reached the highest level since the Anti-Defamation League started to keep records back in 1979. And in particular, Virginia was the third-highest state for antisemitic incidents in the last year. So with that in mind, how do we address these attacks and these organizations based around hate, both publicly and in the workplace?

Col. Larry Wilkerson  

That also is an excellent question, one that I'm engaged in trying to answer for the military almost every day because a lot of these people, too many of these people, get into the military. The Patriot Fund is an interesting group. As I understand their history, they actually sprang out of Charlottesville, and the problems they're one of these, I forget his name now. But one of the people who was there didn't like some of the leadership of that riotous group in Charlottesville. And so he created his own independent group to be a little bit more like them or even even more seriously criminal, in a sense. Particularly with the anti-semitic remarks, as you said, I think Virginia was number three in the country in 2022. According to the league, these groups really troubled me because they are the kind of groups that, for example, John Hagee, head of Christians United for Israel, has put together a motorcycle group that runs all across the country and preaches about the end times and the rapture and armageddon and is very straightforward about using Israel. Hagee, for example, is sent $3 to $5 billion to finance West Bank settlements in Israel, a real friend of Bibi Netanyahu, if you will. These are very dangerous people. And they're dangerous in a global sense, as I just mentioned with regard to Israel, but they're also dangerous in the domestic sense. With regard to the sanctity of our democracy, these people do not want democracy; they really want an autocracy; they want to foster a state where they're the rulers. And the Patriot fronts, a perfect example of that sort of thing, as are these groups with Hagee. It's not good that we're doing this sort of thing. It's not good that we have this sort of thing. For example, it just happened in Tennessee, where it's clear to me I spent a lot of time studying the 1850s a lot of time, more time than I've ever spent in my life on any particular era in American history other than post-World War Two, which is what I teach from 1950 to the present time. I went back and looked at 1850 to 1860. And one of the things I noted was we are back in those times in every sense of that expression. We are back in those times. We don't have slavery, but we have other things that emulate and simulate slavery if you will. One of the things that were indicative that just happened was the legislature in Tennessee, unseating those two, three originally, because they receded the white person, those two black persons. When I watched that when I listened to those people on the floor of the Tennessee legislature when that guy was talking about the sacred nature of Tennessee's legislature, I said, Man, do you know anything about your history? Do you know that in 1850, 1860, The things that were happening on the floor of that legislature nullified the Constitution of the United States? You became traitors to the United States of America, you divorced yourself from the union, and you say that's a sacred place? Well, maybe since you've made it a sacred place, but you certainly made an unsacred when you unseated these members who were duly elected by the electorate of Tennessee. So this is the kind of phenomenon that's happening right now all across the country. Thank God, I don't see too much of it in Virginia, but I'm sure it's here. I saw it in Charlottesville, and that is that they want to disabuse us of our democracy. They don't want it; they don't like it. It doesn't support their views. It doesn't support their hatred; it doesn't support their anti-semitism. It doesn't support their white supremacy; a dictator would bring him on and let him have Jesus sorted aside; indeed, let it be Jesus; why didn't he descend back to Earth and establish His 1000-year kingdom and make us all the people we want to be with an AR-15 in our hand, and everybody else can go to hell. That's the way these people feel. And to me, the FBI feels the same way. That's a serious threat to our democracy.

Thomas Bowman  

Well, I guess to use one of their own phrases. This is what it looks like when your sacred spaces get trampled. Colonel, I want to give you a chance for some closing thoughts. Help us be prepared. We've talked about energy, geopolitics, and fascism; what would you say? And just put a button on it. And imagine Governor Glenn Youngkin is listening right now. What does he need to know?

Col. Larry Wilkerson  

The first thing I would say and the last thing I would say is what Powell used to say to me all the time, it didn't matter whether we're dealing with China, or Russia, or Japan, or whomever, do not take counsel of your fears. And what that means, in essence, is to have some faith in yourself. You are a great power. You didn't get to be a great power and have such a powerful economy in such a successful economy. Through lackadaisical work, laziness, and ineptitude, you got there because you are a vibrant, healthy democracy. You threaten that democracy, and you will find out that your fears have indeed advised you. So don't take counsel of your fears. Don't be afraid of everything that some politician tells you. You should be very afraid because 9 times out of 10, he started to use that to enhance his own political power, or she started to use that to enhance her own political power. I think alarm Boebert, Or I think Marjorie Taylor, very when I say she's trying to use that to enhance her political power. Don't take counsel of your fears. Do not be fearful. You are pretty good, America.

Thomas Bowman  

Well, let's leave it there. Thank you so much, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, for joining us today on Pod Virginia and Providing your really valuable insights on these pressing issues.