Follow the Money
Follow the Money
Where Campaign Cash Really Comes From, Who Benefits from Climate Policy, and Why Christians Stay Silent About China
By Paul Truesdell
Before I begin…
Why I Do Long-Form: A Four-Minute Explanation
You know what’s funny? Every marketing guru out there tells me I’m doing it all wrong. “Paul, you need to be on TikTok. You need fifteen-second clips. You need memes. You need to hook ‘em in three seconds or they’re gone.”
And I say: Good. Let ’em go.
Here’s the thing about those short-form videos—the TikToks, the Reels, the quick-hit content. They’re designed for instant gratification. Quick dopamine hits. Scroll, laugh, scroll, react, scroll. The average user burns through two hundred videos in thirty minutes. Half of viewers bail within three seconds if they’re not immediately entertained.
That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the feature.
And it works beautifully—for a certain kind of audience. The “entertain me” crowd. The “what have you done for me lately” folks. The meme-based, short-attention-span consumer who wants answers without questions and solutions without understanding.
That’s not my type of prospect or client.
Let me tell you who I’m looking for. I work with people who are fifty-five and older, often within five years of retirement or already there. These are folks who’ve spent decades building something—careers, families, wealth, wisdom. They didn’t get there by scrolling through thirty-second clips. They got there by thinking things through. By asking hard questions. By sitting with complexity.
Long-form podcasting is my filter.
When I do a two-hour episode, I’m not trying to compete with TikTok. I’m doing the opposite. I’m saying: If you’ve got the patience to listen to this, if you’re intellectually curious enough to follow a conversation that unfolds over time, if you actually enjoy thinking deeply about money, about retirement, about how to spend the next chapter of your life—then you might be my kind of person.
The research backs this up. Long-form podcast listeners are different. They score high on what psychologists call “openness to experience”—intellectual curiosity, comfort with complex ideas, appreciation for nuance. They have what’s called a “high need for cognition”—they genuinely enjoy thinking. They’re not stressed out by three-hour conversations; they’re energized by them.
These are the people who say, “I really want to dig into this and understand it fully.” Not “just give me the bullet points.”
And here’s the beautiful irony: the completion rates on long-form podcasts are extraordinary. Seventy to ninety percent of listeners finish episodes. Even those marathon three-hour shows? Dedicated listeners stick around because the content rewards their attention.
Compare that to short-form, where you lose half your audience in three seconds.
Now, some would call that a failure. I call it efficiency.
When someone finds The Paul Truesdell Podcast and actually listens—really listens—to an episode or two, they’re self-selecting. They’re telling me something about who they are. They’re patient. They’re thoughtful. They want depth over speed. They’re not looking for entertainment; they’re looking for insight.
That’s exactly the kind of person I want to work with in my practice. Because when we sit down to talk about retirement planning, about protecting what they’ve built, about making decisions that will affect the rest of their lives—I need someone who can handle a real conversation. Not a soundbite.
The “entertain me” client? They’ll fire you the moment the market dips. The “what have you done for me lately” client? They’re always chasing the next shiny thing. But the intellectually engaged client—the one who found you through a long-form podcast and thought, “This guy thinks like I do”—that’s a relationship built on substance.
So no, I’m not going to dance on TikTok. I’m not going to compress forty years of experience into fifteen seconds. I’m going to keep doing what I do: long conversations, deep dives, real thinking.
And the right people will find their way here.
That’s the nature of the beast.
Now, the rest of the story.
Let me tell you something I learned a long time ago, back when I was carrying a badge and working cases that most folks never hear about. If you want to understand why something that makes no sense keeps happening, you have to follow the money. It is that simple. The money trail never lies, even when everybody around it does.
Now, when you start looking at where the big institutional money managers are putting their clients' assets, you discover something interesting. All that patriotic advertising, all those commercials with American flags waving and military families featured prominently, well, it starts to look a lot like window dressing. Marketing. Because when you dig into the actual portfolios, you find massive investments flowing into companies that operate primarily in countries that are not exactly our friends. American patriotism, for a lot of these outfits, is nothing more than a way to get your money. What they actually believe in is whatever grows their assets under management, because that is how they get paid.
And here is where it gets really interesting. Follow the money behind the folks fighting against immigration enforcement. Follow the money behind the sanctuary city advocates and the obstruction campaigns. You start seeing patterns. Money flows in from foundations and organizations that, when you peel back two or three layers, connect to foreign interests. Some of those interests are not friendly to this country at all. The structure is clever, I will give them that. A Communist Chinese company invests in a subsidiary, which creates an American offshoot, which funds a political action committee or a nonprofit advocacy group. By the time the money arrives at a politician's campaign or a legal defense fund, it looks as American as apple pie. But it is not. It is money laundering for the purpose of influencing American political outcomes. Plain and simple.
Florida is not exempt from this. We have politicians right here in our own state taking substantial donations from sources that, if you trace them back far enough, lead to some very questionable places. And nobody seems interested in asking the hard questions about where that money originates. The pattern is always the same. Layer upon layer of corporate structures designed to obscure the original source. They are betting that Americans are too busy, too distracted, or too trusting to follow the trail. Most of the time, they are right.
Just recently, federal investigators secured a guilty plea from a woman in New York who orchestrated a thirty million dollar fraud scheme that included selling foreign nationals, many from China, access to prominent American politicians at fundraising events. She collected foreign-sourced funds and then made contributions in her own name or through straw donors, violating every campaign finance law on the books. She took photos with elected officials at these events and used those photos to market her scheme to more foreign investors. And this is just one case that happened to get prosecuted. How many others are operating right now without anyone looking too closely?
This is not a new phenomenon. It goes back decades. Remember the Clinton administration? During the 1996 election, the Democratic National Committee had to return nearly three million dollars in illegal foreign contributions, much of it traced back to Chinese sources. Names like John Huang (pronounced HWONG), Charlie Trie (pronounced TREE), and Johnny Chung became synonymous with campaign finance scandal. Chung received three hundred thousand dollars from Ji Shengde (pronounced JEE SHUNG-DUH), who just happened to be the head of Chinese military intelligence. Let that sink in. The head of Chinese military intelligence was funneling money into American political campaigns.
Vice President Al Gore attended a fundraiser at the Hsi Lai (pronounced SHEE LYE) Buddhist Temple in California, where Maria Hsia (pronounced SHAH), later identified as having connections to Chinese intelligence, facilitated over one hundred thousand dollars in illegal contributions. Buddhist nuns and temple employees pleaded the Fifth Amendment when Congress came calling. Twenty-two people were eventually convicted of fraud or funneling Asian funds into American elections. Others fled the country entirely.
Meanwhile, something far more serious was happening at our nuclear weapons laboratories. Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of our most sensitive facilities, had been penetrated. A Department of Energy intelligence analyst named Notra Trulock discovered evidence that China had obtained design information on the W-88 nuclear warhead, our most advanced miniaturized weapon. The FBI investigated. They briefed the White House. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was told that Chinese espionage operations were ongoing inside our weapons laboratories. And what happened? Not much. The investigation dragged on. Security clearances remained in place. The Clinton administration appeared more concerned about protecting its China policy than protecting our nuclear secrets.
A scientist named Wen Ho Lee (pronounced WEN HO LEE) was eventually fired from Los Alamos and charged with fifty-nine counts related to mishandling classified information. The case largely fell apart, and he pleaded guilty to a single count. The judge apologized to him for the way he had been treated. But the larger question remained unanswered. How did China advance its nuclear weapons program so rapidly? The Cox Report, a seven-hundred-page congressional investigation, detailed extensive Chinese espionage targeting our nuclear and missile technology. Thirty percent of that report remains classified to this day.
Here is what the Cox Report documented. Chinese intelligence services had been systematically targeting our national laboratories for years. They used scientific exchanges, academic conferences, and personal relationships to collect information. When legitimate channels were not enough, they turned to espionage. The result was that China obtained design information on every deployed thermonuclear warhead in the American arsenal. They acquired technology that allowed them to leap ahead by decades in their missile programs. Prior to 1993, Chinese missiles lacked the accuracy to reliably hit their targets. By the late 1990s, their missiles could reach any major American city.
The technology transfer extended beyond nuclear weapons. American companies like Loral Space and Communications provided technical assistance that improved the reliability and accuracy of Chinese rockets, ostensibly for commercial satellite launches. The Commerce Department, under pressure from political donors, transferred export licensing authority from the State Department to make approvals easier. The CEO of Loral was a major Democratic donor. Coincidence? Follow the money.
Now here is where the money trail gets particularly instructive. After Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, he could have faded into obscurity like most defeated candidates. Instead, he reinvented himself as the high priest of climate change. He made a documentary, won an Academy Award, shared a Nobel Peace Prize, wrote bestselling books, and became fabulously wealthy in the process. His net worth went from around two million dollars when he left the vice presidency to somewhere north of three hundred million dollars today.
How did he do it? He co-founded Generation Investment Management in 2004, a firm that manages over thirty billion dollars in assets, all focused on sustainable and ESG investing. He joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading their climate change solutions group. He became a senior advisor to Google. And in 2003, he joined the Board of Directors of Apple, where he served for over two decades.
Now think about this for a moment. The climate change agenda has pushed massive subsidies toward solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries. Government policies in the United States and Europe have mandated renewable energy targets and provided billions in taxpayer support. And where does the overwhelming majority of that equipment come from? China. China manufactures over eighty percent of the world's solar cells and more than seventy percent of its wind turbines. They dominate the lithium battery market. When you follow the money from climate policy, it flows directly to Chinese manufacturing.
The International Energy Agency has documented this dominance extensively. China controls at least seventy-five percent of every single key stage of solar photovoltaic panel manufacturing and processing. Not just final assembly, but the entire supply chain from polysilicon production to finished modules. Their share has grown from fifty-five percent in 2010 to over eighty-four percent today. Even when American or European companies install solar panels, those panels were almost certainly manufactured in China or using Chinese components.
Wind turbines tell a similar story. Chinese manufacturers now supply nearly sixty percent of all wind turbines installed globally. Ten of the world's top fifteen wind turbine companies are Chinese. Their prices are twenty percent lower than American or European competitors because of massive government subsidies and economies of scale. In 2024 alone, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China than in the rest of the world combined.
And batteries? China is projected to account for seventy-one percent of global battery manufacturing investment through 2026. CATL (pronounced SEE-AY-TEE-ELL), a Chinese company, provides thirty percent of all batteries used in electric vehicles worldwide and about a third of global grid energy storage systems. The climate transition that Western governments are mandating is being built in Chinese factories.
And Apple? The company on whose board Al Gore sat all those years? Approximately ninety percent of Apple products have been manufactured in China. Their largest manufacturing partner, Foxconn (pronounced FOKS-KAHN), operates massive facilities in China employing hundreds of thousands of workers. Apple's supply chain is so deeply integrated with China that the company has invested billions in Chinese manufacturing capacity. They have been slowly diversifying to India and Vietnam, but China remains the foundation.
So here you have a former Vice President who was involved in a campaign finance scandal connected to Chinese money, who later built a fortune promoting climate policies that benefit Chinese manufacturing, while sitting on the board of a company that manufactures almost everything in China. I am not suggesting any laws were broken. I am simply suggesting you follow the money and draw your own conclusions about where loyalties lie and who benefits from what policies.
But there is another aspect of the China question that troubles me deeply, and it has to do with something beyond money. It has to do with morality and the strange silence of American Christians on one of the greatest religious persecutions happening in the world today.
The Chinese Communist Party has waged a systematic campaign against Christianity that has intensified dramatically under President Xi Jinping (pronounced SHEE JIN-PING). They call it the Sinicization of religion, which is a fancy way of saying that any faith practiced in China must serve the Communist Party first. Churches are required to raise the national flag. They must install surveillance cameras. They must display portraits of Xi Jinping. They must sing patriotic hymns praising the Party before they can sing hymns praising God.
Churches that refuse to comply face demolition. Pastors who resist face arrest. Believers who persist face imprisonment on fabricated charges like picking quarrels and provoking trouble, a catch-all accusation used to punish anyone the government wants to silence.
One of the most infamous examples occurred in January 2018, when authorities dynamited the Golden Lampstand Church in Shanxi (pronounced SHAHN-SHEE) Province. This was a large evangelical house church that had cost millions to build and could accommodate thousands of worshippers. Paramilitary police surrounded it in the early morning hours, planted explosives, and blew it to rubble. They destroyed the underground sanctuary first, then the main structure. An American Christian advocacy organization called it a demonstration of the government's complete disregard for religious freedom.
In Zhejiang (pronounced JUH-JYAHNG) Province, sometimes called China's Jerusalem because of its large Christian population, authorities removed over twelve hundred crosses from church steeples between 2013 and 2015. The campaign continued. Churches were forced to replace their crosses with national flags. Those that resisted were targeted for demolition or forced closure. The message was clear. The Communist Party demands absolute loyalty. Any symbol that suggests a higher authority than the state must be removed, literally torn down from the rooftops.
Reports from organizations like ChinaAid, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom document the acceleration of persecution. In 2024 alone, over twelve thousand Christians were investigated, threatened, or detained for house church activities. More than two thousand house churches were shut down. At least five hundred church buildings were demolished, including some that had been registered and approved by the state.
In October 2025, authorities arrested nearly thirty leaders and members of the Zion Church network, one of China's largest underground Protestant organizations, across seven cities including Beijing and Shanghai. Pastor Jin Mingri (pronounced JIN MING-REE), the founder, was among those detained.
Then came December 2025 and the siege of Yayang (pronounced YAH-YAHNG) Church in Wenzhou (pronounced WEN-JOE). More than one thousand police officers, including SWAT teams, riot police, and firefighters from multiple jurisdictions, surrounded this house church network in the early morning hours of December 15th. Several hundred believers who had been keeping vigil inside were detained. Signal-jamming vehicles prevented communication. Drones monitored from above. It was a military-style operation against unarmed Christians.
Church leaders Lin Enzhao (pronounced LIN EN-JAOW) and Lin Enci (pronounced LIN EN-TSEE) were arrested and accused of being principal suspects of a criminal organization. An elderly man in his seventies named Cai Wangling (pronounced TSAI WAHNG-LING) was detained for opposing the forced installation of a national flag at his church. When the flagpole broke during the confrontation, authorities treated it as a crime worthy of extended imprisonment.
After the raid succeeded, the government spent hundreds of thousands of yuan on celebratory fireworks in the town square. They held a commendation conference with slogans proclaiming Listen to the Party, Follow the Party. Then they brought in bulldozers and cranes. By early January 2026, the cross atop Yayang Church had been torn down. Parts of the building were demolished. Armed police surrounded the site, and residents were ordered not to photograph or record anything.
In the same week, the Early Rain Covenant Church in Sichuan (pronounced SEE-CHWAHN) Province saw its current leader Li Yingqiang (pronounced LEE YING-CHYAHNG) and other key members taken into custody. This church had already suffered severely since 2018, when its founder Pastor Wang Yi (pronounced WAHNG YEE), a prominent human rights defender and legal scholar, was arrested along with one hundred members and later sentenced to nine years in prison for inciting subversion of state power.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly designated China as one of the worst violators of religious freedom in the world. The persecution includes torture, forced disappearances, and even transnational harassment of believers who have fled abroad.
Why this intensity now? The Chinese Communist Party perceives the rapid growth of Christianity as an existential challenge. Estimates suggest there are between forty and one hundred million Christians in China, a number that rivals or exceeds Communist Party membership. Independent churches foster communities outside state control. They create networks of trust and mutual support that operate beyond government surveillance. For a regime obsessed with maintaining absolute control, this is intolerable.
Some analysts have speculated that the intensified crackdowns may be connected to preparations for potential conflict, perhaps over Taiwan. Regimes throughout history have suppressed potential internal opposition before military mobilization. Whether or not that specific theory is correct, the timing coincides with Xi Jinping's emphasis on national security, a massive military buildup, and increasingly aggressive rhetoric about unification with Taiwan. The Communist Party clearly views independent religious faith as a security threat, not merely a social nuisance.
And yet, where is the sustained outrage from American Christians? Where are the organized boycotts, the congressional pressure campaigns, the Sunday morning sermons condemning this persecution with the same vigor applied to other injustices? If a Christian baker in Colorado faces legal action, it dominates evangelical media for months. If churches are dynamited in China and pastors imprisoned for years, it barely registers.
I think the answer, at least in part, comes back to money. American corporations have enormous financial interests in China. American investment portfolios are heavily exposed to Chinese markets. American consumers have grown accustomed to inexpensive goods manufactured by Chinese workers, some of them in facilities with conditions that would never be tolerated in this country. Nobody wants to upset that arrangement, even when the human cost includes the systematic destruction of Christian faith.
There is also a certain selective outrage in modern advocacy. Certain causes generate enormous attention and funding. Others, no matter how severe the suffering involved, struggle to gain traction. The persecution of Christians in China involves tens of millions of people, decades of systematic abuse, churches blown up with dynamite, pastors serving nine-year prison sentences, elderly believers detained for opposing the installation of Communist propaganda in their places of worship. Yet it receives a fraction of the attention devoted to far lesser grievances in Western countries.
Perhaps the issue is too big, too far away, too complicated. Perhaps people feel powerless to change it. Or perhaps the inconvenient truth is that meaningful opposition to Chinese religious persecution would require Americans to accept higher prices for consumer goods, lower returns on investments, and a fundamental reexamination of the economic relationship that has made China wealthy and powerful while hollowing out American manufacturing. That is a trade-off most people are not willing to make, even when the lives of their brothers and sisters in faith are at stake.
The Chinese Communist Party understands something fundamental about Western democracies. They understand that our political systems respond to organized pressure and that our economic systems reward short-term thinking. They have learned to use our own openness against us, funneling money through layers of corporations and nonprofits to influence our elections, while counting on our addiction to cheap consumer goods to keep us from asking uncomfortable questions.
So here is what I am asking you to do. Think about it. Think about who you are voting for and where their campaign money comes from. Think about the policies you support and who benefits financially from those policies. Think about the investments in your retirement accounts and whether they align with your values. And think about whether your silence on certain issues is purchased by your comfort.
When you see massive amounts of money flowing into any political campaign, follow that money. Ask where it originates. Look past the first layer and the second layer. Find out who really benefits when certain policies are enacted. And if you believe in something, get involved. Campaigns need volunteers and small donors and people willing to knock on doors and make phone calls. Democracy is not a spectator sport, and it certainly should not be a commodity for sale to the highest bidder, foreign or domestic.
The money trail never lies. Follow it, and you will understand far more about what is really happening in this country than any campaign advertisement or cable news segment will ever tell you. And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us start paying attention, we can begin to reclaim a political system that increasingly serves everyone except the American people it was designed to represent.
That is all for today. Think carefully about what you have heard. Ask questions. Demand answers. And remember that in a world where almost everything can be bought and sold, your integrity and your principles are worth holding onto. They cannot put a price on those unless you let them.
God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
Where Campaign Cash Really Comes From, Who Benefits from Climate Policy, and Why Christians Stay Silent About China
By Paul Truesdell
Before I begin…
Why I Do Long-Form: A Four-Minute Explanation
You know what’s funny? Every marketing guru out there tells me I’m doing it all wrong. “Paul, you need to be on TikTok. You need fifteen-second clips. You need memes. You need to hook ‘em in three seconds or they’re gone.”
And I say: Good. Let ’em go.
Here’s the thing about those short-form videos—the TikToks, the Reels, the quick-hit content. They’re designed for instant gratification. Quick dopamine hits. Scroll, laugh, scroll, react, scroll. The average user burns through two hundred videos in thirty minutes. Half of viewers bail within three seconds if they’re not immediately entertained.
That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the feature.
And it works beautifully—for a certain kind of audience. The “entertain me” crowd. The “what have you done for me lately” folks. The meme-based, short-attention-span consumer who wants answers without questions and solutions without understanding.
That’s not my type of prospect or client.
Let me tell you who I’m looking for. I work with people who are fifty-five and older, often within five years of retirement or already there. These are folks who’ve spent decades building something—careers, families, wealth, wisdom. They didn’t get there by scrolling through thirty-second clips. They got there by thinking things through. By asking hard questions. By sitting with complexity.
Long-form podcasting is my filter.
When I do a two-hour episode, I’m not trying to compete with TikTok. I’m doing the opposite. I’m saying: If you’ve got the patience to listen to this, if you’re intellectually curious enough to follow a conversation that unfolds over time, if you actually enjoy thinking deeply about money, about retirement, about how to spend the next chapter of your life—then you might be my kind of person.
The research backs this up. Long-form podcast listeners are different. They score high on what psychologists call “openness to experience”—intellectual curiosity, comfort with complex ideas, appreciation for nuance. They have what’s called a “high need for cognition”—they genuinely enjoy thinking. They’re not stressed out by three-hour conversations; they’re energized by them.
These are the people who say, “I really want to dig into this and understand it fully.” Not “just give me the bullet points.”
And here’s the beautiful irony: the completion rates on long-form podcasts are extraordinary. Seventy to ninety percent of listeners finish episodes. Even those marathon three-hour shows? Dedicated listeners stick around because the content rewards their attention.
Compare that to short-form, where you lose half your audience in three seconds.
Now, some would call that a failure. I call it efficiency.
When someone finds The Paul Truesdell Podcast and actually listens—really listens—to an episode or two, they’re self-selecting. They’re telling me something about who they are. They’re patient. They’re thoughtful. They want depth over speed. They’re not looking for entertainment; they’re looking for insight.
That’s exactly the kind of person I want to work with in my practice. Because when we sit down to talk about retirement planning, about protecting what they’ve built, about making decisions that will affect the rest of their lives—I need someone who can handle a real conversation. Not a soundbite.
The “entertain me” client? They’ll fire you the moment the market dips. The “what have you done for me lately” client? They’re always chasing the next shiny thing. But the intellectually engaged client—the one who found you through a long-form podcast and thought, “This guy thinks like I do”—that’s a relationship built on substance.
So no, I’m not going to dance on TikTok. I’m not going to compress forty years of experience into fifteen seconds. I’m going to keep doing what I do: long conversations, deep dives, real thinking.
And the right people will find their way here.
That’s the nature of the beast.
Now, the rest of the story.
Let me tell you something I learned a long time ago, back when I was carrying a badge and working cases that most folks never hear about. If you want to understand why something that makes no sense keeps happening, you have to follow the money. It is that simple. The money trail never lies, even when everybody around it does.
Now, when you start looking at where the big institutional money managers are putting their clients' assets, you discover something interesting. All that patriotic advertising, all those commercials with American flags waving and military families featured prominently, well, it starts to look a lot like window dressing. Marketing. Because when you dig into the actual portfolios, you find massive investments flowing into companies that operate primarily in countries that are not exactly our friends. American patriotism, for a lot of these outfits, is nothing more than a way to get your money. What they actually believe in is whatever grows their assets under management, because that is how they get paid.
And here is where it gets really interesting. Follow the money behind the folks fighting against immigration enforcement. Follow the money behind the sanctuary city advocates and the obstruction campaigns. You start seeing patterns. Money flows in from foundations and organizations that, when you peel back two or three layers, connect to foreign interests. Some of those interests are not friendly to this country at all. The structure is clever, I will give them that. A Communist Chinese company invests in a subsidiary, which creates an American offshoot, which funds a political action committee or a nonprofit advocacy group. By the time the money arrives at a politician's campaign or a legal defense fund, it looks as American as apple pie. But it is not. It is money laundering for the purpose of influencing American political outcomes. Plain and simple.
Florida is not exempt from this. We have politicians right here in our own state taking substantial donations from sources that, if you trace them back far enough, lead to some very questionable places. And nobody seems interested in asking the hard questions about where that money originates. The pattern is always the same. Layer upon layer of corporate structures designed to obscure the original source. They are betting that Americans are too busy, too distracted, or too trusting to follow the trail. Most of the time, they are right.
Just recently, federal investigators secured a guilty plea from a woman in New York who orchestrated a thirty million dollar fraud scheme that included selling foreign nationals, many from China, access to prominent American politicians at fundraising events. She collected foreign-sourced funds and then made contributions in her own name or through straw donors, violating every campaign finance law on the books. She took photos with elected officials at these events and used those photos to market her scheme to more foreign investors. And this is just one case that happened to get prosecuted. How many others are operating right now without anyone looking too closely?
This is not a new phenomenon. It goes back decades. Remember the Clinton administration? During the 1996 election, the Democratic National Committee had to return nearly three million dollars in illegal foreign contributions, much of it traced back to Chinese sources. Names like John Huang (pronounced HWONG), Charlie Trie (pronounced TREE), and Johnny Chung became synonymous with campaign finance scandal. Chung received three hundred thousand dollars from Ji Shengde (pronounced JEE SHUNG-DUH), who just happened to be the head of Chinese military intelligence. Let that sink in. The head of Chinese military intelligence was funneling money into American political campaigns.
Vice President Al Gore attended a fundraiser at the Hsi Lai (pronounced SHEE LYE) Buddhist Temple in California, where Maria Hsia (pronounced SHAH), later identified as having connections to Chinese intelligence, facilitated over one hundred thousand dollars in illegal contributions. Buddhist nuns and temple employees pleaded the Fifth Amendment when Congress came calling. Twenty-two people were eventually convicted of fraud or funneling Asian funds into American elections. Others fled the country entirely.
Meanwhile, something far more serious was happening at our nuclear weapons laboratories. Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of our most sensitive facilities, had been penetrated. A Department of Energy intelligence analyst named Notra Trulock discovered evidence that China had obtained design information on the W-88 nuclear warhead, our most advanced miniaturized weapon. The FBI investigated. They briefed the White House. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was told that Chinese espionage operations were ongoing inside our weapons laboratories. And what happened? Not much. The investigation dragged on. Security clearances remained in place. The Clinton administration appeared more concerned about protecting its China policy than protecting our nuclear secrets.
A scientist named Wen Ho Lee (pronounced WEN HO LEE) was eventually fired from Los Alamos and charged with fifty-nine counts related to mishandling classified information. The case largely fell apart, and he pleaded guilty to a single count. The judge apologized to him for the way he had been treated. But the larger question remained unanswered. How did China advance its nuclear weapons program so rapidly? The Cox Report, a seven-hundred-page congressional investigation, detailed extensive Chinese espionage targeting our nuclear and missile technology. Thirty percent of that report remains classified to this day.
Here is what the Cox Report documented. Chinese intelligence services had been systematically targeting our national laboratories for years. They used scientific exchanges, academic conferences, and personal relationships to collect information. When legitimate channels were not enough, they turned to espionage. The result was that China obtained design information on every deployed thermonuclear warhead in the American arsenal. They acquired technology that allowed them to leap ahead by decades in their missile programs. Prior to 1993, Chinese missiles lacked the accuracy to reliably hit their targets. By the late 1990s, their missiles could reach any major American city.
The technology transfer extended beyond nuclear weapons. American companies like Loral Space and Communications provided technical assistance that improved the reliability and accuracy of Chinese rockets, ostensibly for commercial satellite launches. The Commerce Department, under pressure from political donors, transferred export licensing authority from the State Department to make approvals easier. The CEO of Loral was a major Democratic donor. Coincidence? Follow the money.
Now here is where the money trail gets particularly instructive. After Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, he could have faded into obscurity like most defeated candidates. Instead, he reinvented himself as the high priest of climate change. He made a documentary, won an Academy Award, shared a Nobel Peace Prize, wrote bestselling books, and became fabulously wealthy in the process. His net worth went from around two million dollars when he left the vice presidency to somewhere north of three hundred million dollars today.
How did he do it? He co-founded Generation Investment Management in 2004, a firm that manages over thirty billion dollars in assets, all focused on sustainable and ESG investing. He joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading their climate change solutions group. He became a senior advisor to Google. And in 2003, he joined the Board of Directors of Apple, where he served for over two decades.
Now think about this for a moment. The climate change agenda has pushed massive subsidies toward solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries. Government policies in the United States and Europe have mandated renewable energy targets and provided billions in taxpayer support. And where does the overwhelming majority of that equipment come from? China. China manufactures over eighty percent of the world's solar cells and more than seventy percent of its wind turbines. They dominate the lithium battery market. When you follow the money from climate policy, it flows directly to Chinese manufacturing.
The International Energy Agency has documented this dominance extensively. China controls at least seventy-five percent of every single key stage of solar photovoltaic panel manufacturing and processing. Not just final assembly, but the entire supply chain from polysilicon production to finished modules. Their share has grown from fifty-five percent in 2010 to over eighty-four percent today. Even when American or European companies install solar panels, those panels were almost certainly manufactured in China or using Chinese components.
Wind turbines tell a similar story. Chinese manufacturers now supply nearly sixty percent of all wind turbines installed globally. Ten of the world's top fifteen wind turbine companies are Chinese. Their prices are twenty percent lower than American or European competitors because of massive government subsidies and economies of scale. In 2024 alone, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China than in the rest of the world combined.
And batteries? China is projected to account for seventy-one percent of global battery manufacturing investment through 2026. CATL (pronounced SEE-AY-TEE-ELL), a Chinese company, provides thirty percent of all batteries used in electric vehicles worldwide and about a third of global grid energy storage systems. The climate transition that Western governments are mandating is being built in Chinese factories.
And Apple? The company on whose board Al Gore sat all those years? Approximately ninety percent of Apple products have been manufactured in China. Their largest manufacturing partner, Foxconn (pronounced FOKS-KAHN), operates massive facilities in China employing hundreds of thousands of workers. Apple's supply chain is so deeply integrated with China that the company has invested billions in Chinese manufacturing capacity. They have been slowly diversifying to India and Vietnam, but China remains the foundation.
So here you have a former Vice President who was involved in a campaign finance scandal connected to Chinese money, who later built a fortune promoting climate policies that benefit Chinese manufacturing, while sitting on the board of a company that manufactures almost everything in China. I am not suggesting any laws were broken. I am simply suggesting you follow the money and draw your own conclusions about where loyalties lie and who benefits from what policies.
But there is another aspect of the China question that troubles me deeply, and it has to do with something beyond money. It has to do with morality and the strange silence of American Christians on one of the greatest religious persecutions happening in the world today.
The Chinese Communist Party has waged a systematic campaign against Christianity that has intensified dramatically under President Xi Jinping (pronounced SHEE JIN-PING). They call it the Sinicization of religion, which is a fancy way of saying that any faith practiced in China must serve the Communist Party first. Churches are required to raise the national flag. They must install surveillance cameras. They must display portraits of Xi Jinping. They must sing patriotic hymns praising the Party before they can sing hymns praising God.
Churches that refuse to comply face demolition. Pastors who resist face arrest. Believers who persist face imprisonment on fabricated charges like picking quarrels and provoking trouble, a catch-all accusation used to punish anyone the government wants to silence.
One of the most infamous examples occurred in January 2018, when authorities dynamited the Golden Lampstand Church in Shanxi (pronounced SHAHN-SHEE) Province. This was a large evangelical house church that had cost millions to build and could accommodate thousands of worshippers. Paramilitary police surrounded it in the early morning hours, planted explosives, and blew it to rubble. They destroyed the underground sanctuary first, then the main structure. An American Christian advocacy organization called it a demonstration of the government's complete disregard for religious freedom.
In Zhejiang (pronounced JUH-JYAHNG) Province, sometimes called China's Jerusalem because of its large Christian population, authorities removed over twelve hundred crosses from church steeples between 2013 and 2015. The campaign continued. Churches were forced to replace their crosses with national flags. Those that resisted were targeted for demolition or forced closure. The message was clear. The Communist Party demands absolute loyalty. Any symbol that suggests a higher authority than the state must be removed, literally torn down from the rooftops.
Reports from organizations like ChinaAid, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom document the acceleration of persecution. In 2024 alone, over twelve thousand Christians were investigated, threatened, or detained for house church activities. More than two thousand house churches were shut down. At least five hundred church buildings were demolished, including some that had been registered and approved by the state.
In October 2025, authorities arrested nearly thirty leaders and members of the Zion Church network, one of China's largest underground Protestant organizations, across seven cities including Beijing and Shanghai. Pastor Jin Mingri (pronounced JIN MING-REE), the founder, was among those detained.
Then came December 2025 and the siege of Yayang (pronounced YAH-YAHNG) Church in Wenzhou (pronounced WEN-JOE). More than one thousand police officers, including SWAT teams, riot police, and firefighters from multiple jurisdictions, surrounded this house church network in the early morning hours of December 15th. Several hundred believers who had been keeping vigil inside were detained. Signal-jamming vehicles prevented communication. Drones monitored from above. It was a military-style operation against unarmed Christians.
Church leaders Lin Enzhao (pronounced LIN EN-JAOW) and Lin Enci (pronounced LIN EN-TSEE) were arrested and accused of being principal suspects of a criminal organization. An elderly man in his seventies named Cai Wangling (pronounced TSAI WAHNG-LING) was detained for opposing the forced installation of a national flag at his church. When the flagpole broke during the confrontation, authorities treated it as a crime worthy of extended imprisonment.
After the raid succeeded, the government spent hundreds of thousands of yuan on celebratory fireworks in the town square. They held a commendation conference with slogans proclaiming Listen to the Party, Follow the Party. Then they brought in bulldozers and cranes. By early January 2026, the cross atop Yayang Church had been torn down. Parts of the building were demolished. Armed police surrounded the site, and residents were ordered not to photograph or record anything.
In the same week, the Early Rain Covenant Church in Sichuan (pronounced SEE-CHWAHN) Province saw its current leader Li Yingqiang (pronounced LEE YING-CHYAHNG) and other key members taken into custody. This church had already suffered severely since 2018, when its founder Pastor Wang Yi (pronounced WAHNG YEE), a prominent human rights defender and legal scholar, was arrested along with one hundred members and later sentenced to nine years in prison for inciting subversion of state power.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly designated China as one of the worst violators of religious freedom in the world. The persecution includes torture, forced disappearances, and even transnational harassment of believers who have fled abroad.
Why this intensity now? The Chinese Communist Party perceives the rapid growth of Christianity as an existential challenge. Estimates suggest there are between forty and one hundred million Christians in China, a number that rivals or exceeds Communist Party membership. Independent churches foster communities outside state control. They create networks of trust and mutual support that operate beyond government surveillance. For a regime obsessed with maintaining absolute control, this is intolerable.
Some analysts have speculated that the intensified crackdowns may be connected to preparations for potential conflict, perhaps over Taiwan. Regimes throughout history have suppressed potential internal opposition before military mobilization. Whether or not that specific theory is correct, the timing coincides with Xi Jinping's emphasis on national security, a massive military buildup, and increasingly aggressive rhetoric about unification with Taiwan. The Communist Party clearly views independent religious faith as a security threat, not merely a social nuisance.
And yet, where is the sustained outrage from American Christians? Where are the organized boycotts, the congressional pressure campaigns, the Sunday morning sermons condemning this persecution with the same vigor applied to other injustices? If a Christian baker in Colorado faces legal action, it dominates evangelical media for months. If churches are dynamited in China and pastors imprisoned for years, it barely registers.
I think the answer, at least in part, comes back to money. American corporations have enormous financial interests in China. American investment portfolios are heavily exposed to Chinese markets. American consumers have grown accustomed to inexpensive goods manufactured by Chinese workers, some of them in facilities with conditions that would never be tolerated in this country. Nobody wants to upset that arrangement, even when the human cost includes the systematic destruction of Christian faith.
There is also a certain selective outrage in modern advocacy. Certain causes generate enormous attention and funding. Others, no matter how severe the suffering involved, struggle to gain traction. The persecution of Christians in China involves tens of millions of people, decades of systematic abuse, churches blown up with dynamite, pastors serving nine-year prison sentences, elderly believers detained for opposing the installation of Communist propaganda in their places of worship. Yet it receives a fraction of the attention devoted to far lesser grievances in Western countries.
Perhaps the issue is too big, too far away, too complicated. Perhaps people feel powerless to change it. Or perhaps the inconvenient truth is that meaningful opposition to Chinese religious persecution would require Americans to accept higher prices for consumer goods, lower returns on investments, and a fundamental reexamination of the economic relationship that has made China wealthy and powerful while hollowing out American manufacturing. That is a trade-off most people are not willing to make, even when the lives of their brothers and sisters in faith are at stake.
The Chinese Communist Party understands something fundamental about Western democracies. They understand that our political systems respond to organized pressure and that our economic systems reward short-term thinking. They have learned to use our own openness against us, funneling money through layers of corporations and nonprofits to influence our elections, while counting on our addiction to cheap consumer goods to keep us from asking uncomfortable questions.
So here is what I am asking you to do. Think about it. Think about who you are voting for and where their campaign money comes from. Think about the policies you support and who benefits financially from those policies. Think about the investments in your retirement accounts and whether they align with your values. And think about whether your silence on certain issues is purchased by your comfort.
When you see massive amounts of money flowing into any political campaign, follow that money. Ask where it originates. Look past the first layer and the second layer. Find out who really benefits when certain policies are enacted. And if you believe in something, get involved. Campaigns need volunteers and small donors and people willing to knock on doors and make phone calls. Democracy is not a spectator sport, and it certainly should not be a commodity for sale to the highest bidder, foreign or domestic.
The money trail never lies. Follow it, and you will understand far more about what is really happening in this country than any campaign advertisement or cable news segment will ever tell you. And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us start paying attention, we can begin to reclaim a political system that increasingly serves everyone except the American people it was designed to represent.
That is all for today. Think carefully about what you have heard. Ask questions. Demand answers. And remember that in a world where almost everything can be bought and sold, your integrity and your principles are worth holding onto. They cannot put a price on those unless you let them.
God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.