This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Chuck DeVore is the chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He is a former state representative from California.
Federal Newswire
How did you become an elected official?
Chuck DeVore
I was a volunteer at a pretty young age. I was the head of my college Republican club. I ended up serving for 10 years on the Orange County Republican Party Central Committee in California, which is a volunteer position, at the time when Orange County was probably one of the most important Republican counties in the country as far as the ability to occasionally shift California to vote red.
That was a long period of preparation, so when I ended up running for office, I certainly knew how to run a good campaign. In my case, it was a pretty crowded primary field. I think we had about five candidates running. There was about $2 million spent between the five. I was outspent about 2 to 1, but I won by 20 points in a district that at the time was a safe Republican district, and was elected in November of 2004. I served for six years.
Federal Newswire
What is causing the migration from California to Texas?
Chuck DeVore
For quite a while, there's been a pretty big disparity between the two most populous states when it comes to taxation and regulation, and just a general feeling of ‘live and let live.’ In California, there's an interesting poll that's run every other year out of UC Berkeley that asks people, “do you want to leave California?” Then they slice and dice it demographically by men and women, age, ideological orientation, income, and education. What's interesting is pretty much across the entire spectrum, people are thinking about leaving California.
[There are still a lot of people] who are conservative...in a state the size of California, almost 40 million people, even if it's a shrinking fraction of the population. The number-one reason they cite for wanting to leave is the political environment. That ranks even higher than the heavy taxes or the high cost of living. Among the young people in California, it's the high cost of living that they cite as the reason to leave.
Federal Newswire
Is California’s natural beauty the only thing preventing people from leaving the state?
Chuck DeVore
California is certainly benefiting from an enormous amount of goodwill and infrastructure that's been built up over the years. Hollywood is obviously one-of-a-kind, although increasing technology is allowing people to recreate a lot of the Hollywood magic elsewhere.
Likewise, a lot of the software and hardware innovation that drives the world today comes out of Silicon Valley. Of course, that's immediately stolen by China and replicated to the degree that they can. And California’s university and state college system is still top-flight, [namely] the UC system, the Cal State system, and other colleges.
There's a lot of capital that California has been living on, the foundation of which has been decades of investment into things like the water and the freeway infrastructure, things that haven't been invested in very much in recent years.
California is really living off of its legacy, which is why for three years in a row, California has lost population.
Federal Newswire
What are your thoughts on the impact of disinformation in the U.S. by our foreign adversaries?
Chuck DeVore
I think we need to put some teeth back into the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is a World War II act that made it easier at the time to track down people who were acting on behalf of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. The problem with it today is that there's been very little enforcement.
It would be wise for states to look into instituting state FARA acts. In my role as a board member of State Armor, a group that is very concerned about the ongoing penetration of American public institutions by the People's Republic of China, we've been urging states to create the equivalent of a federal FARA act that would require lobbyists who register with a state to indicate whether they are acting on behalf of foreign interests, and whether [they are] foreign companies or governments.
There should be strict penalties, so that if you don't comply with these registration requirements, you could face prison. That would make it easier for the public to make their own determinations. Presumably there'd be a database where it would be easy to find out who was paying them.
Federal Newswire
What about the Confucius Institutes on on college campuses?
Chuck DeVore
There's been a fair amount of pushback against the Confucius Institutes across the country over the past five or six years. Many of them have been removed from state campuses. A lot of them have now shifted to high schools or other institutions. They're still out there.
The first thing that they do is...try to improve cultural appreciation for the People's Republic of China. They're trying to burnish their image.
The second thing they do is keep tabs on Chinese students who are studying overseas. They want to make sure the students don't join any group that might protest China's mistreatment of Uyghurs, or join a protest about a free and independent Tibet or Taiwan. They're keeping an eye on these students. They're also ensuring the students know, when they are called upon, that they are required under Chinese law to conduct espionage.
That leads to the third thing, which is that they are beachheads to steal our intellectual property. What you'll often see with Confucius Institutes is that they will be at top research institutions where the federal government and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are funding sophisticated and classified research. These individuals will often figure out ways of getting on these programs, and then they'll steal the intellectual property and bring it back with them to China.
They're part of what the Chinese call United Front Organizations. These groups include... secret Chinese police stations around the world. In fact, the [prime minister] of Hungary just agreed to an arrangement with China to bring these police stations into Hungary. They're not so secret in Hungary.
Ostensibly it is to help Chinese tourists, but the real reason is to make sure that any Chinese nationals abroad know that their big brother government is watching them, and know that at any time that government requests, they are required under Chinese law to conduct espionage on behalf of the Chinese government.
Federal Newswire
Were we wrong to think that free trade across borders would bring greater levels of freedom to places like Russia and China?
Chuck DeVore
...In the case of China, the events of June 6th, 1989, Tiananmen Square, should have disabused anyone of the notion that the Chinese Communist Party was capable of reform. That was the time when Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, said that the strategy of China was to ...hide its strength and bide its time.
In other words, he knew that they needed to do a lot of building with modern technology and manufacturing and the state of their military, and while doing so keep a low profile and act like they were harmless. That time is over. Under Xi Jinping, they are obviously flexing their muscles. China now has a shipbuilding capacity of about 250 times that of the United States.
We still have a tonnage advantage of vessels afloat in the ocean, but they're rapidly catching up and should surpass the U.S. Navy's tonnage within about two years. I would argue that trade can have salutary effects, but I'm reminded that the intellectuals of the time in 1913 said the same thing about Western Europe on the verge of World War I.
They said that the trade that was binding Europe at the time was too important, was too valuable, and that countries would never go to war against each other as they had in the past. The ‘Guns of August’ had their own brutal logic in August of 1914 that seemed to put an end to that fantasy pretty quickly.
Federal Newswire
Why isn't the United States doing whatever it can to bottom out the Russian economy by producing as much oil as possible?
Chuck DeVore
I think the Biden Administration is caught between a rock and a hard place. You see this not only with the Russian Federation, but with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In both cases, you have large oil producers and exporters where the Biden Administration actually relaxed sanctions–certainly with Iran, and certainly with Russia–and has failed to enact sanctions that were strong enough to prevent the export of Russian oil around the world.
The reason why they did that [was similar to] the run up to the 2022 midterm elections when President Biden, very irresponsibly, virtually drained the entire U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an attempt to keep gasoline prices low prior to the 2022 election. Now America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve is lower than it's been since just a few years after its creation…It's just about completely depleted.
Now you see us having the worst of both worlds with the price of energy going up. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just issued its consumer price index this morning, and we see that energy prices are going up at a double digit rate, about 13% per year.
...The Biden administration has been putting a thumb on US domestic energy production, from a regulatory standpoint, access to capital, and things like the new Securities and Exchange Commission rule on climate change. In spite of that, America continues to export more energy than it imports. We are energy independent, even though we are importing more oil than we export, [something] largely due to the issue of refineries in which oil is best for those refineries to use. If you include coal, we're exporting more energy than we're importing.
The problem is that it's not enough to keep prices low. It would be even worse if Biden were to crack down on Iran and Russia. You would see oil prices surge at least another 20-50%. The price of gasoline nationwide would probably go up to an average of $4.50 to $5 a gallon. That would definitely ensure Biden’s loss in 2024.
Because of that, I think you're seeing this Administration not use all of the tools at its disposal to deny Russia a very important benefit in the prosecution of its war against Ukraine.
