Guests - Ava Chen, Michael Letts, Betsy Smith
China Watch Wednesday: Ava Chen on the Handful of Families Running the CCP
The Chinese Communist Party isn't really run by a country of 1.4 billion people — it's run by fewer than a hundred people, and mainly by a handful of ruling families who've turned the entire nation into a laundering machine. That was the core message from Ava Chen of the New Federal State of China, who spent the hour walking through what dissident businessman Miles Guo has spent years exposing about what Chen calls the CCP "kleptocracy."
Chen's framing draws a sharp distinction most Americans miss. "Your war is not with China," she said. "Your war is with a handful of CCP kleptocrat families." China's GDP has grown nearly twentyfold since it joined the WTO in 2001 — from roughly $1.2 trillion to close to $20 trillion today — and according to Chen, the overwhelming beneficiaries of that growth are a small circle of Politburo-connected families who have systematically absorbed China's private economy. Because communism rejects private property, Chen explained, the party spent the 1980s and '90s quietly injecting itself into private companies through forced share arrangements — effectively confiscating ownership while keeping the original founders on as managers loyal to the party rather than to the business or the Chinese people.
She used Smithfield Foods as her case study. The American pork producer was acquired in 2013 by a Chinese company then called Shuanghui, later renamed WH Group, in a $7.5 billion deal that drew a Senate hearing and pointed questions from Senator Chuck Grassley about food safety and Communist Party influence. Chen said the "private" buyer wasn't private at all — CDH Investment, which by the time of the Smithfield deal held a majority stake in WH Group, is controlled, according to Guo's research, by three families: former Premier Wen Jiabao's family, the Jiang family, and the family of Zhu Rongji, another former premier. Add in more than twenty "princeling" relatives — sons, daughters, and in-laws of the ruling elite — and Chen said you have the real ownership structure behind a deal Americans were told was a straightforward corporate acquisition.
More recently, Chen pointed to a lobbying disclosure flagged by activist Laura Loomer: a firm lobbying Congress on foreign farmland purchases reportedly failed to disclose a foreign-interest connection to WH Group, then quietly amended the filing weeks later after a whistleblower complaint. "That means your politicians are under the influence of those lobbyists behind the scenes working against you," Chen said.
The scale of the laundering operation Chen described goes well beyond one hog-processing deal. She pointed to Macau's casino industry — where, she said, roughly two-thirds of the world's total wagering activity flows through venues tied to Chinese money, citing Wynn Resorts' Macau revenue as dwarfing its Las Vegas business. She described offshore trading companies that never need to physically move goods or cash across a border to move value between accounts, and futures exchanges in Shanghai where, she said, state-linked traders can manufacture billions in gains or losses between accounts with the push of a button.
Chen connected this system directly to Iran. She credited Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's recent designation of Iran as an "economic outcast" and said the real financial lifeline keeping Iran's oil trade afloat runs through Chinese state-linked banks — specifically Kunlun Bank, which Chen said was built to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions and is tied to Wang Qishan, the former Chinese vice president and anti-corruption chief once described by Michael Bloomberg as the most influential politician in the world. "Iran is just a symptom," Chen said. "CCP's network is global, and the kleptocracy is the system."
Chen closed on Huawei, whose criminal trial — United States v. Huawei, on RICO and trade secret theft charges — began jury selection this week in Brooklyn. She described Huawei as effectively a military intelligence platform with two "fathers": the Chinese military's intelligence apparatus and Xi Jinping's own family, through a brother-in-law she said holds a beneficial stake behind founder Ren Zhengfei. Her prediction for the trial was blunt — that both Beijing and entrenched American financial interests have reasons not to want the full picture of who financed and profited from Huawei's rise to come out.
Her closing appeal was to vote. "There's way more of us. There's only a few of them," Chen said, arguing that the CCP kleptocracy's greatest fear isn't military opposition but an informed and engaged citizenry that refuses to be divided along party lines.
Michael Letts: What 25 Years of Forgetting Looks Like
Michael Letts, founder, president, and CEO of InVest USA — the nonprofit that has spent more than 30 years equipping law enforcement officers, including ICE agents, with life-saving body armor — joined the show on the eve of the 25th anniversary of September 11th to talk about what he saw in New York and why this year's anniversary carries a different kind of weight.
Letts was a first responder at Ground Zero, driving up from South Carolina because, as he put it, there were no flights and the country simply mobilized. "You had people responding, wanting to help," Letts said. "People drove from California all the way to New York nonstop." He described the scene as numbing — the smell, the devastation, the near-certainty that survivors were unlikely — but said what defined the response wasn't grief, it was focus. "We have people at risk that still may be there. We're going in regardless of the situation," he said, describing the mindset of rescuers who pushed exhaustion aside because there might still be a child trapped beneath the debris.
The conversation turned to this year's controversy over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's planned attendance at the 9/11 memorial ceremony. More than 106,000 people have signed a request asking the mayor to stay away from the four-hour remembrance at Ground Zero. Letts didn't hedge on where he stands. "If he wants to attend and show respect, great," Letts said. "But if you took a position that you were actually sympathetic to the deaths of those people, that is an insult to be at that thing." Letts noted Mamdani has been consistently critical of America in the years since, and said the only circumstance under which his attendance would be appropriate is a public apology — which Letts doesn't expect. "He should definitely not be there," Letts said. "He shouldn't get a speaking part, for sure."
Letts extended the criticism to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who has said Mamdani should attend to prevent "divisiveness" from prevailing. "There is absolutely no respect for American sovereignty, for American sacrifice," Letts said. "Quite frankly, I'm shocked that she's still governor. I'm shocked that he is still the mayor."
But the heart of the conversation was memory. Letts described the responders who ran toward the towers — many not even on duty when the call came — as operating from an identifiably American instinct: sacrifice without a second thought about the cost. "They know good and well they weren't coming out," Letts said of those who went in anyway. "That is the spirit that everyone listening comes from who's an American citizen. That is our heritage."
Letts, also an ordained chaplain, has run InVest USA's "Bless the Vest" program since before the September 11th attacks — 32 years and counting — pairing local churches with individual police officers. Congregations "adopt a cop," raise the funds for a vest, and commit to praying for that officer by name. "You'll see a change in this country just by doing that alone," Letts said. He'll be back in New York for this year's anniversary and encouraged listeners to do something simpler in the meantime: thank a first responder in person. "Just a few simple words," he said. "You'd be amazed at the difference it'll make."
Smith & Winn: Betsy Brantner Smith on a Week of Crime, Chaos, and Cover-Ups
Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith (Ret.), spokesperson for the National Police Association and a 29-year veteran of law enforcement in suburban Chicago, joined for the show's regular Smith & Winn segment covering the week's most notable crime and public safety stories — starting with a viral flight out of Arizona.
Arthur "Layne" Lundeen, a 67-year-old former Long Realty agent from Tucson, was restrained with duct tape and zip ties after allegedly launching into a racially charged, violent outburst on an American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Newark, forcing the plane to divert to Baltimore. Smith relayed new context from an interview author Jonathan Cahn gave to Glenn Beck: Cahn had been sitting next to Lundeen for nearly two hours of ordinary conversation about family and travel before their talk turned to Cahn's faith and his new book on his conversion from atheism to Christianity — at which point, according to Cahn's account, Lundeen "snapped." Passengers, including a gun range owner and a retired police officer seated nearby, helped subdue him using zip ties, duct tape, and other restraint materials flight crews keep on hand. Lundeen faces federal charges. "We have demons among us," Smith said, only half-joking, before pivoting to a case she said reflects the same phenomenon in a far darker form.
That case is the Lindsay Clancy trial in Massachusetts, which ended in a mistrial after a Plymouth County jury deadlocked 11-1 following seven days of deliberation. Clancy is charged with murdering her three young children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — in 2023; her attorney has argued she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, while prosecutors maintained she acted "intentionally, rationally, and swiftly," pointing to phone calls and texts Clancy made to her husband around the time of the killings as evidence of ordered, deliberate thinking rather than a psychotic break. Smith was skeptical of the psychosis defense from the outset. "You can't diagnose evil," she said, adding that she worked a strikingly similar case in 1999 that ended in a conviction. Judge William Sullivan has scheduled a hearing later this month to determine whether prosecutors will seek a retrial.
Smith also highlighted the conclusion of Operation Meridian, a monthlong law enforcement effort that recovered 79 missing and endangered children across Ohio, ages 6 to 17, in what officials called the largest operation of its kind in the state's history. One case involved a 13-year-old girl found concealed in a crawl space beneath a bedroom closet floor; another involved two sisters separated by years before being reunited through the same investigation. Smith tied the recovery directly to the broader immigration debate. "This is why illegal immigration and an open border is so very dangerous," she said, arguing that federal law enforcement agencies doing this kind of work are the same ones being "demonized and vilified" by local officials in places like Pima County.
Closer to home, Smith predicted Tucson and Seattle-style rebranding of violent crime is coming to Pima County, pointing to Seattle's new police chief directing officers to refer to shooters as "trigger pullers" rather than by more direct language. She connected it to a broader pattern of euphemism on the left, comparing it to the now-familiar substitution of "birthing people" for mothers. "It's as though we're so childish that we just can't bear to hear the words," Smith said, arguing that crime is rising in Tucson even as it falls in most other major cities — something she attributed to city and county leadership rather than to the police themselves.
Smith closed on a heavier note: Marana High School canceled classes this week after a student was found dead on campus early Tuesday morning; police say a preliminary investigation indicates the student broke into the school around 1:30 a.m. before being discovered by staff, and a cause of death had not been confirmed. Smith used the moment to renew a warning to parents about a new AI-driven scare campaign spreading among teenagers on platforms like Snapchat, Discord, and Instagram — an AI-generated "Cat in the Hat" character sending kids personalized, threatening messages referencing their schools or families, designed to frighten them into secrecy or risky behavior. Her advice was unequivocal: "There is no reason for anybody under the age of 18 to be on social media," Smith said. "It rots their brains, because their brains aren't formed."