US Army: Service Members Can Return After Being Involuntarily Discharged for Declining COVID Vaccine

Good evening and welcome to the Capitol Report on Entity Television. I'm Steve Lance. Here's a look at what's coming up. How close is a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas? Israel's special war cabinet voting on a deal this evening. Both President Biden and Israel's prime minister say the talks are progressing. And discharged against their own will. This for declining the COVID-19 vaccine. Now the army wants soldiers who didn't get the shot to return to service. A major turn in policy for the United States Army. But where does the DOD stand? And President Biden casting doubt on Beijing's agreement to help the curb flow of fentanyl. What's he saying as officials point to the Chinese regime's track record of deception? 240 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza as the Israel-Hamas war rages on. Now both sides are saying they're closer to a deal to release some of them. Israel voting on the deal this evening. The White House says they're cautiously optimistic. Entity's Melina Wisecup reports. Israel's special war cabinet met today to discuss a hostage exchange deal with Hamas. But it wouldn't be an all-for-all exchange. Reports are indicating that this would be around 50 Israeli women and children in exchange for around 150 Palestinians. Palestinians and it also comes along with a four-day ceasefire in Gaza, though NTD has not been able to specifically verify the details of this deal that's underway right now. Both President Biden and Israel's prime minister have expressed cautious optimism. We are making progress. I don't think it's worth saying more, even at this moment, but I hope there will be good news soon. Very close. We could bring some of these hostages home very soon, but I don't want to get into the details of things because nothing is done until it's done. Some family members of the hostages are also growing anxious with their government and how they are balancing the priorities of countering Hamas and getting their families home. We all feel, especially when we're talking about our families, that this should be the top priority. It doesn't mean that we should not care about taking down Hamas. Absolutely not. Nobody is claiming that. Nobody is saying that. But we definitely have a criticism on how this prioritization goes. And the latest move here from the U.S. Congress is that 13 Democrat senators are now pressuring President Biden to make a deal with Israel for them to open up their border to allow humanitarian aid to get into Gaza. Now the Biden administration is changing its posture on this issue. National Security Spokesperson John Kirby today said that the U.S. would not support Israel military action in Gaza unless there is a plan to protect civilians. Reporting from Capitol Hill, Melina Weiskopf, NTD News. The Army now turning to a new source for possible recruits, unvaccinated soldiers who were previously dismissed for not taking the COVID shot. NTD's Arian Pasdar spoke with a retired Army colonel. The military discharged around 8,000 service members for not getting the COVID vaccine. Almost 2,000 of those were part of the Army. Now the Army is trying to get those soldiers back. Earlier this month, it sent out this letter to all soldiers discharged for not getting the vaccine, writing individuals who desire to apply to return to service should contact their local recruiter. On Tuesday, the Pentagon was asked whether this applies to the entire military or just the Army. I'm hesitant to comment just because I haven't seen the letter and the contents of it. So I'd refer you for more specifics to the Army. Congress already ordered the military to drop its mandate months ago. However, of the almost 2,000 discharged soldiers, less than 20 have returned. The service members were forced out, oftentimes in a very ugly manner, and have gone on with their lives. And now they're saying, being told, please come back in. John Mills is a retired Army colonel. He says soldiers might feel betrayed, which is why they're not returning. Just last year, the Army secretary said that unvaccinated soldiers are a risk to the force and that they jeopardize readiness. Now the Army is ready to hire them back and change their records from involuntary discharge to honorable discharge. However, many are also calling for back pay, something the Army is not talking about. Are they owed back pay? Absolutely. Are they owed an upgrade to their discharge characterization? Absolutely. Congressman Ben Klein raised the same question, asking, what about reinstating them at rank and paying them with back pay? The attempt to get the soldiers back comes as multiple military branches have struggled to attract people in recent years. The Army missed its recruiting goal by 10,000 this fiscal year. Arien Pasdar, NTD News. Should the U.S. trust the Chinese Communist Party? President Biden casting doubt, while some Republicans say we shouldn't believe a single word from the regime. NTD's Iris Tao has more on a recent deal in which China agreed to stop the flow of deadly fentanyl from reaching the United States. After announcing a deal with China to curb the flow of fentanyl, President Biden now sounding skeptical about whether the Chinese regime would actually follow through. Watch. So, the United States is going to seek to work together with China to target the fentanyl components. We're not just going to trust that this is happening, we have to verify it. During the APEC summit in San Francisco last week, the White House announced that China had agreed to work with the U.S. to crack down on chemicals needed to make fentanyl, nearly all of which come from China. For more than a year, Chinese officials have been reluctant to cooperate with the U.S. to curb this flow. And now, despite this deal, Biden's Director of Drug Policy, Rahul Gupta, is also casting doubt on Beijing's swords by pointing to the fact that the last time China had agreed to crack down on fentanyl in 2019, it just started instead to ship the ingredients needed to make it to Mexico. Republican Senator Rick Scott saying directly in a statement that he does not trust a word that Xi Jinping says, and neither should any American, including Joe Biden. Congressman Mike Gallagher also skeptical about last week's agreement. I'm skeptical of the fentanyl agreement, I have to confess, only because we've seen this movie before. We tend to pay cash up front, but for the CCP, the check is always in the mail. Just last month, the Justice Department indicted eight Chinese companies in the fentanyl supply chain. The DOJ says they use a wide range of trafficking tactics, from encrypted messaging apps to fake shipping schemes and Bitcoin payments, all to ply and cover their trade, leading to the deaths of Americans. Back to you. And coming up, who will have an advantage in a potential rematch, President Biden or former President Trump? Matt Brainard will join us to assess. And up next, is China trying to befriend an anti-socialist? We'll bring you China's message to Argentina's newly elected president and what he says about working with communists. I had a pretty normal mom life. Everything was pretty good and it was a very happy life. And we just had a new baby. And then all of a sudden, within a day or two, she's on life support and fighting for her life. And I knew something was pretty wrong. A little less than a week after I came home, I couldn't breathe. That's when we decided to go to the hospital. 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Life doesn't always give you time to change the outcome. Prediabetes does. With early diagnosis, prediabetes can be reversed. Take the one-minute prediabetes risk test today. Go to doihaveprediabetes.org. Welcome back to The Capitol Report. I'm Steve Lance. As presidential primaries inch closer, recent polling causing concerns for Democrats. So who has the advantage in a potential rematch, President Biden or former President Trump? To discuss, we sit down with Matt Brainerd, executive director at Look Ahead America. Matt Brainerd, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Matt, given the kind of, I guess, anxiety, if you will, within the Democratic Party over President Biden's election prospects with a lot of polls coming out that aren't looking favorable for him right now, how do you assess and see this all playing out, especially with California Governor Gavin Newsom waiting in the wings? I think they're in a lot of trouble right now because they're already getting past the point of deadlines that need to be met for getting on the primary ballot in states. And those are coming hard and fast, and it's not an easy process. So switching out a candidate becomes increasingly difficult. And the decline in President Biden is stark. It's hard to recognize just how bad it is. But take video of him at any of his recent events and then put that side by side with him debating Paul Ryan in the debates back in 2012. And put those two together, and they're two completely different people. And that stark contrast, just showing that side by side and how far gone he is, there are a lot of voters who are going to vote for Biden no matter what. There are a lot of voters who are going to vote for Trump no matter what. And the election's primarily going to be decided by the people who go one way or the other. To them, that is absolutely terrifying. These are not voters who are strongly driven by ideology, because if you are, you know, it could be weekend at Bernie's. It could be weekend at Biden's. And you still vote for him. And same thing for Trump. He could get convicted on, you know, 100 charges of felonies, right? You're still voting for him. But the people who are making those decisions who are going to decide the election are between the two candidates. They're not ideologically driven. What they're driven by is aesthetics and appearances of competence, as well as a few other metrics, such as, are you better off now than you were four years ago? And I don't think that people are going to hold Trump accountable for the COVID. So when the voters who are up in the air, who could go either way, they think of Trump, they don't think about Trump's economy under COVID. They think about it pre-COVID. They think about the world pre-COVID, where there was general calm in the world. We were making peace. We were killing terrorists. Or here, where jobs were abundant, wages were increasing across all demographics. And then you say, well, are you better off now than you were then? And the answer is resounding no. And the problem with the no is that the Democrats can't really counter that, because they don't have the facts on their side. You can't tell someone it's sunshining when it's raining. But they don't even have an advocate. Usually it would be the president that would go out and forcefully make the case. But they just don't have somebody that can do that anymore. And I think that the panic's going to set in, and you're going to see increasingly strident attempts to get Biden to sit it out, to let somebody else emerge. But that creates its own problems, because you have two wings of the party. You have folks that maybe they like Gavin Newsom. They think he's a good person, a good candidate, a good record in California. Maybe they think that. But you also have a vice president, a woman of color. And you're going to bypass her, probably somebody even less popular than Biden is, to give it to this white guy from California. So there's a real conflict in even resolving, OK, if it's not Biden, who? You raise a lot of very interesting points, for sure. And one other thing that we're seeing right now is some very interesting polling coming out. I believe it was NBC News. President Biden is significantly down amongst voters that he traditionally would have those votes, whether it be young people, 18 to 34, the minority vote. Why do you think he's losing these folks? I think it comes down to the economy and the way the world is currently on fire. Many of these people are young, but they're not so young that they can't remember what things were like under President Trump. I remember the campaigns against President Trump saying, you know, we need to get back to normal. Right now, the normal that people desire was under the Trump administration, when Trump was in president. There was a confidence that things were being handled correctly, that the economy was on the upswing. Now, whether you're young or old, you're experiencing a really difficult world. Prices are going up for everyone. Wages are not keeping pace. We see conflicts breaking out internationally that we didn't have under President Trump when people trusted that America was strong. And you wouldn't have President Putin trying to step into Ukraine. You wouldn't have Hamas thinking we can get away with this in Israel. And that just wasn't happening under him. And young people are, they're aware and they're paying attention. And I think that many of them are immune to a lot of the rhetoric that typically surrounds political debates. They're very realist. They're very close to what's happening on the ground. They're experiencing it. They're living it. Right? It's not at a distance from them. They're in the economy. They're trying to get the jobs. They're trying to work their way up the ladder, trying to have enough money to buy a home and start a family. So they're bearing the brunt of Bidenomics. And even if they maybe thought Trump was, you know, orange man bad and they got brainwashed back in the day because they spent too much time on the Internet, on Reddit, now the reality is sinking in. And the alternative that they're looking at, going back to Trump where things were going well or now where they're paying three times as much as they were for products that were affordable in the past and the jobs just aren't there and the wages aren't keeping pace. For many of them, it's becoming an easy choice. Maybe not a choice they're happy about, but it's becoming clearer and clearer who the best president for them is. Matt Brainerd, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. The CCP now congratulating Argentina's president-elect, Javier Mele, for his win, hoping to save ties between China and Argentina. But is that possible with the anti-socialist Mele set to take power in Argentina? Here's what Mele said when Tucker Carlson asked him about socialism in a recent interview. Never embrace the ideas of socialism. Never allow yourselves to be seduced by the siren songs of social justice. So this battle must be unceasing. We cannot take a day off because when we rest, socialism creeps in. China on Monday said it wants to keep working closely with Argentina. Argentina's current president, who is left-leaning, was very open to business with the CCP. He even turned away from using the U.S. dollar to instead use the Chinese yuan for some international payments, a move China welcomed. However, this might now be changing, with Mele repeatedly saying he'll cut Argentina's ties with China. That's because he, quote, doesn't do business with communists. Argentina is now also expected to decline its invitation to join the China-centered BRICS bloc. Mele is set to be sworn in on December 10th. Is the U.S. able to reduce economic dependency on China? And how does the Chinese communist regime use economic coercion in Asia? To explore, we sat down with John Dotson, deputy director of Global Taiwan Institute. John Dotson, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, well, thank you for having me on your program. Happy to have you, John. So, John, I guess right off the top, if you could just kind of give us your overview and sense of what came out of the APEC summit, the good, bad, the ugly, and your thoughts. Sure. I think overall, I actually think the outcomes of the APEC summit are going to be pretty modest. I mean, a lot has been made of it, and I suppose you could point to the fact that Biden and who, or Biden and Xi, excuse me, are talking is a sign of progress in and of itself. But I really don't see that much actually coming out of it. There has been sort of some hyping of limited signs of progress, such as the restoration of military-to-military communication ties and supposedly efforts by the Chinese to crack down on fentanyl production. But I think these are actually pretty modest steps overall, and I don't put a lot of faith in them, really. Not much has actually changed in terms of the dynamics between the United States and the PRC. And from what has come out of these meetings, it does seem like both sides remained pretty staunch in their positions on Taiwan as a major sticking point between the two sides, with, again, it being reported that Xi made very strong statements about this to President Biden. So I actually think the outcomes of it are going to be pretty modest overall. So you know, APEC, it's an acronym for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. However, much of the headlines throughout the week were centered around U.S. and China. Do you see it as a potential missed opportunity because of the Asia-Pacific encompassing a lot of our actual friends and allies, whether it be South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, a kind of a lost opportunity where we don't deepen those ties, or should we be deepening those ties even further? Well, there are other sort of either bilateral or multilateral efforts going on in terms of economic ties with other countries in Asia. And the fact that the discussions at the APEC summit did seem to be more of a bilateral character between the U.S. and China, I think, doesn't necessarily rule out action in those other areas. My sense is that, at least for this set of meetings anyway, the U.S. side had a pretty modest set of goals of really just trying to get basic communications back on track rather than pursuing a lot of active progress on particular issues. But there are other multilateral economic initiatives that are ongoing by the administration. So I think just the fact that the focus of the APEC talks may have been on U.S.-China relations doesn't necessarily rule out efforts in some of those other areas. If you could tell us, John, in your research and studies, how the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, uses economic coercion. I'm guessing that they use it in various ways depending on the country, but specifically when it comes to the U.S. and Taiwan. Sure. Well, in the context of Taiwan, there are very clear examples that you can point to where the PRC does use economic coercion as a very active tool of policy. We've seen that over the last few years. Well, for example, when there's some political action in Taiwan that the PRC doesn't like and they want to send a symbolic message, that's when they suddenly find bugs in shipments of fruit and have to declare a ban on them. So we've seen bans over the last few years on Taiwanese products such as pineapples, on monkfish, wax apples, things like this. And those bans tend to come about at not coincidental moments when the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, wishes to send a message. So yes, the CCP does very much use economic coercion as an active tool of policy. And how about their, I guess, efforts in the United States? No, it's certainly there too. Probably the clearest example that can be pointed to there has been a long-going effort over the course of many years by the Chinese government to try to control the supply and trade in rare earth minerals, which go into a wide variety of products, and of trying to use their very dominant position in the rare earths market as a tool of leverage over the United States in other areas of policy, either sort of opening the gates a little bit when they're happy and choosing to close those gates when they wish to send a message. So how do you counter the various types of asymmetric warfare, if you will, and soft power campaigns that the CCP uses, especially when you factor in the policy of, at the very least, economic engagement with China, when we're trying to rally our allies, whether it be Taiwan or South Korea, to become closer to us, but at the same time distance themselves from China? Sure. Well, there's no entirely easy answer to that question. In dealing with a country the size of China and one with an economy the size of China, and now especially when we've seen over the last few decades so much of our own supply chains and manufacturing chains have gone into China, I think it would be extremely difficult to cut ourselves off completely from the Chinese economy. But I do think there are sensible steps that can be taken to reduce U.S. economic dependence on China in a number of areas, as well as to, well, for example, I actually think the Biden administration, well, both the Trump administration and now the Biden administration have been on the right track in trying to restrict the trade in certain high technologies to China as a means of both sort of maintaining American economic competitiveness, but of also sort of reducing the dependence that we have on the PRC for manufacturing in a number of areas. John Dotson, thank you so much. Thank you, sir. And that is all we have for you this evening on The Capital Report. Thank you for watching. From the nation's capital in Washington, D.C., I'm Steve Lance. Have a nice evening. See you back here tomorrow.