During discussion on White House security,
guest favors interning ‘all the Chinese Americans we can find’
By P.C. Staff
The Japanese American Citizens League on Friday issued a statement condemning comments made during a discussion on a podcast featuring multiple guests, during which one asked rhetorically if it was appropriate to “… intern all the Chinese Americans we can find, because it kind of seems like we should.”
In its statement, JACL in part said: “While JACL strongly supports freedom of speech, invoking the incarceration of Japanese Americans to suggest that another ethnic group could or should face similar treatment is both ignorant and dangerous.”
The remarks were made during the Aug. 14 episode of the “Timcast IRL” podcast during a nearly 30-minute-long segment of the two-hour, 10-minute long show led by guest host Phil LaBonte that began at the 1:04:28 mark in the program during which he and the panelists — Kevin Smith (not the filmmaker), Chris Karr, Ian Crossland and Carter Banks — began discussing an Aug. 13 news story from the Daily Caller website headlined “CCP Intelligence Official Buys Building Steps From White House.”
It reported that a “senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence official” named Philip Qiu, aka Qiu Feili, had, with Family Foundation, purchased the White House-adjacent building on July 26. The article quoted “multiple intelligence experts” who believed that the purchase posed … “ an urgent national security threat.”
It was during that discussion, which ranged from U.S. immigration policy in general to whether noncitizens in the U.S. could buy firearms or should be able to purchase real estate, the rise of “birth tourism” and more when Crossland asked rhetorically, “Do you think we should intern the all the Chinese Americans we can find, because it kind of seems like we should.”
It was then that the topic of the World War II mass incarceration of ethnic Japanese, the majority of whom were U.S. citizens, was broached. In the conversation, Crossland added: “I know I don’t want to implicate all Chinese Americans because that’s horrific. That’s — I know plenty of Chinese people, Chinese Americans. I don’t want them interned if there was some conflict between the Chinese. But how can you tell? How can you tell who’s who? How can you tell where their allegiances are, and how do you know if their allegiances will or won’t flip if the tide of war starts to change?”
Chinese American members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus on Wednesday also issued a condemnation of the comments. Those individuals included CAPAC Chair Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.); Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus; and Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), CAPAC chair emerita.
“As Chinese American Members of Congress, we are appalled by recent comments made on a pro-Trump podcast while discussing a hypothetical war with China. The panel made deeply disturbing statements, arguing that ‘it seems like we should’ send Chinese Americans to incarceration camps and that it is difficult to ‘tell where their allegiances are.’ ”
Regarding the idea of incarcerating Chinese Americans, LaBonte at one point during the podcast said, “I think that even entertaining those arguments is a bad, a bad strategy because if you entertain an argument, you’re, you’re implicitly saying, ‘Well, that’s a reasonable perspective.’ ” When Crossland posited that “maybe there would have been a Japanese uprising in California” if the U.S. government had not forcibly removed and incarcerated Japanese Americans from the West Coast, LaBonte answered: “Probably not.”
Also in condemnation of the statements in favor of the possibility of incarcerating Chinese Americans, JACL stated: “The U.S. government has formally acknowledged the incarceration of Japanese Americans as a grave injustice, a chapter in our nation’s history that will forever symbolize what can happen when fear and prejudice are allowed to overcome our commitment to constitutional rights and our shared humanity.”
JACL added that it stood with CAPAC’s denunciation of the comments made during the podcast. The entirety of JACL’s statement may be read here.
The namesake for the podcast is Tim Pool, who has been described as a conservative influencer. In 2024, according to the Associated Press, Pool was among several other conservative influencers who was indicted for unknowingly working for a “company that was a front for a Russian influence operation.” According to U.S. prosecutors, the operation had an interest in “amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to distract from such Russian activities as the war in Ukraine.