The country’s reliance on China for vital industries that are necessary for United States national security is “truly frightening,” says Curtis Ellis of America First Policies.

This week, President Trump’s administration announced that additional tariffs on China would be delayed until September for some imports and December for others. The plan is to set a ten percent tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports — including on imported cell phones, laptops, and computer monitors.

In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Ellis told Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour that it is “insane” how the U.S. relies, in some cases, almost exclusively on Chinese-made products that are vital to the country’s national security.

LISTEN:

MANSOUR: I got to say, Curtis, looking at this list … of the things that we get 75 percent [of our supply of] from China — that alone should make people worried. We’re talking about all laptops, all cell phones, monitors — these are things that are really kind of important. These are the things that you need for your national security … we are reliant on this country that is right now beating up its protesters in Hong Kong … this country that imprisons its own people, that is a giant surveillance state, that steals our intellectual property, the list goes on and on. We’re dependent on them for things that are necessary for our national security. It’s ludicrous. It’s crazy. [Emphasis added] ELLIS: It is, it’s insane. It’s truly frightening and it’s insane. And it also shows how the goalposts have moved continually. The globalists keep moving the goalposts, keep making different excuses, shifting excuses for our relationship with China. At first it was, “Oh they’re going to make the cheap stuff. They’re going to make shoes, we don’t need to make shoes. They’re going to make clothing, it’s a sunset industry, textiles.” Then suddenly, they buy IBM’s laptop division. I remember when that happened. The ThinkPad turned into Lenovo computers. I said, “How can they let that happen?” The U.S. government buys IBM computers, what are we doing … letting those be made in China? [Emphasis added]

Ellis said those goalposts have quickly become a national trade policy where “everything that can be made in China, should be made in China.”

“You heard the people saying … the Democrats particularly were fond of this one ‘Well we’re going to go into green energy and that will mean millions of new jobs for Americans.’ Well, excuse me, if it’s cheaper to make laptops and it’s cheaper to make bricks in China, it’s going to be cheaper to make solar panels in China unless you have an affirmative program to stop that from happening,” Ellis said. “That’s what is going to happen. And low and behold, that’s what happened. There’s a trade case — China was convicted of stealing the technology that controls wind turbines and stealing the technology and subsidizing their solar panel industry to drive their American competitors out of business.”

“And all of our drugs, by the way, most of the ingredients that go into pharmaceuticals and medicines are made in China,” Ellis continued. “Again, there’s no need for that. We can make those here. The Chinese are not innately predisposed to have an advantage in making all of these things. Most of that could be made right here.”

Ellis said multinational corporations have been “complicit” in the economic dominance of China and the mass offshoring and outsourcing of American jobs, saying they “were more than happy to just ditch the American people, the American consumers and go to China where they could get subsidized factories, subsidized energy.”

For decades, free trade has helped gut working and middle class jobs and stripped whole middle American towns of their industries and livelihoods. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed and China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO), nearly five million American manufacturing jobs and 50,000 manufacturing facilities have been eliminated from the U.S. economy. This mass elimination of working and middle class jobs due to free trade has coincided with a nearly 600 percent increase in trade deficits.

The most recent study by economists at the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) finds that permanent 25 percent ariffs on all Chinese imports to the U.S. would create more than a million American jobs by 2024, Breitbart News reported.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.