In a meeting with Republican lawmakers last Friday, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned them of the dire threat America faces from communist China. “This fight is inside the gates today,” Pompeo insisted. Noting just how pervasive the threat is, he continued, “Containing where they are today leaves them in our institutions of higher learning. It leaves them in our high schools. … It leaves them in our PTA groups. It leaves them inside our city councils and our state legislatures all across America. This is a deep effort that has been going on for 50 years. Republicans and Democrats alike refuse to deal with it, and we started to and did.”

Pompeo’s clear message was to not let up nor backtrack on the progress the U.S. has made under President Donald Trump in combatting Beijing’s nefarious agenda. Furthermore, what’s at stake is not merely the U.S. but the entire Western world and cultural values. “This is about the West and our ideas,” Pompeo asserted. “This is not the United States versus China, and we have to get this right. And we need partners and friends to do it.”

Pompeo did note that the U.S. has successfully developed an “enormous coalition” with several countries to counter China’s aggression. Those countries include India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and several European nations.

Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has gotten much more aggressive in pushing its agenda of world domination. Pompeo explained, “A substantial number of international businesses have seen the political risk in China as different from what they thought it was three or four years ago. … This is a place that has fundamentally shifted under Xi Jinping in a way that is different from the Chinese Communist Party of even 20 years ago.”

The fight won’t be easy and it will be costly. That’s the “reason we didn’t push back for 50 years,” Pompeo said. “For 50 years we told people, ‘You could have it all. You can get check stuff. You can outsource our jobs to these other places. We can allow them to do this; don’t worry [about] the leverage they gain from having these enormous supply chains. By the way, put TikTok on your phone, no worries.’ We didn’t articulate for them that you put TikTok on your phone and your chilidren’s most private personal information is in the hands of some really really bad actors that mean real ill for America. They may just store it in the cloud or the hard drive for a while, may not put it to use, but collectively, the data set that they develop will be used in a way that puts our young men and women at risk and puts American freedom at risk.”

Speaking of American freedom, China certainly put its weight on the scales in seeking to influence the U.S. election in November — successfully, we might add. William Evanina from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted last month, “We’ve also seen an uptick, which was planned and we predicted, that China would now re-vector their influence campaigns to the new [Biden] administration. … That malign foreign influence, that diplomatic influence plus, or on steroids, we’re starting to see that play across the country to not only the folks starting in the new administration, but those who are around those folks in the new administration.”

The fact of the matter is that China is America’s biggest threat, and that threat is only growing. And Joe Biden’s entanglement with our nation’s number one threat does not bode well.

Just how hard will Joe Biden really push back against Beijing given his son Hunter’s suspicious business dealings with China? And just how hard will Democrat lawmakers push to challenge China? Given Democrat leadership’s feckless response to the revelation of Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) having been compromised via a years-long relationship with a suspected Chinese spy, we think we know the answer.

Finally, there’s the highly troubling reality of Beijing’s outsized influence over Big Tech. With the recent censoring and purging of conservatives from social media and the killing off of competitor Parler, just how much of this aggressive un-American free speech-stomping action do Americans have China to thank for? The CCP has been engaging in this type of Internet censorship for years — with the help of American tech companies like Google.

The enemy is inside the gates, indeed. It’s in our own pockets, and its intentions are far from benign.