The Chinese Communist Party claims it has made new breakthroughs in its push to develop fusion energy. The reactors are envisioned as the next generation of nuclear technology. But at the same time, the new developments may not be what they seem, and China is currently outspending the United States in the race to develop fusion energy. But some of the money is coming from an unlikely source. We’ll discuss all this in this episode of “Crossroads.” *Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇 https://ept.ms/3Z16XWE Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

“The media really gave the liberal and leftist elites a language with which to pretend that they are the crusaders on the side of the good, when actually they themselves are the villains in this story in a big way. And that language is wokeness.” Batya Ungar-Sargon says she used to suffer from what’s been called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But after speaking to people outside of her political bubble, she now believes he’s actually a centrist candidate. “Any time you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy, when he is really the opposite of that. He’s the sort-of apotheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the people,” she says. Ms. Ungar-Sargon recently traveled the country, speaking to everyday Americans about how they perceive the political, economic, and cultural climate. She compiled her findings in a book: “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.” “The most shocking thing I found was that the American Dream for working-class people is much more alive and well and healthy in red states than it is in blue states,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon. We discuss how, according to her, the democratic party betrayed middle-class Americans by creating a knowledge industry consisting of credentialed elites who benefit economically from illegal immigration and trade liberalization. Watch the video: “I think much of the Democratic policy today is part and parcel of this upward transfer of wealth, whether it’s student-loan forgiveness, whether it was the lockdown policies, whether it’s the open border, whether it’s the climate agenda and the Green New Deal, Defund the Police—all of this stuff is about the fumes, the virtuous fumes that the over-credentialed elites create out of their ideology. And they always demand that the working class pays for it,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Batya Ungar-Sargon, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Batya Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much for having me back, Jan, and for all of the important work that you do. Mr. Jekielek: That’s very much appreciated. Back in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, you noted that two-thirds of the working class voted in his favor. But what happened afterwards was more astonishing. There wasn’t a big soul searching among the Democratic Party to figure out what happened, but it was almost like a blame. How do you account for that? Ms. Ungar-Sargon: That’s such a great way to put it, a blame. It’s so true. The side that likes to portray itself as the defender of democracy was extremely upset that a democratic election did not go its way. In many ways, most of them were pretty aggressive. They tried to undermine the results for the four years that Donald Trump was president by impeaching him and by portraying his supporters as racists or rubes or deplorables, whatever the insult of the day was. It was totally astonishing, because he got two thirds of white working class voters back then, and now he is certainly positioned to get that many white working class voters, but he is also now dominating with Hispanic voters. In terms of polling right now, he’s looking at a third of black male voters. The whole idea that all his support came from the white working class is no longer the case. He is now the working class candidate. In my view, that is really the reason why the Democrats have been so intent on trying to destroy him, whether it was with the impeachment, or now with the lawfare. That is why anytime you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy, when he is really the opposite of that. He is the apotheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the people. They did not have a reckoning and admit, “We were wrong about Donald Trump. He really is representing working class voters.” It’s because the vast majority of people in those elite positions on the Left are not just liberal, they are part of an economic elite. Their economic interests are very much in conflict with those of the working class voters who Trump represents. Rather than admit that, these Leftists have been the beneficiaries of income inequality in America. The top 20 percent is now hoarding over 50 percent of the GDP, as well as the pathway to the American dream. They would much rather cast Donald Trump and his voters as evil, because it’s the perfect alibi. Then they don’t have to deal with the fact that they themselves sold out these voters many years ago who are now turning to Trump. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve done something really amazing here. You’ve spoken to people and found out what they think about all this. Talking about Trump here a little further, it was the Democratic Party, but also the whole system that went after him, painting him as a Russian stooge. Of course, that was preposterous on its face from the beginning. It took a very compliant legacy media to make people believe a lot of this stuff, because it was so outlandish. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: They weren’t just compliant, they were very much the drivers of the narrative. The media plays a huge role in how the elites see the world, but not in the way regular people see the world. Regular people tend to believe their own eyes and not what the cable news channels want them to believe. When you get a college degree, especially if you get a college degree or a graduate degree from an elite university, you become inculcated into a way of seeing the world that is very much echoed by the elites in the media. They have a lot of purchase with that elite, especially because they’re looking at things from the same point of view. They’re defending their economic interests, but in a language that dresses them up like they have some sort of high-minded morality. The media really gave the liberal and Leftist elites the language of wokeness with which to pretend that they were the crusaders on the side of the good, when actually they were the villains in this story in a big way. That’s why the title of my first book was, “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. In my second book, I really wanted to understand who is on the other side of this. I understood there was this massive class divide in America and that story was not being told. I asked, “Who is the working class that has been abandoned by these Democratic and Leftist elites?” Then I traveled the country to find out. Mr. Jekielek: For a lot of its history, America was highly meritocratic. Through your discussions you find that has really changed and people are deeply aware of that. That is one of your central themes. There is an elite class divide in America. It took a while for us to grasp how significant that is, and that these elites may think differently than many of us. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: We were a meritocratic society, but that all started to change somewhere in the 1970s. 1971 was the high watermark for working class wages. They really started to stagnate after that, even though corporate profits and productivity have been skyrocketing all along. They used to travel in concert right along with working class wages, then they really decoupled in the 70s. Now, working class wages are down when you factor in inflation and the fact that the cost of groceries is up 18 percent. People are living on a shoestring budget and they can’t afford groceries. It is really terrible. The process whereby the elites abandoned labor in order to cater to a highly credentialed, overeducated, urban elite started in the 70s and escalated in the 80s. It really started to take hold as a new paradigm with President Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] into law. That was a multi-country trade agreement, in which 5 million good paying working class jobs that secured a middle class standard of living for these laborers were shipped off to China and Mexico to build up their middle class. That was the beginning of this descent. After that, President Barack Obama said that those jobs were not coming back and defunded vocational training, which had been another great avenue to the American dream for working class Americans. He simply defunded it. The idea was everybody was going to go to college and join the knowledge industry and obviously become Democrats as a result. Because we know what happens to people when they go to American universities. Then Joe Biden really sealed the deal by opening the border and welcoming in 15 million illegal immigrants to compete with the working class for their jobs. If you look at the graph of working class wages and align it with the graph of the number of immigrants in the country, they are in complete correlation. As the number of illegal migrants and legal migrants entered the country, the wages that working class Americans were able to command simply dropped, because there was a larger supply of labor. Certainly, the vast majority of illegal migrants are competing with working class people for jobs. When you look at those two graphs together, you really see a compelling picture of why working class wages stagnated and why working class Americans are so gung ho for Donald Trump. He showed up on the scene and was the first person to say, “This is crushing working class Americans.” For his pains, he and all of his voters were cast as racists, as though the border has anything to do with race. It doesn’t. It’s all about the economy and the wages that a working class person can command. That is the narrative of how the Democrats abandoned the working class and started catering to a college-credentialed elite whose economic interests were in conflict with that working class. At each of these stages, you can see how it improves the economic fortunes of people in the knowledge industry at the expense of the working class. Mr. Jekielek: There is a vision of a flattened world, where all people are fungible. You could be in a different country that creates a product, and we bring it here in this perfect free trade world. In some ways, borders stop being as important to this elite class. Perhaps the acquisition of capital became its only purpose. What are your thoughts? Ms. Ungar-Sargon: I totally agree. If you work in the knowledge industry, your economic fortunes are not limited to a certain place or time. We really saw this with the pandemic. You could go anywhere and work from anywhere. That more cosmopolitan elite has much less of a feeling of belonging to the United States, or to any place at all. There’s a real crisis of patriotism with these people. A lot of that comes from the fact that in order to graduate from an American University, you have to take a composition class, which is taught by an English PhD, who has gone through the critical theory training. An essential component of that is that America is a deeply flawed, white-supremacist state, whose racism is baked into its DNA and is irredeemable. The more time you spend at a university, the more time you spend being exposed to those ideas. A lot of these people have a graduate degree, so they spent a lot of time being educated, and let’s put that in quotation marks, by people who believe in this very deeply. As a result, they don’t really feel the same kind of connection to this country. Then you have to take into account the economic piece of this, that the college-credentialed elites are the consumers of the labor of the working class. As a result, they want more illegal immigrants to come in, because it drives down the wages that they have to pay their cleaning lady, their landscaper, their construction worker, or for a meal in a restaurant. Therefore, they love the open border, because it’s effectively a control on the wages that working class people can command. It literally puts money back in the pockets of those very elites. Effectively, it’s wage theft. It’s an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the overly-credentialed college elites, the top 20 percent. They have effectively plundered the middle class over the last 40 to 50 years. That’s where the class divide comes from. Mr. Jekielek: There is no moment in history that demonstrates this better than the lockdown policies. People in the knowledge industry could work from anywhere, and suddenly they’re working from home. Many people were happy to do that. They felt virtuous for doing what they were supposed to do, shelter-in-place. They were ignoring this whole economy of people running society, delivering their food, and basically taking care of every aspect of their life. It just came through the door and they didn’t even need to interact much. At the same time, we had the largest upward transfer of wealth in history. All of this happened all at once. Based on what you’re saying, it doesn’t sound like it was an accident. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: No, I don’t think it was an accident at all. Much of the Democratic policy today is part and parcel of this upward transfer of wealth, whether it’s student loan forgiveness, the lockdown policies, the open border, the climate agenda, the Green New Deal, or defunding the police. All of this stuff is about the virtuous fumes that the over-credentialed elites create out of their ideology. They always demand that the working class pays for it, and it literally does put money back in their pockets. The lockdown was such a great example of that. These people immediately worked from home, and immediately saw the values of their homes skyrocket. Meanwhile, while they were demanding these lockdowns, the children of the working class fell further and further behind. Of course, the elite’s children went back to school very quickly, relying on the labor of working class people who they had sent out into the plague. It used to be that people in the elite class had a sense of noblesse oblige, a kind of humility about their good fortune. That has evaporated. The idea of meritocracy, that everyone should have access to the American dream and equal opportunity, has instead become an ideology that protects the elitism and the status of the over-credentialed elites. They are convinced that they have more money than everybody else because of their own virtue and merit, and because they’re good at studying for tests. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about these amazing people you talked to. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: I wanted to feature people who were interesting, fascinating, and had great stories, but who were also representative of larger trends. Joe Price is an amazing professor at Brigham Young University. He has a group of grad students that you can ask to find data for you. I asked them to give me a snapshot of the working class in 2000, and in 2020. They gave me this snapshot which helped me analyze the trends in working class life. The entire first chapter of the book is devoted to this data analysis. Mr. Jekielek: What was the most shocking thing that you found in this data? Ms. Ungar-Sargon: The most shocking thing I found was that the American dream for working class people is much more alive and well and healthy in red states than it is in blue states. I was not expecting to find that. The price of housing alone is so radically different between red states and blue states. If that is an essential component of how you define the American dream, which I think it is for most Americans, the American dream is much healthier in red America than it is in blue America. Mr. Jekielek: There’s so much of this love of being able to work hard to get ahead. The American dream means that will translate into creating a good life for your family. Of course, homeownership is a piece of that. But despite everything, quite a number of the people that you spoke to still believe that this dream is possible, even though it seems a lot harder. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: Yes. There was such a deep love of this country and a deep respect for work. This is something that’s really lost on the Left. To Democrats and to the Left, the way that you help the working class is having more people with a higher income qualify for welfare. That’s not what working class people want. They take a deep pride in their work and see it through a spiritual lens. They see it as a way to create a uniquely American inheritance and as something that connects them to their parents. They talked a lot about seeing their parents get dressed to go to work every day and take so much pride in their jobs. The problem is today, these jobs can no longer afford them the most basic hallmarks of stability, no matter how hard they work. That’s the problem. It’s not that they don’t want to work or that they should be getting more help from the government. No. The problem is that they work really hard, and yet, the cost of a middle-class life relative to the wages they bring in has become a total mismatch. That is completely unacceptable, because our entire country relies on their work. Somehow, these big corporations were able to offload all of their risk onto their workers, and that’s unacceptable. The cost of employing somebody should even out by the time they’re in their thirties to a living wage where a person can sustain a family. It’s so obvious that a democracy depends on that. Instead, what we have right now is an oligarchy of the credentialed, where the only people who can be guaranteed that American dream are people in the top 20 percent in the knowledge industry who do jobs that most of us would not miss if they disappeared tomorrow. But if all the truckers disappeared tomorrow, we would starve. Yet, somehow a truck driver cannot be guaranteed the most basic, fundamental, modest version of what it means to have a stable life. I did between 75 and 100 interviews. I traveled as much as I could until my money ran out and did the rest of them on the phone. I then took all of the interviews and culled them down to the people who I felt had the most sympathetic stories that represented larger trends. It was very hard finding people. Obviously, we all have our own networks, but I didn’t want my confirmation bias or anything random about my life to determine the picture that I was trying to paint. The other books that exist in this genre are often done by academics who have a team of 10 or 20 researchers at their disposal. They have a foundation and an unlimited amount of time and money. Some people spend 10 years on a book like this. I didn’t have that kind of time. I have a day job working at Newsweek. I really had these constraints, but I also felt that it was better to have whatever I could come up with, rather than no book at all. I hired somebody and he found about five or six of the people in the book. He happened to be in Appalachia, so he would drive around. I would tell him what kinds of stories I was looking for people and what kinds of industries. Then it was by word of mouth. I put up ads in different places and I used Facebook groups. I was very hesitant to approach people at work because I felt that there was a consent issue there. I would approach them and they would assume I was a customer and that made me uncomfortable, so I tried not to do that. There’s a lot of working class people around us all the time. It’s just a question of engaging them in a dignified way. I was totally surprised by how willing people were to share their stories with me, which were deeply personal, and I was very grateful for that. Mr. Jekielek: It’s a remarkable set of stories. One of the things you highlighted is called the benefits cliff, meaning you might not make enough money, but you’re still eligible for all kinds of benefits. But then at some point if you start making enough money, you no longer qualify for the benefits. It is hard to save anything or do anything more than live month to month. Please tell us about that reality. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: Yes, the benefits cliff is a really big deal, and it came up a lot in the interviews. Let’s say you’re a single mom working for $11/hour, and you have a child with some sort of disability or medical issue. The child has Medicaid, the Cadillac of health benefits. You’re working for $11/hour and you’re getting by because you get free healthcare from the government. You get food stamps and maybe you get help with housing. There’s a lot of help available to people who are poor. But then let’s say you’re a really good worker. You show up on time, you work really hard, you’re invested in the job, and your boss notices. He says, “Hey, I think you'd be really good at the next level. I want to give you a raise to $15/hour.” If that single mom takes that raise, she will lose the equivalent of $25,000 a year in government benefits. What she will be making in increased salary will only be around $10,000 a year, so it’s a massive sacrifice. We have incentivized people to stay below a certain level of income. If she gets married, she will lose the vast majority of these benefits. She could take the job, which maybe even comes with healthcare, but that healthcare is probably going to have a $5,000 deductible. It’s probably going to be terrible healthcare, and so she’s actually harming her child. Why would she give up this amazing government healthcare for this terrible private healthcare? In all these ways, we are incentivizing people to work against their own best interest. Everybody I interviewed said they would rather have a better job that paid better than have anything from the government, which they were not really interested in. Yet, so many of those jobs don’t afford them the things that they need. This is a really big problem. Because they were very upset at this idea that people had to choose not to work, or would choose not to work. But then they themselves, if they needed help with a little thing here or there, they could never get the help they needed. They all had stories of people who they knew who worked so hard, who needed a little bit of help and could not get it. These were people often who had disastrous things happen to them, and as a result, couldn’t afford to feed their families, people who worked and then felt very much frustrated that there was a lot of help for the people who they felt did not deserve it as much. But this benefits cliff is real. We have to find a way to stop incentivizing the worst behaviors and start incentivizing the behaviors that lead to autonomy. Mr. Jekielek: You’re telling me the system is set up to keep people down. You mentioned that if they get married, they will lose these benefits. If there’s one thing that guarantees success for the children and for the family, it is a stable marriage. It’s the golden ticket, but that is disincentivized in the structure that you’re describing. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: I have also seen the data about that success sequence. I actually did not find that in my interviews. I met a lot of people who had followed the success sequence and were still the working poor. I met a lot of people who didn’t, who had children with multiple partners out of wedlock, and who made it. But those trends are obvious. We know that the number one predictor for downward mobility for a child is whether they are born out of wedlock. Yet, we penalize people for getting married and doing the thing that would most help their children to succeed. It’s insane and it’s appalling. Mr. Jekielek: There is another jargon term called degree inflation. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: Yes, there is something called the diploma divide, which really represents the way having a degree can ensure you the hallmarks of a middle class life. People who have a college degree are healthier and live longer. On average, they will make a million dollars a year more than a person without a college degree. They are really insulated from the kinds of precariousness that plague working class life. That’s a real problem, because it’s not like these people are coming out of college with a succinct set of skills that they then deploy in the workforce. We know that over 50 percent of Americans with a college degree are underemployed, meaning they’re working in jobs that don’t require that degree, although they still make more than people who don’t have a degree. That degree really has become a gatekeeper of the American dream, when it was supposed to be a pathway for it. Mr. Jekielek: People that work with their hands in the real world have to deal with reality, more so than people who work at a computer in the virtual world. A degree may be required to get a job, but maybe someone without that degree would do much better at the job because of the real-world skills they have. You have to pass this ideological litmus test now. It almost becomes another kind of ceiling where all sorts of people that are getting jobs are of this woke ideological persuasion, as opposed to people who would look at it and say, “This is crazy. This has nothing to do with me.” Ms. Ungar-Sargon: Yes, I would say that woke ideology is very alien to working class Americans of all races. I would define wokeness as taking a worldview that was based on right vs. wrong and replacing it with a worldview that only distinguishes between powerful and powerless. It ascribes all virtue to the allegedly powerless who have no agency and no responsibilities. Then they say, “All people of color are powerless and all white people are powerful,” and that’s it. Then you have your matrix and your rubric and your binary where people of color are inherently virtuous and have no agency and no moral responsibility to act. They can’t act at all because white people are inherently evil and run the world. That’s woke ideology. This is very foreign to how working-class Hispanics and black people see themselves. They find it insulting and alienating. On the issue of taking responsibility, I would say they over-ascribe responsibility to themselves. They’re much more likely to blame themselves for things going wrong, than the market that’s stacked against them, which is why they’re so patriotic. On the whole, they really don’t like the woke ideology because they see it as intolerant. But by the same token, they also don’t like Republicans who build an entire agenda around fighting wokeness, because they see that as intolerant too. The most common view on LGBTQ issues that I encountered among working-class americans was extremely pro-gay, but extremely worried about the transgender agenda. To them, there is no LGBTQ. There are the gay people in their lives who they want to see treated with love and respect, and who they want to get married and raise children in a loving environment. Then there’s the transgender ideology that’s coming for the schools and coming for the sports, and they really don’t like that. The reason they don’t like wokeness is because they see it as intolerant and they are deeply tolerant people. I would urge any Republicans listening to this to keep that in mind. Mr. Jekielek: They believe that people should be able to make their own decisions for themselves, but they don’t like a coercive ideology saying, “This is how you have to be. This is how you have to think.” Ms. Ungar-Sargon: This comes back to Trump. To the Left and the Democrats, Trump is an extremist, but to his supporters, he’s a moderate. They love that about him because they don’t look to politicians to tell them what their values should be. They already know what their values are. They look to politicians to embody and to pursue policy that reflects their values. Because they are extremely moderate, they want a moderate agenda. Trump’s agenda is about tariffs with China, controlling immigration, and 15 weeks on abortion. He’s pro-gay, he’s courting unions, and he’s courting blacks. That’s it. That’s very close to what I found working class people want. Now, they’re not all going to vote for him. For some of them, character is really an issue. Although increasingly, it’s an economic privilege that many of them don’t have, to be able to vote on character. The one thing that Trump has not talked about that was very important to people was healthcare. The vast majority of people I interviewed wanted a total moratorium on immigration. Okay, Trump has that piece. But they also wanted some kind of government-backed catastrophic healthcare plan. They couldn’t stand the idea that people would have to go into medical debt. Those that work with their hands for a living, who do physical manual labor, could over the course of their career see their bodies break down and then not be able to afford to see a good doctor. That was really offensive to them. Mr. Jekielek: In the book you mention the cost of individual healthcare has had maybe a 100 percent increase. It is truly an unbelievable increase, relative to wages or inflation or almost any measure. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: Yes. In the 60s, it cost $120 a year for a family to have healthcare, and now it costs like $25,000 a year. It’s disgusting and obscene. The insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies are cartels, and everybody kowtows to them. The first party to support policing the border, protecting American jobs, and healthcare affordability is going to have a ruling majority. I don’t know which party will get there first. I’m not particularly invested in which party gets there first, but that is the winning formula right there. I just hope people are listening, because it’s astounding to me that nobody would want to pick up this formula and run with it. Mr. Jekielek: I love how people react to you when you say, “Trump is the centrist candidate and he has a very centrist agenda.” It’s obvious just looking at it, but somehow, people are missing this. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: They are missing it because there is a lot of energy expended in trying to hide this on both sides. The Republican donor class and the Republican elites don’t want to admit that Trump is a centrist. But the Democrats also don’t want to admit it. He effectively picked up the Democratic agenda from the 90s they had abandoned when they ignored labor to cater to the college-credentialed elites, and then he ran with it. He’s literally the pro-labor past of the Democratic Party coming back to haunt them. They have to destroy him because he literally embodies their own failures. He is the exposure of their own failures. That’s why you have this narrative about him being racist and his followers being racist, or him being a unique threat to democracy, despite being the most popular politician in the country. They have to portray him as a unique threat, because to admit the truth is an indictment of themselves and their own failures. Mr. Jekielek: Batya, who needs to read this book? Ms. Ungar-Sargon: If you’re a working class person, you will find people like you talking about the things that matter to you and how to help widen the pathway to the American dream. I hope that it will give working class people comfort and a sense of relief to see their own views represented, because effectively, they have been silenced. If you are part of the elite you should read this book, so you know how your fellow Americans are living. It’s just appalling to have neighbors who are working so much harder than we are and yet struggling to achieve the things that we take for granted. It’s not always easy to learn about that and to see the things that we should have humility about. I had the Trump derangement syndrome, so this has been a long journey for me. I was wrong about Trump. I feel very humble towards the people who have a fraction of my education who were right about him, and I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s a nonpartisan book, so I would hope that people on the Left and on the Right would find something to help them remember what this country is all about, and which unites us more than divides us. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that at one time you had Trump derangement syndrome. It’s a kind of brainwashing that people are subjected to by big media and other institutions that are all pushing the same line over and over again. That has had a profound impact on us and that’s part of the reason we’re here today. How do you understand that, and how did you suddenly see through it? Ms. Ungar-Sargon: I didn’t suddenly see through it, and it took a long time to deprogram myself. It started with realizing how corrosive the woke ideology was. My rabbi, who’s the most amazing person I know, always really loved Trump. When he first told me that, it was like a crack in the armor, because I know he’s an incredible person and obviously not a racist. There is a local working class bar here that I go to, and people there gently helped me along. Throughout 2018 and 2019, the wokeness was ramping up and becoming more and more obviously psychotic and more and more anti-Semitic and just disgusting. I started to become really uncomfortable with the way the people in my milieu talked about black people. I started to understand that my black friends felt really uncomfortable with the way that the woke media talked about race in general. It happened slowly, and then all at once. First, you have to get rid of the derangement syndrome. Then you slowly start to think, “If they were wrong about all of his supporters being racist, what else are they wrong about? Are they wrong about the Russia hoax? Okay, they were big time wrong about Covid. What else are they wrong about?” The sneering of the elites vis-a-vis the working class always bothered me. Then I started to see that as very much connected to the way that they covered Trump. His analysis of himself absorbing the blows of their contempt for the working class started to ring true for me. That’s how I ended up here. Mr. Jekielek: Your book, “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women,” is the product of your journey. It’s an incredible book and I highly recommend it to our viewers. Batya Ungar Sargon, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much Jan. God bless you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Batya Ungar-Sargon and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host Jan Jekielek.

In a major decision last week, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine in a 6–3 vote. Critics called Chevron the “Lord Voldemort” of administrative law. So what was Chevron deference exactly? How did it transform the federal government? And what are the implications of this recent Supreme Court decision? Watch the video: In this episode, I do a deep dive with constitutional law scholar and Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger. He’s the founder and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which argued the two relevant cases in front of the Supreme Court. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Philip Hamburger, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Philip Hamburger: Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a couple of recent major Supreme Court decisions in the realm of administrative law. There’s a key one involving the Chevron deference. Please tell us what that means. Mr. Hamburger: I must say that I knew Chevron was on the way out when my taxi driver wanted to talk to me about Chevron and how bad it was. That was a clear sign to me that Chevron was on the way out. What is the Chevron deference? Without going into undue detail, it was a case involving emissions from plants and a statute that limited the amount of bad emissions. The question was how do you measure the amount of emissions and the statute used the word stationary source. The question was what did that mean? Of course, no one really knew and the statute didn’t explain it. It was actually a blank. It was a great uncertainty. It was a genuine ambiguity. In its wisdom, the Supreme Court suggested that the court did not have to figure out what it meant, but could defer to the agency in trying to understand what that meant. That developed the so-called Chevron test, in which when one encounters an ambiguity or even just a silence in a statute. When an administrative agency interprets that by issuing a rule, the courts will defer to that interpretation in certain circumstances, if in fact it’s a genuine ambiguity or there isn’t clarity in the statute, and if it’s a reasonable interpretation or plausible interpretation. That is a little odd because normally a court will take the best interpretation of statute, not just one that somebody proposes that happens to be reasonable. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about this key case. Mr. Hamburger: It actually begins in the water. If you’re fishing in the Pacific, which has very intensive fishing, there are a different set of regulations. But if you’re in the Atlantic fisheries, which is what this case is about, there’s a regime in which the National Maritime and Fisheries Service sets up councils to determine how to limit fishing, so as to preserve the fisheries. It’s not an unreasonable thing to do. The question is how do you do it? The agency has rules developed by these councils providing that there should be observers on boats to observe the catch and figure out whether or not there’s overfishing. In other words, rather than send out its own boats to figure out whether there’s overfishing, the agency wants observers on your boat to see what you’re doing. To say the least, this is something of an intrusion on a small boat. What’s more, the agency requires that you pay for the observers on your own boat. This is a little odd and it’s rather expensive, 700-plus dollars a day. That could turn out to be more than you’re actually earning. But also, the underlying statute doesn’t require this. This is the key point. The statute is silent as to who pays for these observers in the Atlantic fisheries. The owner of the Relentless and some other boats in Rhode Island and Massachusetts sued. They said, “We shouldn’t have to pay for your observers. You want to have observers on our boats, that’s bad enough. But then you want us to pay for it, which is really outrageous, particularly since we can’t afford this. What’s more, the statute doesn’t require this.” The agency comes back and says, “There’s a silence or ambiguity, and the court should defer to our interpretation. That’s the crux of this issue. Mr. Jekielek: Forty years ago, do you think the court had any idea that their decision would turn into this very wide-ranging Chevron deference? Mr. Hamburger: It seems rather doubtful. They probably didn’t quite understand what would happen to it. They undoubtedly thought they were developing a little piece of doctrine, but they didn’t realize it would become an entire judicial regime in which the role of judges would be changed, no longer exercising independent judgment, but deferring to executive agencies as to what the law is. It’s quite improbable they understood that. If they had thought of that, they would have written the opinion rather differently, because they would have anticipated the host of problems that have since arisen. Mr. Jekielek: What problems have developed? Mr. Hamburger: We’ve now reached a situation under the Chevron deference where any agency that can find an ambiguity or silence in a statute—which most statutes are filled with—and that wants to get something done that it has not been authorized to do by Congress, can scour its statutes to find the ambiguity or silence. Then they can say, “Aha, there’s an ambiguity. Aha, there’s a silence. Therefore, we can issue rules interpreting that ambiguity or silence, and the courts have to defer to us, if it’s not too unreasonable.” The net effect is a double one. One, it empowers the agencies to do all the interpretation of the law and decide what the law is. It profoundly changes the role of the judges and profoundly empowers agencies. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a third consequence. The way Congress approaches lawmaking actually shifts. Mr. Hamburger: Yes, there are these unusual secondary effects. Indeed, one of them is that Congress observes all of this and thinks, “We don’t have to amend our statutes. In effect, the agencies will do it for us.” It’s like much of so-called administrative law which actually infantilizes Congress. I don’t think Congress is actually incapable, but there’s a great danger that if you relieve it of its responsibilities, it will just put its feet up, have a drink, and watch the world go by. That’s what it has done. Mr. Jekielek: That’s quite an indictment. Please explain this for us. Mr. Hamburger: If you tell a small child that they don’t have to do the dishes or don’t have to clear the table, they’re not going to fight you on that. If you tell an able-bodied adult they don’t have to earn a living, they will say, “Okay.” If you tell Congress that they don’t have to think about amending the laws or adjusting them or approving them every now and then, they will find other things to do like fundraising and socializing and trying to get reelected. It used to be that congressmen and women were actually quite able legislation drafters. Draftsmanship and the compromises that go into drafting statutes were a large part of what they did and they were quite proud of it. This wasn’t that long ago. But Chevron profoundly undermines that. It leaves us with a Congress that can focus on things that seem important to them, like the fundraising and less sober dealmaking. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve seen a huge range of different interpretations of this decision. What exactly was the decision and what are the implications, in your view? Some say it’s a small thing, some say that no one will listen to experts anymore, and some say that administrative law has been totally upended. Mr. Hamburger: I suppose there is a half truth to each of those statements. It is a very important decision, because as Justice Roberts said, “This is recognizing our mistake.” It is admirable for a court to recognize its errors, particularly the Supreme Court, because there’s no appeal from the Supreme Court to another court. That’s good, and that should be recognized as an important event. Will it actually change much on the ground? That is less clear. Why do I say that? For one thing, I know some administrative law experts who are confident that most agencies have already adjusted. Ten years ago, the Supreme Court stopped following Chevron. Some lower courts continued to follow it. But for ten years, it’s already been the walking dead. In a sense, this is just a coroner’s certificate, and we already knew that the thing was dead. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain that to us a little more. Mr. Hamburger: About 10 years ago, beginning around 2014 to 2015, the Supreme Court no longer relied on Chevron and its decisions. There were hints from some of the justices that they understood that there was something deeply wrong with this doctrine that undermined the rule of law and the nature of what a judge is, and that gave the agencies power that the Congress hadn’t given them, and so they stopped following it. Some less sophisticated circuits, like the Federal Circuit, followed it a year or two ago. But many circuits had already tried to weave around it. On the whole, it has been of greatly diminished significance for the last decade. In that sense, it already didn’t really matter that much. Now, I don’t think it actually matters that much for another reason. I don’t want to downplay it too much, but this is not an earth-shattering change. In a sense, this is not an attack on the administrative state. It actually holds administrative ideals. If you think about what legitimizes the administrative state and administrative lawmaking for the 20th century, it has always been that there has been prior legislative authorization and subsequent judicial review which sandwiches administrative power and is meant to be very reassuring. Even if administrative power is a deviation from the Constitution, we’re told not to worry about it. Congress has authorized it, we have democratic authorization up front, and you have the independent judiciary reviewing it afterwards, so there’s a degree of safety in all of this. Chevron undermined all that. Chevron said, “Okay, agencies, you can make regulations without Congress intending for you to do so. The judges will defer to that rulemaking and that interpretation. “ This is even when the judges would have reached another decision about what the law was if they had acted independently. Chevron undermines the protections that justify administrative power both before and after the fact. One could view this as actually restoring the justifications for administrative power. In which case, this isn’t really an attack on administrative power. It gets rid of the excesses of administrative power beyond its justifications. Now, I’m a little skeptical even of the justifications, but it does make some sense that if you’re going to cut back on administrative power, you’re going to do it in a way that actually restores administrative ideals. That is what happened here. Mr. Jekielek: That’s one side, and you said there is a half-truth on the other side as well. Mr. Hamburger: The half-truth is that there’s a degree of truth-telling here from the court. Chevron was based on a fiction, and countless scholars and judges have called it a fiction. The fiction was that Congress, through ambiguity and silence, intended agencies to exercise extra rulemaking power. Everybody knows that was just a fiction. Since when is silence really authorization? Since when does ambiguity mean authorization, if it’s genuine ambiguity? It’s healthy to have a court recognize the truth and simply to say, “No, this was a mistake. This was based on fiction. This doctrine was wrong.” That’s actually reassuring for Americans who want judges who don’t mind telling the truth and don’t mind saying. “We were wrong.” In any organization, if we made a mistake, we would be called on it. The most immature thing you can do is to say, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.” The mature thing that all adults learn to do in this country is to say, “That was a mistake. I’m going to fix it. I’m sorry.” Perhaps that’s also a worthy thing to have happened in the judiciary. It’s good that they can be mature enough to say, “Yes, we made a mistake and we’re going to fix it.” Mr. Jekielek: You have written a lot on administrative law and ask the question if administrative law is in fact lawful. This is a subject that you have thought about quite a bit. Please tell us about your background. Mr. Hamburger: For a long time, I was just an historian. I studied 17th century English law, slowly moved my way into 18th century America, and then 19th century America. I didn’t focus on administrative power. I didn’t really pay much attention to it. But by a series of accidents, it got my attention. Administrative power was being used to censor my friends in the sciences and social sciences. For three years, I didn’t want to pursue it. I thought, “Let someone else inquire into that, because administrative law is boring.” But eventually I got into it and started studying it. After studying that particular area involving institutional review boards, which have a very bad effect on the study of science, I then began to realize that there’s an interesting relationship between history and modern law. It’s not a matter of original intent, it’s not about that, but there are certain patterns in governance. When a system of law is established with constitutional limits, those in power always seek to expand beyond those limits. One of the standard ways of doing that is to create parallel institutions to create a system of control that’s not law but a set of rules or other modes of control. That was true in the 17th century and it turns out it is also true today. That led me to a clear understanding of administrative power that turned out to hit a nerve and to be persuasive to people. Actually, it’s a series of evasions. If you have a system requiring you to rule by law, perhaps if you want more power, you want to rule by rules. Then if you don’t like that, you rule by subtle threats and other modes of persuasion. There is a cascade down from elevated modes of governance to less elevated modes of governance with less accountability. That turned out to be fun to write about. I ended up being very involved now in contemporary administrative power which is a lot of fun. Mr. Jekielek: I was wrong in thinking it was boring. But laws are also rules, correct? Mr. Hamburger: Yes, but they are rules made by the constituted authority, namely Congress. Then we have mere rules, which are not laws, and those are made by agencies. When they find it too frustrating to make a rule, they will give you guidance. When they don’t want to issue guidance because they don’t even want to say publicly what they’re doing, they‘ll have a little conversation with you and they’ll make a threat of regulatory harassment. Then there really is a decline to ever less lawful means. Administrative law as it’s taught is a very elevated thing of this notice and comment rulemaking. It’s not quite law but at least it’s about those rules and all types of restraints. If the administrative state stuck with that, it wouldn’t be so worrisome. But unfortunately, all the guardrails have fallen aside. It’s important at least to restore the administrative ideals and I would say to restore the rule of law. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying it’s important for administrative agencies to play their role and this can be helpful to guide them. Mr. Hamburger: If we’re going to have an administrative state, and some people think that’s inevitable or desirable, it surely should work through rules, not lesser means of control, and it surely should do it with congressional authorization. This case and another case, Garland v.Cargill, which we litigated, reinforce that there are statutory bounds and agencies should work within those. It’s not too much to expect. Of course, it’s very important for the judiciary because the judiciary’s central role is for judges to exercise independent judgment about the law of the land. That tradition of independent judgment is something I spent years studying and writing about. I traveled up and down the Atlantic coast looking at old archives and finding old constitutional cases from the 1780s in the States. It turns out that early Americans were well aware of this tradition of independent judgment. That’s the foundation of cases such as Marbury v. Madison, where Justice Marshall said that it was the province of the judges to interpret and exercise independent judgment. The case Loper Bright and the Relentless cases decided this week in overturning Chevron hark back to Marbury v. Madison. Justice Roberts decided it on statutory grounds. He says that the Administrative Procedure Act, requiring judges to decide questions of law, is merely reflecting this age-old tradition where judges exercise their own judgment. The moment they defer to someone else’s judgment, they are not being judges. Here it actually gets quite interesting. For a long time, people thought that Chevron was a separation of powers problem. There are a thousand law review articles on the constitutional problems involving separation of powers. But it became important to ask another question, “What does it do to litigants in court?” What happens in court is very disturbing, because usually the government is bringing an action against an individual or company. In other words, these are regulatory enforcement actions by agencies. In other words, the agency is one of the parties, and an American is the defendant. In those circumstances, what does the Chevron doctrine do? It tells the judges that they should prefer the legal position of the agency, the government, in a dispute with any American. The net effect is systematic judicial bias in favor of the government against others in judicial proceedings, even when you get to court on review. That’s actually a due process problem and it is scandalous. That was one of the problems that helped turn the judges away from Chevron. They don’t want to admit that, of course, because then a lot of other deference doctrines fall. But we can’t have a judiciary being biased in its proceedings. That’s of central importance here, and the Supreme Court realized that it doesn’t want to be engaged in judicial bias in its cases. Mr. Jekielek: What are the broader implications now? One of the criticisms is that the experts have been disempowered and no one will listen to experts anymore. Mr. Hamburger: I’m not sure that is really true. First of all, in interpreting statutes, the judges are actually the experts. To the extent this is about ambiguity and silence in a statute, the experts are the judges. But what about the experts in policy, which is what those concerns really focus on? The experts in policy are still there. They may be in the agencies, they may be in the private sector, and they'll still have a voice. The question is, will they first be authorized by Congress or not? When a judge encounters a genuine ambiguity they can’t resolve through statutory interpretation or silence in a statute, what that judge now needs to do is simply say, “The statute doesn’t say anything on this.” The net result of that is that Congress then will have to come in and say, “We’re authorizing the agency to make rules on the subject. In other words, they are allowing them to rely on its experts to develop rules and do exactly what they were doing on Chevron. The only difference is Congress will have to come in and authorize that, which is actually of some importance, because that’s actually a fundamental justification for having administrative rulemaking, that there’s a statute underneath it. In some sense, this actually buttresses administrative power. It certainly doesn’t remove expertise. It simply requires Congress to authorize that process of agency rulemaking depending on their experts. Mind you, the expertise vision of administrative power is out of date. That prevailed in the mid-20th century. Justice Kagan, when she was a law professor, wrote a very well-received article called “Presidential Administration,” in which she points out that the policies adopted by agencies are increasingly reviewed or directed by the White House. These days we see all of government administrative power cutting across agencies. Ultimately, presidential politics and power drives most rulemaking of any significance. If something really matters, the White House involvement will always be there. These days, it’s hard to talk about administrative law resting primarily on expertise. That’s not to say there isn’t expertise, but as Kagan’s scholarship shows, this is largely driven from the White House these days, and that’s not about expertise. That’s about presidential politics. Mr. Jekielek: It has been ten years that this Chevron doctrine has been downplayed, especially at the Supreme Court level. But you have all sorts of other deference doctrines. Mr. Hamburger: You could call them the children of Chevron, but some of them predate Chevron. They’re all named after various cases; the Mead-Skidmore deference to informal guidance and interpretation, the Kisor-Auer deference to agency interpretations of their rules, the Stinson deference, and the Griggs deference. There are all these little deference doctrines. One might ask, “What’s going to happen to them?” Mr. Jekielek: But even with Chevron, there are rules that have been made by agencies that are now in question. Mr. Hamburger: Let’s talk about the agency rules. Yes, there probably is some indeterminate amount of agency rulemaking that depends on Chevron for its authorization. How much there really is, I don’t know. At a recent conference there was a rather strong opinion from very distinguished academics, that in fact the agencies had already adjusted, that in fact they were not as dependent upon Chevron as they used to be. I don’t know myself and that’s not something that I’ve studied. But I suspect it’s somewhere halfway in between. There will be some rules that are dislodged. That simply means that Congress will have to come back and provide extra authorization for the rules or adopt them itself by statute. There will be other instances where the agencies have found other mechanisms to accomplish their policy, and they’re not dependent on Chevron. Mr. Jekielek: There would also be examples where Congress doesn’t like the rule. Mr. Hamburger: Right. There will be some instances where Congress won’t adopt the rule, that’s true. But that’s our political process. This is actually an important matter. There’s scholarship by Michael Rappaport and John McGinniss, which shows that policy adopted by Congress is apt to be relatively moderate because it involves back and forth and compromise, which used to be the hallmark of congressional conversation. When legislation or rulemaking is passed off to agencies, which Chevron puts on steroids, there is a risk that the regulatory policy will be relatively extreme, because it is driven by White House control. This is problematic for a number of reasons. One, one might distrust extremes, and that’s not unreasonable. There’s a lot to be said for compromise. Not everyone sees the truth. One needs to talk to other people. But the other danger is that when all the regulatory power of the federal government is in the hands of agencies under some degree of control or restraint by the White House, then everything turns into a presidential election. Too much turns on it. This is one reason why presidential elections have become warfare. Presidential elections become existential events. This leads to all sorts of misbehavior from all directions, and that’s a disaster for the country. It’s tearing us apart. Therefore, there’s a lot to be said for not having so much depending on presidents, but more on representation in Congress. To the degree that Chevron has shifted power to agencies under presidential control, again citing Elena Kagan, one might worry that that’s been very dangerous and it’s exacerbated the tensions in the country, so it’s very healthy to pull back from that. Getting rid of Chevron does that. That surely is wholesome. Mr. Jekielek: A Texas state senator said that there was a lot of anticipation in industry that Chevron would be struck down, and that the lobbying dollars were shifting to the states. Mr. Hamburger: I would have thought there would also be a shift to Congress. In fact, I’ve argued to congressmen and their aides that if they want to raise more money, they should actually do more lawmaking and take up their constitutional responsibilities. That didn’t seem to move them. I would have thought, “Yes, lobbying money would shift to the representative bodies, Congress and apparently also the states.” I didn’t know that. The danger is that a lot of the influencing that goes on involving large corporations in particular are through the agencies. The agencies have very close relations with the large corporations. That’s at the cost of others, including small businesses or medium-sized businesses, and also the public. The progressive story was that agencies would control big business. I don’t know if it works that way. There’s some evidence that big business influences agencies. Who controls who? I don’t know. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about these other deference doctrines. Actually, one of them was challenged when it came to Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] v. Jarkesy. Mr. Hamburger: Let’s talk about the deference doctrines, and then let’s talk about Jarkesy, just to break it up into parts. There are other deference doctrines. They run by the names of their cases and there are usually pairs of cases, like Mead-Skidmore. Mr. Jekielek: As a reminder to our viewers, a deference doctrine means that the judiciary gives preference to another interpretation. Mr. Hamburger: Right, which is rather troubling. It categorically favors one party’s legal position over another, which is very odd, and actually unconstitutional, because it denies the rest of us due process. There are other deference doctrines. There’s the Kisor-Auer deference, a deference to agency interpretations of their own rules. There’s the Mead-Skidmore deference to informal agency interpretations, including guidance, the Stinson deference, and Griggs deference. These are all little mini-deference doctrines, and they all suffer the same basic problem, which is that the judges are giving up their own independent judgment and giving a leg up to one party, and it’s always the most powerful party, the government. This is not the way judges are meant to act. Loper Bright, and Relentless, these two cases didn’t resolve the fate of those deference doctrines, but it does hint that they also have to be cast aside. Two other deference doctrines did go by the wayside. There is one called the City of Arlington deference, where a court will decide the boundaries of its own jurisdiction. There’s another one called Brand X deference, where agency interpretation will defeat a court holding, which is astonishing. These were both mini-versions of the Chevron deference. These are applications of Chevron in extreme circumstances. Those have fallen as of this week. However, I will defer to the future to worry about those, that can all wait. Let’s talk about Jarkesy. The SEC v. Jarkesy case presents itself as a jury case, and that in itself is already profoundly important, because so much of what’s at stake in these cases are our constitutional rights vis-à-vis the administrative state. The administrative state is often thought to be a matter of separation of powers, but it’s actually a great threat to our civil liberties. An administrative adjudication has more or less wiped out our Seventh Amendment civil jury rights. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain that for us. Mr. Hamburger: When the agency wants to pursue a case against you for violating its rules, what will it do? It could go to a district court, and the Securities Exchange Commission was one of those. It could go to a district court and say, “The Justice Department will enforce the regulations against you in front of a real judge with a jury and all the panoply of constitutional rights you have as a defendant.” But as an alternative, the SEC could also say, “We’re just going to prosecute you in-house in front of our administrative law judges, who aren’t really judges, they’re just employees of the agency.” Not only are they not real judges, but they also don’t provide juries. When the SEC found that it was prevailing better in its own in-house court rather than in the real courts, around 2014 it was actually quite candid in suggesting it would just switch more cases from real courts to its own courts, where indeed they have something like a 99 percent victory rate. This is a problem for many due process reasons, but also for jury rights reasons. The Jarkesy case challenged the denial of jury rights, and blessedly the Supreme Court recognized jury rights. There was some risk under a prior case called Atlas Roofing. They would simply say, “When the government proceeds against you administratively, you don’t get jury rights,” which was astonishing. Now, this is relevant for Chevron because generally there are two types of deference. Courts defer to agencies on questions of law and that includes Chevron deference, but they also defer to agencies on questions of fact. When an agency proceeds against you with its own in-house proceedings without a jury, the administrative law judge, an agency employee, creates an administrative record, writes up what he thinks the facts are, and that becomes the facts of the case. The judges will defer to that, so it doesn’t go to a jury or even to a real judge. The case overturning Chevron didn’t deal with fact deference. It was decided on narrow enough grounds where that wasn’t affected. But the restoration of jury rights in the Jarkesy case means that increasingly cases will come to the courts with a jury, and therefore, there will be no room for fact deference to the agencies. We are seeing a restoration of the judicial role, both directly as to deference to law and indirectly to the restoration of jury rights. That is profoundly important. Mr. Jekielek: Fact deference is an unusual term, because it is deferring who decides the facts. In recent years there has been a lot of debate about what the facts are and what is disinformation. Mr. Hamburger: The funny thing is that under the regime that existed until this week, if you were prosecuted by the SEC in its own in-house proceedings, and then you appeal to a court, you actually petition to a circuit court, you’ve got two problems. There’s deference to the agency on the law and there’s deference to the agency on the facts. In law school we’re taught that there are two ways to win—either on the law or the facts. Apparently, the court will be biased against you on both grounds. Therefore, it was very desirable that the Supreme Court backed away from that sort of injustice. It was a gross violation of due process,so it’s very gratifying to see it being more centered and going back to its traditional role of actually deciding cases for itself. Mr. Jekielek: Both of these cases together have a much more significant impact. Mr. Hamburger: The cases actually restore each part of government to its own role. The courts now will be deciding with their own independent judgment what cases come before them. The executive agencies will be confined to making rules within their scope of congressional authorization, and Congress will have to authorize rulemaking if it wants it to happen. Whether this goes far enough is another question, but overall, this is highly desirable. If one wants to have an administrative state that’s defensible, that doesn’t look like an assault on people’s constitutional rights and on the structure of the government, you have to have each part of government more centered in its traditional role. That is what happened this week. How will this impact Congress now? We‘ll see. Hopefully, Congress will be resuming its role of authorizing agencies to make rules. I’d rather see it resuming its real constitutional role of actually making the law, not handing it off to agencies. But if they’re going to hand off rulemaking to agencies, so that agencies do the regulation, it should be authorized by Congress. That will be a pressure on Congress to actually get back to its legislative function. That’s a good thing. Mr. Jekielek: You founded the NCLA [New Civil Liberties Alliance], which has had a number of cases in front of the Supreme Court recently, including the ones related to Chevron deference. Please tell us about the NCLA. Mr. Hamburger: The NCLA is a civil rights organization that sues administrative agencies to reduce their unconstitutional power and defend our civil liberties. We go equally after each administration regardless of its politics, but also strategically go after types of power that cut across agencies that are unconstitutional. It’s a little improbable that I’m involved with it, because before, I just studied history . But about six or seven years ago I became interested in contemporary litigation, and I ended up founding this organization. To my astonishment, it’s actually been quite successful. We have three cases in Supreme Court this summer, and we’ve already been able to make a real difference, which is nice. Mr. Jekielek: Again, this has been a very informative discussion. A final thought as we finish up? Mr. Hamburger: None of this is settled. Every case is not the last word. It’s a continuing conversation for all sides. Rather than see the Jarkesy case or Loper Bright or Relentless as resolving this, it’s an invitation for those who disagree to bring better arguments and for those who agree with the cases to buttress them and reconsider the alternatives. The conversation is what lawyers and judges do. It should be done moderately and with full respect to the opposing points of view, all of which are very reasonable. That means that one can never say that there will be a settled point when this is finished, and the conversation is over. Mr. Jekielek: Philip Hamburger, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Hamburger: It’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Philip Hamburger and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

“We don’t know who the peer reviewers are. Imagine opening a newspaper and there’s no masthead. You don’t know who any of the editors are? There’s no accountability for why this work got through or not?” In this episode, I sit down with Emily Kaplan. She is an investigative journalist, author, business leader, and passionate advocate for women’s health and for a return to what she calls “the roots of true scientific exploration.” “We’re one of two countries where you can directly market pharmaceutical products to consumers,” says Ms. Kaplan. Today, she is the co-founder and CEO of the Broken Science Initiative, an alternative approach to health and science that promotes predictive value, access to data, and prioritizing patient welfare over profit. “My sense is we’re not going to fix these big systematic problems, but you can empower the individual to critically think about things and allow them to make better choices for themselves and their family. So, that’s really the goal of the Broken Science Initiative,” says Ms. Kaplan. We discuss various forms of scientific misconduct, touching on peer review, statistical manipulation, and the over-medicalization of childbirth. Watch the video: “The highest predictor of whether you’re going to have a C-section or not is what hospital you deliver in. It’s not you. It’s not your doctor. It’s the hospital,” says Ms. Kaplan. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Emily Kaplan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Emily Kaplan: Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. Mr. Jekielek: You created the Broken Science Initiative. There are real problems with what’s being portrayed as science today. There is a replicability crisis that John Ioannidis pointed out in his huge paper on the topic. He says that a lot of science simply doesn’t pan out. You cannot replicate it, which is a foundational issue. Please tell us what’s going on. Ms. Kaplan: We think of science as the empirical branch of knowledge and it should be where we most look for truth. We’re never going to find ultimate certainty or the ultimate truth, but we can pursue it. The replication crisis is a really important symptom of a larger breakdown that allows for statistical manipulation and corruption. The pharmaceutical industry spent more money lobbying Congress last year than any other industry. That’s huge. That’s more than manufacturing and more than finance. If you look at the spending by the pharmaceutical companies on media, you can see a very similar playbook. We’re one of only two countries where you can directly market pharmaceutical products to consumers. All of this falls under this idea of a broken science. This isn’t political. People try to move this into the political sphere, because people feel very defensive about it. You want to trust your doctor. Your doctor didn’t go to medical school to mistreat you. But the power structure has been inverted, so we’re seeing all these symptoms. Greg Glassman, my partner at the Broken Science Initiative, and I have both been looking at these problems for about 20 years. When Covid happened and there was real polarization and disagreement about what you could trust or what information was valid. Actually, it was a gift, because it brought science to the dinner table in ways we hadn’t seen before. Regardless of which side they were on, many people didn’t really know who to trust. My sense is that we’re not going to fix these big systematic problems, but you can empower the individual to think critically about things and allow them to make better choices for themselves and their family. The goal of the Broken Science Initiative is to expose these problems. There is a tremendous amount of scientific misconduct going on right now. We lost Harvard’s president and Stanford’s president within six months of each other to charges of scientific misconduct. This is a real issue that Americans need to inform themselves on. In the fall, we will be launching an education society so kids can understand the importance of asking good questions and challenging authority in a polite and respectful way. The only way that we make progress scientifically or as a society is having better ways to accomplish things and solve problems. I fear that we have gotten away from that. The isolation and polarization that we see politically is terrifying. We lose curiosity about the things we think we understand. But if you’re not open to listening to other people’s ideas, we are all in big trouble. The truth is that we all want a better life for our kids than we want for ourselves, no matter what political party you’re involved in. From my stance, health is the root of happiness and a common denominator for all of us. Bobby Kennedy is taking on the chronic illness epidemic in a very thoughtful way. I said that I wasn’t going to get political, but I do think he deserves a lot more attention. He has successfully sued many branches of the government. He knows how they work and where the corruption lies. The chronic disease epidemic in this country is our number one vulnerability. There are many things that doctors and patients can learn and do. Moms and dads can help their kids in terms of lifestyle changes and getting the sugar out of the diet. These are rudimentary things that we don’t really think of as medicine, because they’re preventative, but they are predictable. Again, at the core of the Broken Science Initiative is this idea of predictable outcomes as the demarcation between science and non-science. Mr. Jekielek: We absolutely need to talk about predictability. You mentioned critical thinking and openness to new ideas. You also mentioned the distinction between science by consensus vs. science by predictability. Please explain that distinction for us. Ms. Kaplan: Consensus means that we all agree on something by taking a vote. But there is no voting in science. That should stop us right there. Mr. Jekielek: What do you mean there is no voting in science? Many people would say, “If you get the smartest people in the room and these people vote that something is true, doesn’t that make sense?” Ms. Kaplan: No. There are three Supreme Court cases that make up the Daubert standard, which determines who can be a scientific expert in a court case. Two of those tests are that you have to have been published with peer review, and you have to be accepted by the scientific community. Let’s think about that for a second. If you look at space exploration, is that not science? A lot of that is top secret and it has not been peer reviewed. Are those people accepted within their scientific community? Yes. But what about the person who builds a rocket and blasts it off from their backyard. They hit their target and then they do it again. They’re not scientists because nobody knows that they are doing that. We have these ways of thinking and creating standards, or have a certain litmus test for how we define science, but I don’t think that definition is correct. We have this confusion about peer review. There’s a general misunderstanding about peer review being similar to good journalism. Peer review is actually a consensus. It’s a group of people who have decided that if you get a p-value that is a statistically significant result, that means that you have validated your hypothesis. With the way p-value works, that’s not right, actually. You’re just looking at the data sets of the null hypothesis and comparing them to the data you gather through the intervention. You’re saying, “Is there a relationship between these two? Did we prove or disprove the null hypothesis?” There is no testing the null hypothesis. That’s an assumption and you’re not saying anything about your hypothesis with a p-value. You’re also not saying that you can replicate the work, which is our standard at the Broken Science Initiative. You have to be able to replicate your results so that you know that you have a predictable outcome. You have to take that as a standard to get published, and you have to have a significant p-value. You need to have peer reviewers who are not paid. They need to be told when they get a manuscript to assume that there is no scientific misconduct and that all facts and information are correct. I’ve had peer reviewers tell me that they also are often told, “'Don’t comment on the design of the study, because the study has concluded.” Mr. Jekielek: It’s very easy for a skilled experimental designer to help the person that’s funding them get the idea they want. When your funding depends on getting a certain outcome, then you are conflicted. Ms. Kaplan: We had this big scandal at Dana-Farber, which is the Harvard Cancer Research Institute, where they were copying and pasting images. They were taking an image that was day one of the control group, and later, they were pasting it into the intervention group, as if to say, “The tumors didn’t grow. We have suppressed tumors.” Mr. Jekielek: That’s obviously not a mistake. Ms. Kaplan: Then that is published, so it gets through these gatekeepers. Is that a design failure? Actually, it’s an execution failure. There’s so much of this kind of image manipulation going on. No one is really looking at the images except for these image sleuths like Elisabeth Bik, who is a big hero of mine. They’re all doing this on PubPeer, and it’s a hobby for them. My point is that the statistical significance is so easy to manipulate that you can come up with whatever outcome you want. We’re not going a step further to say, “You’re claiming this is a statistically significant result, but let’s look at the images. What do the images say?” With some of this stuff, you don’t need sophisticated technology. You can literally see that it’s been copied and pasted. Why is this not something that’s causing complete unrest in our society? You have these major institutions committing real fraud and the outcome for the patients isn’t being considered. This is another part of this consensus. You’re a doctor and you hear something’s coming from Harvard Medical School and you say, “I’m going to trust it. I’m not going to challenge that.” There are even statistical things that are really interesting, like intention-to-treat analysis. We do this thing called journal club where we go onto a Zoom chat and take studies apart. We’re looking at real hallmark studies and then finding how the information is being portrayed in the article vs. what we really know. The intention-to-treat analysis is very common. It means that you take a snapshot of day one of a trial. Then you have people who drop out of the study or maybe they die. You take their data and you basically supplant it for the time that they’re not in the trial, assuming that it was the same result consistently across that time. We just did this. We were looking at an exercise and aging study out of Norway which did this. They have people who drop out of the study and they just assumed they kept exercising. Actually, we don’t know that. Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. They weren’t part of the study anymore. We’ve taken something that in its purest sense is about drilling down on uncertainty, and then we’ve developed all of these statistical, mathematical tools that have made everything far more complex. There’s this whole idea of person-years, which is another statistical thing that is very difficult to understand. It’s a way of estimating, but it doesn’t end up being very accurate. We are not rethinking what statistical tests are actually meaningful. Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute, who has spoken at some of our events, calls it a ritual. I love that observation. It only has the meaning that we put into it. It’s not actually a stop gap. It’s not actually a safeguard against any of this stuff. Concerning peer review, there is also the problem of not knowing who the peer reviewers are. Imagine opening a newspaper and there’s no masthead. You don’t know who the editors are. There’s no accountability for the news that is being published. Another great example is the research that Begley and Ellis did with Amgen, where they realized that cancer and hematology drugs weren’t as effective as they should be. They tried to replicate 53 trials, and they went to great lengths to do this. They worked with the original researchers and tried to recreate the environment, so that all the variables were as close and as stable to the original work as possible, and they could only replicate 11 trials. They could only replicate 11 out of 53 hallmark cancer and hematology studies, going to extreme cost and length to do so. Then they promised the researchers anonymity because they needed their buy-in and needed them to help. The researchers knew that their work couldn’t be replicated, but none of those trials have been retracted. Those studies still live in high-impact journals as though they are sound research, even though the people involved know their work couldn’t be replicated. Amgen knows, but they haven’t shared it. Mr. Jekielek: I just referenced John Ioannidis’ work, his meta-analysis, which is shocking. I can’t remember the exact statistics right now, but it was so low. Ms. Kaplan: Most research findings are false, and that is shocking to people. You can look at people like Marcia Angell, who was editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Smith, who was the BMJ editor, and Richard Horton, who was head of Lancet. These are top medical journals. All three have independently come out and basically said, “We cannot trust anything in these publications.” Marcia Angell wrote a book about it, but it hasn’t changed anything. It is because of this that I have no hope for the systematic way that we are handling these things. You have people at the highest positions in their own industry who are calling foul and nothing changes. Why is that? Greg sold CrossFit in 2020. We’ve spent about four years trying to find the root cause, rather than looking at these symptoms. There are many organizations doing great work looking at research that won’t replicate or looking at Covid. Mr. Jekielek: Please lay out the symptoms for us. What you call a symptom, a lot of people might even see as a cause. Ms. Kaplan: There are many people who are really focused on what happened with Covid, which showed that science is broken or that medicine has been corrupted or captured. That’s a symptom. The amount of money going to the government and to the media from pharmaceutical companies is a symptom. During Covid, Fauci and Collins controlled all the money. They should not be involved in policy, which is a conflict of interest. If somebody disagrees with them, they’re potentially not going to be funded. That’s a symptom. It should be like the separation of church and state. Peer review is a symptom. This Daubert case, which I would love to see overturned, is a symptom. From our perspective, looking at the philosophy of science, this goes back to Karl Popper and his denial of induction. Induction is a very clear and simple way of being able to take information that you know and then apply it to a future prediction. Hume actually is the first person to call induction into question, which is reasonable to do. There is an inherent bias if you take your past information and then apply it to something in the future. However, you’re not going to get the best outcome if you don’t take someone’s medical history into account. You’re looking at an MRI and you want to know what led this person to getting the MRI? That’s hugely important and that is all inductive reasoning. This has led to this frequentist approach where it’s all zeros and ones, yes and no, and very binary. Our goal is to return predictive value to science, because it isn’t a zero or a one—it’s on a scale and you want to know how close you are to certainty. Mr. Jekielek: When these MRIs are looked at, they don’t involve the patient’s history? Ms. Kaplan: No, actually, they do. That’s an example of how we absolutely need to take the patient history into account moving forward. But with this denial of induction comes the notion that we have to be unbiased about how we process information. This is where a lot of the statistical tests come from, like null hypothesis. Significant testing is really a product of this frequentist mindset. Mr. Jekielek: Frequentist is a word many people will not understand. Ms. Kaplan: The frequentist approach means we’re going to have certainty about things. It’s like in computer language, it would be zero or one. We employ the Bayesian approach, which is about predictive value. If you use Bayes’ theorem, you can test the hypothesis outcome. As an example, I just did something on Instagram looking at mammograms. People often talk about mammogram sensitivity and specificity, which is just the rate of false positives or true positives or false negatives, which is not telling you anything about you. It’s telling you about the test. But as a patient, what do I want to know? I want to know what is the likelihood that I have a positive mammogram which indicates breast cancer. I need to have a prevalence rate, which is prior information. That’s larger information than just what I’m looking at. With sensitivity and specificity, all you need to know is the outcome of the test. But if you want to know something for the patient, you really need to know what the prevalence rate is. Then you can come up with positive predictive value. Ms. Kaplan: (pre-recorded audio) Suppose you get a mammogram and receive a positive result. What is the probability that you actually have breast cancer? Let’s calculate it. Positive predictive value is a measure of how often someone who tests positive for a disease actually has the disease. Positive predictive value can also be expressed as a conditional probability, the probability you have breast cancer given you have a positive mammogram. We can use Bayes’ theorem to calculate the positive predictive value. First, we need to know how well mammograms correctly diagnose cancer. This is known as sensitivity. It is the percentage of true positives out of all the mammograms that correctly diagnose cancer. This is known as sensitivity. It is the percentage of true positives out of all the mammograms done. Sensitivity for a mammogram is around 84 percent. Next, we need to know how common breast cancer is in the population. This is the disease prevalence represented in our formula with the letter P. For breast cancer, 1.25 percent of women have it. Next, we need to know the percentage of the time a mammogram correctly identifies an individual who does not have a disease. A test with a high specificity means there are few false positives. For mammograms, around 91 percent of the time the test is negative, when in fact the person does not have cancer, so the specificity of mammograms is 91 percent. What does this mean? Let’s put it all together. If you get a mammogram and receive a positive result, the probability that you actually have breast cancer is only 10.56 percent. At first, this may seem shocking, but let’s think about it. If 1.25 percent of women have breast cancer, and a mammogram gives a false positive 8.88 percent of the time, for an uncommon disease, most of the positive test results will be wrong. Ms. Kaplan: That’s hugely important and nobody tells patients that and it causes stress. You could do this for anything. You could get an AIDS test and then ask, “Am I dying? I'd like to know that.” It may be two weeks before you can go back and get another test. It would be nice to know the likelihood that you are going to die, even if it is five or ten percent. You don’t care about the sensitivity and specificity of the test other than how it relates to you. That requires predictive power, so you need to have other information. Using the Bayes’ theorem, with something like the mammogram or the AIDS test, you can refine it. You could say, “I have a genetic predisposition. I don’t want the general prevalence rate. I actually want my cohort rate. Am I more likely than the general population to have breast cancer?” Then you factor that in and you'll still be able to figure out how likely this test will predict that I have it. There are things like that we are not doing, that we could be doing. I’m not trying to take down the practice of medicine. Doctor morale is at an all-time low and I understand why. They entered this profession to heal and to treat, but they do not spend much time with patients. I have a doctor friend who says that it used to be when the doctors walked down the hallway the administrators would run and hide out of fear. Now, it’s the other way around. It is because the doctors are being yelled at for not filling the form out correctly, or not coding something correctly. They are not accountants, and that’s not why they got into this. They got into this to hold the hand of the patient, help the person heal, and help prevent illness, but we’ve taken that power away from them. I like to remind doctors they are the only ones with any moral authority. They take the Hippocratic Oath and that really means something. As patients, we are absolutely dependent on them, because the pharmaceutical companies are only beholden to their investors. They have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver returns, and so do hospital systems, and even academia. The only safeguard that I see in the system is the doctor who stands up and says, “If I put you on this drug, you’re going to get these side effects, so let’s just try something different. Let’s see if we can get 50 pounds off of you and see how that goes. Then maybe you won’t need this drug.” That’s a conversation we would all value and respect. It’s not happening to nearly the degree that it should be happening. You can see this with federal funding. More than 80 percent of medical research funding goes into treatment, not prevention. Let the pharmaceutical companies pay for the treatment. Why doesn’t the government pay for the prevention? You’re working for me, right? I don’t want the treatment. I'd like to prevent the disease. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about yourself. Actually, you have a journalism background as well. Ms. Kaplan: I got a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. I’ve written for newspapers and magazines. In 2020, I worked at Primetime, mostly covering murder stories. I’ve always been very curious about problems, corruption, how things work or don’t fall apart, interplay between different groups, and thinking about how to take complex information and make it accessible to people. Telling truth to power is really important to me. When I was coming up as a journalist, you weren’t trying to be friendly with the power set. I had a lot of really great mentors that were really rigorous with me. I’ve launched a couple of startup companies and then helped with that, which I love. It’s actually quite like journalism in that you have to be scrappy and resourceful, compile lots of different data, and figure out what is going to work and what’s not going to work. Those companies all had a heavy tech focus. I had been working on a long form story about Greg Glassman. He had sued the CDC. He had taken on the NSCA [National Strength and Conditioning Association], which was the rival personal training certification company. They had used peer review to publish a journal article in the preeminent exercise physiology journal that said his company, CrossFit, had caused injuries. Greg recognized that they had falsified all their data, so he sued, and he won. A federal judge called it the biggest case of scientific fraud and misconduct she had ever seen in all her years on the bench. I was in the process of writing up that story when he got canceled. He was called a racist because he put out a tweet when George Floyd was murdered. This whole tweeting situation happened because the IHME [Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation] was the modeling body for Covid. Greg is a math guy and was raised by a rocket scientist. The methodology that he designed and developed for all of CrossFit was based on Newtonian physics. During Covid, he recognized that these models were wrong. We didn’t have a death rate. We didn’t have a denominator. How are we making these projections? So again, predictive value. In the United States, it was the IHME that was doing that work. He had been tweeting at them for a while, “Guys, your math is wrong. You’re leading us to financial despair in this country with these policies that aren’t based on solid math. Then they said that they were going to start modeling racism as a public health issue, and Greg just about lost his mind. He thought these guys had led us into quarantine. Lockdown was going to disproportionately impact minority groups. Why in the world would we trust them to model racism? It’s too important of an issue. He wrote, “What is this Floyd 19?” Then he had this quote from this medical journal that nobody bothered to put into google, because they would have found the article, but they didn’t. Because he’s a 60-something-year-old white man, it was easy to just call him a racist. I was working on the story about the case that he had against the NSCA. He called me and said, “I need you to help me.” I said, “I can’t, I’m not a PR person. If I do that, I won’t ever be a journalist again.” The allegations against him escalated, then turned into toxic workplace and sexual harassment accusations. I knew him very well. He had more female executives than he had male, which is basically unheard of for a male-run company. CrossFit was the only sports company to ever pay women the same prize money as men. I had asked Greg years before, “Why did you do that? He said, “What do you mean, why did I do that? It’s the right thing to do. It’s strange that it’s not standard procedure.” None of these stories matched with the man that I knew. As the allegations escalated, I felt a moral obligation to jump in and help him. I had done some negotiation training at Harvard Law School. I ran a business that was in the Middle East and in the United States. I was comfortable in a high stakes environment. I felt like I couldn’t stand on the sidelines and watch him be destroyed for things he hadn’t done. I jumped in and got on the phone with the New York Times who was running a story the next day and explained that I’ve written for the New York Times and I was not a PR person, but I knew they had the story wrong. To her credit, the reporter there worked with me. She had to run the piece the next day, but after that we were able to work together. I said to Greg, “I’m going to do a deep investigation into this. Who’s behind it? What escalated things to the point where it seems very much like a smear campaign?” He gave me access to everything I asked for; all his credit cards, all his photographs, and anything that I could use as verifiable information to forensically rip dates and locations. I was able to prove the allegations were all false. That launched my crisis management strategic communications firm. I do the broken science work and I help people who have been wrongly accused in the media. I also help businesses that are trying to launch products into markets that they know are going to be tricky. It’s a lot like being an investigative reporter. I go in and try to figure out who is behind it, what is true, and what is not true. It’s very hard to disprove a negative. It’s really easy for somebody to throw an allegation at you, and it’s very hard to prove that didn’t happen, especially with sexual harassment. I had a client who was accused of sexual harassment, but had never even met the woman. It was a big corporate board and somebody wanted him off the board, so they spread this rumor about him. The fear that it was going to be leaked to the media was enough to threaten his job. We all need to take a minute and think about why somebody is saying something, what their motivations are, and how they might just be wrong by accident. We can’t just jump on these social bandwagons, because that does the biggest disservice to the real victims. There are women who really are sexually harassed. It’s really important to be thoughtful, ask good questions, and be conscious of the impact that you have when you challenge somebody. In the medical sphere, if you decide to take a treatment, do you really understand what that treatment is? We just had this story that we’re writing up for Broken Science. We have original pieces that we put out, and then we also have ones that are curated news pieces which are part of our newsletter. There was a headline around the world saying that this new cancer therapy called CAR-T was amazing. It had stopped tumor growth in the brain, which would be remarkable. We really do need a cancer treatment breakthrough. But when we looked at the study, all-cause mortality was no different and people weren’t living longer. They were stopping the tumors from growing, but they were dying at the same rate. That’s fascinating. What does that mean? I don’t have an answer, but I would think maybe the treatment is killing them. They’re not dying from the tumor. They’re dying from something else. Nobody in the media covered that. Everyone that covered it said, “It’s a cancer breakthrough. Look, these tumors have stopped.” That’s great. You stopped the tumor, but the goal is to live longer. Mr. Jekielek: Your approach is to see the context of every scenario and make sure you factor in all these elements that often are missing. Ms. Kaplan: Yes, and it’s also to challenge both yourself and whatever it is that you’re considering. It is asking good questions, and really good questions come from really good listening. We’re not doing enough listening. There is a real detriment to not having a life of learning and wanting to be curious. I love people who don’t agree with me, because I always learn from them. But I think that that is less and less common. Even for me, I can put people off because I challenge them. It’s not because it’s a disrespectful thing. It’s just the opposite. I respect you enough to want to know how you formed that idea because it’s different from mine. Please explain it to me. It doesn’t mean I’m going to agree or disagree. It means that I want to know how you got there. Mr. Jekielek: There’s one study that you looked at that says black women in America can disproportionately die from childbirth compared to many industrialized countries. Is that true? If so, why is that? Ms. Kaplan: Yes, it’s true. This is looking at statistics and not peeling back to get to the root cause. I did a lot of reporting on maternal mortality in my prior life when I was still a journalist. I became really interested in C-sections because the maternal mortality thing is usually downstream from a C-section. C-sections are really difficult to study. Neil Shaw is a great researcher in Boston who has looked at this more critically than anybody else, because he was delivering babies in two hospitals in Boston, both Harvard medical teaching hospitals. The populations were very similar. His C-section rate was much different in one hospital than it was in the other. Now, he’s the same doctor and there are all these variables that are constant. He became really obsessive about trying to understand why so many more people were being given C-section in one hospital. He was the doctor choosing to do it. He thought, “What’s going on in this one hospital where I’m delivering more by C-section than the other hospital?” Because he’s just one guy, the patient populations are very similar, and the hospitals are funded similarly, he was able to unpack some of this. He said to me, “It’s really hard to study, because you never deliver a baby via C-section and think that you didn’t really need to do that.” The hindsight bias is so strong, because every time you think, “Thank God, the baby’s okay.” With the maternal mortality crisis, they will say things like hemorrhaging or name other things. The CDC codifies this stuff. They’re not calling it a C-section death. The race component of this comes in because it’s probably a socioeconomic thing more than a race thing, if you were to really dial it down. If you have a C-section, you’re not supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds for weeks. If you have an hourly paying job where you don’t get maternity leave and you have to go back to work maybe a week after you have a baby, you are at way higher risk for some sort of complication. If you’re a mom and you’re home with other kids you are responsible for and you’ve had a C-section, then you are at high risk. Those populations are not cared for properly. We don’t care for women in the health system very well. I really became very interested in women’s health, because we know that women’s brains are different, our hearts are different, and our 91 are different. Everything in our health is dictated by your endocrine system, which is hormonal and women’s bodies are not studied. In 1977, the government made it illegal for women to be in clinical trials if you were of childbearing age. What is childbearing age? It’s like the majority of your life, like age 15 to age 55, if you want to be safe. We weren’t studying women’s bodies. It was illegal to do so. Then in 1993 they said, “Okay, women can be involved in clinical trials again.” It wasn’t that long ago that med schools started doing female cadavers. It was just this assumptive practice that our bodies are the same, except that because of our hormonal cycle, we are complicated to study. Maybe people don’t want complex problems that are hard to understand. The diseases women get are different, the prevalence rates are different, and the treatments affect us differently. There is a huge amount of research that needs to be done in that realm. Childbirth is a huge inflection point for a woman for all kinds of reasons. It’s usually the first interaction that she has with the medical system. We have over-medicalized childbirth. It used to be that you would have a midwife, unless you were at high risk, and then you would go to a hospital. I have interviewed nurses who have said, “I used to sit by the woman’s bedside and tell her that everything was normal and this is how it goes. I would count for her, and do all kinds of things. Now, I’m sitting with a bay of 20 monitors watching heart rates.” Today, you have a heart rate monitor in the room with you and it’s monitoring the baby. The mom’s heart rate is going to go through the roof, because she’s worried about the baby. There was a clinic pilot program where they realized that moms will skip their follow-up appointment, but they will not skip their baby’s follow-up appointment. If you can book the mom and baby at the same time, and you have the pediatrician and the OB in the same office, the mom will show up. It’s a simple fix. It’s like the maternal mortality stuff is happening because women aren’t going to the hospital, they’re going to a hospital that’s not taking them seriously, or they’re not making follow-up appointments to monitor for real problems. In many countries, when you give birth, somebody from the medical establishment, whether it be a doula or a midwife or a doctor, comes to visit you at your house. You get a lot of data when you visit somebody in their house, not just about the patient, but also about the environment. Is she being cared for? Is she safe? Is she healing properly? We don’t do that here. Again, that feels like a frequentist approach, because what we’re doing is checking a box. With the IVF [in vitro fertilization] doctors that help you get pregnant, their success score is based on whether you get pregnant or not, not if you have a healthy baby. This is a misalignment. Lots of women who go through IVF try to pick the best doctor they can find. The doctor will tell you their rate of getting people pregnant, not the miscarriage rate, which is really important. Mr. Jekielek: By the way, what happened to the doctor who had the two hospitals that were very similar, but had these different rates of C-sections? What was happening there? Ms. Kaplan: His premise is that it has to do with the mom being involved. He was developing a dashboard that would basically allow the mom to know all of these different things, and the medical team would have to go in and talk to her about certain things. His premise was if the mom is really involved and there is open communication, the C-section rate will plummet. In one hospital where there was all this technological innovation, it was leading to more C-sections. The mom wasn’t at the table. The doctor would come in and say, “You’ve been in labor long enough. We got to take you into the OR.” There’s a fallacy that women are scheduling C-sections because they want to. I didn’t find that in the data at all. Most of it happens in real time. Things aren’t going quite right and we know we have this other way of delivering. Why not just make that a preferred option when things don’t seem to go right? Maternal mortality is a big risk. There also was a lot of data I found that said that women are far more likely to have to have a hysterectomy later in life if they’ve had a C-section. It also prohibits your ability to have lots of kids, right? It’s the only time a surgeon will cut on the same scar over and over again. Surgeons are taught to never do that, because it’s very damaging. I actually did a story about how you can find out what your hospital C-section rate is. The highest predictor of whether you’re going to have a C-section or not is not your doctor. It’s the hospital you deliver in. Mr. Jekielek: There was a study done on which type of psychotherapy works best, but it turned out that actually the method of psychotherapy doesn’t matter. The only variable that really kind of jumps out is the identity of the psychotherapist, irrespective of which method they use. Some people are successful and some people aren’t. Ms. Kaplan: Please tell me more about that. I’m curious. Mr. Jekielek: Presumably, they were real good listeners, or they somehow knew how to cue in on body language. It was the therapist that mattered. They could use any method they wanted to, and they would be successful. Ms. Kaplan: Listening is an incredibly powerful tool for healing. There’s something that stands out in research and how we identify these things, like this protocol works better than this other one. But it turns out it’s about the practitioner. We have this doctor morale problem. I hope the Broken Science Medical Society becomes a huge network for doctors to feel empowered again. There is also a rejection of wisdom in our culture. Medicine is both an art and a science. Somebody comes in presenting certain symptoms, and you can have an intuition about it. If you entered it into AI, it might not put it all together. The last time you saw them, you remember this person mentioned they had headaches, or that they had some other symptom that now becomes very important. Again, it’s taking that prior knowledge and applying it to the patient you’re treating. But it also has to do with experience, treating patients, and spending a lot of time listening to patients. We’re not valuing that, because we’re not allowing doctors to spend time with patients. For the average doctor’s appointment, the doctor is spending like 12 minutes with a patient. That is not enough time. There’s some interesting work that looks at the communication breakdown between doctors and patients. It indicates that when you’re scared or nervous, you are most likely to put forward your least significant symptoms. Also, they’re thinking about how to code whatever it is that you just mentioned. There is a communication breakdown where you’re listing your least significant symptoms, and then I’m not hearing the rest. At Broken Science, we have a class that’s coming out this summer that’s for patients to navigate their own healthcare. As a journalist I’m thinking about what questions you can ask that can help drive you to be a driver? Just like with maternal mortality, you have to have a seat at the table. These are the most important decisions you’re ever going to make in your life. You can’t be passive. Yes, you’re vulnerable. Yes, you want to get along with people. But there’s a respectful way of doing this and you don’t have to be combative. If you’re reluctant, having an advocate or somebody go with you to the appointments is hugely helpful. Mr. Jekielek: I really appreciate what you’re doing here, because you’re not necessarily saying that you can solve this huge, giant problem. You’re pointing out some of the problems, but you’re also empowering people to help themselves in this difficult environment. How do people access the Broken Science Initiative? Ms. Kaplan: Brokenscience.org is the mothership, and we have just redesigned the site. The back end is actually an AI operating system, so it will go in and learn what your interests are. Then it will start recommending things to you. We also realized a lot of the material was intimidating to people, so we’ve created summaries and versions of the really dense material. It is at different grade levels so that you can really come in knowing nothing. You can also go and read the original work, and all of that is free. We’re starting these cohorts that are called societies. The medical society is the first one we’re launching, and that’s going to be a networking opportunity. There’s a huge amount of social media type capability on the back end of the site so that people can follow each other and share research. They can invite each other to events. We’re doing this thing called Journal Club, which is taking apart the medical journal studies that will be part of the resource library for the doctors and patients. I’m not a doctor, but I’m interested in all this stuff. There will also be individual groups that will be more specifically focused on the medical profession. The approach is very similar to what Greg did when he started CrossFit. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to save everybody, but he knew anybody who wanted to work really hard and do his methodology would benefit from it. It was a real grassroots way of building. Harvard Business School called it the fastest growing company in world history. We’re going to replicate that. We have our personal health society that’s launching at the end of the summer, and then an education society. Those cohorts will feed into each other. With our personal health society, there will be a lot of people who do self-experimentation. I’m going to do the keto diet for six months. Then we’re going to have doctors in the doctor cohort who can go study them and then hopefully publish that work in a journal that we'll launch in a year or so. There’s a lot of exciting stuff. Our YouTube channel has a lot of content. I’m creating explainer videos where I break down some of these concepts. I have one on induction, and I have one on statistical significance. I’m happy to do more of those. I love it when people say, “I’ve been doing this forever but I never I can’t quite remember. I don’t quite understand. I can’t hold onto this.” Then I can think of ways that we can animate it. Our Instagram account, (at)BrokenScienceInitiative, is very active and popular. I’m doing a new show called Emily Unleashed that looks at people who have changed a paradigm in art or science, and there’s an Instagram account for that. When we launch, it will be on YouTube and it is meant to inspire critical thinking. It talks to people about how they stood up to the status quo and it either made them tons of money or it got them canceled, but they felt they had to do it. I want to inspire more of that American spirit rebellion. Don’t defer to authority, not on matters that are really important. Learn to listen and be respectful to each other. But there is no ultimate certainty. I am not 100 percent confident in anything that I just said to you. I’m pretty confident, but somebody could come in here and know more about something and I would be open to listening to them. Mr. Jekielek: Emily Kaplan, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Kaplan: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Emily Kaplan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

“At the age of 10, I formed a question in my mind, which was: how can you hate me when you don’t even know me? And now, for the next 56 years, I’ve been looking for the answer to that question.” The son of American Foreign Service members, Daryl Davis grew up in many different countries and was exposed to a variety of cultures, religions, and ideologies. He became an internationally renowned musician, touring and performing with the likes of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and B.B. King. But a personal experience with bigotry at a young age made him curious about why people hate. “When I met this guy, he was a Grand Dragon. And he rose through the ranks to Imperial Wizard. And when he dropped out, because of this perception change and hanging out with me, he gave me his Klan robe and his hood,” says Mr. Davis. Today, Mr. Davis has made a second career out of befriending white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan, helping over 200 of them to renounce their racist ideology. “People ask me: Daryl, why don’t you burn that stuff? No, I’m not going to burn it,” says Mr. Davis, referring to his Klan paraphernalia. “Yes, it is despicable. But it’s also a part of our history. And you don’t burn our history: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the shameful. You expose it, so it doesn’t happen again.” In this episode, we dive into Mr. Davis’s childhood, his passion for music, his encounters with the Klan, and the methodology he uses for helping them to renounce their racism. Watch the video: “The greatest weapon to combat racism, anti-Semitism, [and] all types of discrimination is the least expensive weapon known to man. It’s free, yet it is the most underused. It’s called conversation,” says Mr. Davis. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Daryl Davis, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Daryl Davis: It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve made a life project of speaking with people who are enmeshed in hateful ideologies and inspiring them to step out of them. Please tell us how you got into this. Mr. Davis: It all goes back to my childhood. I just turned 66 years of age, but let’s go back to when I was a kid. My parents were in the U.S. Foreign Service. I grew up as an American embassy kid living in different countries every two years and coming home in between. My first exposure to school was overseas and my classmates were from all over the world. Any country who had an embassy where we were assigned, all of their kids went to the same embassy school. This child might have been from Japan, Nigeria, Russia, Czechoslovakia, France, or Germany, whoever had an embassy there. Since that was my first exposure to school, it became my baseline for what school was. This was in the 1960s. When I came back home, I would either be in all black schools, or black and white schools, meaning the newly integrated schools. At that time, there was not the diversity that we have today in our country. I was probably living 10 years ahead of my time when I was overseas, because that multicultural environment in the schools had yet to come here. I couldn’t figure it out. One time when I came back in 1968 at the age of 10 in the fourth grade, I was in an integrated school. Even though desegregation was passed by the Supreme Court in 1954, four years before I was born, schools did not integrate overnight. It took years. Even today in 2024, we’re still dealing with some of that. I was in an integrated school and one of two black children in the entire school. The school was first grade through sixth grade, and I was in the fourth grade. There was a little black girl in second grade. Consequently, all of my friends were fourth and fifth graders who were white. Several of my friends invited me to join the Cub Scouts, which I did. I was the only black scout anywhere in the area. We had a parade, and I was the only black scout participating in this parade. The streets were blocked off, and the sidewalks filled with white people waving and cheering, until we got to a certain point in this route. Suddenly, I’m getting hit with bottles and soda pop cans and small debris from the street by a small group of spectators off to my right on the sidewalk. I remember there being a couple of kids maybe a year or two older than me and a couple of adults who I assume were their parents. They were throwing things at me. Never having had any precedent for this kind of behavior my first thought was. “Oh, these people over here don’t like the scouts.” That’s how naive I was. It wasn’t until my white scout leaders came running over and covered me with their own bodies and quickly escorted me out of the danger that I realized nobody else was getting this special protection. I thought, “Why am I being targeted?” I had no clue. I kept asking them, “Why are they doing this? I didn’t do anything. What did I do?” I had no idea. All they would do is shush me and rush me along and tell me, “Keep moving, keep moving. Everything will be fine,” so I kept moving and everything was fine. They didn’t follow us. By the end of the march they still had not answered my question as to why this was happening. When I got home my mother and father were cleaning me up and putting band-aids on me. They asked me, “How did you trip and fall down and get all scraped up?” I said, “I didn’t fall down,” then I told them what happened. For the first time in my life my mother and father sat me down as an only child and explained to me at age 10 what racism was. I had never heard the word racism. I had no clue what they were talking about. My sphere consisted of people from all over the world and we all got along. This racism made no sense to me. My ten-year-old brain could not process the idea that someone who had never seen me before, never spoken to me, and knew nothing about me would want to hurt me for no other reason than the color of my skin. It made no sense. My parents had to be wrong because the people who were doing this to me in the parade did not look any different to me than my little white friends from school or my little white friends overseas, whether they were my fellow Americans or my little French, Danish, or Polish friends. Again, this was in 1968 and a lot of things began happening with the culmination of the assassination of Dr. King. I then realized that my parents had not lied to me. This phenomenon called racism does exist, but I did not know why. At the age of 10, I formed a question in my mind, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” For the last 56 years, I’ve been looking for the answer to that question. Mr. Jekielek: But through music, correct? Mr. Davis: Yes, I made a left turn. My parents did not want me to be a musician. Mr. Jekielek: You became a very successful musician and this was important on your journey to answer this question. Mr. Davis: Yes, indeed. I heard Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard, the pioneers of rock and roll. I liked that kind of music and I said, “That’s what I’m going to do.” Back in the 1940s, there were Jim Crow laws where you and I could not sit together at a concert, even if we were both allowed into the building. Actually, I might not even have been allowed in some buildings. But let’s say if you and I went to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra or Tommy Dorsey in the 1940s, we could not sit together. There were seating sections with ropes and signs hanging over them that said, “White patrons only. Colored seating only.” We could not cross sit and if they cross sat, they would be arrested. That was the law and that same law was in effect in the 1950s. But two things happened in the 1950s. One was the creation of rock and roll by black artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Bo Diddley. It was popularized by white artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, and others. That same law was in effect. But the second thing that happened was when these people came out playing this new rhythm and new beat the white kids and black kids could not sit still. They wanted to move. They bounced up out of their seats and knocked over those signs and they were boogieing and dancing in the aisles together for the first time in American music history. Police would come in and shut down the show because they were race mixing and that concert was over in the middle of the song, boom, done. Because they couldn’t have that. A lot of rock and roll concerts started getting banned. They were banned from different towns, not just in the South, but also in the North. These white kids and black kids who were dancing together to this music, to this new beat, they didn’t even know each other. Because in the 1950s, black kids and white kids did not go to school together. Adults, city fathers, mayors, people like that, began blaming it on a communist plot. It was the devil’s music and it was corrupting white youth. They said, “We’ve got to stop this rock and roll because it’s integrating black kids and white kids.” We give a lot of respect and respect is due to a lot of the civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and many other black and white people who marched, demonstrated, and did sit-ins and boycotts in order to bring white adults and black adults together. These rock and roll pioneers were achieving that with their music with the black and white youth. That’s another reason why I liked the original form of rock and roll. Mr. Jekielek: What did your parents say when you decided that music was going to be your focus? Mr. Davis: Oh, my goodness, we went round and round. My parents had taken me all over the world. I met kings, I met emperors, I met presidents of foreign countries and all kinds of people like that. They were hoping maybe I would get any job other than being a musician. But I was more focused on the king of rock and roll rather than the King of Jordan. Mr. Jekielek: You ended up playing with Jerry Lee Lewis. Mr. Davis: I did a lot of shows with Jerry Lee Lewis, yes. The main one that I played with in his band was Chuck Berry. Oftentimes it would be a rock and roll revival with Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. I knew Jerry Lee very very well, but I played mostly most extensively with Chuck Berry. I had my own band as well. Mr. Jekielek: I heard you speaking at an event and you told a powerful story about your first positive encounter with a Klansmen. Please tell us about that. Mr. Davis: I majored in music and got my degree, so I wanted to work full-time playing music. Around that time, a movie came out called Urban Cowboy that featured a lot of country music. It was a big hit at the box office. A lot of bars and clubs that were playing Top 40 and other genres of music switched their format to country. If you want to play music full-time, you do what people want to hear. I joined a country band. I was the only black guy in the band and usually the only black person anywhere we played. There was a lounge called the Silver Dollar Lounge in Frederick, Maryland, which sits about an hour and 20 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. The Silver Dollar Lounge had a reputation of being an all-white lounge. But there were no signs that said, “Whites only,” nothing like that. But you knew that if you were black, you were not welcome. When you go somewhere where you’re not welcome and alcohol is being served, that is not a good combination. The band had played there before because they were pretty well-established in Maryland. I knew of this place, but I had never been there. Now, we’re booked into the Silver Dollar Lounge and I go there with them. When I walked in, people looked at me, but they didn’t bother me. We played our first set of music. On the break, I’m following the band over to sit down at the table, and I felt somebody put their arm across my shoulder. I don’t know anybody here, so I’m trying to see who is touching me. It was a white gentleman, maybe 15 years older than me with a big smile on his face. He says how much he enjoys the music and the band. He says that he has never seen me before, but he has seen the band before. I said, “Yes, they have played here before, but I just joined.” He goes, “This is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis,” and I was not offended by his statement. But I was surprised that given the fact that he is a decade-and-a-half older than me but did not know the black origins of Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano style. I proceeded to explain to him that Jerry Lee got it from the same place I did—from black, blues and boogie-woogie piano players. That’s where that early rock and roll, rockabilly style came from. He says, “Oh, no, I ain’t never seen no black man play piano like that, except for you.” I said, “Well, I have. I know Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s a good friend of mine. He told me himself where his influences came from.” This guy didn’t believe that. But he was so fascinated with me that he wanted me to go back to his table and let him buy me a drink. I don’t drink alcohol, but I let him buy me a cranberry juice. He pays the waitress, takes his own glass, clinks my glass, and cheers me. Then he says, “This is the first time I ever sat down with a black man and had a drink.” Now, I’m even more mystified. He goes, “How can that be?” At that point in my life, I had sat down with literally tens of thousands of white people and had a meal, a beverage, and a conversation. How is it that this man had never done that? Innocently, I asked him why. He didn’t answer me and just looked down at the table and was very quiet. I asked him again. His friend said, “Tell him, tell him.” I said, “Tell me.” Then he says, “I’m a member of the Ku Klux Klan.” I started laughing at him because I did not believe him. I know a lot about the Klan. They don’t just come up and embrace a black man and want to hang out and buy him a drink and converse. It doesn’t work that way. I figured, “Okay, this guy’s joking. I’m going along with the joke.” He pulled out his wallet and handed me his Klan membership card. I recognized the Klan emblem immediately and thought, “Whoa, this is for real,” so I stopped laughing. It wasn’t funny anymore and I gave it back to him. But we talked about the Klan and some other things. Then he gave me his number and wanted me to call him any time I was to return to this bar with this band. He wanted to bring his friends, his Klansmen and Klanswomen, to see the black guy who plays like Jerry Lee. I don’t know if he called me the black guy to his friends, but that’s how he explained it to me. I would call him every six weeks and he would come and bring his Klansmen and Klanswomen. They came in street clothes, not robes and hoods. They would come near the stage and watch me play the piano. They would get out on the floor and dance. On the breaks, I'd make my way to his table, thank him for coming, meet some of them, and also thank them for coming. Two of them didn’t want to meet me. They would get up and walk to the other side of the room when they saw me coming, which was fine with me. This went on until the end of that year. I quit that band and went back to playing rock and roll and R&B. A few years later, it dawned on me. The question of how they could hate when they didn’t even know me had been plaguing me since the age of 10. I said, “Daryl, it fell right into your lap, and you didn’t even realize it. Who better to ask that question than somebody who would go so far as to join an organization that has over a hundred-year history of hating people who don’t look like them, and who don’t believe as they believe?” I said to myself, “Get back in contact with that Klansman and get him to hook you up with the Klan leader from Maryland. Start with him, and interview him. Then go up north, go down south, go to the Midwest, go to the West, and interview other Klan leaders and other members, and write a book.” Because no book had been written by a black author on the KKK from in-person interviews. Mr. Jekielek: This sounds like a crazy idea. Please tell us more about how this came to you. Mr. Davis: It was curiosity. I knew a lot about the Klan and I never heard of them buying a black guy a drink. Something was going on here. I needed to find out more about this. But I also wanted to find out more about how you could hate somebody when you don’t even know them. With my childhood travels with my parents and my adulthood travels as a professional musician and lecturer, if you combine those two sets of travels, I have played in all 50 states. I have been to 63 countries on six continents. That has exposed me to a wide variety of skin colors, ethnicities, cultures, ideologies, and religions. All of that has helped shape who I’ve become. It was just very foreign to me to talk to somebody who was judging me when they didn’t even know me. All he saw was this body and he already had a different reality. His perception became his reality. Where did that perception come from? How can I perhaps alter it? Mr. Jekielek: Did you reach out to him? Mr. Davis: I reached out to the guy that I originally met and got him to connect me. He did not want to do it because he feared for my safety. I said, “Give me his number and his address and I will go see him myself. He only gave it to me on the condition that I not tell this guy where I got his personal information. The leader’s name was Roger Kelly. Then he warned me, “Daryl, do not fool with Roger Kelly. He will kill you.” I said, “That’s the whole reason I need to see him. Why would he kill me? I don’t understand that.” For me, it was more like, “Don’t get furious, get curious. Try to understand where all this is coming from.” Mr. Jekielek: What did you find? Mr. Davis: I found a lot. A Klansman or a Klanswoman or a white supremacist is not stamped from a standard cookie cutter. They come from all walks of life, all educational levels, and all socioeconomic levels. I interviewed Mr. Kelly and I learned that he had a lot of false perceptions stemming from ignorance. When I say ignorance, I don’t use that term in the derogatory sense. I use it in a sense of being unaware of something. Ignorance breeds fear. We fear the things that we don’t understand, those things of which we are ignorant. If we don’t address that fear and keep that in check, that fear in turn will escalate into hatred. We fear the things that we hate. They frighten us. If that hatred is not stopped, it will in turn escalate into destruction. We get angry because we hate something. The next thing you know, we want to destroy it. Ignorance breeds fear. Fear breeds hatred. Hatred breeds destruction. We spend way too much time in this country talking about the other person, talking at the other person, and talking past the other person. Why don’t we spend time talking with the other person? The greatest weapon to combat racism, anti-Semitism, and all types of discrimination is the least expensive weapon known to man. It’s free, yet it is the most underused. It’s called conversation. I say forget about the destruction in the past. I’m sorry it happened. But what has been destroyed is not coming back. The destruction is a symptom of the root cause. Forget about the hate and don’t focus on that. That’s also a symptom. Forget about the fear which is another symptom. Focus on the root cause which is ignorance. If you can cure ignorance, there is nothing to fear. With nothing to fear, there’s nothing to hate. With nothing to hate, there’s nothing to get angry about and destroy. The cure for ignorance is exposure and education. That man had been aware of black people, but he had never spent any time with them or been exposed to them on a social basis. It was no skin off my back and just a little bit of my time. Through that exposure, he got educated, then his mind began changing. That perception that he had of a black person, a Jewish person, a gay person, a Muslim, or any of the people that he hated began to change. As a result, he got out of the Klan. When I met him, he was what’s called a grand dragon. A grand dragon in Klan terminology is what you and I would call a governor, the head of the state. Each state that has a Klan chapter has a grand dragon. The national leader who oversees all the states that you and I would call the president, they call that person the imperial wizard. When I met this guy, he was a grand dragon, and he rose up through the ranks to imperial wizard. When he dropped out, because of this perception change and hanging out with me, he gave me his Klan robe and his hood. Mr. Jekielek: Please show us the hoods and robes that you collected as a sign that people left the Klan. Mr. Davis: Some were going to throw them away or burn them. I said, “No, give them to me. At first I didn’t know why I wanted it, but I just knew I wanted it, and now I know why. I’m going to start my own museum. This is the robe of an imperial wizard. You can tell by the color blue and sometimes it’s purple. This is the Klan emblem that every Klan member uses on their robes, on their T-shirts, or the business card that the guy gave me in the Silver Dollar Lounge. He oversaw all the states for his chapter. This is what’s known as the hood and this is the mask. Members who want anonymity wear this mask, which is attached with three snaps and or Velcro. If they don’t care that you know who they are, they simply detach the mask, and the face is exposed under the hood. This guy here was a Grand Dragon. Now, you have a choice. You can have a white cotton robe, with blue or purple adornments to signify your rank, or you can have a satin robe, in which case it would be all blue or all purple. I have some of those, too. Green is the color of the Grand Dragon, the state leader. You can have a white cotton robe with green stripes and green cape, or you can have a green satin robe. This guy chose the satin. You see, he wore two of these things, and he wore the American flag and the Confederate battle flag on both sleeves. Now, let me tell you about this fellow. This guy was the Grand Dragon of Maryland at one time and I remember him. I never met him, but I remember hearing about him on the news. He went to prison for four years for trying to bomb a synagogue in Baltimore. He continued running the Klan while in prison through his right-hand guy on the outside. Then he got out, took over the Klan again. A couple of years later, he went back to prison for three years for assault with intent to murder two black men with a shotgun. I wanted to meet him. What was going through his mind? When he came out, I got to meet him. I had written him letters in prison. He didn’t know I was black until later. He sent somebody to check me out, but I didn’t know about it. They reported back to him, and he was all upset. He wrote me some letters because he was cussing out Jews and black people. Everything wrong with the world was because of the blacks and the Jews. Of course, he thought he was talking to a white guy. Then he found out I was black and he wrote back to me. He was all upset and said that I was trying to trick him. I said, “No, I just don’t walk around saying I’m black. I’m a human being.” Anyway, we got together and spent a lot of time together. He was vehemently violent and anti-Semitic and racist. But over time, he began changing because of those conversations. I don’t agree with them and they know that, but I allow them to be heard. I show them that respect. Understand, when I say respect, I don’t respect what they’re saying. I respect their right to say it. In return, they treat me the same way, and it’s a fair exchange. There is fairness. Being a Klan leader, you don’t make a lot of money. You might get a small stipend from the quarterly dues, but not enough to pay your mortgage or your car loan or whatever. You have to have a regular job. Grand Dragon, Imperial Wizard, these are just titles, like Boy Scout leader. His regular job, when he was in the Ku Klux Klan and trying to bomb the synagogue in Baltimore, was a Baltimore City police officer. He was not an undercover cop in the KKK gathering intelligence. He was a bonafide KKK member on the Baltimore City police force. This is his uniform. When he and I became friends, he gave me the robe and the hood and the uniform and some other things, because he knows I go around and lecture and I can show them to people. I’ve got a couple of other items here that I'll show you. This is a Klan rally banner that they use at their rallies or when they have their marches, and it bears that emblem that I showed you there. Mr. Jekielek: Who gave you that? Mr. Davis: This came from a leader of another Klan group. I also deal with a lot of neo-Nazis and this came from one of them. I’ve got a bunch of these, and like I said, I get them over the years. These will all be going into my museum. People ask me, “Daryl, why don’t you burn that stuff?” No, I’m not going to burn it. Yes, it is despicable, but it’s also a part of our history. You don’t burn our history; the good, the bad, the ugly, and the shameful. You expose it so it doesn’t happen again. Everybody knows what this is. Now, people call this the Confederate flag, but it’s not the official Confederate flag. It is the official Confederate battle flag. This is the flag that flew during the Civil War to preserve slavery. The official flag of the Confederacy is the red and white stripes with the blue square and the circle of silver stars representing each colony. Now, we see this flag flying in people’s yards, on the back of their pickup trucks, and on their T-shirts and caps. Some people do understand what it is and others don’t. They say, “This is my heritage. It’s not about hate. It’s about heritage.” That particular flag flew to preserve slavery. I tell these people, “Come to a Klan rally with me. When you see one of those people with your heritage flag, you go up to them and you tell them, ‘Hey, that’s not what that’s about. It’s not about this. Give me back my flag.’ They probably won’t give it to you. But if you do that, I will come to your house, I will take your Confederate battle flag, and I will hoist it up your flagpole for you.” I have yet to have anybody come and take me up on that offer. Let’s talk about that flag for a second. We Americans went to war against Great Britain and we beat Great Britain, which is why we celebrate the Fourth of July in this country. There are plenty of white Americans who are of British descent from Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland. We love Great Britain and they are our friends. They can go back there and find their third cousin removed. But they don’t run out and put up statues to King George III or fly the Union Jack. The loser does not get to fly his flag or build his statues on the winner’s property. We went to war in 1941 against Japan when they bombed Pearl Harbor. There are plenty of Japanese Americans in this country. We treated them very poorly by putting them in internment camps when that happened. But they were no less American than we were. They love their ancestry, but they don’t run out and build statues to Emperor Hirohito and fly the Japanese flag. We went to war against Germany. The majority of white Americans in the United States are of German descent. That’s the largest group. The second largest is of British descent. These Americans of German descent don’t build statues to Adolf Eichmann and Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler and fly swastikas, unless they’re neo-Nazis or something. The Confederacy lost the war. They need to get over it. Mr. Jekielek: Everything you’re talking about requires dialogue. Let’s say I’m a very understanding person and I’m ready to give people the benefit of the doubt. When I think about Klansmen, these are people that I might not ever want to talk to, but you did. Through that process, you facilitated something amazing. You made a project out of this. Mr. Davis: This project has led to the formation of a new foundation called the Pro-Human Foundation, cofounded by myself and Bion Bartning. We always talk about what we are against and say, “I’m anti-this and anti-that.” Okay, fine. What are you for? Therefore, we have the Pro-Human Foundation. I’m not anti-racist. To me, racist is a noun describing the person. I am anti-racism, meaning the ideology. The ideology needs to be erased, not the person. The person acquired that ideology, so let’s not be anti-the person. Let’s be anti-the message. Let’s be pro-human. These are people that I never believed would change. Why would they? They hate me because of the color of my skin. They went so far as to take a blood oath to join a group. When you do that, that becomes your family above and beyond all others. You go through a whole ritual to be in the Ku Klux Klan. I’ve seen these things. Now, you’re leaving and renouncing that group? You have betrayed your family. You’ve given your enemy your robe and hood and your flag? That would be like one of our U.S. generals taking off his uniform and giving it to ISIS or Al-Qaeda. But transformation can happen. What caused that transformation? It was not me saying, “You’re wrong. Give me that hood and robe.” No. It was conversation and exposure to people that they didn’t know. That brings the education out. They’re being self-educated through that exposure. What did it cost me? A little bit of time, but no skin off my back. Look what I got. I got some friends out of that. Some of them even come out with me to my lectures and renounce their former organization. Some are working very hard now trying to get others out of that movement and trying to prevent young people from joining those movements. Mr. Jekielek: How many people have you helped pull out of these types of organizations? Mr. Davis: Over the last 42 years, I would say just over 200. Mr. Jekielek: Have you ever feared for your life in the process? Mr. Davis: I’ve been threatened before, sure. It’s not on a daily basis or anything like that. But I’ve had my share and I still get them. I’ve had violent, physical confrontations. To me, violence is not the first resort, but I’ve had to be violent. I’ve had to hurt people and put them in the hospital, or put them in jail for putting their hands on me or trying to hurt me. I’m not going to just sit by and let somebody beat on me. Fortunately, those situations have been few and far between. But you realize going in that these people do not like you. You are inferior and they are superior. That’s the term supremacist. They have to let you know that they are superior. How do they do that? They step on somebody and push them down. But I’ve even had some of those that I’ve been into a physical confrontation with come back and apologize to me. But there will be people on all sides, black, white, and every color who will go to their grave being hateful, violent, and racist. They probably will never change, but I don’t give up on those people. I just simply move them down my list of priorities and deal with the ones who are willing to sit down and talk. Even though they disagree with me and don’t like me, at least we can converse. Then I work my way down to the ones who are a little harder. But here’s something else that’s very interesting. Hate is very exhausting. When these people get out, they feel like a burden has been lifted and they can breathe. Their lives become a lot better. Those hardcore ones that call them race traitors and say that they sold out, when they see that person blossoming and having a great life their eyes open up. They begin wondering, “Have I gone down the wrong road? Can I get that too?” Some of them change through that vicarious situation. Mr. Jekielek: That’s fascinating. Mr. Davis: I never dreamed I would be doing this all these years later. I first started writing the book in 1990. Now, I’ve finished my second book and it’s going through the editing process right now. But the first book came out in 1997. I started writing in 1990, interviewing KKK people. I had no intentions of becoming friends with these people or hanging out or anything like that. All I asked them was, “Tell me how can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” Then we parted ways. But over time, through these conversations, I would see them changing. When you’re the interviewer, you’re asking them questions. They will answer the question, but they won’t reciprocate. They won’t ask you anything. You might say, “What do you think of Donald Trump’s policy on this issue?” Then they'll give you the answer. But they don’t say, “Well, what do you think about it?” They’re not interested in what you have to say because you are inferior. Nothing you can say is going to be of any consequence for them. They have all the answers. Over time, you'll ask a question, “What do you think about that issue? This always catches you by surprise because there is no timeframe, it just happens randomly. They will say, “I think this. What do you think about it, Daryl?” Then it’s like, “Whoa, this person actually asked me a question. I have some modicum of value. This person wants to know my opinion.” That’s when you realize that you’ve broken through. The crack in the armor is beginning to appear. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve had people on the show who are detransitioning from so-called gender-affirming care. They may have taken drugs and cross-sex hormones. They’ve been living in this ideological space of gender ideology. But they found that it wasn’t good for them and decided to leave this ideology, which is called detransitioning. They originally went into it thinking that it would help them and they found a community of supportive people. But the moment that they leave, they get this vitriolic hate that you were just describing. Mr. Davis: Right, because they went into a community that welcomed them like a family. Now, they say, “You are betraying us.” When I help somebody transition out of hate into normalcy, it’s very important that I give this person support because they are hanging in the wind. They have left their clan family. They betrayed that family and they can’t go back. If their biological family is in that clan, they don’t want them back, so they’re out there hanging in the wind by themselves with nothing, and they want to belong to something. Chances are they’re going to find some other kind of group. If it’s not the clan, it might be the neo-Nazis. It might be some religious culture or satanic worshipers. They want to belong to something. It’s important for you to be an anchor to help them re-enter society on a normal basis. Otherwise, they will fall. It’s like an alcoholic. When they decide they want to stop drinking they need some kind of support like Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s where the Pro-Human Foundation comes in. This is what we do. I’m not saying to let them slide, by any means. It’s how you approach them. If they think you’re there to change them, it’s not going to happen. You cannot change somebody’s reality. You can try to change their reality, and you know it’s not real, but to them, it is real. They only know what they know. If it’s real to them, it’s a lost cause for you to try to change their reality. Don’t ever attempt to do that. They will push back. If you push harder, it’s going to escalate. Maybe even beyond yelling and screaming, maybe even to the point of physical violence. You need to understand that one’s perception is one’s reality. Whatever somebody perceives becomes manifest as their reality. If you want somebody’s reality to change, you have to offer them a better perception. If they resonate with that perception, they then will change their own reality. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying to give them the opportunity to broaden their perspective on reality. Mr. Davis: Precisely. I lived 10 years in Africa. I lived in Europe and visited many other countries in between. As a kid in elementary school, whenever I would come back home here to the States, you would go around the classroom and say where you’re from. I had just gotten back from Africa. My fellow classmates would ask me, and they were serious, “Did you ever see Tarzan?” That was their perception of Africa. They don’t picture tall buildings and houses and cars. They picture wild animals running through the backyard and mud huts and straw. Does that exist? Yes, that exists. Do trailer parks exist in this country? Yes, they exist. We don’t show them in our tour guide, but they exist. But one’s perception is one’s reality. They say, “You’ve been to Africa? Did you see Tarzan? Were there lions in your backyard?” It was all kinds of crazy stuff. These are kids and they’re being honest. That’s their perception. When I was a little kid, there was a mythical place which represented some place very far away. It was called Timbuktu. You know the phrase, “I’m going to knock you to Timbuktu,” meaning you are going so far that you are never coming back. Timbuktu actually does exist and I’ve been there. It’s in the country of Mali on the west coast of Africa. I lived in Dakar, Senegal, Conakry, Guinea, and Accra, Ghana on the west coast. We visited other countries, then went to Mali. Back then, you could not drive into Timbuktu. You had to drive your car a certain distance, then you had to walk into the village. But yes, it does exist. When I tell people that I’ve been to Timbuktu, they don’t believe me. Mr. Jekielek: Even when what someone seems to represent is beyond the pale, you have to try. Mr. Davis: Don’t say you or I, always say we. In other words, if I want to say something to somebody about one of my experiences, I wouldn’t say, “I look at it like this,” or “You look at it like that.” I would say, “Why don’t we look at it like this for a second?” I would use the words we and us. Even though you may be on the worse of terms, include them. It begins to wear on them, and they begin to shed their animosity. The next thing you know, they will be using these words. They will say, “If we look at it like this.” Now, he has caught on. Now, he’s calling me, we. Mr. Jekielek: What was the most dramatic change that you’ve seen happen in your process of trying to connect with people? Mr. Davis: I walked a Klan bride down the aisle and gave her away to her Klan leader husband. The one I mentioned, Roger Kelly, oversaw 13 states as an imperial wizard. When he left the Klan, he didn’t just quit and hand it over to his second in command. He shut it down. He shut down all his chapters in those 13 states. Now somebody else might come along and try to reboot it, but they can’t use that particular name. Seeing somebody give a person that they hated their uniform and their badge of honor is just incredible. Mr. Jekielek: The work you’ve done is inspirational. Mr. Davis: I’m just a rock and roll piano player. I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist. If I can do it, anybody can do it. But you have to know how to do it without allowing yourself to get triggered by somebody who doesn’t know you. That’s where we fall short. I don’t get triggered because somebody who just met me tells me I’m stupid and I’m inferior, and all they saw was that. Why would I be offended by that? They don’t know me. They’re just spewing stuff from their learned perception, so I’m not going to be offended by a lie. Mr. Jekielek: What would be your advice to folks that are seeing intolerance around them? Mr. Davis: Never give up on having a conversation, but don’t force it on people. I know people who say, “I’m not going to Thanksgiving dinner with my family because my brother voted for so-and-so and I voted for this one, and we just can’t talk.” It doesn’t matter who becomes president. Whoever becomes president is only going to be there for a minimum of four years, and a maximum of eight years. How long have you been with your family? Decades? You’re going to throw away decades of a relationship over somebody who’s only going to be around for four to eight years? If I can go to a KKK rally and talk to people, you can sit down at your Thanksgiving dinner table and talk to one of your siblings or your parents. Juxtapose those two things. That will help you to have another perspective. Mr. Jekielek: Daryl Davis, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Davis: It’s my pleasure. I hope we can do it again. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Daryl Davis and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

A new moon race is brewing. The Chinese communist regime has now declared that it found water and minerals in soil samples Chinese scientists had been analyzing from a previous lunar probe. The recent discovery is now spurring a competition over who will build the first moon base, and possibly who can establish a functioning system on the moon to begin taking advantage of the purported water supply and minerals. Alongside these motives, however, is a corresponding military ambition, and a race to control—and potentially weaponize—the earth-moon system. We’ll discuss all this and more in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇 https://ept.ms/3YTHbUp Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

“I was born in a village where we were subjected to attacks on a monthly basis, or yearly basis. The government troops [would] come and burn down the villages—kill whoever that they will find. … When I see what happened recently in Israel, where they went and burned down, and shot people—that’s exactly what I experienced when I was a child.” When Simon Deng was nine years old, he was kidnapped from South Sudan and brought to the North. He was given to an Arab family as a “gift,” and enslaved for more than three years. “I’m here talking to you as a living proof of the slavery which still exists,” says Mr. Deng. 25 years ago, Charles Jacobs helped to liberate tens of thousands of slaves in Africa, and received an award from Coretta Scott King for his work. “We went to the slave redemption sites, and we talked to the survivors who were brought back. And they told us their stories,” he says. Today, Mr. Deng and Mr. Jacobs are cofounders of the newly-formed African Jewish Alliance, which raises awareness about the threat posed by Jihadism. Watch the video: “Hamas is no different than Boko Haram in Nigeria,“ says Mr. Jacobs. ”It’s one front in Israel, but it belongs to a global movement. And people need to know that.” Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Simon Deng, Charles Jacobs, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Charles Jacob: Thank you. Simon Deng: Thank you for having us. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with you, Simon. Many Americans and people in the West believe that slavery is an issue of the distant past. But you’re actually living proof that’s not true, and that it exists today, so why don’t we start with your story? Mr. Deng: Thank you for having me here. I am here to talk to you as living proof that slavery still exists in Sudan. As a child, I was kidnapped from my loved ones, taken to northern Sudan, and given away as a gift. I became a slave in Sudan when I was nine years old. Mr. Jekielek: You are originally from South Sudan, which is now a separate country. Can you provide some background on what is happening there? For many people, the idea of slavery is something they find difficult to understand unless given more context. Mr. Deng: Yes, that is true. When we talk about Sudan, we are talking about a country where there is no media and no cameras on the ground to film the footage, especially when it concerns people who are so far away that nobody even acknowledges their existence. Sudan has been at war for a very long time. The conflicts between the northern Sudanese and the southern Sudanese started in 1955. The northern Sudanese fought against the southern Sudanese before the secession that occurred in 2011. There was a temporary peace agreement in 1972, in which the sitting government in Sudan was believed to be a government for all people. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a government for a particular group of people—Muslims and Arabs in the north. Africans in the south were being ignored and disregarded. The same government that had previously signed a peace agreement with the southerners in 1982 later canceled the agreement, declaring Sudan an Islamic state aligned with Iran. Sudan became the first African country on the continent to become an Islamic state and subjected everyone to Sharia law. This made the southern Sudanese feel like second-class citizens, with Muslims being prioritized. In 1982, a war broke out in which two million southern Sudanese were killed due to a declared jihad against the infidels. It was a brutal conflict, with individuals from other countries volunteering to fight in the name of jihad, including Osama bin Laden, who was in Khartoum at the time executing this policy. The creation of al-Qaeda was tied to this conflict, with Osama bin Laden’s soldiers fighting against the southern Sudanese. Slavery still persists in southern Sudan, but it goes largely unnoticed since there are no cameras or journalists present, and access to the region requires permission from a government that does not want outsiders to see what is happening. Mr. Jekielek: Charles, I'll turn to you soon, since I know you have extensive knowledge on this topic. Simon, could you please share what occurred in your village? Mr. Deng: I was born in a village that was subject to attacks on a monthly and yearly basis. Government troops would come and burn down the villages, killing whoever they found. Usually, we had to run to the bush and then wait for our father to come back and rebuild the village. To build a village, you only need a few things, like some wood to cut to build huts. That’s where we were. We were not in a city like other places. When I see what happened recently in Israel, where they went and burned down and shot people, it reminds me of exactly what I experienced as a child. It’s especially disturbing when the people doing the shooting and killing claim it is in the name of Allahu Akbar, which means “God is great”. It makes me wonder what kind of God they believe in. That’s exactly what I experienced as a child. Mr. Jekielek: Were you captured? Mr. Deng: My dad decided to take his family to the capital city, Malakal. We were in a village at the time. In that town, one of my neighbors was leaving and going to northern Sudan. He asked me to help him with his luggage. As a child, if someone asked for help, I would do it. He told me to sit next to his luggage on the train while he went to get something in the market. He didn’t show up by the time the train was leaving, and I became terrified. He eventually found me and calmed me down and explained that we couldn’t go back once the train left the station, so we would continue all the way to Kosti, a city in northern Sudan. He promised me that when we arrived in Kosti, he would put me on another train going back south, which was a lie. When we arrived in Kosti, we were walking into the city with a northern Muslim man with three African kids with him. That’s how I ended up in his hands. My neighbor gave me away to him as a gift. Mr. Jekielek: The last part of the story is about how you managed to escape. I understand you were there for about four years. Mr. Deng: Three-and-a-half years passed. My slave master’s family had a son who needed to go to junior high school. In his village in northern Sudan there was no junior high school, so they had to move to Kosti. One day in Kosti I saw three Shilluk gentlemen with the Shilluk tribal marks, which I myself have today. At that time, I didn’t have those tribal marks. In fact, during my time as a slave, I was given an offer to convert to Islam, to be given an Arab name, and to become their son. I was willing to convert to Islam if it would save me from the daily hardships I endured. I was even willing to take on an Arab name if it meant being treated like a human being. However, the idea of becoming their son was incredibly difficult for me. In my mind, even as a child, I had a loving mother and father. I had a wonderful family. I had been kidnapped against my will and no one knew what had happened to me. How could I give up my identity? During that time, there was only one word I knew—yes. I couldn’t say no to anything, not even to the torture I had to endure. I always told them that I would let them know later, buying time. I relied on two things—hope and faith that someday someone would come and prevent another child from going through what I had experienced. That hope and faith came when their son had to go to junior high school. It was in the city of Kosti where I saw the three gentlemen with the Shilluk tribal marks. This was what I had been waiting for. I approached them with so much happiness on my face because of the tribal marks they had on their foreheads, something I didn’t have. Since I couldn’t communicate in their language, all I could do was speak to them in Shilluk. Unfortunately, one of them told me they were from northern Shilluk, while I came from southern Shilluk. He said they didn’t know my mom or my dad, even though I had mentioned their names and the name of my village. I assumed they knew. Hearing this, tears started to run down my face and I felt disappointed. But then, another person came and comforted me, saying that while they didn’t know my mom, they knew someone from the village I mentioned. They promised to go and meet that person and they would come back to meet me the following day. True to their word, I was waiting for them, and there they were. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was someone from my village. That person broke down in tears upon seeing me. For two-and-a-half years, my dad had been looking for me. My dad had offered ten cows to anyone who could provide information about his missing son. Two-and-a-half years passed, but nobody came forward to claim the reward. My parents organized a funeral for their lost and deceased child, and this is why he was crying. Then he warned me not to reveal to my slave master that I had encountered someone I knew, as he feared I would be taken to an undisclosed location. I kept my promise. He was the one who rescued me from slavery and brought me to freedom. Without him, I wouldn’t be here today, talking to you as a free man in the United States. Mr. Jekielek: What an incredible story. Charles, you’ve dedicated your life to liberating slaves from the region. I even heard that you received an award from Coretta Scott King for your efforts. This work has been ongoing for decades. Can you explain how this kind of slavery is similar or different from what we know in North America? Mr. Jacobs: I actually first learned about this issue on an airplane. Back then, smartphones didn’t exist, so they provided magazines for passengers to read. I was reading an article in Newsweek which stated that one could buy and sell a black woman for $30 in Sudan and other places. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that such a practice still existed in my time. This article was buried on page 19. Why wasn’t an article about the buying and selling of human beings given more prominence? This made me question the collective mindset that prevented certain realities from being acknowledged. Through my research, I discovered that slavery was prevalent in Sudan, Mauritania, and many other places. However, human rights organizations seemed to relegate these reports to the bottom of their agenda. There were no large-scale protests calling for the liberation of these slaves, unlike the marches against apartheid in South Africa. While apartheid was undoubtedly horrific, I couldn’t understand why the human rights community and the media seemed indifferent to people like Simon. Mr. Deng: I remember sitting down and talking with Bishop Macram Gassis, who was exiled from Sudan for speaking out against slavery in the country. Mr. Jacobs: Then I started the American Anti-Slavery Group and I received a lot of interest from decent people. I wrote an article in the New York Times that broke the story about slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, and I began building an organization. As the research director of the American Anti-Slavery Group, I represent black chattel slaves, a people many Americans believed had long ago vanished. Our organization is made up of American and African abolitionists; black and white, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish. For three years, we have been working to bring attention to the issue of the present-day slave trade and advocate for the removal of Sudan from the United Nations. It is unacceptable to have a country that enslaves and kills people being represented in the United Nations. We gained support from organizations like the NAACP and influential individuals like Eleanor Holmes Norton, an important black congresswoman. Many people were genuinely concerned about this issue. The Arab Islamic regime declared a jihad against black, Christian southern Sudan, and militias would attack African villages. They would just shoot the men, because this is not the kind of slavery that we once had. You don’t need musculature. They didn’t take them because they wanted them for rice harvests or cotton picking. This was all for concubinage and humiliation and spreading their culture through the womb of the captured slave women. It was a different kind of slavery. At one point, I met John Eibner from Christian Solidarity International [CSI]. He became a hero in this fight. His organization figured out how to buy back slaves that had been taken by the North from the South. They paid cooperating Arabs near the border, who did not want war with the South, to retrieve people like Simon and bring them back. The cost was around $35 or $50 per slave. We raised tens of thousands of dollars in the U.S., with support from Europe as well. We garnered media attention, and even children were contributing to the cause. There were heartwarming stories on NBC and CBS about kids donating money to bring back slaves. Eventually, I traveled to South Sudan illegally, passing through Kenya as it was not possible to travel through the north. I joined Christian Solidarity International on this journey. We walked for half-a-day to reach a clearing under a large shade tree, where we encountered hundreds of women and children slaves that had been returned and who were waiting for us. Did they truly know they would be redeemed? It must have been a horrifying night for them. They were told they would be freed. Why would they believe that? Eibner arrived with a duffel bag filled with cash. It was the most incredible scene I’ve ever witnessed. He sat down next to the Arab retrievers and paid and paid, and then it was all done. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it. He stood up, and speaking through a Dinka translator (mostly Dinka people were enslaved), he then said, “You are blessed by God. Don’t dwell on what they made you do. Good people from the West have paid for your freedom. Now, you are free.” I have only experienced this feeling three or four times in my life. When this happens, their families, brought nearby, start screaming and jumping and dancing, and I dance with them. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done, aside from marrying my wife. CSI has saved tens of thousands of people in this way. Eventually, the word reached President George Bush, and he compelled Khartoum to hold a plebiscite allowing the South to decide whether they wanted to remain, considering that the region is predominantly black African Christian. Unsurprisingly, they voted 99 percent in favor of separation. That’s how we have the newest nation in the world, South Sudan. Now, the same thing is happening in Nigeria. It is also occurring in roughly 10 African countries, including Mali, Somalia, and Burkina Faso, as this expanding and militant ideology takes hold. Unfortunately, not enough attention is being paid to this issue. Therefore, we have formed the African Jewish Alliance to address this. We are here in Congress, speaking with members, and inaugurating our efforts. What happened to the Jews on October 7th of last year is exactly what I witnessed in Sudan. It follows the same pattern; ransacking villages, shooting people, burning them alive, and gang-raping girls before taking them as slaves. We recently celebrated the return of four Israeli hostages, and one of the girls, Noah, reminds me of the girls I interviewed in Sudan who were survivors of the slave raids. It’s the same horrendous situation. We spoke to the survivors who were brought back, and they shared their stories with us. This beautiful girl told me that when the jihadists came to her village and massacred people, they lined up the girls and selected one to rape. She resisted, and they slit her throat in front of the other girls. No one else resisted. They told me that they would chop off the feet of anyone who tried to run away. They also threatened to burn people’s huts with them inside. It’s difficult to listen to such horrifying things. The one thing the jihadists didn’t do, unlike Hamas, was use GoPro cameras. Now, if you watch what Hamas did to the Jews, you can see what they did to the blacks. We formed an organization that includes Igbos, Darfuris, South Sudanese, and Nigerians, with plans to include Mauritanians. These people that we are working with live in the United States and are an important and powerful constituency. Decent American people need to be aware that blacks and Jews are being tortured, murdered, and enslaved by the same ideology. In other words, Hamas is no different from Boko Haram in Nigeria. It may be one front in Israel, but it is part of a global movement, and people must know this. Mr. Jekielek: Your organization purchased tens of thousands of people for $35 to $50, if I recall correctly. Somehow, that fact really brings it home, doesn’t it? Mr. Jacobs: The abolitionists in America did the same thing. They bought Frederick Douglass’ freedom because he was in the North and was the biggest voice for abolition there. As an escaped slave, they were afraid that Southerners would come and capture him. Therefore, they purchased his freedom. As a supposedly advancing human culture, we should have moved beyond such practices. Yet, they persist, but it is considered politically incorrect to acknowledge it when it’s not done by Westerners. Mr. Jekielek: I have some knowledge about South Sudan. I have known several Commissioners on International Religious Freedom. Nadine Maenza informed me about significant progress in South Sudan regarding religious freedom. However, there is also an ongoing war. What is the current situation over there? Mr. Deng: When we talk about Southern Sudan, the country has returned to turmoil, with the Sudanese government fighting among themselves. The capital city, Khartoum, has been completely destroyed. It is a brutal war that forced the previous government to relocate the capital to Port Sudan in the east in order to avoid the chaos in Khartoum. In terms of religious freedom in the south, yes, there is some freedom, but Southern Sudan is not at peace internally. It is engulfed in its own war to the extent that the international community has grown weary of it. The United Nations is providing protection. Hundreds of thousands are in UN camps in the capital city of Juba, fearing their own government. The citizens of the country are being protected by the United Nations within their own country. This is happening in South Sudan. In the other part of Sudan, things are not going well. In other words, the issue of religion and freedom is not really the question. The question is how to survive today and live for tomorrow in these two countries. Mr. Jacobs: It’s a tribal society with many tribes. The tribes united to fight off the Arab Islamic North. They came together and defeated a jihad, winning their own freedom. However, as soon as they achieved their freedom, the tribes began fighting each other. It’s really a tragedy. Mr. Deng: Two years after independence, we killed half-a-million of our own people in the South alone. It’s a topic that nobody talks about. I even had to go on a hunger strike in Washington for 45 days to force President Obama to take action. I strongly believe that southern Sudan is an American responsibility. You cannot abandon a child that you helped deliver. Eventually, after realizing that my life was in danger, President Obama decided to go to Ethiopia to tell the warring faction to make peace. This led to a peace agreement, even involving President Salva Kiir Mayardit. Mr. Jekielek: It is a very complex reality. Mr. Jacobs: Indeed, slavery still persists in Africa, and it is important for Americans to understand what is happening. That is why we are doing the work we do. The Nigerian-American community approached me and explained that they saw parallels between what’s happening in Israel and what’s happening to them. Nobody seems to care about their plight. We started working together because they face the same enemy, with the same cries of “Allahhu Akbar,” and the same violent shootings, murders, rapes, and kidnappings. In addition to the Nigerian-American community, we have now added other African groups. I am just discovering that this is happening in numerous African countries, around 10 that I know of. Some of them are Burkina Faso, Somalia, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mozambique. Africa might be the epicenter of Islamist extremism in the world today. If this ideology takes over the entire continent and forcibly converts Africans to a faith that is not their own, and if millions are killed, raped, slaughtered, kidnapped, and enslaved, it will be a new world. Slavery has existed in numerous societies throughout history. The Chinese, Romans, Greeks, Africans, Muslims, Jews, and Christiansn all had slaves. We take pride in the West for being the ones who abolished slavery. How can we continue if we allow this to happen in Sudan, where young boys were abducted and later killed when they became old enough to be dangerous? Mr. Deng: When we came to this country and tried to inform Americans, especially elected officials, that we were being targeted by radicals due to our Christian faith, we were met with disbelief. We refused to be forced into Islamization and Arabization. People didn’t listen to us. In fact, elected officials at that time accused us of paranoia and of trying to involve them in our war, even though we were warning them about what Osama bin Laden was doing in Sudan. Al-Qaeda was actually established in Khartoum, an African country, not in Afghanistan. We, the people of southern Sudan, were left vulnerable to slaughter in the name of ideology. Similarly, the situation is the same in Israel. What is happening to us mirrors what has happened in Israel. It is crucial for people around the world to not be naive about the ideology of Islamic radicals. They should look back at what occurred in Africa in the past. While America was fighting Osama bin Laden, he was establishing a base in Somalia, known as Al-Shabaab. He then proceeded to attack American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In the eyes of Arab Muslims, a black person by nature is considered a slave. Mr. Jacobs: The Arab word for black, abib, is the same word for slave. Mr. Deng: Yes, abid. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t we come together and denounce this? That’s the purpose of the African Jewish Alliance. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that Israel played a role in assisting the South Sudanese. Mr. Deng: During the first war, from 1955 to 1972, when the southern Sudanese were fighting against the government in Khartoum with their spears, they had no one to support them. It was the Israeli Mossad that provided them with logistical support so they could defend themselves. Understanding that no neighboring country at that time was willing to help the southern Sudanese, we will never forget the generosity of the state of Israel. When October 7th came, everyone was fleeing Israel. Everybody was running out of Israel, but I was rushing in. A gentleman on the airplane asked me why I was going to Israel when everyone else was leaving. I asked him where he was going, and he replied that Israel was his home. I explained that these were my people, and I was going there to stand in solidarity with them. I wanted to be there for the victims’ families, to mourn with them and share in their grief. That’s exactly what I did. I walked from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in solidarity. On this journey, I was joined by a few southern Sudanese who were in Israel as refugees. Even though I didn’t know them, they volunteered to walk with me to Jerusalem. I am grateful for what Israel has given us. We would have done more, but we didn’t have the means. We are not a government. We are a people who will never forget the friendships and the kindness shown to us by Israel. Mr. Jacobs: That is an amazing story. It’s important to note that the Mossad and IDF [Israel Defense Forces] went into southern Sudan to see the atrocities being committed against the black Christian community by jihadists. They dropped supplies, guns, and machine guns, and also provided training to the Anyanya fighters. Mr. Deng: Not the SPLA [Southern Sudan People’s Defense Forces], but the Anyanya. Mr. Jacobs: Yes, this was before the SPLA. They trained them to fight. If Israel were not besieged and in danger today, they would be the first to help countries like Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, and Sudan again. This event in history was truly remarkable, though very few know about it. Mr. Deng: I believe this African-Jewish alliance is connected to that. Mr. Jekielek: What are your thoughts on the recent events in LA? Can you tell me what you saw happen? Mr. Jacobs: A few days ago in Los Angeles, people were going to a synagogue when they were attacked by hundreds of individuals wearing keffiyehs. It’s unclear how many leftists and Islamists were among them, but they assaulted and beat the people at the synagogue. It’s terrifying that in America, Jews are being attacked. Jews in America believed it was a safe haven, where they would be treated better than in Europe. However, the LA police did nothing to stop this crowd from hurting Jews, which is extremely troubling. College campuses are also hostile environments for Jewish students, as progressive individuals influenced by their professors often harbor hatred towards us. Some of us knew it was coming, but none of us knew it would be set on fire on October 7th. The Jewish community is in shock, because anti-Semitism is a mind virus that shape-shifts. Whatever is considered the worst sin of any human epoch, the Jews are charged with. When it was about religion, it was deicide or not following Muhammad. When race science promoted the idea of white superiority, the Jews were slandered as racial vermin. When nationalism was the only virtuous way, the Jews were hated for being stateless cosmopolites. Now, in the age of globalism, we are hated for having a state. It is no longer socially acceptable to claim that Jews are an inferior race or that we control everything. Instead, the focus is on portraying the state of Israel as the biggest sin of our time. This new defamation has been promoted by the college professoriate, which largely leans towards the extreme Left. Unfair media coverage has also perpetuated this narrative. Many young people who attend elite colleges hold misguided views on the Middle East. There is an alliance between the Left and radical Muslims, known as the red-green alliance, which is driving Jews out of Europe. France may soon see a significant decline in its Jewish population, as may England. The issue at hand is a new way of discussing the human condition, often referred to as woke or progressive or intersectional. It divides the world into two categories: oppressors and oppressed, with a racial undertone. White people are labeled as the perpetual oppressors, while non-white people are always seen as the oppressed. Jewish people are now considered white, although historically, we were not part of the master race. This irony is evident. This viewpoint makes it difficult to recognize acts of evil committed by non-white individuals, such as the ongoing atrocities in Africa against black people and Jews. It is puzzling why someone who claims to be anti-racist would not take action to free black slaves today. Evil exists in every person, regardless of race. Mr. Deng: The world should not be naive and fall asleep, especially after what the U.S. went through during the Civil War. We don’t act and call it for what it is when we can see the danger is coming towards us. Americans thought this was far away, even when we told them that these things are going to come, because of the eyes of those people with the ideology of Islam. In the eyes of those people with the ideology of Islam, you are the head of infidels and you cannot call yourself the superpower of the world. Whereby, if you call yourself a Christian country, you can’t ignore us. But we, the people of southern Sudan, are being slaughtered because we refused to surrender, we refused to convert to Islamization, so jihad was declared on us. What you don’t understand here is that this thing is not only on us, it affects everybody. Those radicals and terrorists are being backed by Iran, whose goal is to Islamize everybody by force. If you don’t stop this, you will be subjected to it. Please wake up! There are about 11 terrorist groups in the continent of Africa today being backed and funded by Iran. I don’t know about Asia, and I don’t know about here in this country. Do you believe that Iran is not funding terrorists in this country? They are. If you live here, you might be surprised tomorrow. Something bigger than October 7 can happen somewhere else. Where? I have no idea. You claim to be against racism. What in the world would stop you from acting against the enslavement of black people? Just focus on that for one day. After that, what happened? Did the girls come home? If they did not, where are you, first lady? Why do you just say one word and then turn a blind eye? We need to bring the girls home. We also need the hostages back home in Israel. Mr. Jekielek: Simon, please remind us of this scenario, bring the girls home. Mr. Deng: When Michelle Obama heard that schools in Nigeria were raided by jihadists and black girls were kidnapped and taken captive, enslaved, and made wives of their captives, she was properly astonished and shocked. She started a campaign called #bringbackourgirls. That’s how most Americans got to know about what was happening in Nigeria. But then, for some strange reason, she let it go and went silent. She shouldn’t have. We invite her back because we need to bring back all the girls. Mr. Deng: Slavery is evil. It’s the demonization of a fellow human being by a human being. We are all made in the image of God, whether you’re black or white. No human being is entitled to own another fellow human being as a piece of property. That should be denounced by any person, whether you’re Chinese, Asian, African, or European. It’s not good. It’s brutal. It’s inhumane. Mr. Jekielek: Charles, a final thought as we finish up? Mr. Jacobs: The world believed that it had defeated slavery, but it didn’t. When it fought slavery, it did so by moral teachings, by persuasion, and by war. The moral people in the world said to themselves, this is worth fighting for. This is worth risking everything for, to stop this human bondage. Mr. Jekielek: Simon Deng, Charles Jacobs, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Deng: Thank you very much. Mr. Jacobs: Thank you for having us. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Simon Deng, Charles Jacobs, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

The steel industry is facing too much supply and tumbling prices. Much of the problem is coming from China, where Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies have led to overcapacity. Faced with this issue, the United States placed tariffs on Chinese goods, including steel and aluminum, which the CCP has in turn tried getting around by using Mexico as a waypoint to the U.S. market. This loophole is now being closed as well. We’ll discuss in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇 https://ept.ms/4fTQJ7T Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

Right now there is a debt bomb at the center of the U.S. economy, with commercial real estate in this country in total free fall. Visit any mainstream commercial building here in New York: On the ground floor you have restaurants, Starbucks, boutique bakeries, and so on, and it looks nice. But go up the elevator, and you’ll find floor, after floor, after floor, after floor of emptied-out office space. No companies. No employees. No workers. No nothing. Just a giant loan from the bank that no longer has any rental income to support it. It’s fair to say that we’re living in a new Gilded Age. On the outside everything looks fine—it’s New York City, the commercial capital of America. You have skyscrapers packed one next to the other, people walking around, the whole thing looks bustling. But on the inside, you have emptied-out buildings, with floor after floor completely vacant. And it’s not just New York. The same is also true in many other large cities in America: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, San Jose, Portland, Atlanta, and so on. And the match to this powder keg lies in the fact that roughly $1.2 trillion-worth of this commercial real estate debt is set to mature over the next 2 years. A lot of banks are about to learn that all the money they lent out to buy these buildings simply isn’t there anymore. And so, to figure out what’s going on, which banks are going to be most severely affected, and what’ll likely happen to common Americans like you and I, we put together an entire episode outlining this problem—the popping of the American commercial real estate bubble. 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale

In recent years, drug cartels have built a vast and lucrative business selling fake prescription drugs laced with fentanyl—which drives addiction faster than any other synthetic narcotic, says Michael Brown, who was a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for over three decades. The majority of people dying from fentanyl-related overdoses now are taking what they think is a fairly innocuous prescription drug like Xanax, and they have no idea that it’s been laced with fentanyl, he says. The DEA says seven out of ten pills seized by the organization contain a deadly dose of fentanyl. “You take that wrong pill for the first time, and your life is over,” Mr. Brown says. Now he’s global director for counter-narcotics technology at Rigaku Analytical Devices, which produces equipment that can identify narcotic substances. “In the 60s and 70s, drug dealers were concerned about killing their clients, because they didn’t want to kill their clients. But the client base today is so vast and diverse that they can lose 100,000 and still make hundreds of millions of dollars,” Mr. Brown says. Watch the video: In this episode, he breaks down this new drug cartel business model, how the supply chain works, the role of Chinese money-laundering proxies, and what he believes it would take to turn the situation around. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Michael Brown, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Michael Brown: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: We’re going to talk about the fentanyl crisis in the United States that is affecting so many people. Please give us a sense of the big picture of where we’re at. Mr. Brown: That’s such a broad topic because there are so many individuals and so many different paradigms being affected by Mexican cartel fentanyl. I'll start with a new paradigm—fentanyl pills that are designed to look like Oxycontin, Adderall, Percocet, and Valium. The cartel sat back and they looked at America’s addiction to prescription drugs, because there’s a lot of people in America who will never transition to illegal narcotics, like meth, heroin, or cocaine, but they will take prescription drugs. They said, “If we can infiltrate the prescription drug market with fake pills and put fentanyl in them, we can force that transition from prescription drugs to fentanyl.” Again, they were very successful in creating that new paradigm. A large majority of the overdose deaths we see now are people who thought they were taking an Oxycontin or a Vicodin, but it was a fentanyl pill with more than two milligrams of fentanyl, and it killed them within 30 seconds. The cartels realized they were onto something, so then they started putting fentanyl into the cocaine supply. We’re now seeing it in the marijuana supply. They understand that fentanyl is so powerful and that the individual who was already addicted will transition to fentanyl. In some states such as Massachusetts, drug users are only seeking out fentanyl now because it’s so strong. It has really changed a number of drug-user paradigms, bringing in people who were, generally speaking, not predisposed to using illicit narcotics. Mr. Jekielek: For those of us that are not familiar with the cartel strategy of getting people addicted to drugs, please explain this graduation from heroin or cocaine or to fentanyl. How does that actually work? They always seem to be pushing in that particular direction, with fentanyl at the top of the chain. Mr. Brown: The distribution of narcotics involves heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and now fentanyl. Each one of those drugs in and of itself is highly addictive, but fentanyl right now is the most addictive synthetic narcotic out there being sold. In terms of addictive qualities, we’re talking about its potency. Fentanyl is 10 times stronger than heroin, and 100 times stronger than morphine. As a drug trafficker, I want to sell a product that will bring my customers back as frequently as possible, and that means I want to sell them the most potent substance I have. Right now, the cartels have figured out that fentanyl is king of the game. The more fentanyl they can distribute, the more addiction they can create with it, and that means more profit for the cartels. Unfortunately, most people who die from an overdose-related fentanyl death are taking what they think is a Xanax for the first or second time, but it’s got two milligrams of fentanyl in it and they die. You hear the stories all the time about parents going into their kid’s room, and the kid is slumped over in bed. They find what they think is an Adderall under the pillow, but it turns out to be a pill with two milligrams of fentanyl in it. The DEA [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration] has said that now 7 out of 10 pills have a lethal dose of fentanyl in them. When you think about the millions of fentanyl pills which are distributed, a blue pill and red pill selection. You take that wrong pill for the first time and your life is over. When I was growing up, kids smoked marijuana and they drank some beer. You woke up the next day and had a headache. Now, if you make that mistake, you could lose your life. Mr. Jekielek: Did I hear you correctly that 7 out of 10 pills are lethal? Mr. Brown: According to DEA statistics, now 7 out of 10 pills have at least two milligrams of fentanyl in them. When you think about the cooks in Mexico who are preparing these pills, they’re not using formulas and special equipment. It’s a pinch of this, a pinch of that, then mix it up and push it out. The cartels know this. But they also know if they lose 100,000 people, they’re still going to gain 300,000 new customers. Going back to a business model, it’s a cost-benefit analysis. Mr. Jekielek: That actually yields growth? Mr. Brown: That yields sales because they know more people are going to use the narcotic than die. Then they look at the law enforcement response. They don’t see anything happening in China, and they don’t see anything significant happening in Mexico, so there is really no deterrent. Unfortunately, in the ‘60s and ’70s, drug dealers were concerned about killing their clients. But the client base today is so vast and diverse that they can lose 100,000 and still make hundreds of millions of dollars. In Mexico, in the last 7 to 10 years, over 30,000 people have been killed in specific cartel violence. When the cartel looks at someone taking a pill and dying, that’s just part of doing business. They’re also willing to go out and directly kill 15 to 20 people a day in order to maintain their business model. Mr. Jekielek: You said that 7 out of 10 are dying, but some have become acclimatized to the drug already and maybe can take the two milligrams. Please explain again how all this works. Mr. Brown: There are a couple of things that affect that. When you look at 200 people a day dying across the country, those are the 200 people that got those seven pills that have two milligrams of fentanyl in it. When you look at the pill distribution itself, the cartels are cutting the pills with mannitol, xylazine, benzodiazepine, and other substances which break down the toxicity of the pill. A lot of individuals are surviving. They’re not dying, but they’re falling into a deeper web of addiction until they get that one bad pill. People are also using Narcan now. People are overdosing, going into cardiac arrest, and their friends are Narcan-ing them back, so they’re not dying. If Narcan was not on the scene right now, you would see 10 out of 10 people dying. People understand that fentanyl can kill you, and people don’t use it alone anymore. All these factors are coming into play which are extending the life of individuals who would actually be dead if they didn’t have this outside assistance. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about this harm reduction model and how it plays into this whole dynamic. Mr. Brown: When you talk about harm reduction, that’s a big field. Harm reduction means policies and procedures that reduce the harm caused by narcotic use. One of the big examples is the needle exchange program, which was done 20 years ago in order to reduce the spread of bloodborne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis. But in the process, it provided clean needles, which allowed individuals to sustain their drug use. It reduced one harm, but increased another harm, which is long-term drug use. What we’re seeing now is what I call progressive harm reduction policies. I'll give you an example. In Colorado in 2020, they initiated Bill 110, which decriminalized the personal use of narcotics, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and originally fentanyl, but then they took that back. It basically legitimized drug use. In the last three years, it’s been a complete disaster. They’ve had to call back that bill because they saw increased fentanyl usage, increased overdose fatalities, and increased drug distribution in their city. That harm reduction program was unsuccessful, but even then, Oregon is trying to enact a harm reduction program that mimics Colorado’s. New York has a harm reduction program where you can actually go into safe site injection locations and use dangerous narcotics. If you overdose, there’s a staff member there ready to bring you back, and they consider that a success. Of course, we want to save lives. But are we saving lives in order to let them die at another time, or should we be more aggressive in getting people to abstain from drug use through policy and treatment programs? Mr. Jekielek: People that are in these open-air, drug market scenarios have low life expectancy, because it’s just a matter of time before someone overdoses or gets hurt by other people that are there. Everybody that has made it out said they needed an intervention where someone said, “If you don’t stop this, you’re going to die. I’m going to help you, but you have to stop.” Something like that happened, and hence they credit that for them being alive, not these so-called harm reduction policies. Mr. Brown: I have a podcast called, “The Opioid Matrix,” and I recently had on a guest who was addicted to narcotics and until she went to jail, and that became the defining moment in her life. She said, “If I hadn’t gone to jail I would be dead right now, because I was going to commit suicide using narcotics. I went in to steal some stuff, buy drugs, and commit suicide. But I got arrested and went to jail. In jail, I was born again.” She became a Christian and now she’s out of prison. She has been clean for a number of years, and she’s running a drug rehabilitation program. She said to me, “Mike, our secrets can kill us,” meaning she had this whole life of trauma that she never talked about. She didn’t have anyone to talk to. Because of that trauma, she got into drug addiction and almost lost her life. But for a lot of the individuals that I talk to who have come out of severe drug addiction, it came to a moment of self-realization when they said, “This is not what I want for my life.” Of course, we understand a lot of people don’t have that self-determination, and we have to be there to support them. But we cannot support them by saying, “We accept your dangerous drug use. We’re going to enable your dangerous drug use, and if you stay alive and come through it, then maybe you'll get clean.” Mr. Jekielek: The 12-step program is an effective program, but a pillar of that program is that you never touch the stuff. Mr. Brown: That is the staple of the 12-step program. You have to stop drinking completely. I’ve never heard of an Alcoholics Anonymous program where they say, “It’s okay, come on into the bar. We‘ll give you a drink, and then we’ll drive you home.” That’s not going to work. If you talk to any alcoholic, they will tell you if they take that drink, they’re going to fall back into that web of addiction. Why do we treat those who are addicted to narcotics any differently than we treat those who are addicted to alcohol? Mr. Jekielek: Please outline the fentanyl supply chain for us, all the way from the precursors to these fake prescription pills. Mr. Brown: Let’s imagine you are a precursor chemical broker in Mexico and you work for the Sinaloa Cartel. You can get on your phone app, go through your contact list, and reach out to one of several chemical brokers in China and say, “Look, I need four pounds of some precursors for fentanyl.” They will then go to a chemical supplier, purchase those chemicals, and then send them to you air cargo or express parcel with an international courier. You get a tracking number and you can track your package. If your package doesn’t arrive, they will send you another package. Let’s imagine the broker then coordinates some fentanyl precursors to be sent from a company in China to the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. That package will come to an individual’s house and they'll take that to the cartel. The cartel will then take those precursors to one of the clandestine laboratories where it will then be produced into fentanyl powder or pressed into pills. Mr. Jekielek: Are the precursors legal to import or not? Mr. Brown: That’s where we get into very complex conversation because a lot of the essential precursors are restricted even in Mexico. The cartels have hired chemists and created secondary routes where they can use what are called dual-purpose chemicals. For example, there’s a precursor chemical that’s used to make an anti-Parkinson’s medicine. That same precursor is an intermediate that can be used to make the precursors required to make fentanyl. The cartels have been able to sidestep the restricted chemicals and then go to unrestricted chemicals in order to make the precursors necessary to make fentanyl. I saw this with methamphetamine when I was working in Myanmar, my last overseas post. The cartels in Myanmar had figured out a way to make ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, and other essential precursors from non-regulated precursors. For example, xylazine is a Schedule II controlled substance that is used as a veterinarian sedative. How do you regulate something which is already regulated, but then someone decides to use it for an illegal purpose? You can go into any hardware store, pick up a substance that’s legal, and if you know how to use it for an illegal process, then you can use it. Now, we’re into a very complicated process of managing things that really can’t be regulated. Mr. Jekielek: Okay, so they’ve gotten their chemicals somehow. Let’s continue with how the supply chain works. Mr. Brown: Once we produce the fentanyl in a laboratory, we'll then take it to a special shop housing vehicles that have hidden traps. A trap is simply a hidden compartment that’s built into the vehicle where fentanyl can be hidden and smuggled across the border. With a lot of CBP [U.S. Customs & Border Protection] seizures, they are searching vehicles and finding millions of pills hidden in wheel wells, dashboards, and engine blocks. Those cars are generally going to the United States where they are then taken apart and the drugs are taken out. We know that 95 percent, if not more, of the fentanyl pills being smuggled into the country are in vehicles and commercial cargo. We also see backpackers coming across the border as part of the gotaways bringing them in. But most of the pills are coming directly through the border crossings because it’s bulk shipment. In order to make money, the cartels have to move millions of pills at one time, distribute them, and have those profits come back to Mexico. Mr. Jekielek: What are the ways that people consume fentanyl in the first place? What should people be careful of here? Mr. Brown: If you’re a cartel, you’re looking at what prescription drugs people are using the most. Are they using Percocet? Are they using Xanax? Are they using Adderall? They identify the top 10 prescription drugs being used in the United States by teenagers all the way to those on cancer medication. Then they say, “Okay, let’s press out fentanyl pills that look like these top 10 pills and distribute them into the market.” Let’s say you’re a substance abuser and you’re using fentanyl. You can smoke it, you can inject it, and you can mix it with other narcotics. For example, the cartels mixed it in with heroin. Most people use heroin by injecting it. You can also smoke it, but the injection gets it into your system the fastest. But crack cocaine gets it into your brain much faster by smoking it than by injecting it. The type of drug you are using determines the ingestion methodology. Mr. Jekielek: Are these pills with two milligrams of fentanyl also ingested in all these different ways? Most people don’t know how all of this works. Mr. Brown: A deadly dose of fentanyl is two milligrams or more. In a regular-sized pill, it will be combined with mannitol and maybe a binding agent. Then they will put in that two milligrams of fentanyl, mix it up, and press it into a pill. Mr. Jekielek: And you’re popping that. Mr. Brown: With somebody who thinks it’s an Adderall, they’re taking a pill with two milligrams of fentanyl that will most likely kill them within 30 seconds. Mr. Jekielek: How do they find these pills? How are the pills getting into the normal drug supply chain, or are these just on the street? Mr. Brown: There is already an illicit prescription drug supply chain. There are dealers out there selling legitimate Oxycontin, legitimate Adderall, and legitimate Xanax. The supply chain is already there and the method of distribution is already there. Now, they’re just simply putting in new substances into that existing supply chain which are then being distributed. If you’re going to buy a non-prescribed Percocet from your local dealer, he may not even know he’s selling you a Percocet that contains fentanyl. The dealers in Mexico mixing it are not necessarily telling their customer base or redistributors, “Hey, these pills contain fentanyl.” We also have the domestic drug trafficking groups who are buying fentanyl from the cartels and then mixing in some of these substances and making their own pills for distribution. Mr. Jekielek: The new paradigm is putting fentanyl into these fake pills. The more traditional way is adulterating other drugs with fentanyl. You could also sell it straight up. Mr. Brown: Just pure fentanyl. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Are there other paradigms here, or these are the main two? Mr. Brown: Those are the main three. You have your long-term substance user, you have your prescription drug user, and then you have your occasional recreational drug user. A number of individuals who use cocaine recreationally have died because it contained fentanyl. One of the more notable cases was some years ago when the West Point graduates at a spring break party in Miami bought some cocaine containing fentanyl. They were all hospitalized, but managed to survive. The cartels now see a larger market. They see those individuals who use cocaine recreationally, maybe a businessman or a housewife takes a hit of cocaine once or twice a month, maybe even once a year, but now it could have fentanyl in it. The cartels look at that much larger market and say, “Maybe we can replicate with cocaine what we did with heroin.” It’s not to that point yet, but we are certainly seeing an experimental level of drug alteration with fentanyl going into cocaine and marijuana. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about your background, and how you’ve come to know so much about fentanyl and the whole landscape of the drug industry. Mr. Brown: I started with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 1989, and retired approximately two years ago. I went to the U.S. Army Ranger School for about three to four years to qualify for a South American Addiction Program. Then I spent about 20 to 25 years working overseas in drug production countries, primarily the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I spent my last two years at DEA headquarters working as part of the transnational task force on organized crime targeting precursor chemicals and larger drug trafficking organizations. Now I’m the director of Counter-Narcotics Technology for Rigaku Analytical Devices. It’s a company that produces a device that uses Raman spectroscopy and a laser to identify unknown substances. For example, if a police officer was to stop a vehicle and they had a number of plastic baggies containing an unknown powder, by using that device, they could quickly identify that substance with a presumptive analysis. Mr. Jekielek: Fentanyl has changed the equation around how you can even identify it, because you could be dead just by touching it. Mr. Brown: Absolutely. For law enforcement, every drug situation now is a hazmat situation. If you do find a baggie or a package with an unknown substance, you don’t want to open it up, because it could be fentanyl or another substance that could prove harmful to the officer. Using this advanced Raman technology, you can scan that package and identify it without having to open it up. Mr. Jekielek: You did this work on precursors, and we know that communist China is the source of a lot of the fentanyl precursors. Please tell us about that. Mr. Brown: To understand this, we need to go back 20 to 30 years. We were following the precursors from China to Colombia and Peru for the production of cocaine and heroin. Mexico now is the predominant cartel on the block. You have your top five to six cartels in Mexico producing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and now fentanyl. Some of those drugs are semi-synthetics. But fentanyl and methamphetamine are synthetics, which means they require precursor chemicals in order to produce them. Mr. Jekielek: Our view here at the Epoch Times is that communist China has been engaged in asymmetrical warfare techniques against the United States for decades, and drug warfare is one of them. Some people have described it as a reverse opium war. How does the communist regime work with the cartels to get the fentanyl into America? Mr. Brown: There’s no direct evidence that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is directly working with the cartels, but certainly we know that the PRC is aware of the cartel’s relationship with Chinese chemical producers and Chinese brokers. We have a DEA office in Beijing that works closely with the PRC. It’s more a concept of willful blindness. They are understanding the situation and simply allowing it to happen, saying, “We’re doing what we can, but really the drug problem is a U.S. problem. It’s an addiction problem. It’s a demand problem. The United States needs to deal with their own problem before they blame China.” That has generally been the party line that I’ve heard over the years from China concerning the precursor chemical supply chain. Mr. Jekielek: Given what we have seen over the past few decades, I am deeply skeptical that the communist regime is going to be helping America in this respect. Mr. Brown: In 2019 and 2020, the U.S. worked very closely with China in getting fentanyl and its analogs regulated in order to stop those chemical companies from shipping it to the United States. That was a success, but then China simply continued to work with the Mexican cartels. The Chinese companies in China said, “We‘ll just ship it to the cartels and then they’ll do whatever they want with it.” That was the transition that no one saw coming. China said, “We did our part. We stopped it from coming to the United States, but our relationship with Mexico has nothing to do with the United States. What Mexico does with those chemicals is their own responsibility. You cannot hold us responsible for that.” That was the PRC’s way of saying, “It’s not our problem. We are simply selling legitimate chemicals to a legitimate country. Go talk to Mexico. It’s their problem.” Mr. Jekielek: Recently, the DEA has actually taken a number of Chinese nationals to task around fentanyl enforcement. I’m sure you’re familiar with the case, but can you give me a sense of what happened? Mr. Brown: Yes. The DEA, working with a task force, did an undercover operation targeting eight Chinese companies and 13 Chinese individuals who were involved in an undercover operation to send fentanyl and/or its precursors to the United States. That case was so successful that they got an indictment on the 13 individuals, and they indicted the eight companies. In my opinion, the true metric of China assisting the United States is if they will initiate their own investigation based on the indictments that DEA has provided them. Believe me, if the DEA got an indictment, I guarantee you that case is 100 percent solid, and those individuals in China are responsible for what the indictment says they did. Mr. Jekielek: We talked about the cartel business model of transitioning people who are addicted to a lower-strength opiate to something that is higher strength. Have there been ways in the past which you’ve been involved with that have successfully tackled this issue? We seem to be unable to deal with it today. Mr. Brown: I have spent 20 to 25 years working overseas in several different countries and conducted numerous bilateral investigations which resulted in very successful operations, arrest of targets, and seizure of narcotics. But the success of those operations depended 100 percent on the bilateral relationship we have with those countries. For example, the DEA has two offices in Colombia, and we worked very well with the Colombian national government, the military, and their counter-drug units. It was so successful that we were able to take down the Medellin Cartel run by Pablo Escobar and later the Cali Cartel. That relationship was critical in taking those cartels down, so we’ve been here before. Again, when we talk about fentanyl, we’re talking about Mexican cartel fentanyl, not medical use fentanyl, because sometimes there’s a confusion there. Degrading the ability of the cartels to acquire the precursor chemicals to make the fentanyl and ship it across the border will require a very strong bilateral relationship with the Mexican government and with the Chinese government. The fentanyl problem has now surpassed the ability of U.S. law enforcement to effectively degrade it at its center of gravity, Mexico, or degrade it in China, where the chemicals originate. Mr. Jekielek: You don’t think we can tackle this unless we have a good relationship with either the Chinese regime or Mexico? Mr. Brown: We need both because one is the source of the chemicals, and the other is the source of drug production and shipment into the United States. We really need a trilateral relationship, with each country working together with the United States. Mr. Jekielek: What do we do if we can’t achieve that? That’s a tall order. Mr. Brown: We continue to do what we’re doing. We have investigations, we make drug seizures, and we have harm reduction policies. But we cannot only focus on addiction and treatment. We must first focus on the amount of narcotics coming into this country at record levels. We are basically drowning right now in narcotic addiction. Mr. Jekielek: We have this extreme border situation, which allows for the movement of drugs across the border. With fentanyl, such small amounts are incredibly potent and you can easily evade detection with the de minimis customs rule. Can’t we tackle those types of things? Wouldn’t tackling the border and tackling the de minimis rule have an impact? Mr. Brown: When we talk about cartel-critical capabilities and vulnerabilities, there are five. The first is the ability to procure precursor chemicals from China. The second is the ability to ship those chemicals to Mexico via maritime, air cargo, or express parcel. The third critical capability is the ability to produce the precursors into a refined product. The fourth is the ability to smuggle it across the border. The fifth is the ability to get the money from distribution back to Mexico. Unless you can degrade two of those critical capabilities, you’re not going to be able to break that supply chain. Right now, in the current system that we have, the most critical vulnerability that we have access to is the open border checkpoints. That is where we need to concentrate our efforts in order to stop the cross-border smuggling, because we know that 95 percent of all narcotics coming across the border from Mexico into the United States are concealed in vehicles or in cargo. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s say that the first one is dealt with, what would be the second one? We are seeing record numbers of people coming through the border at the moment. That means border security is completely consumed with these people, not with the drug smuggling that is happening. Mr. Brown: There’s that old saying, “I can only do what is in my control.” As law enforcement, the first three of those critical capabilities in other countries are outside of my control. However, with drugs crossing the border, U.S. customs have control of that. We also have control of going after the money laundering aspect. Cartels are in business to make money. We’re talking about hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars being generated in the United States from narcotic sales, which Chinese money laundering organizations move through businesses to China and then into Mexico. My plan would be, to strengthen the border capability and two; initiate massive money laundering investigations of all Chinese proxies that are working in conjunction with the cartels in the United States. Mr. Jekielek: We have covered both the Chinese drug component and the Chinese money laundering component on the show before. Various different players are involved in these two very distinct areas. Please explain to us how this money laundering works. Mr. Brown: One of the most usable applications is what they call mirror transfers. Let’s say I’m the Sinaloa Cartel. I have $100,000 that I want to repatriate back to Mexican accounts. I'll take that $100,000 and give it to my Chinese counterpart. He will then take that money and break it down and give it to Chinese businesses in the United States, like laundromats, restaurants, and other industries. Those companies will then put that money into their Chinese accounts in Beijing or China. They will then wire that money back to the accounts in Mexico. The cartels go into the bank, take it out, and it’s completely clean. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars being laundered through a remittance or mirror process through Chinese-based companies in the United States to accounts in China, and then from Chinese accounts back to Mexico. If you were able to shut down that money train and deter Chinese money launderers or anyone involved in money laundering that assists the cartels, they would back away because they’re risking their businesses, they’re risking their livelihood, and they need to make a profit. Take that away and that will discourage a lot of Chinese money launderers or money launderers in general from assisting the cartels. In that way we can isolate the cartels, because if their money’s stacked up in the United States, it’s very difficult to smuggle bulk cash back into Mexico now. Mr. Jekielek: One of the policy solutions that has been posited has its own set of problems, which is to designate these cartels as terrorist organizations. There’s a strong case to be made for that, which allows for certain types of military activity against those cartels. How do you view that? Mr. Brown: Again, we’ve been here before. As far as treating cartels as narcoterrorist organizations, we’ve done that before, I mentioned Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. Mr. Jekielek: But it requires a bilateral relationship. Mr. Brown: It’s key that you have a bilateral relationship. Without having had the cooperation of the Colombian government, Pablo Escobar would possibly still be active today. Mr. Jekielek: Recently, the Mexican defense secretary was indicted here for aiding the cartels. He was eventually released, but not much happened subsequently. Mr. Brown: Right. You’re talking about General Cienfuegos. The DEA initiated an investigation on him and identified that he was assisting some of the cartels in smuggling narcotics across the border. They got an indictment and then did a lure operation to get him from Mexico to the United States. They arrested him in Los Angeles, and they were going to prosecute him for assisting and aiding cartel activity. Of course, the Mexican government demanded his immediate release and said that the investigation was a sham, and that if he wasn’t released, there would be serious diplomatic consequences affecting the DEA country office in Mexico City and possibly U.S. embassy operations in general. Of course, this current administration released Cienfuegos, and he went back to Mexico. The Mexican president said, “We'll do our own investigation.” Later, he stated that the DEA investigation was fraudulent, and that the general had done nothing wrong. That was the end of their investigation. Obviously, General Cienfuegos was operating at the highest levels of the Mexican government, and he was involved in working with cartels. Is that an indictment against the Mexican government? I don’t know, but certainly, he was in a position of extreme authority when he was caught and the DEA provided the evidence. The Mexican government simply chose to ignore that evidence. Some months ago, the president of Mexico said, “There are no precursor chemicals in Mexico. There is no fentanyl production in Mexico.” He blamed the United States, saying that parents aren’t raising their kids properly, and that’s why kids are dying from drug addiction. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve talked a lot about fentanyl. I get the sense that drug dealers are trying to progress people to fentanyl because it’s so addictive. Basically, people are on it until the end. Please give us a picture of illicit drug use in America. Mr. Brown: There are a variety of substance users. Some like heroin, some like crack cocaine, some like cocaine, some like methamphetamine, and some just like marijuana, LSD, and psilocybin. Drug use culture is very diverse, and cartels and drug dealers know that. Imagine going into a market with all the various items that you can select. Drug dealers will tend to push the substance that is selling the best. If you go back to the ‘80s and ’90s when crack cocaine hit the market, crack cocaine was a phenomenal sales success because it addicted people quickly. When the addiction wore off, they wanted to buy more. If a drug dealer can sell you a substance that’s going to get you high fast, then come down fast, you’re going to come right back for what they call the re-up. They will make more money the faster you come down. With fentanyl, the intoxication or the addiction is very quick, and it can last for maybe 30 minutes to an hour. If you put xylazine in it, the drug trafficker can stretch that high out to maybe two or three hours or more. Then when the individual comes down, there’s no recovery time. That individual is coming right back for the re-up, and that’s going to make the drug dealer more money. They don’t want to sell you something that’s going to keep you high for five or six hours, then you’re going to go home and come back two weeks later. They are not going to make any money that way. Mexican cartel fentanyl revolutionized the drug game because it got people addicted quickly. It’s very potent, and when you come down, you just want it more. Then we get into the physical effects on the body. When you talk about heroin, when you talk about cocaine, and when you talk about methamphetamine, they are all very addictive, but not as strong as fentanyl. Fentanyl is one of the strongest narcotics out there until you go to carfentanyl, which is 10 times more powerful than fentanyl. That would be the next level. In terms of the drug market, Mexican cartels realize they are selling more fentanyl now than heroin. They’re actually cutting back on the production of heroin and replacing it with fentanyl production for a number of economic reasons. It’s just a better drug to sell. It’s cheaper to make, you can produce more of it, and more people will use it. Again, going back to the cartel business model, the distribution and production of fentanyl is a huge success for them. Mr. Jekielek: That is still astonishing, given the amount of death it causes. Fentanyl is primarily responsible for the increase in drug-related deaths. Nonetheless, people still keep going back to it. Mr. Brown: That’s the addiction factor. People used to joke sarcastically that with heroin addiction it would take you 20 years to die. With fentanyl, it only takes that first time, and in 30 seconds you could be dead. But again, from the perspective of the cartels, they just look at drug users as profit. They represent dollar signs. There’s no humanity involved in drug trafficking. You’re talking about individuals who are some of the most dangerous and least sympathetic people in the world—drug traffickers. That’s when we get back to the term narcoterrorism. Is what’s happening really an aspect of terrorism? Entire communities are being destroyed through the distribution of narcotics. Then we have the gang-level violence like in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where we’re seeing entire communities of young men killed over drug trafficking. Then we can talk about the families of individuals who are using narcotics, the devastation that that causes these families and the community. Not only is the drug user suffering, but the entire community is suffering. Mr. Jekielek: How does addiction work? Is it as simple as a physical dependency, or is there more to it? I’ve heard various explanations. What is your view? Mr. Brown: When I worked in Detroit for a number of years, I was on a crack task force, and I talked to a lot of individuals who were using crack cocaine. The way they explained it is the first time they tried crack cocaine was the last time they tried anything else. They said crack cocaine was so powerful that the dopamine basically rewired the brain system. It’s all about what causes the body to produce dopamine, which are your pleasure receptors. Crack cocaine basically rewired those dopamine receptors to produce more dopamine very, very rapidly, which creates the addiction. The body then becomes adjusted to this new stimulant and says, “Wow, that was really good. I want that.” Then the user basically loses control and he has to feed that addiction. That’s why crack cocaine distribution was so successful for almost 20 years. Even now, we’re seeing a resurgence of crack usage in cities like New York, Chicago, and out on the West Coast. We’re repeating the mistakes of the past, we’re falling back into the same web of addiction that we’ve been trying to get out of for at least as long as I’ve been on the job—32 years. We seem to be losing that battle though, especially with fentanyl. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve spoken with a number of people who view addiction more like a social disease. The people who are prone to becoming addicted are people who don’t have very good social connections. They don’t have ways to get out of it if they get pulled in through one of these fake drugs. Portugal has decriminalized a lot of drugs and has programs that foster community for those people that are vulnerable. This is often described as a success story. How do you view this? Mr. Brown: First, you have to look at the difference between Portugal and the United States. The United States is a diverse country with many ethnic groups. A lot of groups are here, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Portugal is primarily a homogeneous culture. When we look at the diversity in America, African-American communities and Hispanic communities have a much higher drug addiction rate, arrest rate, and also a low economic status. There’s a number of factors in poor communities in the United States that lead to drug addiction. Portugal does not have these same issues. They do not have pockets of African-American and Hispanics and other minority groups who are at the lower end of the social spectrum. That’s one distinct difference. The second difference is that in Portugal you don’t have the same gang and drug culture. It’s completely different. You don’t see organized crime groups killing and causing a lot of violence in Portugal. It’s a different mentality. The third issue is that Portugal has said, “If you get caught using narcotics, you don’t go to jail. But if you don’t go to rehab, you can lose your driver’s license, your passport, and your ability to work.” Most people say, “Okay, I‘ll go to rehab, but I’ll continue to use narcotics.” But what that hasn’t done is reduce the amount of cocaine being distributed in Portugal. Europe has seen dramatic increases in the distribution of cocaine because of these liberal policies. If you’re the Sinaloa Cartel, you’re sitting back and loving decriminalization, because it’s not stopping the amount of cocaine coming into your country. It may be managing addiction, but it’s not ending addiction. If you look at the rates of people who actually have gone through detox and stopped using cocaine, you will actually find that a lot of people are now just long-term drug users. Mr. Jekielek: I’m very concerned that these drugs can be made out of precursors that might be legitimate through a multi-stage process. It almost feels like it’s impossible to disrupt that supply chain. Do you see any way through that? Mr. Brown: We had an opportunity many years ago to go after the supply chain. Earlier I mentioned there were precursor chemicals coming from China to Colombia to produce cocaine. One of the primary precursors is acidic anhydride, often referred to as AA. It has to be shipped maritime in containers because it comes in 55-gallon drums. Hundreds of metric tons of acidic anhydride have been shipped from China to Colombia for the last 40 years to produce cocaine. U.S. law enforcement or international law enforcement never really focused on disrupting that supply chain. They always focused on the tail end, going after the heads of the cartels, and going after the transportation networks in the United States. They never focused on the center of gravity, which are the chemicals. That was allowed to metastasize to what it is now. With the invention of the internet and online chemical formulas, many individuals have taken it upon themselves now to simply teach themselves how to make their own narcotics. For example, in the 1990s, we saw bath salts. You went into a smoke shop and it would say “Potpourri, not for human use,” but everybody knew you could go in there and you could smoke it or you could inject it, and you would get a high. It would take the DEA about 12 to 18 months to regulate that particular substance. But the traffickers knew that within 18 months they could create a new bath salt just by changing the molecule structure. Just one molecule changed, and it’s a new substance. Now, with artificial intelligence [AI] coming in, if I’m a chemist, I can go in with a good AI program and I make a restructured fentanyl formula that is completely legal. It will take law enforcement 18 months to regulate that. By that time, I have another six formulas ready to go. We can now see how the internet has revolutionized drug trafficking. It has made it much more difficult to investigate and to degrade. Mr. Jekielek: This whole picture is a very grim one. Mr. Brown: Sure. Again, I'll reflect back on my experience in Detroit. When crack cocaine came out, every street crew and every gang wanted to sell crack cocaine. It was the fastest way to make the most money. Detroit is a small city and the drug trafficking was condensed in certain areas. In those areas, you could have five or six different groups all struggling to increase their territory for distribution sales, so we saw an increase in violence. When I was working there, they had homicides rates that exceeded 400 homicides a year, if not higher. It was one of the highest death rates in the country related to drug trafficking or gang activity. Even in Mexico, you can see the fight between the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas or the Templars, because they’re all fighting for control of the plazas. The plazas are the territory between Mexico and the United States. Whoever controls those entry points controls the kingdom. I call it the Game of Thrones between cartels. The cartels have been fighting and killing each other for the last three decades. In the last 15 to 20 years, more than 30 or 40,000 people have been killed as a result of cartel violence, and that has spilled over into America. We’re now seeing MS-13 killing people around the country, and you have your Crips, Bloods, and Latin Kings. You also have other groups who are fighting each other for expansion of territory to increase drug distribution, which makes more money. Mr. Jekielek: This is a very grim picture. As an ordinary person living a normal life, how do you avoid getting sucked into this whole world? Mr. Brown: That’s a complicated question. You have to learn how to manage your stress. Today, when I was looking on the internet, I saw there’s a new drug out that helps people manage their weight without exercising. Everyone says, “It’s all the rage.” I thought, “This is America’s problem.” We take a pill for everything. We have forgotten the basics of self-management; managing our stress, managing our outcomes, and relying on our own abilities to deal with those issues. Granted, some people may not have the mental capacity or the economic ability to do that. I understand that, but we are so quick as a culture to turn towards medicating ourselves out of our problems. Then we get addicted to prescription drugs, which creates a window for the cartels to move in with their fake prescription drugs. Now, we have this 100,000 overdose rate creating 100,000 deaths a year. As parents, we have to talk to our kids. The individual I had on my talk show, “The Opioid Matrix,” said, “You’ve got to talk to your kids. You have to get them to open up so you can see where they’re at.” A lot of parents are saying, “Hey, I’m doing that, but I still missed this.” Unfortunately, that’s going to happen. But as parents and as family we have to be more involved in the day-to-day lives of our circle so that we can see those signs, get in quickly, and try to help people. In harm reduction programs they say, “We want to meet you where you’re at,” which I totally agree with. Mr. Jekielek: As you said, we need to seek out a non-medical intervention as an alternative, and not necessarily seek out a medication solution for everything. Mr. Brown: Yes. In the stats that I saw recently, 25 million Americans were on some type of prescription drug. When I look back to the time of my father and my grandfather, there were no prescription drugs, it was just hard work. You study, you work hard, and you succeed. That was the message that was passed down to me by my father. Certainly, they had stress. There were difficult situations, but as you said, it was all non-medical alternatives. Medicine has not evolved to this point where you can go to your doctor and get a prescription for pretty much anything that ails you. That can lead to addiction, and you can become dependent on that prescription drug. For example, Valium is overly prescribed, and also ketamine to some extent. Matthew Perry passed away recently, and his autopsy indicated that he had some ketamine in his system, which was very unfortunate. There are a lot of prescription drugs out there that people are addicted to. Again, that creates a window of opportunity for the drug traffickers to slip something in. Mr. Jekielek: A final thought as we finish up? Mr. Brown: America has to realize the opioid crisis, or what I call the fentanyl crisis, is not going to resolve itself. It’s going to take a serious bilateral effort with China and Mexico to at least degrade two or three of those critical capabilities I mentioned earlier. If China and Mexico are unwilling to cooperate, then the question for the administration is, “Do we simply tolerate another 100,000 overdose deaths by the end of the year, or do we look at the cartels as narcoterrorist organizations such as we did with Medellin Cartel or the FARC in Colombia, and take more aggressive action?” That is the decision the administration and the American people have to make. Mr. Jekielek: Michael Brown, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Brown: Thank you for the opportunity. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Michael Brown and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

Dr. Robert Lufkin was once a self-described “product of the medical establishment,” with a fruitful career as a professor of medicine. He’s published hundreds of scientific papers, and has received millions of dollars in government funding. But when, out of the blue, he was diagnosed with four seemingly unrelated chronic diseases—and told that he was going to have to be on medication for life—he started looking elsewhere for answers. “It was through lifestyle changes that I was able to reverse these very serious and potentially fatal diseases, and get off all medications for them,” Dr. Lufkin says. Today, Dr. Lufkin educates people far and wide on how to take charge of their metabolic health, and is in the process of building new healthcare institutions, including a managed care organization and an undergraduate medical school. He is the author of, “Lies I Taught in Medical School: And the Truths That Can Save Your Life.” Watch the video: “The growth in these diseases is unprecedented in our history, and they’re frankly not sustainable. Half the adult population is hypertensive, the growth rate in type 2 diabetes is going to approach 50 percent of the population soon. When that happens, all these chronic diseases are going to explode. And it doesn’t have to be that way, because this disease is reversible with, in most cases, lifestyle,” says Dr. Lufkin. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Robert Lufkin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Robert Lufkin: Jan, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m a fan of your program and it’s so much fun to be here. Mr. Jekielek: You are a distinguished medical professional. I'd like to let our audience know what you’ve done. Please tell us about yourself. Dr. Lufkin: I’m a product of the medical establishment. In other words, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, although I acknowledge there are conspiracies out there, and there are perverse financial incentives and other incentives in our industry. But basically, I’m a product of mainstream medicine. I’ve spent my entire career at two large medical schools with the academic rank of full professor. I have published hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers. My laboratory has received millions of dollars from the federal government and NIH, as well as from drug companies and equipment manufacturers. I am really speaking from the inside of the medical school academic establishment. Mr. Jekielek: But you had an experience that changed you? Dr. Lufkin: Yes, just a little about my background. I was raised by my parents. My mom was a registered dietician so she specialized in nutrition. Growing up we followed the food pyramid. We religiously avoided saturated fat, and we ate low fat foods. We avoided butter because of the saturated fat, and we substituted margarine that had trans fats and industrial seed oils. We ate a lot of grains and junk foods, which we thought were healthy at the time. Then fast-forward, I went to medical school and eventually entered a career in academics where I essentially spent my whole career. Everything went along fine until about 10 years ago. Out of the blue, I was diagnosed with four chronic diseases that completely took me by surprise. I went to specialists to educate myself about these diseases and find out how to treat them. They basically prescribed prescription medicines for each one. They told me the diseases were more or less unrelated and the prescription medicines would be necessary to not only treat the symptoms but also to control the underlying disease. Although they did recommend lifestyle changes, they also said, “Sure, it’s worth improving your lifestyle, but the reality is you’re going to be on these drugs for the rest of your life. Lifestyle really doesn’t work for these things.” That was a wake-up call for me. It got my attention very quickly and I began talking to other experts. I began doing research and understanding about these diseases, and I eventually began to question the things that I had been taught. I looked closely at some of the breakthroughs in our understanding that have been made in the last few years. It changed the way I thought about these diseases. I realized that a lot of what I had been teaching, and sadly, what many of my colleagues are still teaching about these diseases and metabolic health in general was incorrect. When I implemented a program myself with lifestyle changes, I changed some things very radically, like diet, sleep, exercise and stress reduction. When I went back to my doctors, they couldn’t believe it. They thought the labs were broken. They wanted me to retest the labs. Long story short, what happened was all my labs returned as normal. The diseases were essentially reversed and I was off all prescription medicines, and that’s where I’ve been ever since then. Mr. Jekielek: What were the diseases? Dr. Lufkin: One was an arthritis, a type of arthritis called gout, which is due to urate crystal deposition. There was hypertension, and I was in good company because half of adult Americans have hypertension. The third one was pre-Type 2 diabetes, because my blood sugars were abnormally high. The fourth one was dyslipidemia, which was an abnormality of blood fats. If you think about it, arthritis and hypertension are not really related. Blood fats and arthritis also don’t have an association. But I came to understand that these diseases are all fundamentally driven by the same basic mechanisms. Unfortunately, there aren’t prescription medicines for these mechanisms. What works for reversing these diseases is lifestyle changes. The good news is that lifestyle is in our control. We get to make choices every single day when we wake up; what we’re going to eat, how we’re going to exercise, and how we’re going to live our lives. It’s really empowering that we can take back control of our health with our lifestyle. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying that you changed your diet and some of your habits and that’s it. Then you went back and they said, “These labs can’t be right.” Dr. Lufkin: That’s correct. I was following the standard, recommended American diet, with that food pyramid, and I basically turned it upside down. I began doing things like intermittent fasting and fairly aggressive dietary changes and I’ve never felt better. I don’t consider it a diet now, I just consider it the way I live. Being in ketosis, my brain is clearer than it has ever been. I don’t want to eat carbohydrates anymore in the middle of the day or snack all the time. But to answer your question, yes, it was through lifestyle changes that I was able to reverse these very serious and potentially fatal diseases and get off all medications. I’m not recommending that people stop their medications without their doctor’s approval, because that could be dangerous. I am not saying to just stop everything and try lifestyle. I’m saying begin lifestyle. You‘ll find that when you go see your doctor, they’ll tell you you don’t need the medicines anymore if you have the same success that I had. Mr. Jekielek: We’re here with Dr. Paul Marik at this FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance] conference. He started treating Covid in a way that was unorthodox and much more effective. He similarly had this realization that a lot of what he had been taught wasn’t entirely correct, and then embarked on a journey looking at diabetes. He has this whole cancer monograph of hundreds of peer reviewed research papers showing off-label drugs and vitamins that have profound impact on reducing the incidence of cancer. A lot of research has been done well and we just don’t know about it. Dr. Lufkin: Yes, there is a tremendous amount of research being done and 7,000 papers are written every day. Mr. Jekielek: On these lifestyle changes, people have researched them. It’s not just someone just saying, “Oh, I’m going to try this. Dr. Lufkin: Yes. There are peer reviewed prospective controlled studies for diabetes where people can reverse type two diabetes with dietary interventions to the point that they go off insulin and all drugs. The results are out there. But the medical system is a large institution and there are a lot of institutional drivers and factors. You can go to a hospital and say, “I have a program for diabetes. I can take 90 percent of your Type 2 diabetics off their diabetes meds and return them to a normal blood glucose level. I want to offer you this program.” However, diabetes is the number one cause of surgical amputations and it drives a lot of surgical business. Today, Type 2 diabetes is the number one cause of renal failure, renal transplants, and dialysis. That’s a huge business. Type 2 diabetes is a leading cause of blindness. Type 2 diabetes is a major driver for cardiovascular disease, stroke, and heart attack, which statistically is the number one killer that determines most of our longevity. Alzheimer’s disease is now strongly linked to glucose metabolism, which is what diabetes is, to the point where some authors are referring to Alzheimer’s disease as Type 3 diabetes. Diabetics have a much higher rate of cancer as well. All these diseases are linked, and coming up with a program to reverse diabetes is going to change everything in healthcare. Mr. Jekielek: What you’re talking about is unfathomable, because you’re suggesting that the health system wants to keep people sick. Dr. Lufkin: There are things built into the health system. I don’t think any human being wants to hurt another human being or wants them to be unhealthy. Perhaps subconsciously we tell ourselves things that make us do things. But I believe that the people are basically good and they want to do good things. But looking at the other side of the argument, there are biases built into our institution. In other words, say I’m a doctor in a clinic and I have a diabetic patient. I get to spend seven minutes with them. It’s much easier to prescribe metformin and insulin and take a couple lab tests than it is to do an entire program about a low carbohydrate diet and switch over their whole eating structure. It’s been known that carbohydrates drive Type 2 diabetes for a long time, it’s not a secret. But getting people to avoid junk foods and avoid the carbohydrates that drive Type 2 diabetes is a big ask. Right now in our healthcare system, it’s not enough for the doctor to just say, “Stop eating carbohydrates and you won’t need this insulin.” Sometimes the patient says, “I'd rather have a pill or even a shot than change my whole diet and give up all my junk food and change my way of living.” There are many different factors. There’s a lot of pushback from individuals. Junk food itself is addictive and junk food is mainly carbohydrates. It’s high in seed oils. All these things drive insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. I confess I’m a recovering junk food addict and I know how hard it is to give that stuff up. It’s not enough for the doctor to just tell me, “Don’t eat junk food.” I know enough not to eat junk food, but there are subconscious drivers that we all have that drive our addictions, and it’s not easy to get over them. Patients come to me for their diabetes and I tell them, “Just cut out carbohydrates.” They'll go to another doctor. They will say they want a pill and want something that works like that. But this diabetes effect, this insulin resistance, and this metabolic abnormality that was driving all four of the diseases that I had, it turns out that it drives not only those diseases, but also all the chronic diseases that essentially determine our longevity. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease are all driven by that. If we improve our metabolic health, not only do we lower our risk of getting these chronic diseases, we actually improve our longevity and change many of the phenotypes or appearances of aging. It’s not just being healthier, but it’s actually that we will live a lot longer. It’s dramatic how these things are all tied together. Mr. Jekielek: You said the food pyramid is actually inverted. I believe I saw a South Park episode about this. Dr. Lufkin: Yes, it’s on my Twitter feed, or Instagram as well. Speaker 1: Sir, we’ve got a match. Speaker 2: Nutrition is stabilizing. Speaker 1: We’ve got a well-balanced vaccine, sir. Mr. Jekielek: Okay, so how is that? Please explain that. Dr. Lufkin: That’s a great question. One of the prime drivers of the metabolic disease state that we’re all in, and the epidemic of these chronic diseases that we’re facing in the 2020s had its origin back in the 1960s and ‘70s when United States public health got into making policy for nutritional decisions. Basically, it was around the mistaken idea that dietary cholesterol and dietary saturated fat drives heart disease, and heart disease was and is the number one killer. The United States created a food pyramid plan which emphasized a low fat diet and a high carbohydrate diet, which is basically a junk food diet. It is a pyramid with carbohydrates and sugars at the bottom and things like fats at the top of the pyramid where you eat less of them. This pyramid then became public health policy and all the schools use this for kids. Mr. Jekielek: I remember being taught something like that. It was the same structure as you described, especially concerning saturated fat which was the enemy. Dr. Lufkin: Exactly, cholesterol and eggs too. Today, even the conservative, orthodox cardiologists will admit that dietary cholesterol doesn’t really affect serum cholesterol. Those egg white omelets at the restaurants you see, you don’t need to eat those anymore. In my opinion, one of the healthiest things we can eat is an egg. But these dietary changes starting in the ‘60s and ’70s have now swept through society to where we’re consuming large amounts of junk food, which means a large amount of carbohydrates and refined carbohydrate sugars, and a large amount of seed oils, which are industrial oils. They have the benign sounding name of vegetable oils but there’s no vegetables in them. They were originally developed as a lubricant for German U-boats in World War I with Crisco oil. But they’re unhealthy, and in my opinion, they drive insulin resistance and drive inflammation. We are now seeped in these things. On top of that, with this fast food revolution, it’s not just what we’re eating that’s bad, but we’re eating all the time. When I was growing up, we used to eat three meals a day. Then basically it became, “No, eat six small meals a day.” My kids at school have snacks scheduled into their day. People are eating all the time. Eating itself drives inflammation which is our normal response to food being in our gut. Anytime you eat something, the body normally gets a little inflamed just as a protection from that foreign protein, that foreign material coming into the body. If you don’t want to change what you’re eating, you can still improve your health just by not eating all the time. In other words, narrow your eating window. Cut out between-meal snacks, maybe even skip breakfast, and maybe even skip lunch. I eat one meal a day and I’ve never felt better. I don’t get brain fog in the middle of the day and I’m in ketosis nearly all the time. For me, it’s a healthy way to be and I love it. Mr. Jekielek: I started a keto diet years ago. I go on and off it as a weight loss thing. It actually works well when you’re in that state of ketosis. The fat is being burned instead of the carbohydrates. Dr. Lufkin: If you think about ketosis, human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years primarily as hunter-gatherers. If you’re a hunter-gatherer, you eat when you have a kill, and then you may fast for a week, at which point you’re in ketosis. Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Yuval Harari, who wrote Sapiens, both famously agree that the worst possible thing that human beings have done was the development of agriculture 12,000 years ago. You can see why, because agriculture made food available nearly constantly. That was accelerated, of course, with refrigeration and junk foods. But as food became more and more available, people did not go into ketosis, because there wasn’t this period of fasting between the hunt and the kill. As I researched it more, the amazing thing about ketosis is that it doesn’t just help diabetes, but it also helps cancer. It’s a cancer treatment or an adjunct to chemotherapy for patients. For many Alzheimer’s disease patients, ketosis helps bring back their memory. One could argue that ketosis was the natural healthy state of human beings throughout history until literally the last 12,000 years. Some of the most amazing things about ketosis is its effect on neurodegenerative diseases like Guillain-Barre syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, and certainly seizures. Fasting, which drives ketosis, is an accepted treatment for seizures. There is a whole body of work about how junk food drives violence in kids. These are correlation studies, not controlled prospective studies, so causality can’t be inferred. But there are certainly some correlations with people eating junk food and becoming more angry, becoming more depressed, and becoming more anxious. Some of the possibilities out there now are really exciting. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the agrarian revolution being the worst thing that happened to humanity, but arguably, it created civilization. Then it wasn’t all bad, but you’re saying in terms of the body. Dr. Lufkin: Yes, in terms of the body. Certainly, when I heard that, I thought, “This can’t be true. Civilization allowed people to have philosopher classes and working classes, different classes of people with spare time to have food served.” But interestingly, there is now evidence that there were some relatively advanced civilizations much earlier than we thought, like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and another similar site in Egypt as well. Before the agricultural revolution, it may not be that we were all hunter-gatherers, living in caves. But you’re right, it is a balance. There were benefits from agriculture. Mr. Jekielek: It doesn’t have to be one or the other. We have been conditioned to believe that a pill or some medical intervention is going to solve our problem. We’ve given away our responsibility for our health to the doctors. That also translates into the use of all sorts of medications, many of which interact with each other in negative ways. I’ve heard statistics about how many medications some people take. These all have side effects. The more you take, the more likely one of those side effects will come up. Some are hidden and will come up later. We’re now a highly medicalized society. Dr. Lufkin: That’s a great point. Part of it is that if I go to a doctor, I'd much rather get a pill than get a lecture about exercising more and changing my diet. I used to believe that lifestyle didn’t really matter, and what really worked was a pill. Furthermore, I used to believe, and many people still believe, that taking the pill will actually not just treat the symptoms of the disease, but it will actually control the disease and make them healthier. That’s really not true in many, if not most cases. For example, in Type 2 diabetes, giving the patient insulin and metformin to control the blood sugar spikes doesn’t really control the long-term effects of the disease. You still continue to progress with your diabetes. You get your foot amputated, you get your renal failure, you get your blindness, you get your heart attack, and you get your Alzheimer’s. People aren’t aware that in many cases, these pills don’t really solve the problem. They just treat the symptoms. The interesting thing is there’s no pill for metabolic disease. There’s no pill that you can take that will reverse these things. Metabolic disease is driven by lifestyle and lifestyle is really the secret to curing it. Mr. Jekielek: The corollary is that you have to be responsible. No one will do it for you, especially these 3-letter agencies that avoid responsibility at any cost. It’s a theme in our society that people want some external factor to fix things. Dr. Lufkin: Exactly. I love this about your show which questions the narratives and asks the big questions about science and other things in our society. To your point, we need to take responsibility. A lot of medicine over the 20th century developed a very paternalistic attitude. You let the doctor take care of everything. They’re going to take care of everything and you turn over all responsibility to the doctor. The problem with that is, as we’ve seen, the doctor doesn’t control your lifestyle. You control your lifestyle. We all control our lifestyle, so we need to learn that we’re in charge of our health, not the doctor. Mr. Jekielek: If I recall correctly, half of what professors in medical school teach their students is wrong. That’s very disturbing news. Dr. Lufkin: One of the greatest physicians of all time, Sir William Osler, famously made one of the greatest comments about medical education when he addressed a group of medical students on the day of their graduation. At the time, most medical students were male. He said, “Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we’ve just taught you is wrong. The problem is we don’t know which half.” People who understand medical education or even science itself will know that science is a process. It’s all about questioning the existing narrative and throwing out the stuff that’s incorrect and learning the new stuff. Sir William Osler pointed it out beautifully, and that’s the theme for my book. I have the clickbait title of Lies I Taught in Medical School. It goes through that half of the things I taught were wrong. Hopefully, it can help people avoid the mistakes that I made and which nearly cost me my health and my life. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us how you are trying to change things. Dr. Lufkin: After I was able to reverse my own health conditions I wanted to get the message out to people, and I had written many textbooks as part of my academic career. Mr. Jekielek: To be clear, the message is that lifestyle will transform your health. Dr. Lufkin: That’s right. We are in charge of our health. The medicines that we are prescribed for the chronic diseases that are trying to kill us really don’t treat the underlying disease. If you want to get to the root cause, you need to change your lifestyle and change your metabolism and your metabolic health. That is the message of the book. I began to look at new ways I could get the message out. I had never been on Twitter and I wasn’t a big Facebook person, but I embraced social media. I began using Twitter and I just passed a hundred thousand followers. I have 250,000 total on social media so far, and I began reaching out to them. We were publishing this book. A couple of weeks ago I was in Costa Rica filming a TV series on longevity and health and wellness and metabolism. It just got picked up by PBS and the Discovery Channel and will be airing in about six months to a year. I realized that it’s not enough just to educate people and get the message out. We need to change things in the healthcare system. On the next step of my journey, together with other physicians in Los Angeles, we’ve purchased and put together a managed care organization in Southern California. It has over 100,00 patients, 200 physicians, 200 primary care physicians, and 600 specialists. Mr. Jekielek: To be clear, is this an existing provider? Dr. Lufkin: Yes, we are acquiring it. It’s important to note that these patients are underserved. In other words, they are Medicare and Medicaid, which means they’re socioeconomically disadvantaged. That means generally they have poor health and poor access to healthcare. It is our mission to change that. We’re going to bring in the latest cutting edge technology, some of the things in my book, some of the things we’ve talked about, and some of these ideas of lifestyle to these people. There is an advantage to having a managed care organization like this instead of an insurance company that makes money by denying claims. With managed care, we make money by making the patients healthier. We can spend the resources of the organization on anything that works. It can be red light therapy, it can be massage, it can be meditation, it can be movie theater tickets, or whatever incentivizes the patients to actually be healthier. That’s what we are doing. On top of that, we’ve built an innovation lab where young companies can come in and we will incubate their healthcare technology. We try it on some of the patients who want to try it out. If it works, we amplify it across the network and help them get started. We’re setting up a venture studio fund so that these companies can be funded. We just realized that it’s a great thing to do. It’s great to show healthcare change. That’s a big step. But we wanted to go one last step, and that was the education process. We’ve set up a new graduate medical education program for family medicine, psychiatry, and transitional medicine at a hospital in southern California. This summer, we’re starting a radiology program to teach some of these newer ideas of medicine. We’re even considering starting a new undergraduate program, which would be a new medical school as well. Mr. Jekielek: That’s absolutely great. But this is what I keep coming up against, there’s also so much that’s not working right. Dr. Lufkin: Yes. The knowledge is out there and it’s just a matter of getting it into the people’s hands. I used to think that I just needed to tell my friend who’s a diabetic not to put sugar in his coffee and he will be fine. He’s an intelligent person. I explained about glucose. He gets it and he knows. But what happens the next time I see him having coffee—he’s putting sugar in it. It’s the addiction thing. It’s not enough just to tell people sometimes. They may need to be enrolled in a coaching program with an addiction component. We’re starting to use a low dose Naltrexone, which is an addiction medicine that works for other types of substance abuse. We’re applying it for patients with junk food addictions and carbohydrate addictions. Mr. Jekielek: The drug Ozempic is big in the media these days and a lot of people take it. Apparently, there are problems with it. How do you understand that drug? Dr. Lufkin: It’s a great drug in that it helps people with weight loss, but the problem is you have to be on the drug long term. When people get off the drug, they frequently rebound. Also, the drug is fairly expensive. This is basically taking a pill when lifestyle would do it. For some of these people, they’re not able to get into a program and learn lifestyle changes that can make a difference. With things like ketosis people say, “How do you have the willpower to only have one meal a day?” The answer is, “I don’t. I’m a junk food addict.” But once we get into this metabolic state of ketosis, the appetite goes away. Then I’m not hungry and it’s easy. Can you eat just one potato chip? Of course not, you have to eat the whole bag. Potato chips are junk food and they’re full of carbohydrates. They drive insulin and they drive our hunger. Can you eat just one hard-boiled egg or one slice of cheese? Of course you can, because it doesn’t contain the macronutrients that drive insulin and drive your appetite. By eating healthy foods and avoiding junk foods, our appetite naturally goes away or is maintained in control. This is for many people, but not all people. Some people need surgery and need Ozempic and these other drugs. But it’s possible to do it without these things if the right programs are in place. Mr. Jekielek: With any of these drugs there’s always some side effects. You’re talking about using the body’s own systems to deal with the issue, which seems like a better idea. Dr. Lufkin: Even the longevity drugs like metformin or rapamycin, which turns down mTOR, people say, “Why don’t I just take rapamycin, increase my longevity, improve my metabolic health?” Fine, you can take rapamycin. I take rapamycin, but I also do it with lifestyle because there are things that can benefit from lifestyle that rapamycin probably doesn’t provide. We don’t understand the systems well enough to know how any of these drugs really work. But lifestyle is a proven thing that’s been developed over tens of thousands of years. Mr. Jekielek: As human beings are prone to accepting orthodoxies and once we accept them, it’s hard to change our minds. With this inverted food pyramid, it’s disturbing when you think about the impact it has had over generations. Now, we find it has been indoctrination in the wrong direction. I’ve talked to people about this and they say, “How could that be? I won’t accept that.” Dr. Lufkin: I’m saying it’s the opposite, but many, many intelligent people disagree with me. The National Nutrition Council that designs the food pyramid issues an updated version every few years. It continues the narrative that cereals and grains and carbohydrates should be a significant portion of our diet, with a smaller amount of protein, and then avoiding saturated fats. There is one reason the council comes up with these recommendations, and there was a fascinating paper that came out on this. There are a number of conflicts with the council concerning the major food manufacturers who basically benefit from manufacturing junk foods. They sell junk foods that the food council then recommends in the food pyramid. One problem is there’s not a lobbying force for lifestyle. Lifestyle is free. If I fast during the day, I actually save money because I don’t spend it on breakfast or lunch and I have more time. But there’s no lobbying group for that. We’re up against a number of financial influences that drive the system even in the face of knowledge. To the contrary, people are still getting the information. Our school lunch programs are still driven by this food pyramid and these food recommendations. The narrative today is such that if anyone handed a 12-year-old child a lit cigarette, everyone would be aghast and it just wouldn’t happen. But someone can hand a 12-year-old child a bowl of sugar cereal and pour chocolate milk on it, and nobody thinks anything of it. Actually, it’s very damaging to the child, even at that age. It drives the incidence of Type 2 diabetes in children which at one time we didn’t see at all. Changing the narrative is possible. I used to think drinking orange juice was healthy. Most people think orange juice is healthy. You see it on television and movies as a healthy breakfast, but in my opinion, it’s not. It’s basically sugar and it’s like eating a candy bar. We need to change that narrative so that people can instinctively realize what is healthy, and realize that lifestyle can have a dramatic effect. It’s a big challenge to do that. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, it feels like the challenge of our time. Dr. Lufkin: It does. The growth of the chronic diseases that we’ve been talking about are unprecedented in our history, and frankly, this is not sustainable. Half the adult population is hypertensive. The growth rate in Type two diabetes is going to approach 50 percent of the population soon. When that happens, all these chronic diseases are going to explode. It doesn’t have to be that way because this disease is reversible in most cases with lifestyle. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve become interested in brain chemistry and the hippocampus. We hear that 80 percent of common Covid vaccine injuries are actually neurological. Also, Alzheimer’s disease has skyrocketed. Dr. Lufkin: Absolutely. Mr. Jekielek: It’s a disease that was almost unheard of 100 years ago. Dr. Lufkin: Exactly. Alzheimer’s represents the ultimate failure of the medical research establishment. For decades there has been unlimited money available to come up with a treatment for Alzheimer’s. To this day, there’s no significant pharmaceutical treatment for Alzheimer’s that will have any significant effect on the progression of the disease. Researchers like Dale Bredesen and others have come up with innovative techniques where they look at Alzheimer’s not as a disease of amyloid beta, but actually as a disease of many different things. It may be vitamin D deficiency, or it may be a parasitic infection. It may be lead or mercury poisoning. There are many different factors, but one of the factors is glucose metabolism. It is known that you could diagnose Alzheimer’s disease with a PET/CT scan, which looks at brain glucose. Low metabolism of grain glucose indicates Alzheimer’s disease in certain patients. Ketosis is an alternate fuel source for the brain beyond glucose. When Alzheimer’s patients are put on a ketogenic diet and they go into ketosis, the brain is able to use ketones instead of glucose. Many of the patients are able to have significant improvements in their memory from these ketogenic diets. Heather Sandison, a protege of Dale Bredesen, runs a bunch of clinics. They are actually nursing homes for Alzheimer’s disease and they’re pretty much unique. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this. She has a program where the Alzheimer’s disease patient goes in, gets treated, gets better, and then goes home. Usually, Alzheimer’s is a one-way street. You go into a nursing home and you don’t come out. Mr. Jekielek: I would like to invite some of the folks you mentioned today onto the show to talk about this. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Dr. Lufkin: Every morning when I get up, I get to choose my lifestyle. I get to make choices about the food I eat, what I put in my mouth, and how much I exercise. It’s a choice we get to make every single day to take control of my health and longevity. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Robert Lufkin, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Lufkin: Thank you, Jan. It’s been great. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Robert Lufkin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

The Chinese communist party’s (CCP’s) monopoly over rare earth minerals could soon be broken. The CCP has been expanding government control over its rare earth industry, effectively bringing the entire sector under state control. Yet as the CCP has tried restricting the availability of the precious materials to other countries, they have become the new focus of a global trade war. We’ll discuss all this and more in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇 https://ept.ms/46SHcdf Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/