A new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot has been revealed through leaked documents and by whistleblowers. The CCP plan involves giving orders to activate segments of its overseas sleeper agents and also using its intel agencies to feed false information to news outlets and influencers. The goal of this new campaign is to “eliminate” the spiritual practice Falun Gong, which the CCP has been brutally persecuting for over 25 years. The target of this campaign is global, but with a particular focus on the United States. 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/3AyjtTe Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

“America used to be the shining city on the hill, and now it’s declining rather rapidly. I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people, and I said, ‘What do you think about America?’ And the answer I got was, ’We think you’ve lost your minds.' And that was very concerning to them, because if America goes, what happens to everybody else?” Dr. Ben Carson is a renowned neurosurgeon, former U.S. presidential candidate, and author of, most recently, “The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family.” Watch the video: “The family is where you derive your identity. And we’ve already had the example with the breakup of the black family, and you see the violence that has ensued. The murder rates in our inner cities are so high. People don’t respect other people’s lives. A lot of that has to do with the missing father, and now, that’s spread to the rest of our society as well,” says Dr. Carson. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Ben Carson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Ben Carson: It’s wonderful to be with you. I always enjoy being with people who are logical. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you. I just learned that when you were doing your surgery on the conjoined twins, it was a 31-hour surgery. How does a person even do that? Dr. Carson: It’s like being in the jungle with a hungry tiger. You’re not going to go to sleep and you’re not going to relax until you get out of it. The time actually goes by very quickly, because you are so intent on what you’re doing. I do remember the first set of conjoined twins. After the operation, I was sitting in my office talking to one of the other surgeons, and we both fell asleep in mid-sentence, and then woke up three hours later. We were so tired. Mr. Jekielek: You were literally running on adrenaline. Dr. Carson: No question about it, and you’re also praying for wisdom. You’re just hoping that you'll be able to figure things out as you go whenever you’re in uncharted territory, but you have a sense of what needs to be done. We have many more advantages now than they did in the olden days. The imaging has advanced enormously and now that we’re able to couple that imaging with things like AI and robotics. It’s going to greatly reduce the complications in complex surgery. Mr. Jekielek: Is this a much more common surgery today? Dr. Carson: It is still vanishingly rare, but the techniques have evolved and certainly make it less complex than it was before. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned prayer was an important part of what you did. I don’t think everybody would say that. Dr. Carson: Certainly not a lot of people in the scientific realm. Some of them denigrate prayer and the people who pray. When you look at the human brain, it is extremely complex in the way that it is put together. Even if you believe in natural selection, which says that the things that work stay, and the things that don’t work disappear, you would have to have so many millions of consecutive things that work, without any reversal. It’s just not practical to think that way. The way they solve that dilemma is by saying, “If you have enough time, billions and billions of years, at some point you will get the sequences that are necessary in order to create life.” But that’s like saying if you blow a tornado through a junkyard enough times over a long, long period of time, at the end of one of those tornadoes will be a 747 jet that’s ready to fly. I just don’t think that is possible. Mr. Jekielek: We will be talking about the importance of the family. The faith you are talking about is very important. Back in the day a lot of people believed that natural selection was the way evolution happened, but that is obviously not the whole story. There is a certain faith in this theory among some people who clearly didn’t understand how it worked. Dr. Carson: There have been a lot of struggles on this issue. There have been a lot of strong arguments in both directions. I was once engaged in a public argument about faith and God in the scientific arena, and there was a famous atheist on the other side. At the end, I said, “You win the debate, because you have convinced me that you came from a monkey and I came from God. Mr. Jekielek: That is very amusing. The proper evolutionary biologist would say, “No, Dr. Carson, it’s not a monkey. It’s our common ancestor.” Let’s go back to the topic of overcoming the cultural war on the American family. The premise is simple—if you grow up in a nuclear family, statistically, you are set up for success. Dr. Carson: No question about it. Both the conservative think tanks and the liberal think tanks both come to that conclusion. Children raised in that environment do better academically and career-wise. There is less incidence of teen pregnancy, alcoholism, and mental disorders. You’re firing on all cylinders. There’s really no controversy about that. The question is, what do we do with that information? Do we enact policies that promote traditional nuclear families? Do we try to denigrate them? It seems that Hollywood has taken the latter approach. You can’t look at any series these days and get very far into it before the alternative to the traditional family is presented, not only as acceptable, but as preferable. There is now a reluctance to form traditional relationships. People are not getting married or they’re getting married much later, and that’s having an impact on our population. The babies per woman now is down to 1.6. It requires 2.1 just to maintain the population. Some on the Left say that’s the reason that we should open our borders and let everybody in. But we need to have a more orderly process. Mr. Jekielek: To not be at 2.1 to keep the population at maintenance level feels almost nihilistic. It’s like we don’t believe in ourselves enough to reproduce the population. Dr. Carson: We don’t think into the future. We just think about now and say, “I want this now. This is what works for me now.” The double income, no kids couple is the new American dream. Sure, you have more money to lavish on yourselves, but what happens when you’re 85-years-old? Who is around that really cares about you? Those are all important questions that sometimes people think about when it’s already too late. Mr. Jekielek: We recently had an episode where we talked about Yuri Bezmanov’s interviews back in the 1980s. He was a KGB defector that explained the Soviet Union’s plan for the demoralization of America. It was about how to influence a society to not believe in itself. This lack of belief in ourselves as a society feels like a bipartisan thing. Dr. Carson: Those who want to fundamentally change us into a Marxist or communist country don’t care whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, they just want to manipulate you. As it says in my book, on January 10, 1963, Congressman Herlong of Florida read “Communism’s 45 Goals’' into the Congressional Record. That was over 60 years ago, and you can see all of these things happening in America today. Some of the goals were as follows; infiltrate the public school system and teacher unions to indoctrinate the children, infiltrate the news media and Hollywood so that you can manipulate the population, drive wedges between parents and children and denigrate the status of the family, and make sexual perversion normal, natural, and healthy. You can go right down the list and see that this is all happening today. America used to be the shiny city on the hill and now it’s declining rather rapidly. I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people and asked them, “What do you think about this?” They said, “We’re going to have to change the way we think about America. We think that you have lost your mind.” It was very concerning to them because if America goes, what happens to everybody else? Mr. Jekielek: This term comes from Ronald Reagan. We are still the shining city on the hill compared to many places in the world today. It’s Americans that make America what it is. Many came for the freedom and opportunity that still exists, relatively speaking. So many people are coming through the southern border because they’re looking for opportunity. Dr. Carson: No question about it. But if you’re stuck in the desert and a jalopy comes by that you can get on and get out of the desert, you'll take it. It doesn’t have to be a Rolls Royce. But if you can have the Rolls Royce, which we used to have, why not take it and why not cultivate that? There’s no question that we have deteriorated and that we’re going downhill, but we’re still a lot better than most other places. If you were born in this country you have already hit the lottery. That’s one of the reasons we should study those things that made us into a great nation. We should not be throwing those things away and thinking that we’re just always going to be a great nation. It doesn’t work that way. If you look at the cycle of prosperity and despair in nations historically, we’re near the end of that cycle. But we don’t want to be near the end of the cycle. Why can’t we learn from what people have done before? Why do we have to go down the same path? Our Founding Fathers studied every government that ever existed in the world. One thing that became clear to them is that all governments tend to move in the same direction. It doesn’t matter how lofty their goals are in the beginning. They also move toward growth, infiltration, and then domination. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, it means that that’s just what they do. A lion is not a bad animal because it kills gazelles and eats them. That’s what lions do. Our forefathers worked very hard to give us a system that would not lead to that end, but they knew it was going to be difficult. When Ben Franklin was asked if we have a monarchy or a republic, he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Right now, we’re as close to losing it as we have ever been. We have a department of justice that is blatant in their bias and the way they treat different groups of people. We have elections that are questioned by half of the society and we don’t make any attempt to make them transparent. Those are the seeds that can grow into discontent and cause very serious problems. Historically, that is when bad things happen to countries. Mr. Jekielek: You said that with governments, there is growth, infiltration, and then domination. I imagine bureaucracy would be a part of that. Can you explain how this works? Dr. Carson: In the way our country was designed, the government was there for some pretty specific things. It was for the protection of the people and to provide some basic necessities for a functional society, but it wasn’t to be involved in the day-to-day running of your life. That was supposed to be up to you. When Alexis de Tocqueville came to study our nation, he was very impressed with this environment that fostered innovation and entrepreneurship. That environment is severely affected in a negative way when you have the government butt into everything. A good example would be the government’s desire to have everybody drive electric vehicles, without having the infrastructure that is necessary, and without having figured out what to do with all of those dead batteries. What is that going to do to the environment? This is what you need to do. The thing that made us great in the industrial area is that we let market forces determine what was going to survive and what was going to thrive and what was going to be defeated. People are incentivized to do well monetarily. But they’re not going to work hard to establish those things if there’s no benefit to themselves and their family. Mr. Jekielek: You were quite the innovator in the field of neurosurgery. In the last few years we have seen a lot of changes in the medical schools. Dr. Carson: The DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] philosophy that has invaded some of the medical schools is of some concern. One of the medical schools in California who adopted DEI policies early on has a situation where a large number of their people are unable to pass the national medical board exams. Is that the person that you want to operate on you or your child? There is a certain body of knowledge that is absolutely critical to do the job appropriately. You don’t want an airline pilot who knows 90 percent of what needs to be done. That doesn’t work if you need to have complex surgery done. In the past, we have been a meritocracy. There’s no question that in the past certain segments of our society did not have exposure to the kind of education that would allow you to excel in certain areas. That has largely been corrected, although it’s not 100 percent. I was a first year medical student and did poorly on the first set of comprehensive exams. My counselor told me to drop out of medical school. He said, “You’re not cut out for medicine and you’re just going to hurt yourself and other people.” There was definitely no DEI then. I prayed for wisdom and asked myself, “What kind of courses have you always done well at?” I realized that I did really well in courses where I did a lot of reading. I struggled in courses where I had to listen to a lot of boring lectures, because I don’t get anything out of boring lectures. Some people get a lot out of them, but I got nothing out of them and was wasting six hours a day. I made the executive decision to spend that six hours a day reading. After that, the rest of medical school was a snap. Different people learn in different ways and some of the medical schools have discovered that. Many years later when I was back at my medical school as the commencement speaker, I was looking for my old counselor. I was going to tell him that he wasn’t cut out to be a counselor. Mr. Jekielek: People definitely have different learning styles. Dr. Carson: Some people are very visual in their learning and I am visual as well. I learned to take everything that I needed to know for a test and put it on a flashcard. I would carry these flashcards around in my pocket. During my second year in medical school I was living with my brother who was in the school of engineering and he even knew all the bacteria and what they were sensitive to, because I always had these cards in my pocket. Mr. Jekielek: You knew that this was something that you could do. Concerning this whole realm of demoralization, as a society, we don’t believe in ourselves enough. In your book, you write quite a lot about race. In American history, there was a viewpoint that black Americans were not cut out for certain things. Obviously, you prove that to be just the opposite. Dr. Carson: Yes. There was a time when people didn’t believe that a black person could be a nuclear physicist or an airplane pilot. Obviously, no one believes that anymore. There had to be a time when that door was busted down because it wasn’t going to be opened voluntarily. But that was decades ago and what needed to be proven has been proven. The only people who think that way now are Neanderthals, and there aren’t a whole lot of them left around, so that takes care of itself. Look at the progress that has been made just in my lifetime. I remember when I was six-years-old going down to Tennessee and there were all these white-only and colored-only signs. People were explaining what that meant and why you needed to pay attention. In that same lifetime, you have black generals and admirals and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and heads of foundations and university presidents. We’ve had a black president of the United States. To say that it’s the same and hasn’t changed is craziness. We have made enormous progress and continue to make progress to this very day. Mr. Jekielek: What can we do to believe in ourselves more? Dr. Carson: John Adams, our second president, famously said that our Constitution was designed for moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for the government of any other people. What we can do is get back to our roots. Our founding document, The Declaration of Independence, says that our rights come from our creator, not from government. We need to get back to the belief system that took us from a ragtag bunch of militiamen to the pinnacle of the world in record time. It was because of the things that we believed in. Our Judeo-Christian values taught us to love our neighbor and not to cancel our neighbor if they have a different yard sign. In prior times, if it was harvest time and one of your neighbors broke his leg, everybody else harvested his crops, no questions asked. They didn’t want to know what his religion was or what his political affiliation was. They said, “This is my neighbor and they need my help,” and that made America into a very strong nation. That’s what we need to get back to, instead of allowing ourselves to be manipulated on the basis of race, age, income, gender, religion, or place. We have allowed wedges to be driven in between us and it’s destroying our society. But here is the bigger picture that I talk about in the book. The United States of America stands in the way of worldwide Marxism. We can’t be overcome militarily. Therefore, they need to destroy us from within. That’s why all this effort is focused on the essential element of our foundation, the family. If you destroy that, you destroy the passing on of values. When you don’t have values passed on, you get what we’re seeing on some of these college campuses. They don’t know their own history which gives you your identity upon which your beliefs are based. If you don’t know those things, you’re like a leaf blowing in the wind. Whatever the social breeze is that’s coming along, you get caught up in it and have no idea what you’re talking about. These students have no idea that Hamas, who they’re advocating for, would sooner cut their head off than turn the light on. Mr. Jekielek: There is a multi-faceted assault on the family. I’ve been watching communist China for a very long time. With the Cultural Revolution they were probably the most effective group at eliminating cultural traditions. But they chose not to eliminate military strategy. But somehow, people still gravitate to the family unit very much in China. Dr. Carson: The family is where you derive your identity. We’ve already had the example of the breakup of the black family and you see the violence that has ensued. The murder rates in our inner cities are so high. People don’t respect other people’s lives. A lot of that has to do with the missing fathers. Now, that has spread to the rest of our society as well. Mr. Jekielek: Was the black family particularly susceptible or was it targeted? How did that happen? Dr. Carson: The black family did very well throughout slavery and the Jim Crow era. The family worked together at that point. Then along came Lyndon Johnson and the War on Poverty and policies that did not foster family development. If you were getting aid for living expenses and you got a raise, your rent went up. If you brought someone into the home who had another income, your rent went up. There were other things that pushed the man out of the family. The more babies you had out of wedlock, the more money you got. There were these crazy policies. Mr. Jekielek: Clearly, they weren’t designed to work like that. Dr. Carson: I don’t know and I wonder. Lyndon Johnson was caught on tape saying, “If we give these black people these things, we'll have their vote for the next 200 years.” It was all politically driven. It wasn’t because they were compassionate individuals. But the bottom line is that it caused dysfunctional families to develop where there had been very strong families before. You can see the result of that. Now, that same phenomenon has spread to the rest of our society. We’re seeing a very rapid disintegration of traditional nuclear families and a concomitant decline in our nation. Mr. Jekielek: It seems like people are becoming more interested in having large families again. Please tell us about this. Dr. Carson: I hope that is right, but I haven’t seen too much of it yet. But every time I encounter somebody who has more than two children, I congratulate them and thank them for what they’re doing for our society. It’s vitally important. The other things that are proliferating are the Christian-based schools, the private schools, and the home school groups. They are growing at a terrific rate. Since 2020, the number of homeschoolers has doubled and it’s still accelerating. And the private schools, particularly the faith-based private schools, have very long waiting lists of people trying to get in. Parents realize what is going on in our schools. They understand that what is being taught there is not reflective of traditional American values. The schools denigrate traditional American values. They say, “That’s elitist.” They put some kind of ism on it. People on the Left seize upon the bad and the ugly and just emphasize that in the curriculum. Then you get a whole generation of young people who don’t like our country, who think that we are the source of all evil, and who can easily be recruited to do things that are harmful to us. This is a problem. Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me your children to teach for four years and the seed that I sow will never be uprooted.” They understand how important it is to get to the children early on. That’s why at American Cornerstone Institute, we instituted the Little Patriots learning program, which is internet-based and completely free of charge. It teaches our K-5 children the values that established this country. We have to be there early on during their formative years. The Marxists understand this very well and they’ve taken tremendous advantage of it. We’re seeing the results of that over and over again. We’re seeing the results of what they’re doing in our schools. Covid was a great blessing to us in the sense that it opened our eyes to what is happening in our schools. We are responding and I don’t think it’s too late. Mr. Jekielek: One of the silver linings of the Covid era is that there are many people interested in these faith-based schools who aren’t particularly religious themselves. Dr. Carson: Yes, absolutely. I was talking to the headmaster of one of the schools just this week. He said that there are many people who don’t come from a Christian background, but they recognize the value of traditional education. Actually, these schools don’t spend all their time talking about the Bible. They teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Mr. Jekielek: They also teach how to think vs. what to think. Dr. Carson: Right. Mr. Jekielek: The current rhetoric about the religious schools is that you’re being indoctrinated there and you’re told what to think. Actually, they are teaching critical thinking and the ability to figure things out for yourself based on reason and logic. Dr. Carson: And then to ask the right questions. In 1958, Edward Lewis Schempp filed a lawsuit against one of the counties in Pennsylvania, because at the beginning of the school day, they required the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a Bible reading. The school district and even the state said that all a parent has to do is send a note asking that their child be exempted from that if they don’t want that to happen. But that wasn’t good enough for him, and it ended up in the Supreme Court in 1963. At that time they ruled that it was unconstitutional to have mandatory prayer or Bible reading in schools. It then continued to morph to today when there can be no support whatsoever for anything religious in the public setting. Think about how illogical that is in a country whose founding document says that our rights come from our Creator. The Pledge of Allegiance says that we are one nation under God. Our coins and dollars say, “In God we trust.” It makes no sense whatsoever. It was obviously never the intent of the Founders that we should completely separate God and religion from everything. Their intention was that the Church would not rule the State, and the State would not rule the Church. Mr. Jekielek: This was started by competing religious groups that wanted to make sure that no one religious group would become the dominant. Dr. Carson: That was happening in the Thirteen Colonies. You had people who said, “No Catholics here,” or “No Puritans here.” It was a mess. This 1958 lawsuit was done for the right purposes, but it morphed into something that was never the intent. Mr. Jekielek: But the bigger challenge is, how do you make a society work? Dr. Carson: You have to have the rule of law. If your diverse culture does not fit into the rule of law of the society, then it has to go. Because you can’t accommodate things that are at opposite ends of spectrums. Some of the Sharia laws, particularly the way that they treat women, are not compatible with our laws and our culture. We should not change our culture and laws in order to accommodate that. If that’s what you believe, then you should go somewhere where they believe that. Mr. Jekielek: It’s one thing if you believe in something, but it’s another thing if you’re demanding that others accept it. Those are two different things. Dr. Carson: You hit on one of the key things that is going on in our society today. That is, there are those who want to take what is abnormal and make everybody else conform to that as if it’s normal. I believe that God loves everybody. But I don’t believe that it was intended that men have sex with men, and that women have sex with women. For those who want to do that, they’re welcome to do it. But to say, “This is the norm, and everybody should conform to it,” does not make any sense. What they should be doing is making sure that the norm recognizes that there are things that are not consistent with the norm, and that we need to learn how to tolerate those things. That’s what you do. You don’t take everything and turn it upside down. Mr. Jekielek: This is a society that was designed to help people of different faiths function together, even though we might want our faith to be the norm. But in America you can’t impose your view on others. Dr. Carson: Yes, and you shouldn’t be able to. It is a fear, because in America we tend to be very reactionary. We don’t do long-term planning. We just react to what’s going on. I fear that there may be a severe reaction to this leftward tilt and that we may start trying to legislate morality. We just have to be very vigilant and make sure that we don’t go down that path. Mr. Jekielek: How do we deal with morality? You’ve been arguing that we need a shared morality. It’s not just Christianity that has those ideas. Dr. Carson: You can go to the darkest jungle of Borneo and look at a thief. What does he do? He waits until nighttime when nobody can see him, so he must know what’s wrong without having read the Ten Commandments or anything. There are certain things that we just inherently know are the wrong things to do and the right things to do. You have to have laws. You have to have a basic code of morality. When everybody becomes their own definition of morality, then you’ve got a problem. Mr. Jekielek: You’re concerned that we’re going to legislate morality. What do you mean by that? Dr. Carson: For instance, we may start saying that you’re required to attend church. Those kinds of things have happened historically. We just have to watch ourselves and make sure that we don’t do that. We need to allow people to make choices. The thing about a free society is you can live the way you want to live as long as that is not impinging upon someone else’s freedom to live the way they want to live. You don’t have the right to turn your stereo up at 2 a.m. and blast out the neighborhood. That’s just not right. You’ve got to have rules against things like that. But I don’t want to rule against what you can listen to. You can listen to anything you want in the privacy of your home. Mr. Jekielek: The crux of all this is figuring out where we affect each other as human beings. I’m imposing a little bit on you and you’re imposing a little bit on me, potentially. I could impose on you greatly, and then really infringe upon you. The system that the American founders created makes sense of all of this. Dr. Carson: But where do you initially learn to be reasonable about that? In your family. That’s where you learn that there are other people. There are other opinions. People have property and you learn how to respect it. All those things come through family. Mr. Jekielek: Also in large families, you can’t be too overly self-centered. Dr. Carson: Correct. Mr. Jekielek: Traditionally, people say that an only child is spoiled. That’s not universally true, but it probably does have a tendency to ring true in a lot of circumstances. Do we need to have these larger family units to learn to cope with people? Also, people from large families have much more of a natural inclination to be helpful. Dr. Carson: We can incentivize people to have children. They’ve been doing things in Australia that would incentivize family formation. Mr. Jekielek: Hungary has had mixed success with certain pro-family policies. We need to figure out why people in our current time would want a large family, because it’s so rare. Dr. Carson: If you talk to people who come from large families, they love it. They love their family structure, their siblings, and the interactions that they have, so there must be something really good about it. I’ve seldom met anybody from a large family who wasn’t delighted to have been from a large family. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, how can we work our way out of this? Dr. Carson: I hope it’s only a phase that we’re going through. I hope people will look back in the future and say they temporarily lost their minds and they forgot about the things that made them into a great nation and particularly about the fundamental things like family structure. We need to understand that there’s been a lot of technological things that have impinged upon family relationships. You have children who spend a lot more time with their iPhone or with their computer than they do with their family. Parents need to be aware of the impact that has. You have to be aware of your responsibilities as a parent today because children are impacted by so many more things than they used to be. A lot of people like to say nothing is really any different than it ever has been. It’s a lot different. The things that 10-year-olds know now will blow your mind. These are things that we weren’t exposed to until we were adults. In order to really reestablish a family, it has to be high on your priority list. You have to make a concerted effort, like having dinner together. If you’re going to have children looking at television, watch it with them and discuss what you just saw. That’s what I did with my kids when they were little. I didn’t say, “You can’t watch this and you can’t watch that.” I said, “Let’s watch it together and let’s talk about it.” Then they will have a good understanding of what is happening to the society that they live in and how to insulate themselves and how to be effective in a society like that. It has to be deliberate. It’s not natural like it once was in the old days when you and your family lived out on the farm in the plains of Nebraska. It’s very different now. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Ben Carson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on the show. Dr. Carson: It was wonderful to be here. I look forward to the next time. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Ben Carson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

Filmmaker Mikki Willis is the creator of the “Plandemic” documentary series. In this episode, we dive into KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov’s warnings to the West in 1984, and how he proved shockingly prescient. “We know how to navigate military war, but when it’s a psychological war, when it’s invisible, and it’s happening in such a way that even really wise, intelligent people can’t perceive, that’s the stuff that gets to even the most protected,” Mr. Willis says. We also discuss Mr. Willis’s upcoming release, “Plandemic: The Musical.” Watch the video: “Our creative genius, our music, and everything has been hijacked with these demeaning and demoralizing and divisive messages. And that’s our creativity. And we need to reclaim that and bring our truth and the light to shine into these dark moments,” Mr. Willis says. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Mikki Willis, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Mikki Willis: Thanks, Jan. It’s great to be here. Mr. Jekielek: I’m absolutely thrilled to have you. We’ve already talked about the Yuri Bezmenov interview back in 1984. He talked about subversion and active measures. You’ve put together this amazing short film that encapsulates the ideas he was desperately trying to share back in 1984. When we listen to him today, we’re thinking, “This is actually all happening right now.” Mr. Willis: That’s the scary part, really, and that’s why I keep drawing from historic warnings, like the work by G. Edward Griffin that I featured in my film, “The Great Awakening.” In the 60s, he was telling everyone that communism was not dead, that it was coming here, and that we need to be aware. Then in 1984, G. Edward Griffin interviewed Yuri Bezmenov. He was a KGB defector, a man who escaped once he realized truly what kind of psychological subversion that the Soviets were forcing upon other nations around the world. He made the trek to America and risked his life in really high fashion. If they knew where he was going and what he was doing, he would have been taken out immediately. It took bravery and courage for this man to come here to go on camera and warn America what was coming and that it was invisible. That’s the really terrifying part of all this. We know how to navigate military war, but when it’s a psychological war, when it’s invisible, and when it’s happening in such a way that even really wise, intelligent people can’t perceive it, that can conquer even the most protected nation. He came here to let us know what was taking place. He had only seen America being the land of the free and the home of the brave. He was shocked in the 80s because he got here and didn’t realize how far advanced the active measures had already reached in the United States. It was shocking to him. He took it upon himself to do interview after interview to warn America. He said, “Let me tell you from my perspective as a former KGB propagandist. This is what’s happening to the minds of your people and you need to be very careful. The time bomb is ticking and the danger is coming closer and closer.” But no one listened to him. One of the deadliest things that any nation has ever said is, “That can never happen here.” We’ve been saying that for too long. Unfortunately, now it is happening here. G. Edward Griffin: Our conversation is with Mr. Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. He escaped to the West in 1970 after becoming totally disgusted with the Soviet system, and he did this at great risk to his life. He certainly is one of the world’s outstanding experts on the subject of Soviet propaganda, disinformation, and active measures. When the Soviets use the phrase ideological subversion, what do they mean by that? Yuri Bezmenov: What ideological subversion or active measures or psychological warfare means is changing the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite an abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slowly. It’s divided into four basic stages. The first one is demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy and expose them to your ideology. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students. The next stage is destabilization in the most essential areas; the economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. You can see quite clearly that in such sensitive areas like defense and the economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the United States has been absolutely effective. I never would have believed 14 years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process would go that fast. The next stage is crisis. It may take only six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it happening in Central America now. After a crisis and a violent change of power structure and economy, you have the so-called period of normalization, which may last indefinitely. G. Edward Griffin: What can we do? What is your recommendation to the American people? Yuri Bezmenov: The immediate thing that comes to mind is that there must be a very strong national effort to educate people in the spirit of real patriotism. Number two; explain to them the real danger of socialist, communist, and welfare state government. If people fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, then nothing can ever help the United States. You can kiss your freedom goodbye. As I said, I am now in your boat. If we can sing together, we'll sing together beautifully, because there is no other place on this planet to defect to. Mr. Jekielek: He was seeing something that was actually happening back then. How did so many of us not grasp this for the longest time? Mr. Willis: It’s time for people to realize that we all play a part in this awakening. By design, we’ve been wired to wait for the superhero to sweep in and save us. That has never happened in history and it never will happen. But there is a real true individual calling, if you understand the work of Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey. The hero always discovered one thing on the journey, so much so that it’s become cliche through a lot of the iconic movies that have used the hero journey structure. It is that the hero within is the one you have been looking for. The reluctant hero goes out to find the hero, only to discover that the journey was building him or her up to the point that they could dissolve everything that wasn’t the hero. Then they could stand up and truly awaken to the fact they were the one they were looking for. That’s a very important message for people to understand right now. We are like the cells in the body of an organism. All of the cells bring life, and all of the cells matter. When the cells are fighting and when the cells are stagnant the organism is not healthy. It’s time for us to revive that call for life, that call to procreate, and that call to take back our creative talents and our creative genius. Everything has been hijacked with these demeaning and demoralizing and divisive messages. We need to reclaim our creativity and bring our truth and light to shine into these dark moments. That is what we’ve been building towards for generations. When I look at it from that perspective, I feel very fortunate to be alive in this moment and play some little role in this awakening. Mr. Jekielek: Concerning the demoralization aspect, there are many people that are deeply demoralized to the point where they’re looking outside for solutions. They are looking to people that can never provide them with the solutions. Mr. Willis: You’re touching on something that is a major concern for me. I have two kids, nine and twelve-years-old. When I look at the level of demoralization that’s taking place in America, I believe that a lot of the tyrannical policies, the ESG policies, and the woke agenda will be dissolved. There’s a lot of people waking up to a sense of patriotism that they otherwise would not have. They have learned to love their country through all this mess. We’re going to elevate our consciousness. This level of demoralization that is leading to mental illness is something that I can’t see us getting rid of for a generation or so. What is happening out there is mostly through a lot of the apps that are indoctrinating our children from such a young age. They are taught to believe that nature is so fallible that they could be in the wrong body, and that there is no intelligent force that could possibly help them heal that dysfunction. I look at that and wonder, “Where is the safe space for my children?” Where are they going to find that?” I have really strong, very clear-headed boys that my wife and I have brought into the world. They understand everything that is going on. They are very bulletproof to any of these ideologies. When they hear a kid at camp they‘ll come home and say, “You got to hear what these kids are saying, dad.” They know the difference between what’s real and natural and these new, fabricated ideologies. They know what’s good for them, I’ll put it that way. But it’s been difficult as a parent that wants to grant them freedom to participate in sports and baseball and the trampoline park. But always have that thought of mine in my mind of what are they going to encounter?” I have to warn them, because so many kids are watching porn at a very young age now, and they start to talk about it. My 12-year-old son has already had kids say, “Hey, I want to show you something.” Then my son says, “My dad warned me about this. I don’t want to see it.” I told him what it will do to his mind. I said, “Your curiosity will want to see it more than anything, because there’s a natural tendency in you to be curious about the gift of procreation. That’s what causes us to be attracted to the opposite sex. That drive to procreate is natural. But this form of sexuality is hyper-sexuality that is dark and demented. If you allow yourself to experience that in your formative years it will very likely negatively affect your relationships and the way you relate to women in the future. You should be very careful about the long-term effects of these curiosities.” Thankfully, so far, my boys have been really strong at resisting the stuff that they offered to look at. Mr. Jekielek: This is one of the really huge elephant-in-the-room issues that no one ever wants to talk about, maybe because so many people have been compromised by it. I’ve also tried to avoid it as well. Mr. Willis: Pornography. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. It’s available to you from the moment you can hold an electronic device. We have learned as we’re interviewing in the last few days that people have been experimenting with Google Gemini. This is one of the most powerful Google AI programs out there with a very comprehensive database of information. However, it misrepresents history and chooses images in very extreme ways. It will not portray white people positively, and in some cases it will refuse to portray them at all. We are talking here about ideological subversion and demoralization. Mr. Willis: This is where we’re at and it’s horrifying. It’s really horrifying to see the level of psychological subversion that humans are capable of, and then the AI can take it to the next level. When we start to limit the honest portrayal of humanity through technology, it’s a real issue. But it’s not shocking to me at all at this point. First of all, let’s back up and ask, “What is the overall agenda?” America has a Constitution in order to protect the individual from the tyranny of authoritarians. That is one of the main reasons America was established. There are other countries that are far more beautiful and tropical. But people are not escaping to America for its beauty. They’re escaping because of the constitutional protection for the individual rights we have been granted. They’re escaping because they recognize it in their third world countries that the family has been diminished. They don’t have the freedom of speech that we’re actually losing here in America day by day. They don’t have that basic human right of free expression, so they all want to come to America and be in the firewall for the globalist agenda. There’s a major agenda now by those who want total domination and control to create a world with one central power and one currency on a global level. They don’t want outliers, those countries that are playing a different game. That is what happened with Covid where certain nations and certain states didn’t play the game. We now have outliers that we can look at and these are the best case studies we will ever have. Why is 4 percent of the African population vaccinated and the people there are doing better healthwise? These nations or states that didn’t lock down or force social distancing, why are their economies doing better? Their health rates are better. What is happening there? For the powers that be to achieve their global Agenda, they can’t have these individual territories thinking for themselves. That is at the root of their agenda. America’s strength is not just military strength, but it’s also about the pride and spirit of America. Americans are very different from many people around the world, for better and for worse. How will they try to erode that firewall around America? You have to understand what that firewall is made of, and then what compounds will erode and take down that wall, which is the foundation of our nation. You have to ask yourself, “What is worth living and dying for?” I guarantee you that whatever your answers are, those things are under attack. Some people would say faith, family, freedom, or country—every single one of those things are under attack. With the majority of the European archetype of people, men are intrinsically the protectors and the warriors. Then white men are going to be on that list of things that must be dissolved. They can’t have that in their agenda. But I believe now more than ever their agenda is failing. Just in the last four years, everyone is aware of this agenda. That is the upside of the tragedy of Covid. It allowed many dark things to come to light. That’s why I named my latest film, “The Great Awakening.” I truly believe that we are in The Great Awakening at this moment. Mr. Jekielek: Can you remind us where you came from? You made these films focusing on Yuri Bezmenov and also the true threat of the Chinese Communist Party. Please tell us your story. Mr. Willis: I was born and raised in California. As a result of that, I had one political path to choose from, and that was the Left path, so I became a far-Left progressive. I went on the road with Bernie Sanders in 2016 to produce media for him. Mr. Jekielek: Why was that attractive to you? Why did you gravitate there? Mr. Willis: There is a backstory to that. I was raised by a single mom. She had four kids on her own and was part of the welfare system. Bernie’s rhetoric about helping and lifting up single mothers really reached me. I remember the first time I heard him speak, I said out loud, “Where was he when I was growing up?” We were very poor. My sister stole toilet paper from the gas station at the end of the month. We would run out of our funding. But despite that, I always felt that I had a great life because I had a truly loving mother. All my sisters and brothers were 14 to16 years older than me. My older brother was gay and contracted AIDS, so I watched him live with AIDS for eight years. Then Anthony Fauci came out and prescribed the medicine known as AZT. Now, my brother would have lived forever. He was doing well, but his doctors told him that this was the thing that would help him and actually make HIV go away. He started on the protocol and day by day got worse and worse. He looked like a skeleton of a man. It was really hard to witness that. My mother was concerned and would tell the doctors, “This is not working. He’s getting worse. I’m concerned about my son.” They said, “No, he’s just acclimating to the medicine. If you take him off it, he will die.” It’s so very similar to what’s happening right now in America with so many people that were coerced and forced into getting the vaccine and then it ended up damaging their loved ones. Right now, they’re dealing with the grief, the shame, and the guilt of that. My mom was a cancer survivor and would have lived a long life. But she had the guilt and the shame of knowing that she was part of the decision to keep my brother on that deadly protocol. She didn’t listen to my brother’s community that was saying the medicine was killing people, not the virus. It was the medicine. It was so much for her to handle that she allowed her cancer to come back and within 34 days after my brother’s death, my mom died. This was a huge wake-up for me. As a young man at age 23, I developed this distrust for Western medicine, as you might understand. I went on to pursue my career in Hollywood. I was in front of the camera for a few years, but I really fell out of love with that very fast. I didn’t like the attention. I was much more interested in watching what the crew was doing and how they were lighting the set. Then I went behind the camera. I built my own theater. I taught acting for several years, then directed stage and theater plays and really cut my teeth doing that. The first thing I ever did behind the camera was in the heyday of infomercials. I was asked to co-direct an infomercial for the Vitamix machine and it did really well. Suddenly, I’m directing infomercials of all things, which actually informs some of my work right now. You have to learn how to understand the audience that you’re speaking to, because they’re long-form commercials. You will know how well you’ve done by the sales of the product that you’re selling. It was a great education to understand the psychology of how to speak to the audience through the medium of video. But I stayed out of politics. I was totally allergic to anything that sounded like a conspiracy theory. Every time I would hear the word Illuminati or all this stuff that people would pass around Hollywood, I would just roll my eyes. I wanted nothing to do with anything that sounded like some crazy conspiracy theory. Then I’m on the road and Bernie comes out. I get inspired by his rhetoric and get really fired up. He’s passing through my hometown and I got a press pass. While I’m filming him, one of the celebrities that was traveling with him had been following me on social media, because I used to release a lot of father-son videos on Facebook and they became very popular. Rosario Dawson, the actress, had been sharing a lot of my videos. She saw me behind the camera and said, “Why don’t you go on tour with us? We’re doing a whole tour with Bernie all the way from California to Philadelphia. We'd love to have you.” I said, “Sure, let’s go.” I jumped on the road with them and traveled from California to Philadelphia. During that time I had my political awakening. I started seeing these young people on the tour wearing Che Guevara shirts, Mao Zedong hats, and communist sickle and hammer stickers on their laptops and their water bottles. I asked one kid, “Are you trying to be edgy? What is that on your laptop there?” He pulled me behind the curtain and said, “We’re all democratic socialists, but what we really want is communism.” I laughed and said, “You’re joking, right?” He said, “No, but I can tell by the way you’re reacting that you think it’s the old communism. No, it’s a different kind of communism. It’s one that’s never been attempted and it’s benevolent.” I drill in and ask, “How does it work? What is good about it? Why is it different? It basically led to the state owning and controlling everything.” He says, “We’re going to redistribute the wealth.” I reply, “OK, where does that money go? How does it get redistributed through the government? You’re giving the government more and more of your tax money, and more and more power. Do you understand this is not a new communism? This is what has always happened.” I knew enough about this to at least say that. But this was a shock for me. Long story short, I came off the Bernie tour broken hearted. It was my political awakening and I wanted nothing to do with politics ever again. That’s when I started to do my research and study what was really going on with this thing called democratic socialism. All roads trace back to China and influence from other Soviet Marxist ideologies that have already been attempted and have been atrocious around the world. I thought I had a moral obligation now that I helped elevate Bernie’s campaign and this message. Now, I needed to spend the rest of my life on the other side of this and be a better journalist and undo some of the damage that I had done. Mr. Jekielek: Along the way, Covid happens. How did you react to that? Mr. Willis: A year before Covid happened, I was introduced to Dr. Judy Mikovits. I was told that she had an Erin Brockovich-type story and we should turn it into a movie. I met with Judy and liked her immediately. I knew that she was an honest person. She might be wrong about data, but she was telling the truth from her perspective. I reviewed this conversation that I had with her and everything checked out. It was kind of shocking to me. But I was committed to a documentary that I was already making called, “The Narrative,” to expose Western media. I had also done a lot of research on that. I’ve done a lot of jobs in the mainstream media and I’ve been in boardrooms and know how it works. I was tired of it being so divisive and doing so much damage. As a father, I just thought that I had to expose Western media. I told Judy, “Unfortunately, I can’t make your film. I’m tied up for the next 18 months, but I'll pitch it around because I think it’s a movie that needs to be made.” Flash forward to a year later, and the pandemic is announced. As soon as I saw Anthony Fauci, I immediately called Judy because I remember from my talk with her that she worked with him. I said, “I want to get your take on this. What do you see?” Judy started to talk a mile-a-minute. I ended up inviting her to my studio and said, “Let’s do a little interview just like we’re doing now. I‘ll edit it together on my own and I’ll pay for it. I'll put it out on my Facebook and give it to you. Maybe you can use this to get your movie made,” because I always felt bad that I wasn’t able to make her movie. As I’m listening to the interview, I’m thinking to myself, “If this is true, the world needs to know about this. I took that footage and edited the interview. Then I asked her to give me all the contacts from everyone involved; attorneys, prosecutors, and everyone connected to her trial. I called every single one of them and they all said, “Everything she is telling you is true. She is one of the most honest ladies you will ever meet.” One attorney said, “I have no dog in this fight. I don’t represent her anymore and that was ten years ago. I’m going to let you know she’s the most honest client that I have ever represented. She’s a wonderful woman. Trust what she says.” I said, “Wow, okay.” Then I looked up the NIH, Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Bayh-Dole Act, and all these things that she mentioned, and everything checked out. I then realized this was important and I needed to raise some money and turn this into a short documentary. I needed to take this seriously, because there was a bombshell of information there. We did that and put it out to the world. To my absolute, utter shock, overnight it was getting millions of views. I actually thought the ticker counter was broken at Facebook. At the beginning, it was just people saying thank you. There were people crying and saying. You helped me realize that I’m not crazy. I knew something was going on.” It felt wonderful. Two days later after this thing went mega-viral and had hundreds of millions of views, the media stepped in and because all they could see online was that I was a Lefty, they couldn’t call me far-Right. They couldn’t put me in that category of neo-Nazi, so they just went hard attacking my character, my wife, and my family. It was so much so that my little town of Ojai, California, which is known for being one of the enlightened meccas of California, started a petition to make my family move. They were reporting us to Child Protective Services to take our children, all for trying to wake people up to the realities of what was really happening. That film goes on to become the most seen independent movie in history with probably somewhere around 1.5 billion views at this point. But it was because of the power of the people. I gave the file to the world and advised everyone to download it because they were going to shut my accounts down. I said, “Put it on your computer and share, share, share.” The world became our distribution model. I’m forever grateful to people for doing that. They have continued to do that with the entire series. Mr. Jekielek: That is an astonishing story. There have been multiple sequels now to the original film, “The Great Awakening.” You also have a musical coming out. Mr. Willis: That’s right. People think the musical is some kind of a joke or an online meme. No, we actually created, “Plandemic, the Musical,” which is marking the end of the pandemic. I said, “Let’s go out with a bang.” For me, it’s time to move on to other work. The musical is only 20 minutes long, but it’s an epic little movie that we’ve been working on for two years. It’s a call for people to stand up and to revive their creative genius and bring their unique gifts to this historic fight. It has actually exceeded my expectations. It’s a musical. It was risky, but it was fun. Three years ago, we were actually at Del Bigtree’s house, who is a very beloved freedom fighter out in the world. We were maybe induced by a glass or two of wine. My friend DPAK was there with an acoustic guitar, and he turned out being the musical director of, “Plandemic, the Musical.” We were making up songs and trying to lighten up. The world is in lockdown, and here we were, 50 people with no mask and drinking wine and enjoying Thanksgiving dinner. We’re singing parody songs and it is so fun and entertaining. I looked around the room and realized that we’re not poking fun at the pandemic because this is a very serious tragedy. It is the greatest crime against humanity ever and people have suffered and died. We’re not poking fun. It is a time to use the power of comedy and music and human genius, while they’re chipping away at everything worth living and dying for, while they’re making jokes a punishable crime, while they’re canceling everyone for daring to think for themselves. It’s time for us to counter that and go in the opposite direction. It is what happened during the Renaissance. That’s why you see that the costumes back then were so fabulous and beautiful. People were so oppressed by the Dark Ages that when they came out, they came out so fabulously. They said, “We are here, we have arrived. We are back and we’re not going to let this darkness smother us any longer.” When that colorful, beautiful, creative human spirit is unleashed again, we can reverse engineer that globalist agenda. What are we afraid of? Instead of running away from what we’re afraid of, we need to run into it. Everyone is trying to evade being canceled these days. I say to everyone, “Do everything in your power to get canceled.” Honestly, it’s difficult in the beginning. You have a lot of people that are posing as friends that suddenly turn on you, and it’s shocking. But the other side of getting canceled is that the truth shall set you free. It is the pathway to freedom. Now, I can just be me and say what I want to say. All the people in my life know what I stand for, and they stand there with me. When I was part of the far-Left, I realized that we are all bonded by agreement. We were not bonded because we love each other, because we relate to each other, or because we’re chemically attracted to each other. We’re bonded by ideological agreements. If I don’t check every single box within this cult, I’m out. You have to agree with everything and put every single check in every single box. It’s a very fragile way to be in relationship with people. That’s what we call collectivism. That’s what you have to do to survive within a collective based upon and bonded by agreement. You have to shut down your critical thinking ability and your individual thinking ability so that you are not constantly challenged by the statements and beliefs of your tribe. You have to just shut it down and say, “It’s safer not to think. It is safer not to listen to what they’re really saying. It is safer not to examine these ideologies that I’m marching for. I don’t even think about it. I just march. I just hold up the sign.” You can see this when you see the man on the street interviews of people out there marching and so absolutely passionate about their cause. Then somebody puts a microphone in their face and asks them a simple question. One might be about Trump being a racist. They are asked, “Can you give me one example of where he’s racist?” They say, “It’s obvious everywhere.” Then they are asked, “How about just one example?” They can’t give one. They bought into something so passionately that it leads them to go to a protest and chant something that has no real world evidence to support it. That’s the danger of collectivism which creates a hive mentality. That is the way that China has captured 1.4 billion highly intelligent Chinese people. How do you get them to submit to the model that they’re living under right now? It is called collectivism. Mr. Jekielek: I started out in China human rights before I came into The Epoch Times, one of the few outlets that is honest about the Chinese Communist Party, its role in China, its impact on the Chinese people, and their egregious crimes against humanity. You weren’t initially aware of this type of thing, but I came in while being aware of it. How did you come to gain awareness on these current issues? Mr. Willis: I have a big whiteboard behind my editing bay and each subject that I could identify as an issue I'll write it down on the board; border security, fentanyl, the indoctrination of our children with critical race theory, or whatever it might be. Certain names will keep showing up. If I look at the fentanyl crisis, one of the greatest killers of Americans right now, I want to find the source. Then I will learn that almost 100 percent of it is coming from China. Then I say, “That’s interesting. I need to look into this further. What is this Confucius Institute thing? What’s happening with that?” Then you start to just look in general. What are the things that you can’t criticize? What are the questions you can’t ask? If you want to know the truth and you want to know who’s actually ruling over you, just look at the people and things you can’t criticize and you can’t investigate. The more I looked into this, the more I kept seeing all these recurring names. I looked into the production of precious minerals, batteries, and everything needed to develop our cell phones. Being so dependent upon another nation in terms of trade is dangerous. Our college professors are passing on Marxist, socialist, and communist ideologies to their students these days. A lot of that has been imported from China. When you start to look at every area, you just can’t deny there’s something happening and it’s not good. It feels like we are being invaded. Perhaps these countries realize that we all have nuclear power now. Having two or more nuclear superpowers like America and China go to war would lead to the annihilation of all countries. Someone asked me why I thought China was such a threat. I want to be clear on this. I love the Chinese people, but I’m talking about the Chinese Communist Party. It’s the tortoise and the hare. We Americans have been wired for instant gratification. We are moving so fast in the U.S that when the little wheel comes up on our screen and spins for three seconds we get frustrated. We want everything right now. The Chinese mentality is preparing for the hundred-year march, very meticulously, and very methodically. You never will witness the grass growing in your yard. Only until you step away for a few weeks and come back do you realize that it has grown. That’s what makes them so dangerous. We are the hare and they are the tortoise, in that we’re running in circles and exhausting ourselves with all these ideologies and arguing over all these superficial trivial points. China is laughing, Iran is laughing, and Russia is laughing. They’re gradually encroaching on our territory. They are buying our land, our food supply, and our technologies. Their spies are everywhere with the intention to become the dominant superpower. What does that mean for the survival of America? I don’t know. But all this is taking place right now. There are already predictions that in just a few years China will be the economic superpower of the world. What does that mean? Is the dollar collapsing? What will that mean for our future? It’s time that we wake up and understand what is going on. For me, the answer is sovereignty. It’s the same way that we developed a technology called blockchain, which is a decentralized technology. We need to start looking at how to decentralize in such a way that we bring back that constitutional, individual power. We need to become self-reliant as an individual, as a city, as a county, and as a nation. We need to produce our own food and our own energy. We need to move in the opposite direction of globalism which is the centralization of everything. For me, that is the answer. Anyone who is running for office needs to be focused on bringing back our sovereignty. We need to be a sovereign nation that is dependent upon no other nation. We need to know that we have it all within our nation and we can take care of ourselves. Every individual county and state also has that sovereign ability to say that we are good, just like every family at the micro level. Every family needs to spend more time getting to know their children, because the children are being raised by iPads these days. Have dinner together at the table and speak to each other. Talk about how we protect ourselves. Come back into those traditional roles where the father can be the father again and the mother can be that beautiful, nurturing figure in the upbringing of our children. Come back to those things. Because those are the things that we’ve been lulled away from. We’ve been convinced they were wrong and outdated and the reason why America has done so much damage in the world. In the same way that we can’t be so myopic as to hate another nation’s people because of what their authoritarian tyrannical government has done. We need to start looking at each other as humans again and not these machines under the stranglehold of a force. That is all about division and dependency. We can come back to putting our hands in the soil and growing our own food again. We can come back to educating our children again. You mentioned the issue of porn. It’s one of the most demoralizing, dangerous tools being used to destroy both boys and girls now. It was a boy thing before, but it’s now reached little girls. Females have now surpassed men now in depression and anxiety. Now, these 40 to 50-year-old women on TikTok are crying and pouring their hearts out, realizing that they were bamboozled into a life that has led them to loneliness and anxiety and depression. They never had the gift of having a child or of having a man to love and protect them. Those are the things we have to recognize as the most destructive and dangerous. All of these ideologies have repelled the innate primal attraction between men and women. I want to start by undoing that, coming back into our natural way of being, and co-creating life together. Mr. Jekielek: Two quick thoughts. Concerning the CCP, we already know they want the all-encompassing power of their technocratic social credit system controlling every aspect of your life. In the West we’ve become obsessed with creating a similar thing, which also speaks to this communist subversion. This is not the natural human inclination. The second thing is I would love to collaborate with you on a short episode on the effects of porn. Perhaps we could collaborate on something small to expose this and understand it better. Mr. Willis: I would love to. Mr. Jekielek: A final thought as we finish up? Mr. Willis: I recently directed a piece for Prager University called MIA, which is an acronym for Masculinity in America. It was shocking to me, because I thought I was up to speed on the damage that porn has done. We had a lot of top experts in this short documentary talking about what has really transpired. I would jump at an opportunity to get the latest statistics of what’s happening out in the world. Because it’s a drug and it’s like all drugs. There are gateways out there that lead to deadly drugs, and that’s what porn has become. In our day, maybe it was Playboy, which was the big thing. It’s starting with nude photos, then to soft core, then to hard core. It ends up in this world where it’s strangulation porn. Mr. Jekielek: This is unfathomable. Mr. Willis: It truly is. Here we have a 12-year-old boy thinking that women want to be choked when they’re making love. This is a problem. Some of these young boys have made that mistake in their exploration of their sexuality and have been charged with rape or something horrible. Their dad didn’t teach them and their dad isn’t there for some reason. They learned from watching these horrible people do this camera. This needs to be exposed. In closing, I appreciate what you and The Epoch Times have done. I am really grateful for what you are doing and thank you so much for supporting me and my work. Mr. Jekielek: Mikki Willis. It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Willis: Thank you so much. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Mikki Willis and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

A New York resident has been convicted of spying for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The individual, who was known as a pro-democracy activist, was found to be providing information on Chinese dissidents to the CCP. Similar cases are being increasingly uncovered, where the regime is finding ways to extend its surveillance and abuses abroad. 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/46O7JbC Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

Bangladesh is currently undergoing a change in power. After 15 years in office, the country’s prime minister resigned and fled the country. Its parliament was dissolved. And now, there are allegations from India that the change in power is being orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Local media report that Indian intelligence officials allege that the CCP and Pakistan are behind the student movement currently protesting on the streets, and that the goal is to install a new regime in Bangladesh that is friendly to China and opposes India. 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/3WWzFqi Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

It’s said that when something is about to collapse, it’s slow at first, then all at once. We may now be watching the start of a new economic crisis, as markets are now hit with the largest decline since the “Black Monday” crash in 1987. Back then, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DOW) dropped 508 points, or about 22.61 percent, and wiped out around $500 billion in market value. Well, the new crash, which just started this week, saw the DOW drop about 954 points, or about 2.4 percent, by Monday afternoon. Of course, the situation is still developing, but given other global trends, there’s the possibility this could signal more of what’s to come, especially as we watch similar warning signs take place in the Chinese market. And here’s why: the recent meltdown was caused by bad job numbers going public. But recent data showed the Chinese Communist Party has also been covering up the real state of its job market. The economic trend we’re now watching could soon get much more serious. 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/4fPGH7V Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A recently released congressional report alleges the United States would lose a war against the Chinese Communist Party, were it to happen right now. The July 30 report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy says that the U.S. defense industrial base wouldn’t be able to produce what the United States would need to win this type of conflict. Is this really the case? We’ll discuss this issue and others 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/3X4e6o1 Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

New sanctions on China are expected to be launched by the United States within the next couple weeks. They’re expected to encompass a long list of products, from electric vehicles to chips and medical devices. As this happens, Chinese e-commerce giant Temu is facing problems within China, as vendors protest over penalties. We’ll discuss these issues and others, 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/3LV1iK0 Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A new surveillance system now being tested in China would eliminate online privacy and allow the regime to monitor all online activity. The new system is being proposed as a state-run digital ID, which everyone would need to use for the internet. The program is raising deeper concerns, not just over digital privacy, but also on human rights abuses and digital theft. Moreover, large swaths of content on the Chinese internet are also just suddenly vanishing. Old news articles are disappearing on a large scale as the Chinese Communist Party erases a huge portion of China’s internet history. We’ll discuss these topics 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/46tKTpr Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A bizarre string of incidents is now taking place around the Paris Olympics, which stretches from drug-using athletes, to drug-laced hamburgers, and now into global conspiracies. This began as doping accusations against Chinese swimmers. Then it started to focus on the long history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) using drugs to help win the Games. And now, the CCP has come out with its counter-narrative. The culprit, they say, is hamburgers. And the CCP is now pushing a broader conspiracy of tainted food and hamburgers from the West carrying drugs that are making their athletes test positive for drugs. The bizarre string of incidents is now bringing attention to Chinese labs conducting the tests for doping scandals, whether these are reliable, and ironically even tying into domestic scandals in China around people losing trust in tainted food. 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/4d3sORB Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

The United States just launched a new military command in Japan, with the intent of countering threats from the Chinese Communist Party. This is happening alongside similar actions, such as the United States upgrading military bases in Australia, deploying new missile systems to the Philippines, and others. Among Asian partners, and with NATO partners in Europe, it appears that many countries are shifting focus to growing threats from the Chinese Communist Party, in what looks like a new Asia pivot. 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/3SvHMaK Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

The significance of some of the recent diplomatic moves the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made can’t be understated. It appears what the regime is trying to do right now is enact a plan for the so-called Eurasian Empire. It’s making key moves to create a new world order, so to speak, and to cut off the United States from its new system. The enacting of this new agenda was very public, but easy to miss. During the recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the CCP and member states announced their plans for a new Eurasian trade alliance, along with a new security bloc that can rival NATO. Immediately after, the CCP launched a diplomatic tour, shifting old policies to try to woo countries including India and the Philippines, which have until now been the focus of conflicts with the CCP. Alongside that, the regime has been carrying out similar moves throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. And this has likewise been accompanied by an increased military boldness against the United States. To understand what’s now taking place, we need to go into the concepts of Duginism and the proposed plans for a so-called Eurasian Empire. 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/3A5vy2c Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/