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 clip: 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. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (53 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0203MichaelBrown 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 milligram 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, 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 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 has 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; one, strengthen the border capability and two; initiate massive money laundering investigations to 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, 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 which 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 had 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. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (53 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0203MichaelBrown Epoch Original DVD collection:

“Parents think that media literacy means knowing when someone has actually fake news versus facts. What media literacy and organizations like the News Literacy Project [are doing is] brainwashing children to not listen to independent journalists or organizations like Epoch, or like what Chris Rufo is doing, ... and to instead only go back to the mainstream media.” In this episode, I sit down with Alvin Lui, a bona fide magician-turned-parental rights advocate, to understand the latest woke programming making its way into K-12 education. “The Biden administration just had this agency that’s now proposing to do home visits to parents who are homeschooling their kids—for parents who don’t believe in the ideology—because the children might be abused at home, because the parents don’t believe that they can be born in the wrong body. So that’s the next wave. That’s the next move,” says Mr. Lui. He is the founder of Courage Is a Habit, which provides practical tools and resources to counter woke indoctrination in schools. Watch the clip: “We very rarely say that we’re going to fight for someone’s children. We always say we’re going to teach you to fight for yours, because that is every parent’s God-given responsibility,” says Mr. Lui. “‘Responsible decision-making’ means something very different to parents than what these ideologues are doing in schools. They use your vocabulary, not your dictionary.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (40 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0201AlvinLui FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Alvin Lui, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought leaders. Alvin Lui: Thank you for having me. It was an honor last time, and I’m happy to see you again. Mr. Jekielek: It has been about a year since our last interview. I continue to be amazed and inspired by the materials that you create for parents at Courage is a Habit. You’re a non-profit, but there’s a kind of magic to it, isn’t there? Mr. Lui: We like to think so. We like to inspire people to stand up for their children and adopt Courage is a Habit in their homes. We very rarely say that we’re going to fight for someone’s children. We always say that we are going to teach you to fight for your own children, because that is every parent’s God-given responsibility. We believe that parents, above anybody else, are the first, last, and best line of defense to protect and teach their children. It’s certainly not the public schools. Mr. Jekielek: You call your organization Courage is a Habit. Please explain why. Mr. Lui: When I first started speaking to parents in Indiana, after a few months I started to open my speeches a certain way. I said, “Now everybody here is probably pretty successful in some way or another. You’ve bought houses, you’ve started businesses, and you’ve raised families. Why do you have to come to an event on a week night to listen to a stranger explain to you how to protect your children?” Everyone knows how to protect their children. People have crossed oceans and deserts just to give their children a better life. It’s innate in us to protect our children. What’s so special about today is that someone can point a finger at your face, call you a transphobe, or a racist, or a bigot, and all of a sudden you can’t stand up for your children. I explain this because we’ve made fear a habit. For years these woke ideologies made people feel guilt over nothing. They made people feel like they’re not being kind or inclusive enough or diverse enough. Everybody just gave a little, then gave a little bit more. They said, “Alright, I‘ll put that rainbow sticker on my laptop. Alright, I’ll put that black square on my social media.” Then now when they’re coming for your children, fear has already become a habit. I told them, “The good news is courage is also a habit.” Every time you want to say something and you wonder, “What is my coworker going to think? What is my family going to think? What are my social media people going to think?” Your heart’s coming out of your chest, but you say it anyway. It may not feel like it, but next time, it gets a little bit easier. Mr. Jekielek: It’s like a muscle, which is an analogy I’ve heard. You just have to work it out a little bit. Mr. Lui: Everybody knows that if you’re trying to get in shape, lose weight, or gain muscle, that means going to the gym, doing certain things, and eating a certain way. If you go to the gym for one week and then look in the mirror, nothing’s going to happen. Now, we can’t tell you exactly when because everyone’s body is different, but we know that if you’re consistent enough over the course of a year, you will look different, whatever your goals may be. You just don’t know when that is going to happen. Courage is the same thing. Maybe some people say, “After the 10th time of speaking up, I don’t feel that fear anymore. I don’t care if someone calls me a racist or a transphobe.” For someone else it will take the 15th or 20th time. I can’t tell you when, but I can tell you if you make that a habit, you will not feel that fear if you do it consistently enough. That’s why we call the organization Courage is a Habit. Mr. Jekielek: What has your work focused on over the last year? There is ideological capture in the institutions, especially in the K-12 schools that you focus on. How have people’s attitudes changed? Are we moving in the right direction or the wrong direction? Mr. Lui: We are absolutely moving in the right direction. Two years ago, or even a year ago, the way people were talking about standing up for this was a lot more defensive. Today, people are a lot more offence-minded because they understand that the people coming after our children are not having an honest conversation. Mr. Jekielek: What do you mean by “the people coming after our children”? Mr. Lui: There are organizations, NGOs, and government entities coming into K-12 public education and into colleges that are inserting programs into schools. A big one is social emotional learning. It’s a Trojan horse disguised as mental health that rewires and rewrites a child’s values and worldviews. It has brought critical race theory, the transgender cult, the climate change activism, and all the pornography into the schools. It’s that and more. It’s anything that’s very radical that they want to insert in a child’s mind. They can do it under this emotional health, social-emotional learning type of programming. When it first started coming in, when we started talking about this in 2019 and 2020, nobody knew what to say about it. It sounded like you just wanted kids to feel included. Of course, you want kids to feel included. Now we see that parents are saying, “Okay, I get the scam. I get the psychological gambit. It’s not about inclusion, and it’s not about diversity.” A year ago, we were talking very tactically about what was happening. Instead of only focusing on the technical aspect of what’s happening to children, during 2023, we have really focused on how parents are the ones who were brainwashed first. We’ve been teaching parents and training parents in two ways. The first way is to show how they’ve weaponized your kindness. They use words that no parent would ever disagree with, like empathy, compassion, and inclusiveness. Parents didn’t understand that those words were used to get them to either stand down because of guilt, or go away because they thought, “Yes, the schools are truly teaching that.” For example, what they really mean by empathy is not what parents commonly teach their little kids; “Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. How would you feel if that happened to you?” It’s if a man walks into a women’s restroom, and a young girl has a negative reaction, they say, “No, you need to have empathy for him because he’s marginalized.” That’s weaponizing kindness. The second thing that we teach parents about is language contamination. The easiest way to describe language contamination is that they use your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. Mr. Jekielek: They use your vocabulary against you. Parents don’t actually understand their definition of the word. With something like Title IX, which is supposed to provide protections for women, if you just change the definition slightly, it can actually have the exact opposite effect. Mr. Lui: That’s right. They do that in K-12 in a variety of ways, by using your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. I'll give you one example; responsible decision-making. Who doesn’t want responsible decision-making in their children’s lives? All good parents teach that. When most parents think about responsible decision-making, it’s about making your bed, doing your homework, and listening to your parents. When you get a little older, it’s about driving responsibly and having good credit. The people that are pushing the critical race theory and transgender ideology, for them responsible decision-making means that if you’re white and reach voting age, you have to vote for reparations. That’s their so-called responsible decision-making. If you’re not white, then it’s your responsibility to dismantle the system. You need to go into an office and say, “How come there’s not enough representation? How come the bathrooms aren’t inclusive?” Responsible decision-making means something very different to parents than what these ideologues are doing in the schools. They use your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. This is what we teach parents about. Every time a school tells you, “We’re just teaching this. That’s all,” ask yourself this one question, “Through whose lens is that trait being taught?” Traits are not good or bad by nature. We infuse positive or negative connotations to traits, because we are a civilized society. We are kind people. Here’s an example. Sometimes you get these manhunts for these serial killers. Police chase them for months, maybe even years, and they finally catch them. Then the community breathes a sigh of relief, because they’ve caught this serial killer. He’s off the streets and people are safe again. But you'll notice that every time we catch a serial killer, people don’t say, “That guy, he’s a good goal setter. He had a goal, and unfortunately he exceeded some goals.” “He had tenacity, he was resourceful, he led a police on a manhunt for six months or a year, and they couldn’t catch him. He never gave up. He had grit. He went after victim number five and waited for her night after night. He could never get in her house until he found a way.” We don’t use terms like “grit”, “goal setting”, “tenacity”, “resourcefulness” to describe a serial killer. But if you think about it, doesn’t he have all those traits? He absolutely does. He’s just applied them in a terrible way. Traits are not inherently good or bad. There is no negative or positive, they are just traits. It depends on who’s using them. It depends on who’s teaching them. This is why we ask parents, “Through whose lens are those traits being taught in schools?” Unfortunately, today in public K-12 schools, those traits are taught through the lens of a critical race theorist, and a transgender cult recruiter. We’ve done some work this past year on private schools and found schools with $30,000 to $50,000 a year tuition are just as bad as any public K-12 that we have seen. Mr. Jekielek: How did you get into this advocacy in the first place? Actually, your real occupation is magician and illusionist. Mr. Lui: I am, that’s true. For most of my life I have been a professional illusionist and magician, mostly for high-end parties, corporate events, trade shows in Vegas, and things of that nature. I loved it. It was something that I really wanted to do since I was a little boy. It was something that I thought I would do for the rest of my life. I moved my family from California to Indiana because I really didn’t want to raise children in California. I just didn’t want to fight anymore. California was long gone. To me, it was lost, and I didn’t want to spend my life fighting. A lot of people, until they have kids, really don’t understand just how awful the crime and the schools were. I love Indiana and most of these red states that are extremely well-run. But I saw the same seeds planted that ruined my old home, and I saw them in the schools. It was like watching an old movie all over again, except that it went back 20 years for me. I thought I had another 20 years, but I was wrong. It is now maybe less than 10 years because things move quickly now. The indoctrination of children moves a lot faster now. I always say that people aren’t leaving in the dead of night on a boat escaping from the United States to go to Cuba or Venezuela. If this country goes the way it has been going with these systems already being torn down, and with the children being weaponized like in Mao Zedong’s Red Guard, there’s really nowhere else for my children to go. There’s nowhere else for your children or anybody’s children to go if America goes down. The decision to focus on this rather than what I’ve done most of my life was not an easy one for sure. But if I’m asking parents to sacrifice, to give up things, and to stand up for the children just a little bit, I felt like I had to give up something that I really loved first, so that I’m not being a hypocrite. For the longest time, I focused on what I was doing with Courage is a Habit, almost ignoring that other side of what I used to do. But I still think like an illusionist, because there is no other way I can think. When I see these psychological gambits, this sleight of mouth, these things they do to parents, I see how effective they are, because I spent most of my life keeping secrets in the guise of entertainment. The difference is when you’re an illusionist and people come to your show, they voluntarily suspend disbelief so that they can be entertained. They are entertained for an hour, and then go home. But the woke ideology is not letting the parents go. They’re holding them hostage. They’re inserting that illusion over and over and over again, through academia, through the media, through social media, and through movies. It’s a constant barrage, and there’s no theater to leave. This is happening to parents, to good people, to business owners, and to everyone. Mr. Jekielek: With magicians and illusionists, it’s all about sleight of hand. What would be an example of an illusion that’s maintained this way? Mr. Lui: How about I show you a quick, simple illusion? The common word describing what we do is misdirection. People always think it’s misdirection, but the secret that magicians don’t talk about is that it’s really misattention. Misdirection basically says, “Look over here and I’m going to do this.” But the problem is that misdirection is not a very sophisticated way to get your moves across. I‘ll give you an example, and then I’ll show you an illusion. If I was going to rob you and take your wallet, I could point a gun at you and mug you. That’s a very vulgar way to take your wallet. It works, because you’re seeing the gun. You’re going to give me your wallet, but the problem is you could fight back. Someone could see me, or you could call the cops as soon as I leave. It’s a very ugly way to take your wallet, and it doesn’t take any skill to mug you. The other way I can take your wallet is to pick your pocket. Now, that takes a lot of skill. That takes misattention, not misdirection. I’m going to have a pretty woman come up and ask you for directions. Someone is going to spill something on your jacket or bump into you. Someone is going to ask you something and hold your attention, then I can take your wallet. You may not even know it for 30 minutes or an hour. Maybe you think you dropped it, or maybe it is in another jacket. By the time you realize that you’ve been pickpocketed and you call the cops, I’m long gone. That’s what is happening today. They’re not going to the family home, not yet anyway, and saying, “We’re going to grab your kids and throw them into the gender clinic.” They’re saying, “If you don’t let your child take that puberty blocker, they’re going to kill themselves.” That’s misattention, and it’s a much more sophisticated way to get parents to give up their children. Mr. Jekielek: What is the trick you want to show me? Mr. Lui: We’re going to get it on camera. All right. I want you to just examine these two rubber bands. Go ahead and take a look at them. Mr. Jekielek: They seem like legit, normal rubber bands. Mr. Lui: Now, these are the rubber bands that I got from your office, by the way. These are not my rubber bands. Okay. I’m going to show you a classic of magic, which is a solid passing through a solid. I’m going to take the band, and we'll drop it right behind here. Now, a solid can’t pass through a solid and we know this, right? I can’t come out this way or this way. I can’t go down, I can’t go up, and I can’t come out this way. Now, I want you to feel that. Is that really locked in there? This is not an illusion. You can actually feel that. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, absolutely. Mr. Lui: Everybody watching this can see that stretch and see that tension on the two rubber bands, because a solid can’t pass through a solid, right? If I give it a rub here, you can see it almost slowly melt through just like that. Mr. Jekielek: That’s astonishing. I don’t know how you did that. Mr. Lui: I hope not. Mr. Jekielek: I literally don’t know how you did that. Mr. Lui: That’s an example of misattention. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know what you did exactly, but I know that the solid didn’t pass through the solid. Mr. Lui: Sure, of course not. Mr. Jekielek: How long did it take you to teach yourself how to do that? Mr. Lui: That particular move there, probably six months and losing a lot of rubber bands and unexpectedly snapping people a lot. Mr. Jekielek: This takes skill, and this is what you were talking about. That’s a big commitment to a rubber band trick. Mr. Lui: It’s a lot of commitment to just one illusion. It’s one trick, it takes a lot of commitment, but there’s so much that goes on there. There’s obviously the physical sleight of hand, but there’s also a lot of misattention. There’s also a lot of leading the audience to where I want them to focus. Now on camera, it’s going to probably look a little different. When you do it live, you can move people’s attention where you want to. Sadly, a lot of the things that illusion is used for in entertainment, we’re now seeing in the public discourse, in the way they talk about Covid, vaccines, masks, J6, police brutality, and all the stuff that we are seeing in schools. You see that there is a pornography in schools, but these people will call it book banning. When they do surveys, they will say, “Do you agree with banning books?” Close to 90 percent of parents say “No”. But that’s sleight of mouth. They don’t ask, “Do you agree with pictures of sex acts in middle schools and high schools? Do you agree with books telling second graders that they can be born in the wrong body?” They don’t ask those questions. They ask, “Do you agree with banning books?” That’s sleight of mouth. That’s asking the question in a way where you can get the desired answer. In magic, we often do that. We ask the questions in a way where we can get the answer that we want. Mr. Jekielek: There was a learning process for you to figure out the trick and perform it with confidence. Is there a learning process that is similar for these people who are so committed to taking over the education system? You described them as the Red Guard staging a cultural revolution. But it’s not necessarily like there was a ready-to-go program for this today. There has been a learning process. Have you thought about that? Mr. Lui: Yes, weaponizing your kindness is one thing they have learned. At the time of Mao in China, there was a huge famine. There was such a huge black hole that he took advantage of it to maintain power. America is still a first world country. We have a Constitution. Our life here is pretty good, even though the middle class is shrinking. We don’t have this gigantic vacuum that these present-day Marxists could take advantage of, so they had to create one. The best way to create one is to cause chaos. There are many ways to cause chaos, but dismantling the family, businesses, and systems is one of the most effective ways. They can’t just come in and say, “Hey, I want your children. Your children are born in the wrong body.” They can’t do that. That’s mugging. That’s pulling a gun and taking your wallet, which is very vulgar. This is how they learned to do it and this is their process. They will want to put a rainbow sticker in the schools, and then some parents go, “Why are you putting up a rainbow sticker that represents things I don’t believe in?” They will say, “Don’t you want all kids to feel included? What’s the big deal? You’re making a big deal out of nothing.” Then the parents will think, “Okay, kind people should let them put up a sticker.” Then they will release an equity statement or a non anti-bullying statement. Parents will say, ”Why are you putting that in? If someone is bullying, you punish them. We have rules for that in place at school. Why do you need such a statement?” They will say, “Don’t you want kids to feel safe? We want the community to come together.” The parents will submit again, “Okay, fine. Do the statement.” Then they keep pushing and pushing to the point where now you’ve actually got school counselors saying that the parents are abusive and unsafe. The Biden administration has an agency that is now proposing to do home visits to parents who are homeschooling and don’t believe in this ideology. They claim that these children might be abused at home, because the parents don’t believe that they could be born in the wrong body. That’s the next wave. That’s the next move coming at home schooling, claiming that the parents are unsafe and abusive. They say, “Don’t you want kids to feel safe?” It’s the same psychological gambit. It’s called compliance. I'll give you another example from my old world, especially when you’re doing close-up magic. When you’re doing stage magic, you control the stage and then there’s the lights and you bring people up. But largely, when you bring people up on a stage, they don’t really do anything. They’re just touching the props, but there’s nothing they can do to break anything. But when you do close-up magic or parlor magic, people are really in your space and they feel like they can touch and do things. If I see somebody and I want them to hold something and I’m not sure if they’re going to listen to my instructions or not, I'll just ask them this one simple question, “Are you right-handed or left-handed?” If the person goes, “Oh, I’m right-handed,” then that’s compliance number one. Then I‘ll say, “Okay, go ahead and put out your right hand,” and I’m going to give them something to hold. If they put out their right hand and I put something on their hand and they don’t mess with it, I’ll know that it’s safe to give them something that might reveal the delusion or the magic trick. Sometimes I ask them if they’re right-handed or left-handed, and the person will say, “Why?” I then know that I can’t give that person anything. If they say, “Right-handed,” I'll say, “Put out your right hand,” and then they purposely put out their left hand, they’re not buying into the process of the trick. If they do that, then I'll give them something to hold, but it won’t matter what I give them. They will then mess with it and do all these different things to it. It ends up that those people actually become very helpful to an illusionist, because it seems like they’re looking at everything closely. Then when the illusion works out anyway, the audience goes, “Man, this guy was really messing with him and couldn’t find anything.” It actually adds to it. But with new magicians starting off, they get very nervous dealing with a person like that, because they think that person is going to mess them up. Therefore, you have to learn how to test compliance. That’s what is happening to parents today, like the example I gave you with the stickers. They will say, “Come on. It’s just a sticker. What’s the big deal?” Now you have learned what parents are going to be okay with it. Mr. Jekielek: And which parents are asking for written statements or whatever it is. Mr. Lui: That’s their, “Are you right-handed or left-handed?” Their compliance test is, “It’s just a sticker. What’s the big deal?” That’s their process. I am seeing this happen to people on a national and global level using a lot of the same psychological gambits that we use entertainment. To be honest with you, it has been very disheartening. Mr. Jekielek: It’s almost like this compliance has become a habit. Mr. Lui: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. That will be the next non-profit I start, Compliance is a Habit. I'll give you credit for it. Mr. Jekielek: For whatever reason, we are in a society where compliance is enshrined. Please tell us about some of the materials that you’ve developed that make it easier for parents to understand all this. Mr. Lui: At the end of the day, we produce products and tools and strategies that are easy to consume, and that are graphically very beautiful. We distill it down to things that the average parent can understand. They don’t have to spend 10 hours reading it. Most importantly, we always give them a call to action. That’s what Courage is a Habit really is about—action. It’s about staying on offense. There’s a couple of things last year I was really extremely proud of. One of them was exposing what 99 percent of parents still don’t know, and it’s called media literacy. We have a product called the Mainstream Misinformation Infiltration that features an organization called the News Literacy Project. Now, just because your school doesn’t use them specifically does not mean they’re not using this scam called media literacy, but the product that we produce exposes them. They call themselves non-partisan, but every journalist, every ambassador, and every leader that they have is extremely Left-wing. They tout these people as non-partisan and that they are credible sources. Today, many states already have a media literacy program. Here comes the language contamination, the word literacy. What parent doesn’t want their child to be literate? In fact, we have a horrible literacy rate right now for reading. But when they say “media literacy”, the way they sell it to parents is, “There’s so much going on in social media today. Don’t you want your kids to be able to decipher between misinformation and facts?” Parents say, “Of course I do.” It’s just like when they used to ask parents, “Don’t you want kids to feel included?” It’s the same psychological gambit, just different words. Now, parents think that media literacy means knowing what is fake news vs. the true facts. A media literacy organization like the News Literacy Project is brainwashing children to not listen to independent media like the Epoch Times or independent journalists like Chris Rufo, but instead to only go back to mainstream media, because they know that people’s trust in the mainstream media is all but zero. You can walk down the street and even ask people who are not very political, “Do you trust the mainstream media?” Most of them will say, “No, not really,” because they have lied over and over again. For those people who were pretty blind to it originally, Covid certainly woke up a lot of people with the masks and the vaccines. With the media literacy programs in school, they’re currently telling students to continue listening to three-letter government agencies and mainstream media. That’s what media literacy means in the schools today. There’s already four or five states that are mandating it as a graduation requirement and about 15 states that have it in some way, shape or form. It’s increasing, and they’re going to try to get into all 50 states. Mr. Jekielek: This specific program promotes corporate legacy media as being the sole source of truthful information, correct? Mr. Lui: That’s exactly right. Guess who is supporting an organization like the News Literacy Project? It’s all the legacy media, NBC, CBS, and CNN. They even tout BuzzFeed as one of their credible sources. They’ve got these journalists who are completely Left-wing and claim they are non-partisan. Mr. Jekielek: Many of them believe in so-called advocacy journalism, which is another way of saying propaganda creation. There is an accepted narrative, and the media should reflect that narrative. It’s very difficult for people to understand that this type of journalism is being taught in many of the top journalism schools today. Mr. Lui: That’s exactly what is in K-12 today, and increasingly the trend is to make it a graduation requirement. If you can brainwash children to go back to listening to mainstream media again, that is absolutely dangerous, because now they can feed these kids anything they want to. They won’t even take the time to look at independent journalists that are doing really good work and good documentaries and good reporting, because there is no critical thinking in schools right now. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve learned over the past few years how powerful that type of indoctrination can be. Even with so many people realizing that the mainstream media is not very credible, it is still effective. Mr. Lui: It is, absolutely. Mr. Jekielek: Which states are pushing this so-called media literacy ? Mr. Lui: California, New Jersey, Delaware, and Texas. These four states also have graduation requirements. Almost every state has some form of it, and some states are funding it more. Maine is pushing it now in the next session. Even if you don’t live in one of those four states that currently have it as a graduation requirement, it is very likely that your school or your state education board already has some form of media literacy. You have to just search your state’s education website and type in “media literacy”, and there will probably be some sort of program, whether they use the News Literacy Project or not. Go to your school and ask, “Show me the organization that you’re using for this media literacy program.” Then of course, you want to opt your children out of those classes. Even more important than that, I advise parents to get 10 or 15 other parents together to go in and push back against your school to say, “This should not be a graduation requirement,” because if you don’t get enough people to push back, the school is going to try to run you around. Likely, this is still in the earlier stages compared to all the other indoctrination programs. It doesn’t take a lot, just 10 or 15 parents, and you can push back on this. This is just starting into your school and it hasn’t baked in hard yet. This is the time to push back while we’ve caught something very early. We caught it this year, and we caught it when they were about a year into it. Now. they’re about a year-and-a-half into doing their program. They have a four-year plan to get into all 50 states. Mr. Jekielek: Alvin, as we finish up, when you’re approaching the education of your kids, you have to assume that nothing is what it seems and dig a little deeper and act to remove your kids from situations where you believe indoctrination is happening. Mr. Lui: We talk about the system being dismantled, but we have to accept that the system has already been dismantled. We’re not preventing them from dismantling the system, we’re preventing them from rebuilding it into their own image. It’s like a person’s body being possessed by demons. It still looks like your brother, but it’s no longer your brother. He has been possessed by a demon or a spirit, if you watch zombie movies. Today, when we look at institutions like the American Academy of Pediatrics, USA Boxing, K-12 schools, or any of the companies like Bud Light or Target, when they say they will dismantle them, we assume that means to eliminate them. We think they’re going to tear down these systems and eliminate them. That is not what they’re doing. They’re tearing them down from the inside, rebuilding them, and infusing them with this ideology. But the outside still looks the same. This is why people say, “The American Academy of Pediatrics says it’s okay to trans kids and they are the experts. They’ve been around for a long time, so you’re not going to listen to the American Academy of Pediatrics?” They didn’t change the name. This logo still looks the same, but it’s no longer the same system. It’s like the American School Counselor Associations. One of the things Courage is a Habit is known for is exposing the school counselors. The American School Counselor Association has been around for a long time. They’ve been around for decades, but it wasn’t until 2014 that they started transforming into these social justice activists. They are still called the American School Counselor Association. Their logo hasn’t changed, but their mission has changed. It is the same thing with Bud Light or Target. Think about how long Bud Light has been around. The all-girls St. Mary’s College has been around for 186 years. Last year, they wanted to enroll men into college. They lost a ton of donors, so they pulled back. For 186 years, St. Mary’s College, an all-girls college, never thought about letting a man in, but they did this year and they paid for it. This is not a message of negativity or doom and gloom. This is actually a message of hope. The reason why this is a message of hope is that if we continue to try to hold on to something that we think we can save and bring it back, that’s living in limbo, and that’s living in a false reality. It’s not going to help anybody. In fact, that’s going to help us fight in the wrong way. We have to accept that the system has already been taken over. It’s already been dismantled. The dismantling is done. We are now in the rebuilding phase. The only question is, “Are we going to stop them from rebuilding in their image, or are we going to win and get them out of these institutions so that we can rebuild them in the way they should be?” We should rebuild them based on the Constitution and based on American values. Mr. Jekielek: I am thinking about Bill Ackman’s recent activism at Harvard. You’re watching in slow motion the realization that, “Wow, DEI is really not DEI.” What do you make of that? Do you see this as an inflection point? Mr. Lui: Yes, I do. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about that. Mr. Lui: This is actually a conversation that I’ve been having the last few days. We call it DIE, we don’t actually call it DEI. We call it D-I-E, right? Everything DEI touches dies. But what’s interesting is that we have now pulled people from all walks of life that should not even be interested in this fight. Bill Ackman is a Wall Street guy. You have older men and women from Korea and China that just want to live their life here. You’ve got people who are painters and artists. You’ve got people who are architects. You’ve got people who are biologists. You’ve got people who are just doing their thing. They were perfectly happy going about their lives, doing their passion, doing their careers, and having nothing to do with this. Now, we have all these great minds. These are people that don’t believe in equity. These are people that believe in self-preservation, risk-taking, hard work, taking risks, and not blaming everybody else by saying, “There’s white supremacy. There’s oppression.” These are people that don’t believe that. These are people who are actually very high achieving in their field coming together in the same room and asking, “How do we beat this?” This is my message of hope. These woke ideologists, these DIE people, these critical race theorists, these intersectionality people, these people that want to just continue to tear down America, the mistake they made is doing what they did, and being so insufferable and narcissistic, brought in some of the best minds and the hardest workers that were never interested in this space. Someone like myself, who is an entertainer and entertains for a living, why am I sitting here with a wonderful journalist? These days, I’m often with people that I never would’ve never met who are a lot smarter than a magician doing tricks for people. We are now all taking our skills and experience and putting them into this fight and helping average, hard working Americans every day. We are saying, “Yes, you can do something too.” Mr. Jekielek: Alvin Lui, it’s so good to have you on the show again. Mr. Lui: Thank you for having me. It was an honor. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Alvin Lui and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (40 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0201AlvinLui Epoch Original DVD collection:

What can Americans learn from Taiwan when it comes to conducting secure and transparent elections? In this episode, I sit down with Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute. He was in Taiwan recently to observe the presidential elections there. Watch the clip: What is Taiwan’s significance for the United States? What would Japan do if the Chinese communist regime invaded Taiwan? 🔴 WATCH the full episode (44 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0125AdamSavit FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Adam Savit, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Adam Savit: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Mr. Jekielek: Adam, you were in Taiwan for the recent election, and now you’re in Japan. I’ve seen a video of the tabulation of their voting, and it’s an incredible community event. It’s wildly transparent, and we can learn a lot from them. Let’s start here. Mr. Savit: I did have that thought when I was on the ground, that Americans should actually be jealous of the Taiwanese election process, the entire spirit around it, as well as the technicalities of how they do it. They physically hold up the ballot and look at it. They have observers. That’s how the ballot is counted. They use paper and they use a pencil. Not only that, they have to show up at the exact precinct that they were notified by mail to come to. It has to be in their hometown. We had a guide helping us out in Taipei, the capital and the largest city. His hometown was way down in southern Taiwan. At some point during the day, he hopped a high-speed rail train that takes about three hours to get all the way down south, and he voted in his home district. This is not just about inside Taiwan. If you are stationed overseas or working overseas for any reason, you have to physically come back to Taiwan. There’s an absolute regrouping of Taiwanese ex-patriots from the U.S., from Japan, and from wherever they are. There are tens of thousands of Taiwanese businessmen who are in China, because they can’t avoid doing business with China. They’re so physically close. In the decades preceding the more authoritarian Xi regime, a lot of them went there on business and some of them still remain there. It’s certainly a recognition that the maligned influence of the CCP is still there and they will not take chances with anyone remote-voting from mainland China. They want to see that piece of paper ballot in their hand. Mr. Jekielek: If you want to vote, you have to go back to Taiwan. I don’t know if it’s necessary for the U.S. to do this, but you can see how that might help you to reconnect with your country and your community. I also noticed that with the vote counting, it’s a big event. People of all ages come out to watch and it’s actually a big spectacle. Mr. Savit: Absolutely. As foreigners, we were a small delegation of four. The chair of our China Policy Initiative at AFPI [America First Policy Institute], Steve Yates, was leading the delegation. We had a journalist and a pollster, and we were able to observe a great deal. We were able to get into the party headquarters. On the actual election day, we weren’t able to get into the precinct, but we did watch the returns come in with a group of Taiwanese citizens, again, to emphasize the fact that the returns came in and that they were counted and completed by 8:30 PM on the night of the election. But we did get to witness how the average people experience their elections. We went to a rally of the DPP [Democratic Progressive Party] , which has been the ruling party for eight years and now will be for another four years because their candidate did win the presidency. They claimed there were 100,000 people there. I don’t know about that, but it was a full, mid-sized stadium, with maybe 40,000 to 50,000 people. In any case, it was very impressive. They’re not quite as rowdy as an American audience because it’s a different culture. Everyone is focused on the same thing and there are these parameters. It almost feels like each candidate is a trained announcer and it’s like a choreographed show. When we first arrived, we were able to visit the DPP headquarters. Their theme was Team Taiwan, and they had the English letters on their T-shirts. It was a baseball theme, and they had a big baseball diamond in their headquarters. They had all these screens going and they had these themed T-shirts. They came up and handed us these erasers and said, “This is to erase Chinese disinformation.” It was a very vigorous and real engagement of the public for sure. Mr. Jekielek: The disinformation pushed by the communist regime in mainland China into Taiwan is massive. They have a very strong influence on the largest media who push the Beijing line. But the results of this election are something Beijing didn’t want. Please tell us about this, since you’ve been talking to people on the ground. Mr. Savit: The results are definitely something that Beijing didn’t want. The DPP won and it is clearly the anti-Beijing party. But you still can’t say they’re pro-independence, because they haven’t come out and said that. Just like the United States has strategic ambiguity, and even though we do support Taiwan, we don’t say that Taiwan is independent, which is our stated policy. The DPP has made that same calculation that it’s needlessly provocative to go all the way and say, “We are an independent nation.” But yes, Beijing would have preferred the other major party, which is the KMT [Kuomintang], which was the party of Chiang Kai-shek. It was originally the nationalist party on the mainland and our ally during World War II. After World War II, Chiang Kai-shek was facing off against Mao and the Communist Party. That civil war raged until 1949 when Mao and the Communists pushed the nationalists off of mainland China into Taiwan. The KMT is still that original party. It has been called the oldest political party in Asia, and that is probably accurate. But when it came to Taiwan, that party existed under Chiang’s authoritarian regime. After it formed, Taiwan actually did not have free and open elections for decades. The dictatorship loosened up strings a little in 1986 and had some local elections with a few political parties. But it wasn’t until 1996 that the presidential race was open to other parties. The KMT were the people that fought a war with the CCP, and they are what’s left of those millions of Chinese who were bumped out of China into Taiwan. They still have a longing that one day, they will connect back with the mainland. They also are not under the illusion that this CCP regime, especially under Xi, who’s gotten more radical, is going to be so beneficial to return to, but they are much more accommodating to China. I did hear people saying, “Hey, China is huge. China is right there across the straits. We’re going to have to live with them, and being needlessly provocative is the wrong tack.” Mr. Jekielek: We need to talk about this third party, a populist party. But in this case, maybe those labels are not correct. First, let’s talk about the importance of Taiwan to the US-China relationship. The biggest strategic threat to the U.S. is China. Taiwan faces all this propaganda that it will absolutely become part of the mainland, a central theme of Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator. At the same time, the U.S. is watching and also involved in different altercations around the world. What is the importance of Taiwan to the U.S.? Why should Americans care? Mr. Savit: I would like to emphasize some of the discourse of the America first movement, which of course AFPI identifies with. Some of it does veer into a cynical and I think incorrect view of Taiwan. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recognized that the semiconductors, those advanced microchips that Taiwan specializes in, are of strategic value to the U.S. He said that once that is offshored to the U.S. or to other countries, then we could abandon Taiwan to the predations of China. I think that is absolutely wrong. Another huge issue is the shipping lanes that run from the Middle East carrying natural gas and oil through the Malacca Straits past Singapore and then to Southeast Asia. These lanes pass right by Taiwan in order to reach our allies, Japan and South Korea, two of the biggest economies in the world. If that trade is disrupted, there would be massive strategic ramifications for the U.S., both for our economy and military, because if China were to take Taiwan, it would be able to break into the Pacific Ocean. They could send their ships there unimpeded and China could become a blue-water navy, which means deploying their ships all over the world. Now, the United States is the only true blue-water navy in the world, meaning we deploy in the Middle East, and we deploy in order to protect the shipping lanes in the Red Sea from the Houthis, which leads up to the Suez Canal, which is an absolutely crucial shipping lane for the world. Actually, you could compare that to the waters off Taiwan, except there’s even more volume going through those lanes than there is through the Red Sea. That’s just one huge issue. Mr. Jekielek: You were talking about the spirit in Taiwan and how this is basically a brand new democracy, 30 years in. There’s this spirit to do the democratic process and do it right. At the same time, this external threat is exerting massive influence through these various business people. There are also these overflights by military jets to remind people who is just across the strait and that you have to play along. It’s a very unusual climate. Mr. Savit: It is. I wasn’t aware of any overflights while I was there, but the day we landed there was this missile test. It was unclear whether it was a satellite launch or a missile test, but Taiwan has an emergency text and broadcast system, and the English translation of that text said that there was a missile launch. Apparently, in their native language, it actually said a satellite launch, but in international reports, it said missile launch. Whether on purpose or not, that’s cognitive warfare right there, which makes people upset. As far as the precarious situation that Taiwan is in, I kept thinking of Israel where I have been on the ground before, and it’s a very similar situation. With Israel, you have a relatively small, fragile democracy, but on its land borders it is surrounded by mortal enemies who are wishing them to be gone. With Taiwan, it’s a little different. At least they’re separated by about a hundred miles of sea, and it would take a much more difficult invasion. But Beijing has other methods to use, and yes, they are conducting an election under significant duress. Maybe two days before, there was this intensity built up around the election. But once the election was over, life went back to normal. Part of that was reflected in the existence of that third party called the TPP [Taiwan People’s Party]. I mentioned the DPP, and they are more aggressive towards China. The KMT is more conciliatory towards China. There is no direct correlation between Left-Democrat, Right-Republican, which an American would understand coming to this political situation. It is largely defined by their relationship to China, because that is the dominant question politically in their lives. Because of that, for the first time, there’s a fairly large third party, and I agree with the word populist. They’re saying, “Listen, these other parties have been focused on this China threat. Yes, it’s real, but they’ve been ignoring our everyday concerns.” They have the same problems everyone in the world is having now; inflation, cost of living, and healthcare. They feel that these questions have been ignored, and especially the youth who are disillusioned and also detached from the violent and oppressive history of actually living under the CCP. It’s a populist party and it’s an escapist party. They’re throwing all of these random ideas into a pot, and making promises. They know that as a third party, they'll never actually have to govern, so they really don’t have to go in depth on these policies. But it was enough that they got a good share of the vote, something like 25 percent. The winner, DPP, was something like 40 percent, and then the KMT was somewhere in the 30s. Now of course, the presidency is winner take all, so the KMT lost that, but we’ve got their parliament. It’s a strange hybrid system. They do have districts like the U.S. has congressional districts, so they’re geographic. You'll have a vote there where the winner takes all. In that district, the winner wins. If it’s DPP, they get that seat. They get a presidential vote, they get their local representative vote, and then they get this other party vote. Those party votes are added up and the percentages of those party votes grant them a certain amount of this other pie of legislators. I know it is quite confusing. Actually, there were Taiwanese that we were with who didn’t know how this system worked, much the same way Americans might not know the ins and outs of caucuses and the way electoral votes work. The DPP came out with 51 seats, the KMT came out with 52 seats, but then there’s 9 seats with that third party, the TPP. This is the first time where no party had a majority, and therefore the TPP will be the kingmakers. The TPP will determine what legislation can be passed and what will come to William Lai, the new president. The DPP is very concerned that will mean that weapon systems from the U.S. will not be funded. They‘ll be cut back or they’ll be removed entirely. Mr. Jekielek: This is one big question right now in American politics. How much military support should we be providing outside of the country? Mr. Savit: That’s a real serious question, and we should give consideration to each situation, because each situation is unique. The first thing is that Americans have been having a discourse about for almost two years now on the war in Ukraine. That’s the front burner issue regarding foreign military aid. Again, I'll go back to our America first frame at AFPI. When this war first started, Russia, unprovoked, attacked and invaded the sovereign territory of Ukraine. Also, Russia is an adversary of the United States, there’s no doubt about that. Ukraine had every right to defend itself. We were right strategically to give some support to Ukraine in the form of arms and in the form of aid. Along the line, we’ve gotten to the point now where we’re $100 billion-plus into aid for Ukraine. Most importantly, there is no end point. There’s no stated limitation on this aid and there is no goal. What is the metric we use to measure the effectiveness of this aid and when will this aid ever end? That is something to be very concerned about, and that is one situation. Taiwan is another situation. Again, what Taiwan gets as far as military equipment from the United States is not aid. They’re actually paying for it one way or another. In fact, they have orders backed up. Part of that is due to our supply chains in relation to Ukraine, because so much of our effort has gone there. But it’s also problems with our industrial capacity in general and with our supply chains. Taiwan is ready, willing and able to pay and to defend itself. It is diversifying now away from huge weapon systems, expensive airplanes, and expensive ships. It is going the route of asymmetrical equipment and asymmetrical strategy. DPP officials were mentioning that standoff weapons that can hit Mainland China will never match the missile fleet of China, but it’s there as a deterrent. Taiwan has proven that they can pay for the weapons. They have a serious plan about how to use the weapons, and it’s really a net benefit for the United States. Mr. Jekielek: What is the ultimate impact of the election on the U.S. and its allies? Mr. Savit: It may sound strange, but I don’t think it has a definitive impact. I don’t think it will have an extreme impact on the overall trajectory of this situation. If the KMT got in, they would be a little bit more soft and a little bit more conciliatory towards China. But strangely, a good thing is that Xi has been so extreme that across the political spectrum in Taiwan, as well as the U.S., that these political parties and the average person is realizing the threat. China is not really going to change its tactics either. It’s still not in their interest to launch a hot kinetic war on Taiwan, because other methods have been fairly successful on their own, like the gray zone tactics. An example would be the satellite missile launch on the day before the election. They are constantly sending dozens of military aircraft as well as seacraft across the demarcation line in the Taiwan Strait. They have a full blitz going on against the Taiwan media. They either own or influence aspects of the traditional Taiwan media. They have social media influencers. Some of them are openly marked on Twitter. Some are either live propagandists or bots operating on TikTok. I did ask someone on the ground whether TikTok is present in Taiwan, because some of the work we’ve done at AFPI has been to combat TikTok in the United States. It’s really a conundrum because it brings up questions of corporate independence and persecuting one individual company. It really is a hard nut to crack in a free country like the United States. They said they did have TikTok. They claimed that the Taiwanese government is actually more effective at filtering it to some degree. I also asked them about WeChat, which is literally a CCP chat client and proven to be a CCP subsidiary. That is even available in Taiwan , which is puzzling. They said that anyone in the know is not using WeChat, but it’s still there as a channel as well. But even if it’s a known propaganda outlet or it’s a suspect outlet, you’re still getting this propaganda flashing in front of your face. You’re seeing these articles. For us, we can see the filter in English. The Global Times is a big China propaganda outlet. You can go on the internet and you can read that stuff. Hopefully, you understand what you’re reading, but it’s through some sort of a filter. But they are Mandarin readers, so this stuff is flying in front of them either overtly or covertly. They’re marinating in this Mandarin media environment, where you’ve got 1.3 billion Chinese who are flooding it. Mr. Jekielek: When you say filter, you mean your own filter-like understanding that some things have political decision-making behind them. This is the challenge with TikTok. By the way, certain TikTok content may appear in one country, but it doesn’t appear in mainland China, and you can draw your own conclusions from that. There are a number of ATL episodes explaining how TikTok functions. You can also view TikTok as an espionage issue, aside from it being a massive influence issue. Within a fairly short time, American TikTok users are thinking, “Osama bin Laden had some good points in his letter,” not that they’ve ever read it. These influencers can be dialed up or dialed down in the interest of the Chinese regime, since this company is beholden to the CCP. This is the climate we are in, but most people don’t realize that on the ground. Obviously, TikTok is being used as a massive influence operation in Taiwan, and WeChat could be regarded as surveillance. Mr. Savit: People may or may not realize these things. But Taiwan is probably the place where they’re most educated on it. The problem is that even if they are educated about TikTok and WeChat, they still use them, because they are addictive. It’s crazy. It’s like you’re compelled to use these apps. Again, I would point to the more traditional newspaper mastheads like the Global Times. Sometimes I will Google something, I‘ll look at the result, I’ll look at the title, I‘ll look at the little sub headline and then I’ll say, “Oh, that must be…” It will stick in my head in a way. As much as I know that that is CCP propaganda, it made an impression. Sometimes, you‘ll be reading stuff and then you’ll bring it up in a conversation later. You will ask yourself, “Where exactly did I hear that? Was that true or not true?” That even happens to professionals who are supposed to be very picky with the information that gets through the so-called filter. I can’t imagine being on the ground in Taiwan and reading Mandarin directly, and having all of the CCP’s best propaganda focused directly at you. Mr. Jekielek: There are these large, well-produced supplements that the China Daily would place in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal with a tiny note saying, “This is sponsored content.” Taiwan is obviously an independent country by any rational measure. At the same time, there is the One China policy, and our doctrine of strategic ambiguity. What are the implications of President Biden saying the U.S. doesn’t support Taiwan independence? Mr. Savit: There are a couple of issues going on here. Number one, we do have the baseline reality of the One China policy. Since 1979 and under the Taiwan Relations Act, we recognize Beijing as the address for the Chinese state. That has all kinds of awkward implications, because it also obligates us to arm Taiwan or provide Taiwan with the tools needed to defend itself. That’s already an awkward situation, but we also have the issues of the communication style of President Biden. It seems whenever he’s asked, he'll blurt out something different. Now, in this case, he is actually accurate. We don’t endorse Taiwanese independence. But it’s strategically unwise for the President of the United States to emphasize that, after the party that is more aggressive towards China has just won the election. The President shouldn’t be emphasizing that and stating that emphatically at this point in time. But yes, that is the stated reality of U.S. policy. Mr. Jekielek: Taiwan is a country with its own governance and robust democracy, as we’ve been discussing in this interview. While it doesn’t have an embassy in the United States, it does have a trade office which effectively functioned as an embassy. From its own perspective, Taiwan has been an independent country for a long time. It actually has nothing to do with Beijing. Mr. Savit: It is very odd. It exists in this weird falling between the cracks of what a state is. It’s a philosophical question, “What makes a state? Does it need UN recognition? Does it need U.S. recognition, or is it a political unit which has its own elections and has its own army and conducts its own foreign policy?” Under those definitions, it is a state. That’s part of why even the DPP, which is more independent-minded, finds that it’s not worth it right now to declare independence, because they’re getting a lot of the benefits of independence without that crazy provocation from China. At the same time, they are pursuing diplomatic priorities. There are a dozen countries that recognize Taiwan as the one China. Indeed, one did drop off as a result of the election and I’m sure the CCP twisted their arm. It’s the country of Nauru and it’s the second least populated country in the world. It’s a Pacific Island country of 15,000 people, but it’s important. This gets back to the regional strategic picture. Those small Pacific countries are islands that are spread across thousands of miles. They have a few thousand people, but their territory covers thousands of miles. Those thousands of miles are territory that the U.S. military would have to traverse if they need to get over to Taiwan and China in the case of a war. This is our backyard where China can be building military bases. They are trying to do so in the Solomon Islands where Australia used to have some influence, but now China is putting their claws in there. They are trying to get behind that first layer of defense, which we call the first island chain, consisting of Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Then there’s that second layer of doing a back-around play, which is to influence the Pacific Island nations. Mr. Jekielek: One leader from one of the states in the Solomon Islands is now no longer in his position because he decided to stand up against the communist regime’s influence in that country. Similarly, Former President Panuelo of the Federated States of Micronesia [FSM], which is much closer to the U.S., also stood up to the CCP. He had stories where the Chinese ambassador to FSM was literally walking behind him and telling him what he should be saying and what positions he should be taking. This is happening in that area right now. Mr. Savit: That’s very haunting, but I believe it. I think they are called the Compact Countries. Mr. Jekielek: Correct, that’s exactly right. Mr. Savit: There are three countries. They are independent countries, but the U.S. is responsible for their defense and some other diplomatic functions. They’re client states in a way. It’s the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau. These are three contiguous island states with huge ocean areas around them. If you look at a map, it’s literally in the middle of where we would need to jump to get to China. We ignored these states and were really out to lunch on that question. Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about why you are in Japan, and also about this gray zone warfare that the CCP engages in. You mentioned the CCP overflights to remind people who’s in charge and the media control, but there are other elements which are actually physical. For example, a merchant marine from China is very different from a merchant marine from the U.S. You’ve got reinforced hulls and electronics that are built to interface with the Chinese military. The merchant marine from China can function as an arm of the PLA. It’s a model that China applies across the board. Another issue is Huawei. Why are Huawei products so incredibly cheap all over the world and have established a foothold? It is because there is a strategic imperative and they are not just doing business. Mr. Savit: Yes, they will literally weaponize every aspect of everything. If you leave any avenue or lane open, they will fill it. I'll call them ingenious on that point. Some people will say they are evil geniuses. They will wait for centuries, rather than just years. I don’t know if they’re really incredible geniuses, or if they simply have the weight of numbers and the weight of will, which creates this totalitarian dictatorship that wants to retain control and expand its control. Mr. Jekielek: They are also aided by the permissiveness of free nations. Mr. Savit: Yes, it’s not one-sided. We often say the key to defeating the CCP is American prosperity and bolstering the American homeland and American pride. This is absolutely opportunistic. The U.S. has the potential to have a roaring economy and to have the biggest and best military, which is a deterrent to war. It would not cause war. We were asleep at the wheel while China came in through research projects and through corporate acquisitions, taking tons of intellectual property through hundreds of thousands of students. It’s an issue that we’ve looked at a great deal at AFPI, along with the question of agricultural and strategic land near our infrastructure and military bases. Again, who was thinking about this? Who was thinking that they could buy tracks of a few hundred acres that are within five miles of a military base? No one. They saw an opening and they went for it. It’s legal. We are open societies and we don’t think about preventing this. We also have other countries investing in U. S. land. When we looked at this question. Canada, Germany, and Italy are some of the top investors in U.S. land. What are they using it for? Timber, wine, and that sort of thing. We’re not thinking that someone is going to take this land and do something nefarious with it. That’s exactly where the CCP finds a crack and goes in. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, let’s talk about Japan, obviously an important U.S. ally in Asia. You’re passing through there on your way back to America. Please tell us about Japan. Mr. Savit: I would like to emphasize that Japan is absolutely key. Of course, for the health of Taiwan itself, their military is key. But Japan is really the top ally in this region and is incredibly important, because it is still the number three world economy. It is democratic, and since World War II has had a strong democratic tradition. It has a direct treaty alliance with the United States. If Japan goes to war, then we go to war. There’s no question, and many people might not know this, with a Taiwan conflict, Japan would be drawn into that war immediately. People envision just the main islands of Japan. But they have a long archipelago, hundreds of miles of these little islands. The largest one is Okinawa, which people have heard of. They go all the way down to Taiwan, and the last one is only 90 miles off of Taiwan. If China were to invade Taiwan, they would need to neutralize those Japanese islands. In fact, Japan is fortifying those islands. I talked to some people here who are involved in that, and they’re positioning standoff weapons. On those islands, they are positioning missiles that can reach into China. There’s no question that China will hit those islands. Also, Japan hosts tens of thousands of U.S. troops. We have huge naval and Air Force bases there. Since we are completely integrated with Japan defense-wise, China will fire on those U.S. bases as well. I just had a discussion today with some retired military officials about communication and coordination between the U.S. and Japanese military. They asked, “What U.S. forces need to be in Japan for this contingency? What is Japan able to contribute? Since World War II, Japan has had a pacifist constitution. Technically, they’re not even supposed to have a military; an Army, Navy, and Air Force. They actually call it the Japan Self-Defense Force, that’s the way they frame it. But since China has been on the rise and since President Xi especially, they are recognizing that this is a real present threat on their doorstep. They underlined that for me. They said, “We’re here on the front line. You sit back over there and observe the threat, but we feel this coming down our necks.” There is also North Korea. North Korea is testing missiles that are going over Japan, so they really are a front line state. You can talk about Israel and talk about Taiwan, but Japan is a front line state. Mr. Jekielek: Adam, this has been a fascinating conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Mr. Savit: Yes, Since I’m sitting here in Japan and having this experience right now, I know we have great allies here. We have real serious thinkers that are thinking about the future of Japan. I’m also perceiving a real care, affection, and willingness to work with and help the United States. As I said, they are still a powerful country. They understand the threat of China. It’s just been a wonderful, illuminating experience to be able to talk with them. I hope that we will collaborate and confront this problem together. Mr. Jekielek: Adam Savit, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Savit: Thanks so much for having me. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (44 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0125AdamSavit Epoch Original DVD collection:

As the Supreme Court has issued rulings to defend the Second-Amendment rights of American citizens, the Biden administration is looking for alternative methods of restricting firearms. A newly drafted document aims to restrict private sales of firearms, while other pushes aim to place new restrictions on ammunition manufacturers. In this live Q&A with Crossroads host Joshua Philipp, we’ll discuss these topics and others, and answer questions from the audience. 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/3UxpEPo Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

“Qataris were the ones who said, ‘Here, come to our country, we'll host you.’ So, now it is home to the largest American airbase in the Middle East, where we conduct our war on terrorism. And then down the street from this Al Udeid Air Base is Hamas, the Taliban, al Qaeda financiers, ISIS financiers … it is a truly bizarre arrangement.” Dr. Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He’s also a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Treasury Department, and the author of several books on Islamic extremism. “The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the largest, if not the largest, grassroots political and religious organizations in the Middle East, and it is the cornerstone for just about every radical ideology that we have seen and faced over the last two decades since the 9/11 attacks,” says Dr. Schanzer. We discuss the role that Qatar has played in international geopolitics, commanding vast influence campaigns in the West and funding an array of terrorist outfits in the East. Watch the clip: “The Qataris have been able to sustain it with a massive amount of lobby money and investment here in the United States, and so some of its greatest proponents are the Pentagon and the State Department. And they’ve gotten to the point where it’s almost as if they can do no wrong—until 10/7. That’s when it, I think, began to become clear to the average American that the Qataris are playing both arsonist and firefighter. They spend $200 million a year propping up Hamas in the Gaza Strip. They give Hamas headquarters in Doha. And then as soon as the crisis hits, they are trying to negotiate between the United States and Israel and Hamas, pretending to be a good-faith actor. But at the end of the day, I think we all have realized that they are advocating first and foremost for Hamas.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (48 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0130JonathanSchanzer FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jonathan Schanzer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jonathan Schanzer: Pleasure to be with you. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve all been following the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, especially since October 7th. The role of Qatar in all of this is not well known, and you wrote an article recently that directly addresses this. Qatar was the key state involved in the hostage negotiations, but we know that they actually fund Hamas and other groups. How does this work? Please explain this to us. Mr. Schanzer: I’m not sure how it works. This is really one of the more curious foreign policies embraced by the United States. Maybe it’s important to back up. Most people couldn’t find Qatar on a map. It’s a country of 300,000 citizens total. There’s 2 million people in the country, and 1.7 million of them are the help. This is a country that has more money than it knows what to do with. It produces 11 percent of the world’s energy from the natural gas that it pulls out of the gas field that it shares with Iran, so it has built up this immense wealth over time. You may recall that after 9/11 the Saudis grew uncomfortable with having the United States based in Saudi Arabia. The Emiratis also took a pass on this. The Qataris were the ones who said, “Come to our country, we'll host you,” so now it is home to the largest American air base in the Middle East where we conduct our war on terrorism. Down the street from this Al Udeid Air Base is Hamas, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda financiers, and ISIS financiers. It is a truly bizarre arrangement. The Qataris have been able to sustain it with a massive amount of lobby money and investment here in the United States. Some of its biggest supporters are the Pentagon and the State Department, and they’ve gotten to the point where it’s almost as if they can do no wrong—until October 7th happened. That’s when it became clear to the average American that the Qataris are playing both arsonist and firefighter. They spend $200 million a year propping up Hamas in the Gaza Strip. They give Hamas a headquarters in Doha, Qatar. As soon as the crisis hits, they are trying to negotiate between the United States and Israel and Hamas, pretending to be a good faith actor. But at the end of the day, we all have realized that they are first and foremost advocating for Hamas. Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, please tell us about yourself. You’re the Head of Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies [FDD], so tell us a little bit about the think tank as well. It has a certain perspective on this situation. Mr. Schanzer: I’m originally from Philadelphia, and studied at Emory University in Atlanta. I went on to get a master’s degree at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I studied Arabic and Hebrew. I then went on to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo after my master’s was over, and I’ve got a PhD from King’s College, London. I’ve been studying the Middle East and terrorism for my entire adult life. I can’t really tell you exactly why I’ve done it. I got a sense in the 1990s that terrorism was the thing that was disrupting the peace process. When I was an undergrad and lived in Israel, I had several brushes with Hamas terrorists that were just a few blocks away. They were carrying out terrorist attacks very close by. I was just struck by how common these attacks had become. By the time I was ready to write my master’s thesis, I had no doubt it was going to be about various terrorist movements. I finished that master’s thesis just in time for 9/11. I have fallen into this field. I’ve worked for a number of different think tanks. I worked for the Treasury Department for a number of years, tracking terror finance, and Hamas finance in particular. That was one of my portfolios, and that’s been keeping me quite busy lately. I don’t quite know how I’ve become the swamp creature that I am, but I’ve been in Washington now for more than 20 years. For the last 13 years I’ve been at FDD, a think tank where we now have about 65 people. We cover everything from China, to Russia, to cyberattacks, to Iran, to Hezbollah, and to Hamas, so it’s full service. We earned a reputation some time ago for being Right-wing, which I fully disagree with. We are tough when it comes to matters of national security affairs. We were branded as Right-wing when we took a strong position against the Iran nuclear deal of 2015. We believed that it amounted to appeasement. Of course, not all of us think exactly the same way. But I would say the center of gravity was such that we believed that it was a terrible plan and giving money to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism was going to backfire. We took our lumps for having taken that position. We were obviously opposed to the White House at the time. We are opposed to this White House now in terms of its attempts to get back into an arrangement with the Iranians. We have emerged from all of this in a way where we feel very justified. When you look at what’s happened, October 7th was unfortunately the result of the regime getting money from the international community in the form of sanctions relief, cash, benefits and perks. That money found its way to the coffers of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Shiite militias that are attacking American forces in Iraq and Syria. This is what happens when you don’t think through the consequences of your financial actions. There is an attempt to cast all of this as, “We’re trying to prevent a standoff with the Iranians. We’re trying to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.” You may have done that temporarily, but in the meantime, look at all of these different terrorist groups that you have empowered with the cash that America has provided. This is unfortunate. Maybe some of it can still be undone, but it explains in large part where we are today. Mr. Jekielek: Lee Smith, who has been on this show, has made the case that the purpose of the Iran deal was the opposite of the stated purpose, and actually was to facilitate Iran getting the bomb. Iran is probably the largest financial sponsor of Hamas. Who are the other financial sponsors? You mentioned a few different players. Mr. Schanzer: Up until now, one of the most important revenue streams for Hamas was taxes that it derived from its own population of 2.2 million people in Gaza. That’s gone, so that’s good. That may have been a billion dollars or perhaps even more. It’s not as if they were settling up at Ernst & Young every year and declaring their budget. Mr. Jekielek: Why is that gone? Mr. Schanzer: Because the Israelis have removed Hamas from its base of power, so they’re no longer the sovereign in Gaza. They’re hanging on for dear life right now in southern Gaza. But in northern Gaza, they’ve been removed. In central Gaza, they’ve largely been removed. There are some battles that remain, but they don’t control much right now. They have lost control now that the IDF [Israel Defense Force] is operating in the Gaza Strip. They’ve lost a significant chunk of the territory that they controlled, and also the financial perks that come with being the government. Then from there, one of the patrons is Iran. When we talk about Iran’s patronage, we’re talking about not just the cash that has rolled in, but also the weapons and the training. This is a multi-billion-dollar effort over the course of several decades, but it’s not just Iran. The Qataris we mentioned are at roughly $200 million a year. The Turks are an important jurisdiction for Hamas support. The Turks have actually allowed for Hamas to establish a headquarters in Istanbul. There are isolated reports that have not really been verified, but we believe that there is money coming from that regime. In fact, there was a recent article in the New York Times suggesting that Turkey is the epicenter of the Hamas business portfolio, and of course, the Turkish banks are plugged into the US-led financial system. That means they are able to access American banks through the correspondent relationships that we have with them. That’s not good, because the Turks have some sort of protected status and they are NATO members. They’re treated as responsible members of the international community, so Hamas has been able to leverage that. They have a base of operations in Malaysia. In fact, the Israeli Mossad has assassinated a number of Hamas operatives that have been operating there. Kuwait is a jurisdiction of illicit finance concern as it relates to Hamas finance. It’s the wild west of the banking system in Kuwait. Finally, there’s one jurisdiction that we’re watching very carefully right now where some Hamas operatives are likely to flee, as the Israelis have been threatening to carry out a Munich Olympics-style assassination campaign against some of the Hamas leaders. There are now reports that the leaders are going to go to Algeria, and so that will be another jurisdiction that we need to watch as it relates to how Hamas moves its money around the world. But I suspect that might be a few weeks or even months from now as that transition takes place. Mr. Jekielek: In your article, you said the mask was off for Qatar. Why? What changed on October 7th for Qatar? Mr. Schanzer: The Qataris have been able to evade responsibility for the various terrorist groups that they’ve supported over the years. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, was based in Qatar after 9/11, and he lived there with some protection from what we can see now . The Qataris tipped him off when the United States drew close and he was able to escape. Of course, we captured him years later in Pakistan, but this was really a black mark for the Qatari regime. In the years after that, we’ve seen Hamas operating from there with total impunity. No one seemed to be interested in stopping this. The Muslim Brotherhood was active there during the Arab Spring, and some of these groups were in fact violent. There were groups like Al-Qaeda in Syria, formerly the Nusra Front, that were based in Doha, Qatar, as well. No one seemed to be terribly bothered by this. The Taliban had their embassy there, which was created by the Qataris with the idea that it would ultimately legitimize Taliban rule in Afghanistan as the U.S. took its lumps year after year and ultimately wanted to get out of Afghanistan. It was the Qataris that helped negotiate our surrender, if you will. When we had our embarrassing, botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was engineered by the Qataris, and we thanked them for it. This is a country that somehow has gotten away with supporting extremist groups and consistently weakening American and Western interests over time. My belief is that the October 7th attacks and the impossible situation where we find ourselves now, relying on Qatar, the sponsor of Hamas, to save these 240 Israelis from Hamas captivity, has made it very clear who we are dealing with. You can begin to see that the Qataris are sweating this. The ambassador came out with an article in the Wall Street Journal trying to justify Qatari policy. Qatari diplomats are traveling to New York and meeting with hedge fund investors, trying to explain why they’re not extremists and that they’re truly looking out for Western interests and trying to achieve stability. But no one is buying it. They continue to find themselves under fire, and so for that reason the mask has fallen off. I don’t believe the Qataris are able to pull this off any longer. But they are trying their best. We have reports right now that they’re sinking hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars into the PR firms that are trying to dig them out of this hole. But as they say, the rule of holes is that when you’re in a hole, stop digging. I do believe that the more the Qataris dig, the more guilty they look, and the more compromised they’re going to be here in the United States. Members of Congress are watching, and they do appear right now to want to hold the Qataris to account. Mr. Jekielek: There is a Congressional amendment essentially calling on Qatar to give up the Hamas leaders, correct? Mr. Schanzer: Yes. This is exactly what’s going to lead to the expulsion of these leaders, and right now we understand that Algeria may be their landing spot. This is very similar to what happened to the PLO in 1982. After the Israelis went in and waged war against the PLO, they were forced onto a ship and ultimately they went to Tunisia, Algeria’s next-door neighbor. The idea was that if you pushed them further away from the center of gravity in the Middle East and got them out of the region, they would be in exile. They will probably still exist in some shape or form, but one does get the sense that they will be a lot weaker when this episode is finished. Mr. Jekielek: Israel’s stated purpose is the destruction of Hamas. What does that actually mean? Mr. Schanzer: That’s a good question. It’s a fairly lofty war aim, I suppose. There are probably 30,000 fighters in Hamas’ military. The Israelis would like to capture or kill as many of those as possible, and they’re doing so. One gets a sense that there have been thousands of Hamas fighters that have been killed already. The Israelis have done an admirable job of uprooting the military infrastructure they have found in the Gaza Strip. We’re talking about the massive tunnel system, or what the Israelis refer to as the metro. There was one discovered just within the last few days. It was four kilometers long, wide enough to drive a car in, with electricity, oxygen, and sewage removal. It is an unbelievable infrastructure that they have built, all with the intended goal of fighting Israel. They want to do so by surprise, using these commando tunnels beneath the ground to move heavy equipment and move rockets. The Israelis, of course, are destroying a lot of those rockets. They’re capturing weapons and they’re capturing fighters. This is the short-term goal. Longer term is going to be harder because you can’t kill an idea. The idea of Hamas is extreme Islam and extreme Palestinian nationalism, mashed up together in a virulent form of anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and Jihadism that’s going to be a lot harder to defeat among the Palestinian population. As I mentioned, there will be an extraterritorial assassination campaign that will likely go on for several years. Anyone that had even the vaguest role in October 7th is likely to meet their maker, but I don’t suspect that Hamas will be gone by the end of this. It’s instructive to look at what we did here in the United States against Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They still exist, but they’re a shadow of themselves, and it was a military campaign that ultimately defeated them. You mentioned Lee Smith who wrote a book called, The Strong Horse. His book argues that those that project power are those that capture the imagination of the people of the Middle East. If Hamas ultimately ends up getting defeated soundly on the battlefield, it may come to pass that the people of the Gaza Strip and even the West Bank may give up on the group after having seen its weakness. Mr. Jekielek: There were a number of polls that were run. I don’t know how you run a poll in the Gaza Strip, but they all had a very high percentage of support, not just of Hamas, but also of what was done on October 7th. What kind of stock do you put into those polls? Mr. Schanzer: I don’t put a lot of stock in Palestinian polls. There were polls that were canvassing Gaza citizens before Hamas was removed from power by the Israeli military. But just imagine you’re living in a territory run by a brutal terrorist organization that does not allow for free speech and diversion of opinion. You get a call from a pollster saying, “Do you support Hamas?” The answer is always, “Yes, 100 percent, yes,” and then you hang up as quickly as possible. There was an election that the United States imposed upon the Palestinian people in 2006, part of the George W. Bush democracy agenda. The idea was that if the Palestinians would elect their leader, then the leader would be more legitimate. Then they could go about building a democracy and building a freer society. There were polls taken in the weeks and months leading up to the election, and the polls showed that the leading faction within the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah faction, was going to win. Except when the election took place, it was Hamas that won, which put us in the position that we are in today. Hamas refused to relinquish power and ultimately took over the Gaza Strip by force in a brutal civil war in 2007. Ever since then, it has been one war after another; 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now in 2023. We could actually blame Hamas’ entrenchment in the Gaza Strip on that election in 2006. Mr. Jekielek: Hamas then proceeded to eliminate the rival political party. Mr. Schanzer: Correct. It was a brutal civil war in Gaza. People were pushed off of tall buildings to a certain death. People were shot in the arms and legs to ensure permanent disability. But at the end of the day, the Palestinian Authority, the recognized government of the Palestinians, was run out of town, and Hamas took over completely. In the West Bank today, it’s still the case that the Palestinian Authority is clinging to power, while Hamas runs the Gaza Strip. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to Qatar. I’m specifically interested in the hundreds of millions of dollars heading into DC. How has Qatar managed to play both sides in the way that you have described? Mr. Schanzer: Money talks. It’s hard to ignore that money. The Qataris have bought the rights to the names of a number of American schools. They created something called Education City right outside of Doha, where they have Texas A&M, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, and Northwestern. They bought the brands of these universities to create satellite locations. They’ve sunk huge amounts of money into the university system here in the United States. They bought the World Cup through bribes, according to two British journalists who wrote a fascinating book called, The Ugly Game, where they make a very compelling case that Qatari illicit-financing purchased those games. Mr. Jekielek: To be fair, they also make the case that the soccer authorities indicated that it was for sale in the first place. Mr. Schanzer: That’s right. But this is what I mean—money talks. This money has been sloshing around in world capitals and in the halls of power for quite some time now. The Qataris have dozens of lobby firms, white shoe law firms, and PR firms on retainer. They sponsor the congressional baseball game every year. They kept the metro open when the Capitals were on their Stanley Cup run. The money is enormous. They bought a city block here called CityCenterDC for high-end retail. You can’t go for more than a few blocks here in this town without seeing some Qatari influence. It’s a regular thing. We can see that the Qataris are sponsoring lots of different things. They’ve got a lot of money to spend, and they do, and it buys them influence. They’ve got a lot of different actors conflicted out. But no investment has been more lucrative for the Qataris than the Al Udeid Air Base, that large air base that we have over there, which they built to our specifications. It is for us to use in perpetuity, and it gives them security, because no one will trifle with them when a U.S. military is there. But as they’ve built up this sense of security over time, they’ve also had all of these bad actors based there as well. Again, I do get a sense that this is now all boiling to a head, and that Americans are more aware of this as a result of October 7th. Mr. Jekielek: Why is the funding of the university so important in your mind? Mr. Schanzer: We place a lot of value in the top schools that we have in the United States. It’s one of the reasons why there was so much outrage over the way that some of the schools responded to the spike in pro-Hamas sentiment, or even antisemitic sentiment. Some of the presidents of these schools were brought before Congress to answer to the public. The Qataris seem to understand that working with these schools, investing in these schools, and using the brands of these schools, buys the Qataris some bonafides. It gives them a certain amount of additional respect, and it has helped build their brand. Mr. Jekielek: We’re talking about this hearing where the presidents of UPenn, Harvard, and MIT were before Congress saying astonishing and outrageous things. Representative Elise Stefanik: At MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Dr. Sally Kornbluth: If a targeted individual is not making public statements. Rep. Stefanik: Yes or no? Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? Dr. Kornbluth: I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus. Rep. Stefanik: But you’ve heard the chants for intifada. Dr. Kornbluth: I’ve heard chants which can be antisemitic, depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people. Rep. Stefanik: Those would not be according to MIT’s code of conduct or rules? Dr. Kornbluth: That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe. Rep. Stefanik: Ms. Magill, at UPenn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate UPenn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? Dr. Liz Magill: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes. Rep. Stefanik: I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment? Dr. Magill: If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment. Rep. Stefanik: So, the answer is yes. Dr. Magill: It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. Rep. Stefanik: It’s a context-dependent decision. That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context? That is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer, yes, Ms. Magill. Is your testimony that you will not answer yes? Dr. Magill: If the speech becomes- Rep. Stefanik: Yes or no. Dr. Magill: If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment, yes. Rep. Stefanik: Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide. The speech is not harassment. This is unacceptable, Ms. Magill, I’m going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Dr. Magill: It can be harassment. Rep. Stefanik: The answer is yes. Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Dr. Claudine Gay: It can be, depending on the context. Rep. Stefanik: What’s the context? Dr. Gay: Targeted as an individual, targeted at an individual. Rep. Stefanik: It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Dr. Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric- Rep. Stefanik: And is it antisemitic rhetoric- Dr. Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, and intimidation is actionable conduct and we do take action. Rep. Stefanik: So, the answer is yes. Calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct, correct? Dr. Gay: Again, it depends on the context. Rep. Stefanik: It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board. Mr. Jekielek: Woke, illiberal ideology has infected these schools, and these presidents are reflecting that in their statements. But you’re saying that there is also foreign funding possibly influencing their positions. Mr. Schanzer: Which I think is problematic, at the end of the day. These are American universities that should be serving the American people, raising up the next generation of American students who will one day be American leaders. It’s a problem when you’re looking at an authoritarian government of 300,000 people that is answering to no one. Their values are not our values. They don’t have freedom of religion. They don’t have freedom of speech. They are interested in buying raw power. If they’re doing that through our universities, there is a price that we might have to pay. Mr. Jekielek: Everything you said applies equally to communist China in terms of influence and of buying raw power. That’s at a whole different scale, correct? Mr. Schanzer: But it’s actually really similar. With the Confucius Institutes that have been established in schools across the country, I see very little difference between them and what the Qataris are doing. The Confucius Institutes have a role in picking the teachers that are being brought in and that are indoctrinating the students on the history of China. I don’t know if the Qataris have that kind of influence with the arrangements that they’ve made. But at the end of the day, we are talking about two illiberal systems of government that have somehow nestled into the heart of our education system. That should be troubling to anyone that has their eyes open. Mr. Jekielek: There is also this element of real estate investment. You mentioned CityCenterDC here in Washington. What is the significance of that? Mr. Schanzer: It means gaining a foothold in the city to include in their broader portfolio. They have Harrods department stores in London. They have soccer teams in Europe. We talked about the World Cup. One gets a sense that when you’ve got bottomless wealth, of course you’re going to spend it. But are you spending it for the exertion of influence? Are you spending it so that you can make additional money? What are the dividends? The Qataris are doing this, and it’s twofold. They’re looking at ways to gain influence in world capitals. There is a strategic logic to their investment. I wouldn’t have a problem with CityCenterDC if I didn’t see the congressional baseball game and the lobby firms and the white shoe law firms and the PR firms and everything else. It is part of a broader strategy, which I’m concerned about. It certainly looks like the U.S. government has given up on trying to change the behavior of the Qataris as it relates to sponsoring terrorist groups. We don’t even try to hold the Qataris to account. Look at the number of people who died under horrific conditions building the stadiums for the World Cup. They never paid a price for it. We have given the Qataris a sense of impunity. Mr. Jekielek: Some of the school textbooks in Qatar are rife with antisemitic content. I wonder if that makes its way into American textbooks. Mr. Schanzer: When discussing the Qataris, I’m often asked, “Why are they doing this? What is motivating this sparsely populated country? Why are they out there supporting Hamas and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and all these other bad actors?” They are a Wahhabi country, and we used to only associate that word with the Saudis. It’s interesting. The Saudis have actually undergone a significant process of reform. I’ve been to that country several times over the last several years, and I’m astounded by some of the changes that have happened. However, it’s still got a long way to go. You may recall the Saudis had a falling out with the other Gulf states and the Qataris back in 2017. They had essentially come to the conclusion that the Qatari were too radical even for the Gulf. The Kuwaitis and the Saudis and the Emiratis said, “We’ve had our problems in the past, but these guys, this is a bridge too far.” Their beef with the Qataris is that they are probably the number one proponent for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, for the uninitiated, is the cornerstone of every radical Islamist ideology that we’ve seen come out of the Middle East, whether it’s Hamas, Al-Qaeda, or ISIS. They’re all built from the same core principles embraced by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood back in 1928. Today, the Qataris remain the top proponent of the Brotherhood ideology. It’s not only the spread of textbooks. It’s the sermons at mosques, and it’s the Madrasas, the schools where people are taught Islamic texts and Islamic teachings. This is a broader problem. The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the largest, grassroots political and religious organizations in the Middle East. It is the cornerstone for just about every radical ideology that we have seen and faced over the last two decades since the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Jekielek: That is so different from everything we’ve been led to believe about the Qataris. Mr. Schanzer: Yes. This is a country working with investment bankers and buying Harrods and hosting the World Cup. You don’t think about them like some kind of Taliban-like regime, because they’re not. They’re far more genteel and sophisticated. They’re taught in British and American schools, but yet they’re promoting an ideology that seeks to undermine the Western-led world order. That’s so bizarre about our air base. We’re on the edge of the world trying to defend American values with a military base in a country that is actually trying to erode them, while we are still living by the rules that we created. It’s a truly bizarre thing to watch. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the Saudis, and I remember the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Early on, we didn’t hear that Khashoggi may have been a Qatari agent. But I’m not in any way justifying what the Saudis did to him. Mr. Schanzer: No, it was not justifiable, obviously. Mr. Jekielek: There is a dimension to the story that may have been missing. Are you familiar with this? Mr. Schanzer: I’m familiar with it. There are organizations that to this day are dedicated to the promotion of Khashoggi’s legacy or his memory that appear to be funded by the Qataris. Al Jazeera, which is the flagship television station owned by the Qataris, continues to make this a huge issue. The Qataris and the Saudis have had this long standing grudge match. They’re in competition with one another. The Emiratis and the Qataris are also in a lot of competition. But yes, Khashoggi was believed to have been associated with the Qataris in some way, and that may have put him on the hit list. Of course, this does not justify anything that the Saudis did, but it’s part of that tension that has existed in the Gulf for some time. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about Al Jazeera. Is it really Qatari state media? Mr. Schanzer: Yes, the Qataris say they don’t control it, but they own the controlling stake and they created it. They’ve tried to distance themselves from it, primarily because it’s just so fiercely anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Saudi, and anti-liberal. The Qataris have come under fire for being the patron. Mr. Jekielek: This is the Arabic language channel, correct? Mr. Schanzer: It’s in Arabic, but they also have something called AJ+, which is their youth channel. That was identified by the Department of Justice several years ago as an entity that needed to register as a foreign agent for the Qataris. The Qataris have refused. There are people who to this day still say that Al Jazeera, the flagship channel, also needs to be registered here. You can look at the role that Al Jazeera played during the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war. I remember talking to officials from the Bush administration and they were apoplectic over the influence of Al Jazeera and how it was radicalizing the Arab world against the United States. From a PR perspective, they were stacking the deck against the U.S. The same thing happened in Afghanistan. Actually, the thing that is so troubling about the role of Al Jazeera during both of those wars is somehow the Al Jazeera reporters always seemed to know when American troops were about to be attacked. They had their cameras ready when the attacks would take place. It was amazing. When bin Laden was in hiding and wanted to release new statements to the world they were aired on Al Jazeera. When wars break out between Hamas and Israel, Hamas gets a great amount of access. Of course, they have two dozen senior operatives that are based in Qatar, so they just need to walk down the street to the studio. You get a sense of how cozy the Qataris have been with a range of nasty actors and how that plays out on Al Jazeera’s programming. Mr. Jekielek: What about post-October 7th? Mr. Schanzer: It has been vitriolic. I try to track the Israeli media and the Arabic media. In my view, the stuff that I see on Al Jazeera is really Hamas TV. You can’t really distinguish it from what Hamas would air if it had full control over the station. It would be almost one and the same. Mr. Jekielek: That is astonishing. Mr. Schanzer: Not really. Not when you are the patron of Hamas and you’ve been giving them $200 million a year and you’re allowing them to operate on your soil, is it really a shock that the television station would embrace the same ideologies? It is not surprising to me. Maybe I’ve been watching this for too long. But yes, that’s what Al Jazeera does. That’s their role. Mr. Jekielek: I’m mainly familiar with Al Jazeera English, which doesn’t seem to be that way. Mr. Schanzer: It’s not as vitriolic, but it certainly leans a certain way. What’s interesting though is that the Qataris and the Al Jazeera executives will say, “Look, we allow Israelis to come on.” There was a time when people said, “At least they are giving Israelis a voice.” But I would say it’s a small percentage of the voices that come on. Most of them are pro-Hamas, pro-violence against Israel, seeking the destruction of Israel, and looking to change the map. Mr. Jekielek: You’re seeing a shift in the perception of Qatar, in terms of this proposed Congressional amendment. Please tell us more about that in terms of actual policy changes. What is happening and what do you think should happen? Mr. Schanzer: The fact that we’re talking about Qatar right now is a testament to the awakening that is happening in Washington. For a long time, people were aware of the money that was sloshing around. They were aware of the influence, but there was not a lot said about it, and certainly not a lot done about it. Who is going to look at Qatar, other than terror-finance watchers that are concerned about their influence. That is a very small percentage of Washington. But yes, it feels like a different discussion right now, and I hope it doesn’t go away. I’m not saying that it’s going to end perfectly. This will probably not be some kind of John Grisham ending where the Qataris are designated as state sponsors of terrorism, and we pull out our air base and we put them into exile. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I do think that the contract can and should be revised. If we’re going to have our air base there, we need to have the terrorist groups out. If they’re going to sponsor Hamas, then they should be identified as a Hamas sponsor by the State Department. We continued to look the other way and turn a blind eye. But now, Congress is looking into this, the media is looking into this, and think tanks are writing about it. By the way, with all the influence that the Qataris have bought, they have also funded think tanks here in town, which stopped just a few years ago. Maybe this shift was caused by the World Cup. They may have gone too big there and put themselves front and center in ways that maybe a country that small shouldn’t have. With the kind of vulnerabilities they have, maybe it wasn’t their smartest move. They stuck their necks out a little too far. But at any rate, you see a conversation happening now that wasn’t happening before. That is very healthy for Washington right now, especially as we look to counter foreign finance and foreign information operations. That is a Chinese Communist Party issue, but it is increasingly a Qatari issue as well. Mr. Jekielek: Jonathan Schanzer, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Schanzer: Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jonathan Schanzer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (48 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0130JonathanSchanzer Epoch Original DVD collection:

The United Nations is being accused of helping facilitate mass illegal immigration into the United States. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, which gets money through the U.S. government, is playing a key role in assisting people looking to use the amnesty system to gain entry to the United States, and is working through numerous NGOs as part of these operations. In this live Q&A with “Crossroads” host Joshua Philipp, we’ll discuss this topic and others and answer questions from the audience. 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/49iFZfi Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was hit with more bad news a few days ago after articles of impeachment against her were officially filed in the Georgia State Legislature. Last Friday, House Resolution 872 was submitted to the Georgia General Assembly by state Rep. Charlice Byrd. This resolution accuses Ms. Willis of using her office not to pursue justice, but rather for political gain. The resolution has 22 specific articles of impeachment, with each one of them being an alleged violation of Georgia Code 16-10-1, which states that “any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.” Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

The federal government under the leadership of the Biden administration has allowed for the release of a staggering 6.2 million illegal immigrants into this country over the past three years, with no end in sight. If these illegal immigrants were to form their own state, it would be the 18th largest state in the nation. One of the most shocking things about this crisis is the level to which it’s being facilitated by the federal government’s border patrol. Seeing this state of affairs, Texas has taken matters into its own hands. Its initiative is known as Operation Lone Star, which is a $2-billion-a-year program for the state to secure its 1,200-mile border with Mexico. They’ve set up buoys on the river, allowed local judges to order the deportation of illegal immigrants, deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the border itself, and more recently, blocked federal agents from being able to access the actual illegal immigrants themselves. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

Seeing the massive wave of illegal immigrants flooding into the United States, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been making attempts to mitigate the situation. A month ago, he signed into law a new border security bill that gave Texas state law enforcement very broad authority, such as the ability to arrest migrants who enter Texas illegally. It also allowed local judges to order the deportation of these illegal immigrants out of the country. Since then, Texas has taken many steps to try to stop the influx, including setting up razor wire on the border with Mexico that has since proven to be very effective. However, the Biden administration had its federal officers begin to cut the barbed wire in order to get to the migrants and process them into the country. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

“Empathy, kindness, understanding: Yeah, these are all things that everyone agrees with. But what’s really going on? Lies, deception, and physical child abuse.” Chris Elston was living a normal life as the father of two girls in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, when he became aware of what he calls the “greatest child abuse scandal in modern medicine history.” “And the only thing I could do was to have some signs made and go outside,” he says. Over the last few years, Billboard Chris, as he’s commonly known, has had conversations about gender ideology with tens of thousands of people on the streets of cities across North America. He’s also been assaulted by gender activists close to 40 times—including one case in which his arm was broken. “The actual cure, historically, for gender dysphoria, is puberty itself,” says Mr. Elston. “These puberty blockers, combined with the cross sex hormones, are sterilizing children. They’re sterilizing thousands of autistic kids. And we’re supposed to be the bigots who are speaking out against this? It’s total madness.” Watch the clip: We discuss the taboos and developments around gender and what Mr. Elston has gleaned about this topic from his conversations with ordinary people on the street. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (46 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0127ChrisElston FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Chris Elston, or Billboard Chris, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Chris Elston: The pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Your billboard says, “Children are never born in the wrong body.” It’s such a simple idea and such a conversation starter. Please tell us about that. Mr. Elston: I also have, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers,” which I wear most of the time as well. Our kids are being taught that they might have been born in the wrong body. I’ve recently altered my message a little bit. I’ve dropped the wrong body part, because sometimes when you say that children are never born in the wrong body, people get confused a little bit. They need to think about it too much, so I’ve shortened it to just, “Children are never born wrong”, because people can understand that right away. What are we doing teaching children that they need to be something they are not? Because at the very core of gender ideology, that is exactly what is being taught to our kids. This is almost like a quasi-religious movement, where they are led to believe they have a gendered soul, that somewhere on the inside they have this gender identity that doesn’t match their biological sex. It is complete nonsense. The whole theory of gender identity is nonsense. Gender identity is just a personality. I have this expression, “There are two sexes, zero genders, and infinite personalities,” because that sums up everyone. We would all be better off as a society if we just got rid of this word gender altogether. Mr. Jekielek: Where did you get the idea to wear a billboard? Mr. Elston: I started learning about what I consider to be the greatest child abuse scandal in modern medicine history—this business of giving kids puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to modify their body to appear more like the opposite sex in 2019. I came across this term puberty blockers and started reading about it. Of course, these drugs are doing exactly what they say. They are blocking puberty in children. I’m a dad of two girls. At that time, they were 7 and 9-years-old. Now they are 11 and 14-years-old. I started researching this, and all throughout 2020, I was reading about all of this stuff every night . The more you read, the worse it gets. In July of 2020, a woman in the UK named Posie Parker put up a very controversial sign at the Edinburgh train station that said, “I heart J.K. Rowling.” I love J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author. J.K. Rowling has spoken out against the assault on women’s rights and this child abuse as well. That sign only lasted a day because some people on Twitter complained that it was hate speech, and the government-run train authority took it down. I’m a dad of girls. I’m not sending them into a crazy world that doesn’t even know what a woman is or that is trying to change the sex of children. I was tired of people not being able to speak about this. When kids are being harmed, we should be having a lot of conversations. Instead, nobody was talking about it. They were afraid of getting fired from their jobs. My whole objective has been to start conversations. I followed her lead and I put up an actual billboard in Vancouver, Canada, that said, “I love J.K. Rowling.” That lasted only one day as well, because a Vancouver politician said it was hate speech. She pressured the sign company and they took it down. I was prepared for this. That night, I leveraged all the outrage online into a quick little fundraising campaign. A week later, I had the same billboard up in San Francisco, Portland, LA, all throughout Utah, here in DC all throughout the metro, and in Times Square. That was my September of 2020. But in Canada, where I’m from, no sign companies would work with me. I’m nobody. I’m just a normal dad living out in the suburbs who was living a normal life prior to this. The only thing I could then do was to have some signs made up and go outside. I wear them just because it’s easier than holding them all day. I know I look ridiculous, but I wear a blazer to try to offset that a little and look more professional. I just have conversations. Because as I said, we have to talk about this. I knew that if I kept going and took all the abuse and the assaults and all that stuff that happens, that this would grow into something. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying you’re this mild-mannered, unassuming, suburbanite dad. But suddenly you’re doing this thing. It was a big shift, correct? Mr. Elston: Yes. I had never been to a protest in my life before this, so I’m not some activist guy. But like all parents, the most important thing in my life is my kids, and all these children are coming to harm. There’s a funny thing about this. The parents of these kids cannot speak up because they’re going to alienate their own child if they do, and they’re also at risk from the authorities in many jurisdictions, depending where you live. But in Canada now, all the MPs voted unanimously to call it conversion therapy to help your child feel comfortable with their sex. It’s okay to convince your little girl she’s a boy and that she needs to become a sterilized, anorgasmic, lifelong pharmaceutical patient. But it’s not okay to object to that and help her feel comfortable as a girl. This is now considered conversion therapy and you can go to jail for five years for opposing it. Mr. Jekielek: Let me get this straight. All federal MPs in Canada voted unanimously on this? Mr. Elston: That’s right. Mr. Jekielek: Has anyone shifted their position since then? Mr. Elston: Sorry, no. Mr. Jekielek: Your work and many other people’s work has actually shifted the conversation somewhat since that time. A lot of this stuff works through obfuscation and through changing language. You think that you’re supporting something, but you don’t realize what you’re supporting in many cases, correct? Mr. Elston: Right. If we were to give these members of parliament the benefit of the doubt, we could say they didn’t realize what they were supporting. But I know that they did, because in the history of Canadian politics, this bill received more briefs than any other bill. There was a ton of debate. There were hearings held for the first bill. In 2021, there was a bill called Bill C-6, and this was the same bill that ended up passing. But this bill at the time did not pass unanimously through the House. 62 conservatives voted against it, and about 50 voted for it, including the current leader, Pierre Poilievre. This bill also didn’t pass the Senate before the election was called. When an election is called, all bills die. Trudeau won again, and this bill came back. This time, they just pushed the same bill through unanimously. Mr. Jekielek: What is the substance of it? Mr. Elston: It is called conversion therapy to help your so-called transgender child become cisgender. Now, these are made up terms, as far as I’m concerned. There’s no such thing as a transgender child. They’re called girls and boys. If a girl is a tomboy or if a boy is more effeminate, that’s okay. That’s the positive message we should be sending, that they’re beautiful just as they are. No drugs or scalpels are needed. But in this society, if a girl now says she’s a boy, we are just supposed to take this 12-year-old child at her word. The trend is to have no therapy and no counseling, because to even suggest counseling would be to invalidate the child’s gender identity. It would suggest there’s something wrong with a girl saying she’s a boy. Why would they need counseling for that? This is the theory of the radical Left. It’s a one-way street. It’s okay to say you’re trans. But it’s not okay to object to harming your child with these experimental drugs and surgeries. It’s not okay to help them feel comfortable with their sex. Yes, this is now a criminal offense. Good luck prosecuting it. They haven’t prosecuted anybody, and I don’t anticipate them trying that anytime soon.The real purpose of this bill is just to scare people. It is to silence people, and it works. It has silenced the whole therapeutic profession. Most counselors won’t even talk to these kids anymore. I get parents contacting me saying, “Chris, I can’t find a counselor in British Columbia or even from the United States.” I received an email from a mom recently. In the entire state of Washington, she couldn’t find a counselor, so she came to me looking for help. I know about three people across Canada who will talk to these kids, and we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of kids in North America who have now been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Mr. Jekielek: It’s one thing to have a strong idea, but it’s another thing to back it with money, which clearly you did. You’re putting up big billboards and that doesn’t come cheaply. People might think there’s some kind of dark money funding this. How does this work? Mr. Elston: I’m getting by these days. People donate through my website, 30 bucks or 50 bucks at a time. That’s literally how I’m getting by. I did run up some debt for quite a while. I was running up my credit cards and then working to pay them off. Mr. Jekielek: Because it was that important to you. Mr. Elston: Yes, I don’t care about money. Obviously, we have to take care of ourselves and I need to take care of my kids, but money has never been the driver. There’s always been this deeper part of me that is concerned about the world we live in, so that still remains. I’ve had some unique experiences in my life. I’ve had some bad luck and I’ve had a lot of suffering, so that gives me a different perspective on life. I didn’t care about all the abuse that I knew was going to come my way because I know who I am. My wife and kids know who I am, and that’s all that matters, honestly. Anyone else can say whatever they want. These hit pieces that get written about me, sometimes I retweet them myself. I don’t care. It’s just for fun and to show them that it doesn’t bother me, because that’s what they’re trying to do. Mr. Jekielek: What about your daughters and your wife? How are they? I am trying to imagine what that looks like. Mr. Elston: Throughout 2020, before I took this leap, every night I would be reading about this. My wife would be marking homework or her kids’ tests because she’s a teacher. She knew I was passionate about this. I don’t think anyone understood how far I was willing to go to put a stop to this. I had a vision for how to do this, and it’s not complicated. We just need to talk about it, because we have the truth on our side. This is so crazy and can’t possibly last in any society. Because when you come between parents and their children, and when you teach kids that they’re born wrong and they need to be something they are not, that is not sustainable. It’s always simply been a matter of how long it takes to put a stop to this child abuse. It’s just a question of how many kids are harmed before we stop this. I’ve been more optimistic than pretty much everyone I’ve met, because I also have the advantage of talking to tens of thousands of people on the street. I’ve known from day one that there is overwhelming support for this message from all of us that are on the side of common sense and know that children are never born in the wrong body, that they are beautiful just as they are, and that we shouldn’t be keeping secrets from parents when a kid at school adopts a transgender identity. Because that is the policy across pretty much every school board in Canada and many states in the U.S. as well—to hide from parents that their own child has a new name and pronouns. These are psychological interventions that unqualified 22-year-old teachers are subjecting children to. The NHS [National Health Service] in the UK conducted a systematic review of all of the evidence for this. Part of what they said was, “Pronouns are not a benign intervention.” This is harmful. This is psychologically abusive. You’ve got a struggling child, but universally, that child has something else going on. There is autism. At Tavistock, the biggest gender clinic in the world in the UK, from their own statistics from 1,038 children, 35 percent had moderate to severe autism. These are the milder cases. There are kids who’ve been sexually abused, probably in more than half the cases. I was speaking with Dr. Quentin Van Meter yesterday. He’s a pediatrician and he deals with these kids. He told me it’s probably about 60 percent. There’s trauma, there’s abuse, there’s eating disorders, and there’s borderline personality disorder. The kids in state care are way overrepresented. In British Columbia, there’s a psychologist who works for the Ministry of Children and Family Development named Wallace Wong. He gave a talk at the Vancouver Library a few years ago where he said he is transitioning more than 1,000 kids, including more than 500 in the foster system. That is 8 percent of all children in state care who are now being socially or psychologically transitioned by this one doctor. He then sends them to the BC Children’s Hospital, who will give them puberty blockers. Mr. Jekielek: These are kids that need help and are crying out for help. It took me a while to grasp the magnitude of the harm. The way this “gender-affirming care model” works is that you push aside other issues and you just affirm, affirm, affirm. In other words, you don’t help them with what they really need. It’s difficult for people to fathom that this could be real, and that thousands of kids and young adults have been put through this process. Mr. Elston: It is difficult to fathom. That’s one of the reasons it grew so fast, because people don’t believe it when they first hear it. Without evidence, who’s going to believe that doctors are cutting off the breasts of 12-year-old girls, because these girls want to be boys? This is happening in the greatest nation on earth that’s ever existed. Their own statistics show this. There’s a young girl named Layla Jane who is suing right now. She was 13-years-old and in the eighth grade when they cut off her breasts. She’s got autism. She had trauma. She’s just a young kid. Mr. Jekielek: This reminds me of your sign, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.” Mr. Elston: That’s right. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] writes what are called the standards of care that these gender clinics can follow. They are just guidelines. Marci Bowers, the former interim president of WPATH, this man who says he’s a woman, admitted on a Zoom call that none of the boys who started on puberty blockers at Tanner Stage 2, the beginning of puberty at 10, 11 12-years-old, none of these boys that are now adults have been able to have an orgasm. Marci Bowers: Every single child or adolescent who was truly blocked at Tanner Stage 2 has never experienced orgasm. It’s really about zero. Mr. Elston: Please tell me, what 10 or 11-year-old boy who can’t even conceive of the concept can possibly consent to throwing away their adult sexual function? Of course, they can’t. What child struggling with mental health comorbidities and an abusive home life can consent to sterilizing themselves? These puberty blockers, combined with the cross-sex hormones, are sterilizing children. They are sterilizing thousands of autistic kids, and we’re supposed to be the bigots who are speaking out against this? It’s total madness. We just have to stop caring what unintelligent, ill-informed people say about us. Do you want to look back at your life in 40 years and say, “I knew about all this child abuse and did nothing”? I don’t, and that’s how I viewed this. I wasn’t going to look back at my life and say, “I did nothing”, because I know that I can do something. I know that I can do something, so I talk to parents. I could be sitting across the table at Tim Horton’s from some big brawny dad and he’s bawling his eyes out, because he’s losing his girl to this madness. He can’t speak up and the authorities are against him, so someone has to represent him. A lot of the doctors won’t speak up either because they’re worried about losing their license. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about street conversations. Have you counted how many interactions you’ve had on the street? It’s hundreds for sure, and probably thousands. Mr. Elston: Tens of thousands. Mr. Jekielek: What’s it like out there on the streets with your sign? Mr. Elston: It depends where I go, but it’s overwhelmingly supportive. Some people don’t know about this at all, so they'll come up and say, “What are puberty blockers?” I might have a 30-second conversation because it doesn’t take long to explain it. I say, “Kids who think they’re trans are being given a drug that stops their bodies from going into puberty.” The common reaction right away is, “What?” They don’t believe it. Today though, because there has been so much work on awareness, most people have heard about this now. In the beginning, it was almost nobody. Now I get support nonstop. People give me high-fives, fist bumps, honk their horns, and just come up to thank me because they’ve seen me in a video. The far-Left that is pushing this is losing. They’ve got a lot of money on their side and a lot of organizations pushing this; governments, the UN, and the WHO. But we’ve got truth on our side and the truth spreads for free. It’s unstoppable. Once people learn this truth, they never forget it, because they’re doing this to kids and their own kids are in danger. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve seen some of the videos and not everybody is fist bumping with you. Mr. Elston: That’s right. It depends where I go. At universities, of course, there are going to be more indoctrinated young people. When you’re in a city, there’s hundreds of thousands of people. You’re going to run into some angry, violent people, and that happens from time to time too. I’ve got strategies for dealing with the people who are immediately angry. I have been assaulted close to 40 times by violent people and I just take it, because that’s far more powerful than reacting with anger. When you can just be peaceful and calm in the face of violence, that’s an extraordinarily powerful visual. I don’t want to be fighting in the street. That’s a terrible look, so I just take the abuse. The people who would come at me that way have learned that it doesn’t work with me, so they have stopped trying. Mr. Jekielek: But there’s a third category, and you’ve documented this quite well. It is people who start out quite belligerent, but end up being friendly. Mr. Elston: Yes, that has happened a lot, probably a few hundred times. There was a black gay man at the University of Pennsylvania who rode by on his bike swearing at me. Sometimes with the men, I'll challenge them a little to come back. To this man’s credit, he did come back. I said, “Come have a conversation. Why are you yelling?” He came back, and we talked for 80 minutes outside the university. At first, he was extremely agitated and his face was twitching. Sometimes people are shaking because they get an adrenaline rush. With people who disagree with me or think they disagree with me, I will say things that I know they cannot possibly disagree with. For example, I will say, “There’s no right way to be a girl or a boy. Our kids are beautiful just as they are. If a girl is a tomboy, if a boy is more effeminate, fine. We shouldn’t put kids in stereotypical boxes.” No one can object to that. The Left thinks they don’t like stereotypes. They will all agree with that message. But they have this blind spot. They don’t see they are pushing stereotypes to such a degree that if a girl is more masculine they must be trans. I give speeches where I ask the women in the audience, “Who here was a tomboy growing up?” It’s always more than half of the audience. I will ask them, “Who among the women here enjoyed going through puberty?” Not one arm has gone up in the air yet, because it’s a tough time in life and they just have to get through it. Their bodies are changing. They’re getting sexualized by men and all this other stuff, but we just have to let them grow up. This is the first time in history we have ever dealt with a movement like this. We’ve been around on this planet for maybe 200,000 years as a species. Kids weren’t killing themselves because they were going through puberty. The only thing that the Left ever says is that kids will commit suicide if we don’t transition them. That is their only argument. Mr. Jekielek: Traditionally, puberty has been an important part of the development process. In fact, it was something that was enshrined and something to be proud of as you transitioned from child to adult. This gender ideology is the opposite of that when they say that puberty should not happen. Mr. Elston: Right. The theory among these ideologues is that it would be too traumatic for a girl to start looking like a woman or for a boy to look like a man, because that can’t be undone. The theory is to block puberty to keep them looking neutral, then give them the opposite sex hormones. The sales pitch is, “Puberty blockers just buy them time to explore their gender identity. That is nonsense. In 98 percent of the cases, when kids go on puberty blockers, they then progress to the cross-sex hormones. Because they’re not just signing up for puberty blockers. They’re signing up for the whole thing; the blockers, the cross-sex hormones, and the surgeries. They bought into this idea that they were born wrong and they need to look like the opposite sex to find true happiness. Right now they’re depressed and miserable because of whatever is going on in their life. They’re being sold this lie that it’s because they’re born wrong. Historically, the actual cure for gender dysphoria is puberty itself. Let’s look back before they ever gave kids puberty blockers. You can look at all the academic studies going back decades. The most recent one followed 139 boys from a very young age into their 20s, and 87 percent of them just grew out of it when they went through puberty, and 63 percent grew up to be gay. Today, these same kids would all get puberty blockers, which would actually block the cure. This is totally insane. Mr. Jekielek: There is a video of a gay man coming up to you and saying, “I was an effeminate kid. I probably would’ve been transitioned.” Speaker 1: I’m gay. When I was young, I was a feminine gay kid. If I was a gay feminine kid today, they would have taken my manhood. They would have taken my manhood. Mr. Elston: These kids who would grow up to be gay today are being taught that just because they’re effeminate little boys, they must be trans. Speaker 1: This is also about the erasing of gay men and lesbians. Mr. Elston: Yes, that was in Vancouver. I was actually with a film crew from The Telegraph newspaper in the UK. There were a couple gay men who had walked by who were berating me. Then two other gay men happened to come by and they started arguing with these other gentlemen. Speaker 2: Okay, I’m gay. I just wanted you to know I’ve known. Once I came out, I realized that I’ve always liked guys. Speaker 3: He’s not saying there’s anything wrong with you. Mr. Elston: Okay. Can I have a conversation with you for a sec? Speaker 3: You have to read the sign. You cannot read it? Speaker 5: I can’t read it. Speaker 3: It doesn’t say anything. Mr. Elston: Okay, let’s just slow down for a minute. Can I have a conversation with you for a sec? Speaker 2: No, because I have a doctor’s appointment. I have to go. Mr. Elston: I support the gay community 100 percent. Speaker 4: No, you don’t. You don’t support them. Mr. Elston: We shouldn’t be giving... Speaker 4: I’m gay. Speaker 5: You don’t support them. Speaker 3: I’m gay and I support this. Speaker 5: Okay, you are gay. Speaker 3: It says gender ideology on the back. Speaker 4: I don’t support child abuse. Mr. Elston: That’s a powerful video because it shows that the gay community is not a monolith. They’re just people and people all have different opinions. It’s really powerful because it’s some of these kids that would grow up to be gay who are being harmed. What is the deal here? Is this kid gay or are they trans? I actually never attach sexuality to children at all. We shouldn’t do that. It’s creepy. They’re not gay. They’re not straight. They are just kids. But historically, a lot of them do grow up to be gay. What the Left has been successful in doing is conflating gay rights with trans rights, and they’ve made this into a civil rights movement. Around 2010, all these organizations won the gay rights that they had been campaigning for. These TQ organizations, and I don’t call them LGBTQ, they’re just TQ organizations now, they don’t just shut the doors and say, “We achieved our objectives.” They have to keep donations flowing. They have to keep the doors open and everyone employed, so they changed their objectives to trans rights. These five letters combined, LGBTQ, strike fear in the hearts of men. It stops people from talking. Mr. Jekielek: The Human Rights Campaign has an entire rating system, where if you get rated low on the scale, there can be negative consequences. Some organizations say, “We stand for all LGBTQ.” They say that their organization actually represents this entire, incredibly diverse group. Mr. Elston: Yes, it makes no sense. It’s actually not even a group. It’s honestly just a tactic to silence people. The 2S in Canada, they always go 2S first, meaning two-spirit, apparently it’s a term for trans indigenous people. But this was made up in the 1990s by white people in academia, to be honest with you. But now it’s 2S LGBTQIA+, so they’re lumping asexual people in. They’re lumping people with disorders in their sexual development and medical conditions into this. It’s just this huge identity group. We need to get away from all this identitarianism and just get back to our individual identities as human beings, because we’re all different. This is just a means of causing division in society and silencing people. We have to get back to our roots. Mr. Jekielek: Another clip that you filmed involved an Antifa guy being surprised that not everyone was on his side. Do you know what I’m talking about? Mr. Elston: Yes. I was in London recently for a conference. This large pro-Palestine rally was going on, so I just went out on the streets of London with my signs on. I ran into a couple people I knew. This Antifa guy from America or Canada swore at me and yelled at me. For me, that’s an invitation for a conversation. I struck up a conversation and did my usual thing. I started asking him some questions. The other thing you need to do with these aggressive people is to ask them to define what they believe in, “What does it mean for a girl to be a boy?” Then just take a pause. This man was getting flustered. Three Muslim girls came along, probably 17 to 18-years-old, to see what the hullabaloo was all about. He turned to them for support and said, “This guy thinks kids can’t be trans.” Instantly they said, “They can’t.” They started berating him for about a minute and then he ran off. This was a beautiful moment of intersectionality where he’s there and all these far-Left people are supporting these protests. He automatically thinks that they’re going to support him, but nothing could be further from the truth. That is where these worlds collide. You have these people out there with their signs, “Queers for Palestine.” Go to Palestine and see what happens. You’re going to be literally thrown off a roof because it’s illegal to be gay in these countries. They’re not progressive at all. But these so-called progressives in the West are trying to lump themselves into these causes. They’re stuck in this mindset that they are oppressed and that there are oppressors out there. These cis, heteronormative white guys like me are at the top of the oppression pyramid, and everyone else is terribly oppressed. It’s neo-Marxism. Communism has been rebranded these days as equity, which means equality of outcome. That is not what we’re about in the West. We’re about equality of opportunity where anyone who works hard and works smart can achieve something for themselves. Communism went all throughout the East and South America and Asia, but it never really grabbed hold in the West. It has now been rebranded. The same people who argue with me on the streets about gender ideology are the same people pushing all these other causes as well, and they just see me as an oppressor. Mr. Jekielek: But you don’t think of yourself that way. Mr. Elston: No. Advocating for the long-term health of children and letting them grow up and telling them that they’re great just as they are, I don’t believe that to be oppressive. Mr. Jekielek: In this gender ideology everything is completely turned on its head. That is so obvious, but maybe not as obvious in the other areas you are describing. Mr. Elston: Even with these conversations, it takes a few minutes just to get to the very basics. To have a thorough conversation about what is happening easily takes an hour. We could talk for hours. Take the sports issue, for example. You’ve got Lia Thomas literally lapping women in the swimming pool, but when he was in the male division, he was ranked around 500. Everyone sees that and they know instantly that it’s wrong. They get that right away, but even still, people are afraid to speak up. With this conversation about child transition, it takes a bit more time to educate the population. Over time, when enough people get educated, and it probably only takes 2, 3, 4% of the population to get up to speed on this, we become an unstoppable force. I think we’re already at that point. I have a financial background and I used to be an investment advisor. Even before I started, I viewed this as compounding interest. You start with a dollar and then you double it to $2, then $4, and then $8. Pretty soon you’re at $1 million. It’s the same with this. It’s like a snowball rolling downhill. When I started, there were probably five people on Twitter talking about this who reached any significant number of people. There was almost no one. Now, this is the number one cultural issue of the day on conservative media and podcasts all day long. Even the Leftist publications are starting to tell the truth. The New York Times has and Reuters has. Even the Washington Post has covered some stories of detransitioners. My focus from day one has been to tell the stories of these detransitioners. They are the ones who need to be heard and they cannot be denied. They were the 13-years-olds that were harmed for life. They can’t ever have kids. What is the Left going to do to deny their lived experience? They can’t do it, so these stories need to be told. We are winning spectacularly. Not even two years ago, I was at The Heritage Foundation for a conference with about 35 people from across the country who were fighting this. I was the most optimistic person there because I have a unique experience out on the streets. I knew this wasn’t going to take 10 years. Just a year-and-a-half later, we’ve got 22 states who have passed legislation to stop this. There were two main things that happened in 2022. A lot of people woke up after seeing Matt Walsh’s film, “What Is a Woman? He doesn’t even offer an opinion during the entire movie. He simply asks that question of the so-called experts at universities and they can’t answer it. A lot of people finally understood there is absolutely no foundation to this ideology. There is no truth underpinning it. Then these Boston Children’s Hospital videos that I tweeted out later in 2022 went viral. The first one was about how they performed gender-affirming hysterectomies at the children’s hospital where they will cut out the uterus. Sometimes they will cut out the ovaries as well. Now, these girls can never produce estrogen for the rest of their lives. They are now a lifetime pharmaceutical patient no matter what. Mr. Jekielek: No one could believe this was real. But also people would testify and perjure themselves by saying, “These things don’t happen.” Mr. Elston: Yes. That video took off and I thought I had better record it because it came from their own YouTube channel. I recorded it and that same night they deleted it, so I tweeted it out again. I recorded 40 more videos. Then they deleted all of them from their website. But that woke up a lot of people, and it started a cascading effect of conservatives looking into other gender clinics. It has completely changed the conversation. These legislators down the street here at the U.S. Capitol didn’t want to touch this. I was meeting with some of them, with people from The Heritage Foundation, and with a couple of other people. They were comfortable with the sports issue, but not with child transition, just because they didn’t understand it. It has been a process of education. When people get educated on this, it lights a fire inside of them, and you can’t put out that fire. They’re just going to learn more, and that fire is going to grow brighter and stronger. As I said, it’s simply a matter of how many children are harmed before we can put a stop to this. Mr. Jekielek: You have obviously attracted a lot of attention in the process, which is indeed part of your plan. But what about your family? Has anyone tried to interfere with your family? Mr. Elston: Yes. Right away people doxxed my wife at her workplace. She’s a teacher for grades four or five. Some trans activists, some men identifying as women to be exact, posted online what school she taught at, what class she taught at, and the phone number to call the principal. There’s also a parent at that school that tried to get my wife fired just because of what I say. But I’m an autonomous individual. I’m allowed to have a separate opinion from my wife. She doesn’t talk in public about this, so there’s nothing they can do. They could try, and I would be happy to sue anyone who does try. When people bully you or bully your wife, how do you deal with bullies? You push back. I personally am just not going to take it. If you come after my wife, that’s a completely different deal than coming after me. With this one man who tried to get her fired, I did what men should do. We’re going to have a conversation about it. I found out where he worked, and I drove to his place of employment, which turned out to be his apartment building. Now, I know the line that I shouldn’t cross. I’m not going to bother someone at home, so I didn’t do that. However, I did write that I had gone to visit this person, and unfortunately, it was their home. I wrote that publicly. His name is Nicholas Burling. He then contacted the police, who then contacted me. Right away, this police officer was very aggressive with me as though I had done something wrong, because he had only heard that guy’s side of the story. After having a 45 minute conversation, the police officer said to me, “Chris, I would have done the exact same thing that you did,” so he put a stop to that guy. He ended up making a bunch of TikTok videos. I received death threats for a couple of weeks from all sorts of people. But then he just stopped. Another man tried to get my wife in trouble, and I went and had conversations on a street in his community where for three days he stalked me from afar. Then one day he drove by and he stopped and he threatened to kill me. He threatened to shoot me, and I got that on video. He got arrested, and I finally got that guy a criminal record. He’s not even allowed to talk about me on social media anymore. I did everything peacefully. I didn’t even say a word to him, and he got himself a criminal record. They have learned not to mess with my family because I’m going to push back. However, I’m going to do it the smart way. In the very beginning, I wasn’t recording conversations or anything. I was just out there. Maybe I would take a photo, but I was just talking to people. I was happy because I was reaching some parents and I knew that they were going to be able to protect their own kids now, because nobody knew what was going on. They didn’t know what was in the schools. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the role of schools in all this. Mr. Elston: It depends on the teacher you get. It depends on the administrator as well, and what they’re pushing. I never say there’s one solution for all of this. You shouldn’t automatically take your kids out of school. It depends on your kid. But children are being taught that they might have been born in the wrong body. A lot of this is presented, maybe not directly, but it’s part of an anti-bullying program that some kids are trans. Of course, we want to be inclusive and welcoming and support them. Obviously, we need to love all children no matter what, but this is indoctrination and this is a social contagion. Social media is the prime driver of all of this. It really started taking off around 2015 with Tumblr, TikTok, and Reddit. All these kids are online. But the second-biggest driver for sure is what’s going on in our schools. Because you get these activist teachers who believe in this and they can impact a lot of kids. These schools also have after-school clubs called Gender and Sexuality Alliances. A lot of the troubled kids end up going to these places. They'll give them free pizza. These are awkward kids who maybe don’t have a lot of friends, and now they’ve found a group that loves them. They take on this special identity of trans, and now they’re treated as special. They’re celebrated. The whole school is now going along with a lie and using the alternate pronouns for them. I talk about pronouns because people never fully comprehend how damaging it is to use the wrong pronouns for a child. What message are you sending when you call a girl he/him? You are telling that girl that she needs to be something she’s not. Mr. Jekielek: Also, from a position of authority as a parent. Mr. Elston: Or from a teacher or the administrator, but she’s getting affirmed with this lie that she was born wrong. Then thousands of times throughout the school year, it’s getting reaffirmed every time those pronouns are used. What chance does this struggling 12-year-old have of backing out of that? None. They would have to admit to the whole school that they were wrong about this. Mr. Jekielek: Then they have to face the backlash. Mr. Elston: Face the backlash. Absolutely. This is extraordinarily harmful, and teachers watching this should not go along with these lies. Do not do it. To succeed, evil never presents itself as evil. There is something attractive about all the cults that people get sucked into. There’s some truth at the surface level. There’s the love bombing that goes on. For evil to really prosper, it has to have a nice, pleasant, fluffy surface level. That’s what this is. Empathy, kindness, understanding, yes, these are all things that everyone agrees with. But what is really going on? Lies, deception, and physical child abuse are the results of all this. Instead of telling our kids that they’re born in the wrong body, let’s just tell them they’re perfect just as they are. If they want to do something as an adult, that’s a totally different conversation. Even then, 18, 19, and 20-year-olds should be screening for trauma. They should be screening for abuse and other mental health comorbidities. Those should be taught first. But the fact of the matter is, if we just let these kids grow up and we stopped teaching them that they might have been born wrong, this whole thing is going to die. You’re not going to end up with these 20-year-olds who are caught up in this because this is a cult that has spread all throughout society. It’s a social contagion, and it’s going to take some time to put this thing to bed and kill it completely, but we’re going to do it. It never disappears completely. There will always be true believers, but we will put a stop to this because it’s too crazy to last. Mr. Jekielek: Chris, a final thought as we finish up? Mr. Elston: For people watching this at home, they need to find some courage. They need to be positive. Instead of looking for reasons you can’t do something, look for ways that you can, because I guarantee that they’re out there. Mr. Jekielek: It could be as simple as strapping on a sign and walking outside. It’s unorthodox and appears silly. But as one person, you’ve made a profound difference in a very non-aggressive way. Mr. Elston: Yes, it’s working. It’s low tech. It’s talking to people. As human beings, we’re supposed to talk to people face to face, so that’s all I’m doing. I have faith in the goodness of humanity. I have faith that other people are going to come along and help out, and that is happening. So yes, I’ve been a bit of a catalyst. But there are other people like Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich of Moms for Liberty who are doing amazing work. They’re extremely brave and courageous. They take so much hate. I introduced this subject to Tiffany one night in a Twitter space where I bumped into her. It was the first time I had ever heard of Moms for Liberty, and I told her what I was doing. She believed in me right away. Now there’s 130,000 moms across the country fighting this, and that’s an army of parents. We’re not going to be stopped because our children’s lives matter more than our own. If you’re watching this, I suggest you get on board, reach out to some other group that’s fighting this, reach out to me, go to a school board meeting, and do whatever you can. But we have to do something. It’s like the law of physics, an object in motion stays in motion. Mr. Jekielek: Chris Elston, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Elston: Thank you so much, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Chris Elston and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (46 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0127ChrisElston Epoch Original DVD collection:

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