On Monday, the ongoing scandal surrounding Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis got even deeper, as the divorce records were just unsealed for the man whom she is alleged to be having an affair with. A Superior Court judge ruled that since Nathan Wade, the man she was having an alleged affair with, was the lead prosecutor against a former president, and that since the “criminal proceeding [is] of historic importance,” the claim of a relationship between the special prosecutor and district attorney “must be answered in a transparent manner to preserve public confidence in our judicial system.”
And as such, the ongoing divorce records were opened to the public—and they shed interesting light on what’s been happening behind the scenes, such as the fact that Mr. Wade was held in contempt of court for failing to hand over his financial statements:
“One of the unsealed records shows that Mr. Wade was found in contempt in August 2023 for failing to adequately provide discovery documents. An order that month said Mr. Wade could purge himself of contempt by delivering the documents. In the months after the order, Mr. Wade failed to come into compliance with the court’s directives.” 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

“You have to have a high level of psychological resilience, and these cells provide the resilience.” In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Michael Nehls, a molecular geneticist, physician, and author, most recently of “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom.” Dr. Nehls advocates for a strong “mental immune system.” His studies look at the critical portion of our brain known as the hippocampus, which processes and indexes memories. “But the sad thing is that in our modern society, it doesn’t grow. It shrinks. ... And Alzheimer’s is actually a result of the shrinking process,” says Dr. Nehls. “Your life experience, which makes up actually your individuality, is replaced by essentially a commodity—what everybody learns [from] the news—and it’s replaced. And you are left as a human being [who], at the extreme stage, is only remembering the narratives that would create fear and sorrow.” Watch the clip: And how might the spike protein contribute to this? “What inflammation does is it actually shuts down the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus,” says Dr. Nehls. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (58 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0123MichaelNehls FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Michael Nehls, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Michael Nehls: Jan, thank you very much for inviting me. I’m honored to be here. Mr. Jekielek: You have become an expert on something called the mental immune system. We don’t usually think of things that way. It does make me think of a term that Elon Musk promoted, the woke mind virus. Please tell us about the mental immune system. Dr. Nehls: As a molecular geneticist, I was working very hard on evolutionary research and evolutionary science. From an evolutionary perspective, it is totally clear that we have to follow a certain imperative, which is to be fruitful and multiply. We know this already from other thoughts. But it’s clear that if our ancestors had not followed these rules, the two of us wouldn’t be sitting here, so it’s obvious. To be fruitful and multiply, you have to become an adult. In humans, you even have to become a grandfather or grandmother to protect your children and your grandchildren with your wisdom. That was the case in former times, up to the end of the 19th century. It was shown that if you grow up to become a grandfather or grandmother, the likelihood that your grandchildren survive into adulthood actually increases. In order to be fruitful and multiply and survive to an old age, we need to defend ourselves. Everybody knows we defend ourselves against pathogenic microorganisms quite efficiently. My PhD work was to identify a gene regulator, a gene that regulates other genes of the immune system. Without this gene it would be impossible for our immune system to adapt to viruses, so it was very important work. This is one part of the immune system that we need. But we also have other enemies, enemies which are called pathogenic macroorganisms, in comparison to the pathogenic microorganisms. Mr. Jekielek: Pathogenic macroorganisms? Dr. Nehls: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: I think I know where you’re going with this. Dr. Nehls: Yes, they usually come on two legs. Most people think of animals, like a big bear or a tiger. But usually the major enemy of humans is other humans. We were probably enemies of other human species 50,000 years ago, when there were several roaming the earth, but now it’s only homo sapiens. Anyway, we also have to have an immune system against pathogenic macroorganisms. This one is centered on our ability to think, to be curious, to have stamina, to have psychological resilience, and to have a memory of how to react, based on experience. This experience doesn’t have to be our own experience, it can also be the experience of others. As children, we are educated by our parents or grandparents with their wisdom and their stories. That’s why humans are so eager to learn narratives. Narratives are the food of our mental immune system, so the brain is essentially created for instantaneously memorizing, for the long-term, everything that we experience and what we learn from others. We are social learning machines. Mr. Jekielek: You say that narratives are very important to building your mental immune system. I might argue that narratives are actually one of the chief weapons being used against us right now. Dr. Nehls: The point is that we are eager to learn from other people. Narratives are the food, and we are eager to get as much food as we can for this system. Of course, this natural ability can be used against us, like everything. Love can be used against us. Every instinct that we have can be used against us. There are always two sides of the coin, so to speak. But practically speaking, narratives are a good thing. We learn from narratives. If my grandmother tells me a story, I don’t have to believe it. I’m allowed to question it. That is the nature of narratives. My grandmother had experiences, she conveys them by telling me, and then I have my own experiences. If there’s some conflict, we discuss it, then I can learn and improve. That’s an adaptation to new situations and that’s exactly what our bodily immune system does. It can adapt to variants of viruses and we have to adapt to variants in situations. That’s what our mental immune system can do. Mr. Jekielek: In your book, The Indoctrinated Brain, you’re explaining why so many of us might be believing some extremely preposterous narratives. With the slightest scratch on their surface, some of these narratives seem to fall apart. They’re dominant among so many of us, but there’s something actually happening to our minds. Please explain this to us. Dr. Nehls: The default mechanism of our thinking is also sometimes called System 1 thinking. That goes back to the old mind thinking compared to the new mind thinking. Some people also say it’s the thinking mind. A Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick, did the science on the neural correlates of consciousness. He called System 1 the zombie mode, because it’s not conscious. It’s not consciously acting. System 1 is our default way of acting. It’s learned behavior, but also instinctive behavior. In addition to that, we have the actual thinking system, which we call System 2. It all goes back to a Nobel Prize for Economics, which was given in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman. He got the Nobel Prize for differentiating these two systems. System 2, the actual thinking system, is a conscious system and it requires energy. Because we have to live 24 hours a day, we cannot use up all the energy in the morning. If the situation arises in the afternoon where we might need System 2 energy and real thinking, this energy is not there. He realized with his research that this energy source is limited. By default, our brain operates on System 1. Only if our gut feeling tells us, “Something is wrong in this situation. I should really stop here, think, and not act the same way as I usually do in such a situation,” do we then have to activate System 2 and invest the mental energy. But what happens if this energy is not there, or if the gut feeling is not strong enough? Then we just continue on with System 1. Of course, System 1 also acts in situations which make us afraid. In situations when we’re afraid, we follow the mass of people. Without thinking, we just follow the mass, because the mass means safety. The question is, “Why do people not activate System 2, and what can we do to improve that? Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us what the hippocampus is, its importance in our thinking process, and exactly what you found. Dr. Nehls: We started this whole conversation with a question about the mental immune system, and I mentioned a few functionalities of the mental immune system. The major part is our autobiographical memory, and that’s exactly where the hippocampus comes into play. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s define the autobiographical memory. Dr. Nehls: It’s our mental diary of everything that we experience, that we learn, the narratives which we are told, and everything that we have to remember instantaneously because it happens only once. We may go walking and find a nice bookstore, then we go home back again. We have to remember that there was a bookstore. It’s not like a foreign word that we have to memorize by repeating it 20 times. We saw the bookstore, we remember it was there, and we can go back and find it. This is what the hippocampus is able to do, and it’s unique in that capability. Only the hippocampus is able to remember something that we experience, learn, think, or hear from people only one time, and then memorize it for a whole lifetime. It could be for an eternity, if we put it into a narrative and tell the next generation. This autobiographical memory is based on these four questions, “What happened, when did it happen, where did it happen, and how did it feel?” You have four questions; when, where, what, and how did it feel? It has to evoke some kind of feeling and emotion, because the hippocampus has a limited storage capacity, and it only stores things that come with emotions. If a story has an emotion, we force the hippocampus to memorize it. If it doesn’t have any emotion, or if it’s routine behavior, we don’t store it. Mr. Jekielek: It indexes it or categorizes it, correct? Dr. Nehls: Yes, exactly. For the when and where, it creates coordinates in the space and time continuum in the outside world we live in, but also in the inside world in our brain. It indexes when and where we have experienced something, and that’s the index for the memory content of what we experienced and how it felt. We need the time and space neurons, and there are actually neurons for that. For the space neurons, there was a Nobel Prize given in 2014 for their discovery. In 2016, there were the first papers on the time neurons. They create an index in which the hippocampus will remember forever. We all know that if we want to remember something, it’s always about what happened sometime and somewhere. The memory comes back, because we find the memory traces and reconstruct what actually happened at the time. We need these time and space neurons, and they are located in the hippocampus. For those who don’t know anything about the hippocampus, it has its name because it looks like a seahorse. They’re like the size of a thumb, and just 1 percent of the brain mass of humans is the hippocampus. They’re in the temporal lobe, very deeply embedded under the neocortex, which is a later development in the evolution of the brain. They’re right under the neocortex. The neocortex is actually what I call the neocortical hard disk or the hard drive, because every night, the content of the information that the hippocampus has stored during the day is uploaded into the neocortical hard drive, and it is stored there. Only the time and space neurons have the access to it and they allow us to retrieve the information. Every night when we sleep, the hippocampus is essentially restoring its memory capacity by uploading the information of the day before. There’s only one caveat, which is that the time and space neurons remain. If you grow to age 100—the oldest woman was 122 with no Alzheimer’s—then you have to memorize things for 100 years, so you would run out of time and space neurons to index new memories. That’s why the hippocampus has another unique feature besides its ability to memorize things instantaneously for the long term. It has the ability to grow new nerve cells on a daily basis. The hippocampus has the potential to grow. To contain the wealth of personal experience in our mental diary, our autobiographical memory, the hippocampus, this little seahorse, actually grows. It can grow 1, 2, or 3 percent every year. But the sad thing is that in our modern society, it doesn’t grow—it shrinks. On average, the shrinkage rate for adults is about 1.4 percent per year. Mr. Jekielek: In our modern society, you’re saying there have been studies done that show in one set of circumstances it grows, but in average modern society, it shrinks. Dr. Nehls: Absolutely. In 2016, I published a paper which is called, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease.” In this paper, I show that if you keep up the growth, you will never get Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s actually results from the reversal of a process called adult hippocampal neurogenesis. It is called adult because it’s the birth of new neurons in the adult, which is unusual, and it happens only in the hippocampus. It is called adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus. It’s complicated, but it’s important. Adult hippocampal neurogenesis essentially prevents Alzheimer’s. This is based on many functions of these neurons, because they’re not only there to make an index, but they have additional functions. These additional functions are very important if we think about System 2 and System 1. These new index neurons are not index neurons yet, because they have not memorized anything when we wake up in the morning, but they are there waiting. They are fresh, mature neurons. They are ripening and want to be mature neurons that have a function. In order to do that, we actually have to learn something new. We have to make an experience, otherwise there would be no need for them. Mr. Jekielek: In adults, we have to stimulate them in some way, correct? Dr. Nehls: Yes, we have to give them a job, like memorizing X or Y. But if we don’t give them a job, they will actually die. They have an internal program of death called apoptosis. If cells, particularly nerve cells, are not needed, they kill themselves. Their survival instinct is to make memories and do their job. They are the neuronal correlates of human curiosity. If you have these cells, you are curious. If you don’t have them and if they are not being produced, your curiosity goes down. But your curiosity is not everything. If you’re curious and you enter a new space, you may ask questions where you don’t like the answers you get. Everything that is new has the risk of being dangerous in some way. In order to follow your curiosity, you have to have a high level of psychological resilience. These cells provide that resilience. They are actually dictating how high your stress level is if you experience something new. All the antidepressants that are out there do nothing else but activate the production of these new nerve cells. It is key that you activate neurogenesis in the hippocampus to increase your resilience and get out of depression. Mr. Jekielek: But the hippocampus is getting smaller, and this is reflected in the increased levels of depression and Alzheimer’s. Dr. Nehls: Absolutely. There is one important function of System 2 thinking. Our frontal brain, which contains the working memory, is only currents in your brain, it doesn’t fix any thought. If you are thinking and want to change your lifestyle or go deeply into a problem that might affect many people, it quickly becomes very complicated with all the different alternatives that you have to consider. It quickly becomes complicated. Our frontal brain with the working memory can only keep 4, 5, or maybe 6 items in parallel action. Actually, the number of items reflects your IQ. That is important when we come to this later. Intelligence is reflected by the number of items you can keep simultaneously active in your working memory, but it’s only four or five. A complicated thought might require 10, 15, or maybe hundreds of intermediate thoughts that need to be stored, and only the hippocampus can do that. When we talk about the mental energy that is required for System 2, we are talking about the storage capability of the hippocampus. If you are running out of new neurons that become time and space neurons for these intermediate thoughts, then your battery is empty. You have no memory capacity. You can still overwrite this, but that is a different story, and I'll come to that when we discuss the process of indoctrination. Having no index neurons left means that you are ego-depleted. You are exhausted. We all know that a whole day of social activities, narratives you have learned, discussions you have had, and thinking at your desk fills up all these index neurons that were available from the night before, and then there are none left. When a new thought comes in, what do you do with it? There is no storage capacity. You would rather step back and say, “Let’s sleep now. I'll do it tomorrow.” That is what causes ego-depletion, which happens during the day. But if you wake up in the morning and you have no new nerve cells produced, and if adult hippocampal neurogenesis is not working, then you are starting the day already ego-depleted and you are not able to activate System 2. Then you are in a permanent state of System 1, and you are permanently in the zombie mode. Mr. Jekielek: When there are valid reasons for fear, that also compromises our ability to create these neurons, correct? Dr. Nehls: Yes, it has two effects, actually. One effect is that fear creates a high level of stress. We know that high levels of stress hormones undermine the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus. Eustress, healthy stress, is good. If we have a purpose in life, that is good. We do things that we like to do which should be challenging. That will create new memories and the hippocampus is happy with new memories, and the index neurons are happy. We need a certain stress level to actually achieve something. But if it’s becoming a situation of distress, particularly chronic distress, then the production of these nerve cells goes down. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes a lot of sense in a situation where your life is at stake and when you’re threatened that you need all the energy for fight or flight. You need all that energy. In that situation, the highest levels of stress hormones essentially stop any production of new cells in the body. For example, wound healing is stopped. With chronic stress, the regeneration of blood cells is stopped. That’s why people use steroids to inhibit cancer cells from growing because it stops the production of cells. The same thing happens in the brain. Neurogenesis, the production of new cells, also stops. But it’s usually an acute situation. If it becomes a chronic situation, then production also stops, but based on the high level of steroids. Then you have damage to your mental immune system, which consists of curiosity, a high level of psychological resilience, and the memory function. Now comes the second thing. If you have this fear porn and these narratives that are presented that cause fear, that causes emotions, and emotions cause the hippocampus to memorize. But think about it, you have no index neurons. Particularly in the evening, you’re tired, you’re exhausted, you’re ego-depleted, and you get the news that the next world war or climate change will kill all of humanity. Then you have these perma-pandemics, as the World Economy Forum calls them, which can kill everybody. We are constantly in the situation of being killed, at least from the narrative point of view, but you have no index neurons to store this narrative. Nevertheless, you force the information into the hippocampus, but it costs something. It costs the index neurons that have already been used. They are overwritten, because the hippocampus will remember this new story. Mr. Jekielek: This is literally brainwashing, correct? Dr. Nehls: Yes, it’s the word washing that comes into play here. It’s even more than washing, it’s replacing. You essentially replace former memories, maybe good memories, and maybe things your grandmother told you. Everything that your life experience which makes up your individuality is now replaced by a commodity, which is what everybody learns in the news. You are left as a human being that, at the extreme stage, is only remembering the narratives that create fear and sorrow. You are left as a fearful person that only wants to have one thing, an end to everything, You say, “Please end the horror.” Mr. Jekielek: This is already putting the fear of God into me as you’re describing the mechanism of how this works. You have another part to your hypothesis which involves the spike protein. Dr. Nehls: There are many reasons why neurogenesis is down, and some of them already began before 2020. I'll come to the spike protein in a moment. It’s very important that people understand that spike protein has a bad function, but we are already in a situation where our mind is not working well enough in society. We are already a System 1-driven society. The majority of people do not have not the ability to engage System 2 when it’s needed. It’s not their fault, because we live in a modern society where the hippocampus is not growing, but shrinking. Before 2020, the hippocampus was already shrinking. In my paper, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease,” I show why it’s shrinking and how we can actually remedy it. If you remedy it, not only do you prevent Alzheimer’s, you also allow your brain to grow instead of shrink, and to be open for new thoughts. You are happier because your psychological resilience is much higher. Mr. Jekielek: I might add that your individuality, your uniqueness, and your critical thinking grows. Dr. Nehls: All of that grows, and that has not only implications for you as a person, it has also implications for society. Think of a society that comes across a problem that is important for the whole society. Then you have to find a solution. How likely is it that you will find a solution if the whole population consists of people filled with the narratives that the leaders gave us? It’s much more likely that a unique individual will come up with the best idea and a solution. As soon as one person sparks the idea, it’s like a fire spreading because everybody knows about it. One person invented the mobile phone and now everybody has one. It’s not like everybody has to invent it, and that goes for every thought. The broader the individuality is of each individual, and the more individuals we have with a broad individuality, the better the immune system of a society. But the reverse is also true. If you want to dominate a society, you have to reduce individuality, and you have to reduce the number of people. At the moment, both of those are happening. Mr. Jekielek: You’re alluding to the excess mortality that we’re seeing in the populations right now. Dr. Nehls: Yes, particularly in the population age 16 to 64. Mr. Jekielek: Do you think environmental factors are causing this? Is it diet? Is it video games? There are so many different elements. Dr. Nehls: To be honest, it’s all of the above. It’s all of the above and much more. I wrote a book in 2013 called, The Alzheimer’s Lie, which essentially is the basis of the paper I published, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease.” There I show that Alzheimer’s is not caused by aging. Age is just a prerequisite, because it takes a few decades for Alzheimer’s to develop, while the hippocampus is shrinking to the point of no return. Just because something needs decades of time to develop doesn’t mean that it’s caused by the decades of time. Mr. Jekielek: Just out of curiosity, how easy is it to measure the size of your hippocampus? Dr. Nehls: It’s actually quite easy. When we talk about what we can do to improve its size, there are fantastic studies out there which show that the theory is correct. At any age, you can start to regrow it again. That’s the nice story that I’m going to tell. Everybody who reads my book will find out what he can do to improve the size of his hippocampus. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to these neuropathogenic substances. Presumably they have an impact. We know that spike protein is neuropathogenic and neuroinflammatory. That has been documented in the literature. Dr. Nehls: Everything that stresses the hippocampus will cause damage. You can imagine that if you have an acute inflammation like a respiratory disease, then your immune system reacts to it and first starts to produce proinflammatory cytokines, cytokines that activate the immune system to fight against the pathogenic microorganism. In this situation, you’re usually sick. Sick is just a reflection of the fight going on internally. You have to withdraw, of course, you have to lay down, and you have to sleep. It makes sense to shut down the hippocampus. You are not eager to make new experiences. You’re not outgoing, you are withdrawing. Inflammation actually shuts down the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus for the time being. An acute inflammation is pretty much the same. Like an attack which increases the stress hormones, it shuts down the hippocampus. That’s not a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing if it’s chronic, or if the inflammation is not really caused by a virus, but maybe by something else that is mimicking a virus. That is what the spike protein is doing. When you inject the mRNA, you can produce a spike protein anywhere in your body. Meanwhile, the SARS-CoV-2 has been fabricated to include this furin cleavage site into the mRNA of the spike gene, which then causes the production of the spike protein having this molecular scissor which we call a furin. The furin cleavage is cleaving the spike protein into halves. The outer side, the S1 subunit, is now able to cross the blood-brain barrier and go into the brain. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s disambiguate this a little bit. Typically, we think about the furin cleavage site as being a feature in coronaviruses that hints that it likely came from a lab. It makes it easy for the virus to infect humans. But you’re saying it also has another function. Dr. Nehls: Yes, exactly. It has another function. The main function is to increase its infectiousness. But, practically speaking, it allows now the spike protein to be internally shed from the production site and from the virus, but also from the mRNA when it’s injected, so it really doesn’t make a difference at first glance. If you are either infected or injected, your cells produce the spike protein. It’s been cleaved by furin, and the S1 subunit was shown to be very effective in entering the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier, which usually protects the brain against the bloodstream, so that toxins cannot enter the brain. Mr. Jekielek: The reason this lipid nanoparticle delivery platform was used was to get this mRNA into the cells, because cells are set up to avoid getting foreign DNA and RNA into them. Dr. Nehls: Yes, absolutely. Mr. Jekielek: This is a separate ability to get into cells. Dr. Nehls: It’s separate. It’s not actually in the cells, but into the space around the cells, particularly the space around the cells in your brain. The lipid nanoparticles were chosen to deliver the mRNA to the cells. It’s actually strange because if you want to immunize somebody, you can just inject the protein, or inhale the protein and then you create immunity where it hits the immune cells. Why the mRNA was chosen is really unclear, but it’s not unclear that you needed the lipid nanoparticles to deliver it. It is clear that the lipid nanoparticles were specifically developed to get hemotherapeutics against brain cancer into the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier. They have chosen a vehicle for the mRNA, which was originally actually developed to enter the brain. That doesn’t make any sense for protecting against respiratory viruses, because they never enter the brain. We don’t need any immunization for the brain. The problem is that the lipid nanoparticles are inflammatory, but only for the short time they’re present. The mRNA is present longer and was modified to stay in the cells longer. What is also shown is that the spike protein in itself, particularly the S1 subunit after the cleavage, is very stable and it can by itself travel through the bloodstream anywhere and can enter the brain and stay there. There it was shown to activate the immune system of the brain. The brain consists not only of brain cells, but also brain cells that are actually immune cells. We call them microglia. The microglia already have receptors for spike proteins. They have not learned that during your life, they learn that through evolution. The receptor called TLR4 recognizes the spike protein as a pathogen. It’s tricked because it sees the spike protein and thinks that it is the virus, but the spike protein is just there alone. It has no virus with it, but the immune system cannot differentiate. Now, it activates the fight against this virus which isn’t there and starts an inflammation. But the spike protein doesn’t go away, the inflammation doesn’t go away, and we have chronic inflammation. We know that the proteins that are produced; interleukin-1, interleukin-6, or TNF-alpha, these proinflammatory cytokines are the most potent inhibitors of adult hippocampal neurogenesis that we know of. If you have a chronic neuroinflammation, you also have a chronic inhibition of the adult hippocampal neurogenesis. That’s probably the main cause that people are having brain fog, and having this spikeopathy after infection or injection. Mr. Jekielek: The combination of this fear narrative and prolonged spike production in our body has an extra negative effect on us being able to have good hippocampal activity. Dr. Nehls: Yes. The fear itself plus the spike protein are probably sufficient to completely stop the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, which means your mental immune system is shut down. Then the content of the fear narratives are still introduced as memories in your brain, but they are overriding previous memories. Then you essentially eradicate your personality. Mr. Jekielek: You could also create new memories, which are not necessarily these fear-laden narratives that are overriding past memories. Dr. Nehls: Yes, sure. Let’s say I’m completely ego-depleted in the evening, which I usually am, and a friend calls me and says, “Hey, my daughter is sick. Can you help me?” I’m surely not saying, “No, I’m ego-depleted. Leave me alone. I want to go to sleep now.” I’m surely going to help him. If it’s not routine, I will certainly have to invest and think about what I need to do, and I will remember all this. What will happen is that since no new index neurons are available, I will override old ones. But better safe than sorry. It’s better to help him, rather than trying to keep a memory of the old times. In this situation, the present is more important than the past. But that’s an exception. It’s not what usually happens in the evening. But if it happens every day, and if I overdo it every day, then new memories will always override the old ones. That’s a default mechanism of how our brain works. If I wake up in the morning, I have no fresh index neurons because of the spike protein, but also because of lifestyle. Before 2020, we were already in a situation where the production was down for other reasons. If the production is down and I wake up in the morning, I’m not engaging in complex thoughts. I just want my routine life and I want to be in a routine. I don’t want to question anything. I want to just go along and be happy. Then there are no memories to override the old ones. One day looks like the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and I can’t remember them. The week is over and there’s not much I memorized from the week, because it was the week like the week before it. But there are now situations where I’m forced to memorize. Every day we have a new rule about coronavirus, a new rule about our environment, and a new rule about climate change that we have to obey now. There are all these new rules which are forced into our brain because they have consequences if we don’t follow them. We might get a ticket or we might go to jail. We are forced to memorize all these things. This crisis situation that I described with my friend calling me is something that happens on a routine basis to people that have an ego-depleted mind. Then it becomes really problematic because then you force an override of all your personality in the long run. Mr. Jekielek: I’m thinking of the book, 1984, with the eternal present. We have no sense of history anymore. Of course, this is an extreme view. Dr. Nehls: No, unfortunately, it’s not. This condition is overriding history. That’s exactly what is happening. Mr. Jekielek: These narratives are being inserted into the population that the population itself then self-reinforces. Perhaps they work in the media or they’re an influential person. It ends up becoming a vicious cycle fostering those narratives even further, never mind the constant drumbeat of the propaganda. Dr. Nehls: Yes, it’s really a problem. But some people like to have their own mind, so they usually stay by themselves. We all experienced that. In my family, there is suddenly a wall between one group and the other group. We have birthday parties where we are not invited, because we are not vaccinated. Clearly, there was a big wall. To be honest, before 2020, the people on the other side of the wall were already looking strange to me, because they weren’t curious about what I was doing. It was really funny. Sometimes I was asked about what I’m doing. I said, “I’m writing a new book.” They didn’t ask me about it because they were not interested. They were already living in their cozy System 1 world and didn’t want to be confronted. They knew if I was writing a book, it would have real meaning. Mr. Jekielek: Obviously, not everybody in society is going to be this groundbreaking, visionary, critical thinker, or scientist. But the issue is more about the value we place on that. America is a great, amazing country where we’ve put the people who think differently on a pedestal. These are the people who challenge things and figure out things and are able to rise through merit. It’s almost like in our current cultural, social, and political moment we’re not valuing that. Again, your whole hypothesis jives with why we might not be valuing that. Dr. Nehls: Yes, absolutely. It would explain it, because if somebody is a critical thinker, he introduces critical thought. Critical thought is different from what you want to hear. You have to be curious and have a high threshold of resilience to dive into what he’s telling you, because he’s telling you something that you might not want to hear. Maybe it challenges your lifestyle, so then you will actually withdraw, unless you are curious. Curiosity means that you have a strong mental immune system. A strong mental immune system means you would love to learn what he has to tell you because it might improve your life. But before you can do that, the prerequisite is having a strong mental immune system. When Alois Alzheimer discovered the disease, it was a curiosity. In 1906, it was a total curiosity. In the biggest textbooks on neuropathology 30 years later, Alzheimer’s wasn’t even mentioned as a disease. It was totally uncommon 100 to 200 years ago. When we honor people that changed the world and that created the American Constitution, that was a time when the majority of the people still lived more naturally. All the things that we are lacking today and that we were lacking before 2020 caused the hippocampus to shrink, and that shrinking causes Alzheimer’s. But Alzheimer’s was not present in the early 20th century. At that time, our society was different. It was more freedom-loving. Nowadays we have a society where the shrinking egos follow the herd, and the herd is taught where to run by the narratives. They run to a new global governance system that is reducing our freedom. We really have to make the herd turn around. Mr. Jekielek: I can also imagine a scenario where certain people decide they are the enlightened ones. They are the ones who have bigger hippocampus and are able to think critically and change society. They are going to look down on all those other people. Whenever that happens and is allowed to foster, atrocities will happen. Dr. Nehls: Yes, absolutely. People have always had different abilities. Some people are better at one thing and some people are better at another thing. In the old times, some were better hunters, and some were better fishermen, and some could make a better fire. Everybody has a speciality, and that’s what the social system is about, where hopefully everybody has the chance to do the job he wants to do and is not forced to do anything. For example, someone invents the mobile phone and others then use it. Does it mean that the people who only use it but were not able to invent it are inferior people? I don’t think so. When I did basic research for over 20 years, I went to the lab by taking the bus in the morning. I was happy there was a bus driver taking me there. I was really thinking that the streets are paved, and that somebody has to do that. If everybody was only driving to the lab and doing research, how would I get into the lab? Everybody has a job in society. Some people would maybe be overwhelmed doing research the way I did it. Others might be saying, “I'd rather be an artist.” People should choose whatever they want to choose. But at some point, certain groups have a responsibility if they have an idea about how to change things. Mr. Jekielek: That’s right. If you do have this awareness and this critical thinking capability, it actually gives you more work. Dr. Nehls: My wife was really fearful that I would write the book, because she said, “We might be getting attacked by just having this book out. It’s not easy.” I said, “I know that.” But I’m the type of person, if I see a banana peel on the pavement- Mr. Jekielek: You’re going to pick up the banana peel. Dr. Nehls: I pick it up because I fear that somebody might step on it and fall and break a leg. It may just be a metaphor. But if you see something, if you have the knowledge that something is wrong, as an individual in a society, you have the obligation to do something about it. With knowledge comes responsibility. Mr. Jekielek: Isn’t this possibly the thinking of these budding technocrats as well? They say, “We have to make sure society runs properly.” Dr. Nehls: Absolutely. I can believe they feel the same way, that they know something that others don’t know, and that they have the power to introduce certain knowledge into society. But it’s a problem trying to solve a problem when some are questioning if it’s even a problem at all, let’s say like climate change. Maybe there are other problems which are more demanding and more necessary to solve. Just think about the plastic which we have in the oceans. The point is, societies can only be as strong as the individuals that have an opinion. Mr. Jekielek: You have to be allowed to challenge the ideas. Dr. Nehls: In science, when you come up with an idea, you’re not saying that this is the truth. You’re saying that this is a proposition. This is a theory. When I published my paper on Alzheimer’s and how it can be prevented, I said it’s a unified theory. I did not say that this is a unified truth about Alzheimer’s. It’s a unified theory. Even my new book is a theory. I show the theory and at the end, like a prosecutor, I talk to my reader and say. “Now, you get to be the jury. You can decide if my theory is correct for you.” But even if it’s wrong, it doesn’t really matter, because the science that I show is true. The hippocampus is shrinking in our society, whether it shrinks from certain factors, or if it just happens by accident. Mr. Jekielek: It’s an emergent property of a lot of different systems. Dr. Nehls: Yes, exactly. Perhaps it’s happening by accident, and it’s just how culture has evolved. It’s collateral damage that our hippocampus suffers. That’s all possible. But at the end of the day, we need an open mind, like in science. We need to be allowed to talk about the different options. We have to have a receptive community that is willing to accept these alternative thoughts and think about them. They should be free to pick the best thought. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, how do you propose to help people with that? Because unbeknownst to us, our ability to think has been reduced and we need to regain that. How are we going to do it? Dr. Nehls: Your question reminds me a little bit of the situation when my daughter accompanied me here to fly to the United States. The first thing that this flight attendant told us was that if the oxygen level goes down, you have to take the oxygen mask and help yourself first before you help others. In the last chapter of my book that’s the first step—help yourself first. Make sure that your mental abilities are the best. Even if you are already able to think, you can do a couple of things to make your thinking better. Reduce a couple of deficiencies in your diet. There are a couple of hints about that in the book. But first, you help yourself. Create an even stronger mental immune system for yourself. If you have done that, you are more able to help others. Don’t go back and just draw a line and say, “These are the others. They are inferior.” Don’t think like that, because you need them, and they need your maturity. Maybe you cannot reach out to everybody or not everybody is responsive to that, but over time, I think more and more people will be. There’s also a scientific foundation to this thinking, and I actually show that in the book. In the mid-20th century, Solomon Asch did a confirmation experiment. In this experiment, 12 people were asked to observe the length of a certain line. There were three lines, A, B, and C, and the observed line was the same length as one of the three. It was totally clear that line B was identical in size to the observed line. But 11 of the 12 were asked to say it’s line A, and the 12th one was the actual person that was challenged. All 11 said that it’s line A. He thought, “Wow. But the answer is clearly line B. Why do they all say A?” But it was an interesting result, because 80 percent of the challenged people didn’t follow their commonsense and say B. They actually said A, because the majority had said A. But when one of the other 11 was asked to say B too, then the 12th person was not on his own anymore. The likelihood that he also said B, despite 10 others saying A, was actually increased by 40 percent. Mr. Jekielek: In other words, a little bit of courage goes a long way. In one of your books, you talk about the effects of microdoses of lithium. It’s an anti-inflammatory that helps with Alzheimer’s. Is that right? Dr. Nehls: Yes, it is. On my website, you can find an article I wrote about this, because chronic inflammation is caused by the spike protein, but also by other things that I describe in the book. But the spike protein is very dominant at the current time. This vicious cycle of inflammation that occurs in the brain can actually be undermined. On my website, in this particular article, I show that this vicious cycle can be interrupted and stopped by lithium. It’s not lithium used in bipolar disorder or in manic depression where you use really high levels which are almost toxic, with a very small therapeutic window. I talk about doses which are a hundred times smaller, which I call essential doses. Based on our natural history of human evolution, we have essentially grown our mental capabilities most likely in an era where we actually were not just hunters and gatherers, but fishermen and hunters and gatherers. Along the ocean shores in South Africa, there is a lot of evidence for that. The lithium content in the ocean is a hundred times higher than in freshwater. If you consume mussels or seafood from the ocean, then you actually take in a few milligrams of lithium a day. This small amount of lithium is able to break this vicious cycle activated by spike TLR4, and then activates the immune system by producing interleukin-1. This vicious cycle can essentially be turned around. Because the hippocampus has a low resilience, you get depression. Depression means toxic levels of steroids, activating the cycle again, and then you’re in a vicious cycle. This vicious cycle can be broken. This was shown at the University of Buffalo in New York in test cases of 10 people that were given a low dose of lithium. In a very short time, 9 people immediately got rid of the brain fog, a consequence of spikeopathy. In my 2016 paper, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease,” I have a whole chapter on low dose lithium, because it was shown to actually stop Alzheimer’s progression. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve had many doctors on the show who are treating spikeopathy in its various forms. I’m very curious how lithium fits into their treatment regimens. It’s something I'll be looking into now. Dr. Nehls: It would fit into it because lithium not only breaks this vicious cycle of neuroinflammation, it was also shown to activate neurogenesis in the hippocampus. All the papers are cited in my article. It was also shown to activate autophagy, meaning the removal of proteins, micro-organelles that are not functioning anymore. Another paper cited in my article proposes that it might also work against resident spike protein in the brain. Mr. Jekielek: There is so much to read up on. Can you give us your website? Dr. Nehls: Yes, it’s very simple. It’s Michael-Nehls.com. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Nehls, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Nehls: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being here. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Michael Nehls and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (58 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0123MichaelNehls Epoch Original DVD collection:

On Thursday, the presiding judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s RICO case gave Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis a hard deadline for when she must respond to these allegations in writing: “Judge Scot McAfee on Thursday ordered [Fani Willis] to respond to the allegations in writing by Feb. 2, and has scheduled a hearing on the matter for Feb. 15.” This means that exactly two weeks from Friday, she has to submit her written response to these allegations—and then two weeks after that, there will be an actual live hearing where she has to explain herself to the judge about an alleged misuse of funds, and her alleged affair with a lead prosecutor. This hearing is very consequential to the case. If Ms. Willis is found to have engaged in improper behavior by the court, the case might be handed off to a different prosecutor in the county—who might very well choose to drop the charges against President Trump altogether. Meanwhile, Maine became the second state in the nation to decide to drop President Trump’s name off of the 2024 ballot. This was a decision by Maine’s secretary of state, who believes that President Trump is not qualified to remain on the ballot due to her interpretation of the 14th Amendment—essentially, her belief that he “engaged in an insurrection.” And so, in order to save democracy, she decided to not allow the 1 million voters in the state to have the option of voting for President Trump. However, just like in Colorado, her decision has been put on hold because, on Wednesday, a superior court put a stay on the secretary’s directive. 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

Preparations for a so-called “Disease X” were among the discussions held at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos. During the panel, global health authorities talked about setting plans and procedures in place to get ready for another global health crisis. Among the panelists was the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), which has been trying to gain deeper authority to declare a health crisis, and to set policies on how countries respond to them. And the warnings of another deadly disease just around the corner are now being used to justify the creation of more systems of authority and control around health. 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/3SxmFUT Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

“We were bullying people into these concepts. It was an ideological bullying across the medical spectrum. And as you pull out of medicine, you see this in the schools, in journalism, in peer-reviewed publications—it’s everywhere.” In 2018, Jamie Reed began working as a case manager at a pediatric gender center. But after witnessing firsthand the irreversible effect that “gender-affirming care” was having on children, she decided to speak out. “At the end of the day in these centers, nobody was the responsible one. So, the therapists would write a letter thinking that the endocrinologist was making the decision, the endocrinologist would say, ‘But the therapist wrote the letter.’ And then they would all go and say, ‘But the parents are making the decision,’” says Ms. Reed. She was recently instrumental in Missouri state legislation to extend the statute of limitations for those harmed by gender treatment. That fear of liability, claims Ms. Reed, was enough to close her former gender clinic. Watch the clip: “I was complicit, I worked in an industry that was harming children. And the thing that I have to grapple with every day is making amends for that and trying to address the wrongs that I participated in,” says Ms. Reed. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (48 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0120JamieReed FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jamie Reed, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jamie Reed: Thank you so much. Mr. Jekielek: It’s been a year since you announced that you were going to blow the whistle on the pediatric gender clinic at Washington University. A lot has happened since then. What is it like to become a whistleblower in this field? Ms. Reed: Surprisingly, it has been very positive. This is a great cultural moment when this is a topic of huge interest to the American public. There are so many thoughtful, intelligent people who are discussing this, debating this, and having courageous conversations every day. I’ve really been welcomed into this network and circle of people. Mr. Jekielek: The clinic has now closed, so that has been a significant change. Ms. Reed: Yes. It was a bit of a process. In the state of Missouri, they did introduce some legislation. Similar legislation had been introduced for a few years previous to my whistleblowing. But after that occurred, the legislation was working through. The state of Missouri passed a law to impose a four-year moratorium on any new pediatric patient starting a puberty blocker, cross-sex hormones, or having surgery. There was a grandfather clause, so that anyone who had already been on these treatments could continue. One of the things the legislature did is to increase the limit of time where somebody could sue if they were harmed by treatment. In most states this is really limited. It’s maybe one or two years. They increased the limit of time, and just that fear of liability closed the center. Most of the centers in the state of Missouri that were offering pediatric care have ceased to do so because of the extended period of time for liability. Mr. Jekielek: It’s incredible what a small change in legislation can do. Ms. Reed: It’s a small change, but it’s also interesting for the narrative. Because the narrative is that these are safe, effective treatments, and good long-term care. If that were the case, then nobody would be afraid of an extended period of time for malpractice. Mr. Jekielek: I read the affidavit you provided to the Missouri Attorney General. It’s utterly shocking. You were working at this clinic, and fully bought into the whole approach at one point. Please tell us how you got into this field. Ms. Reed: I’ve spent years working in social work doing case management, working with individuals who are coming into their own for age, being a teen, and learning how to navigate adulthood. I was working with young adults who were HIV-positive. There is a big overlap for some trans people and HIV, particularly for trans women who experience high levels of HIV infection. I was finding that a lot of the individuals that I was working with were trans-identified, so I became an expert in trans issues within that setting. I was really good at helping people with things like legal name change and gender marker change. I understood these systems. I was looking at resources and ways to help people. This position came up working in the pediatric center and a number of people came to me and said, “You should apply for this. This really seems like something that you would be really good at.” I applied and was hired in 2018. The center had only been open for a year. I was the second person to take on the role of the case manager in the center, and really probably only one of two people in the entire state of Missouri to have such a role. I really did go into this believing that we were going to alleviate suffering and help young people become their true selves and embody their truth. Mr. Jekielek: That is the core idea behind this ideology. If you help young people early on as they are questioning their gender identity, and if you deal with that early on, then you will have a healthy, happy person on the other side. That’s the core idea, would you agree? Ms. Reed: Yes, that’s the core idea behind the whole concept. Mr. Jekielek: Everything I’ve been learning over the last several years tells me the opposite is true. Ms. Reed: Yes. If you really start to look at where these treatments came from and evolved, and how we came to even be interfering in the pediatric body, you start to really question the whole model of care itself. When I started at the center, I didn’t know the history of how this developed out of something called the Dutch Protocol that came out of the Netherlands, and how truly revolutionary it was. Without a lot of good quality research, it was to start blocking puberty in a healthy developing body and go from a puberty blocker to a cross-sex hormone in a pediatric child’s body. As I worked in the center and began to understand more about where this came and what we were seeing in the population, so many truths about the treatment just weren’t holding water. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that is in your affidavit is that in the Dutch model they excluded young people with psychiatric comorbidities. Whereas, in your work setting, almost every prospective patient had serious psychiatric comorbidities. Ms. Reed: Yes. The Dutch were excluding individuals with severe or concurrent mental health issues, but they were also excluding patients who did not have lifetime gender dysphoria. Part of their protocol was that people had to have been experiencing gender dysphoria from a very, very young age. In this cohort in the United States that is presenting in these clinics, there is a huge number of teenagers who do not have any lifetime or early onset gender issues. There are teens who have learned enough to say, “Oh, but I have been experiencing this from an early age.” But we see this disconnect where they are claiming this, but there’s no real family history of it. In medicine, you want to not only trust, but also to verify. Somebody may tell me, “I’ve had this since my earliest memories,” but yet you can find nothing in their medical records. There was nothing recorded where they came to a pediatrician and mom had a conversation saying, “I’m concerned about my child’s gender presentation.” There is also nothing documenting this from a kindergarten teacher. There is a really significant number of teens who are coming forward at age 15 and 16 with these presentations where we just don’t see any history of it. In the early research, these are patients that were always excluded. These were not patients that were included in these early treatment models. Mr. Jekielek: What were you thinking? You believed you were stepping into something that could be helpful to young people. Please explain to us the mental state, or the reality, or the core assumptions of a person that believes they’re helping people with this gender medicine. Ms. Reed: There are a number of themes that you see in pediatric gender medicine. At these centers, there are doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers who really do have strong beliefs about helping young people. They see them suffering. A lot of these doctors are young doctors, and they’re newer in these fields. One of our doctors was directly out of residency and he was named a co-director. There is an intentional practice of hiring people directly from my community into these centers. They’re hiring individuals who are from the LGBT community, and that’s intentional. It also creates these feelings where you cannot go against these narratives, because you’re going against your own tribe. You’re going against your own people if you step forward and say, “I don’t see this working the way that it was sold. I see people being harmed.” One of the reasons why there are so many lesbian, gay, bi adults working in this field is because they experienced gender questioning and confusion as a young person. For many lesbian, gay, and bi people it’s just part of our growing up. We experience gender in different ways. We are tomboys and what used to be referred to as sissy girls. We experience gender differently. Part of the problem is that we see ourselves in these kids, yet, we have no good way of diagnostically differentiating who of these patients would just grow up to be a gay person, versus who might experience more of a lifelong gender-questioning pathway. Mr. Jekielek: Which, by all accounts, is extremely rare. Ms. Reed: Yes, that is extremely rare. Honestly, if you looked at earlier data, most of these kids are gay kids. One thing I struggle with is that we are taking away sexual function and fertility from our younger people. That is hard to face as an adult who has had biological children, who has been able to find comfort in my own gender and sex. We’re making these decisions and we’re taking this away from children. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve learned over the last few years about the power of social conformity and the need to belong that ultimately can take over rationality. As you pointed out moments ago, the effects on these kids can create a life of suffering. Is that oversimplifying it? Ms. Reed: No. We were not just in an ideological bubble, we were backed up by the university. Our culture right now is upholding places like these as if they are somehow sacred and not to be questioned. We didn’t just run the pediatric gender center. We infiltrated into other medical divisions. We had the audacity to go in and train these other divisions so that they would start to take on the language. In my training I would directly say, “We’re not here to be the language police. But you can’t say certain things to your patients. You have to use whatever pronouns your patients come forward with. You have to change the charts to update how they’re identifying.” We were going into these medical systems like tentacles to shift things all across the board. When we first did these training sessions in 2018, there was no pushback. The audience would be like, “Oh, they know everything. They’re so great.” By the end of 2022, other medical professionals were slowly starting to recapture what they already knew. They were starting to push back and ask questions. They would say, “Is there a line anywhere? Do we just affirm anything these children are saying?” Part of the complicity that I still feel is that we were bullying people into accepting these concepts. It was ideological bullying across the medical spectrum. As you can see in medicine, in the schools, in journalism, and in peer-reviewed publications, if you question this gender medicine, you’re the worst of the worst. You’re transphobic. You’re homophobic. You’re a Nazi. It’s just remarkable how quickly all of these systems were captured. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to read something about the center that I found, “The center tells the public and parents that it makes individualized decisions. This is not true. Doctors at the center believe that every child who meets four basic criteria; age or puberty stage, therapist letter, parental consent and a one-hour visit with a doctor, is a good candidate for irreversible medical intervention. When a child meets these four simple criteria, the doctors always decide to move forward with puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. There were no objective medical tests or criteria or individualized assessments.” How is that even remotely possible? Ms. Reed: Those were some of the basic scientific questions that began to really trouble me. In medicine there should be a differential diagnosis done. Everyone presenting just statistically cannot come through to the other side meeting the differential. It’s almost like if everybody said, “I have rheumatoid arthritis,” and then everyone that self-diagnosed and presented that claim came out the other side with treatments for rheumatoid arthritis. We had set up a system where children were basically fulfilling the role that we used to give to doctors that had the training to provide a differential diagnosis. What was so challenging was seeing it continue to fall on the kids. I would watch parents basically turn to their adolescents, who are struggling or in so much distress and say, “Do you know that you have to be sure about this? Are you really sure?” At the end of the day, everybody just looked at the kid. As a parent, I know children are even more anxious and struggle even more if the adults in the room don’t tell them that they’ve got this covered and say, “We’re the adults. We make the decisions. It is not on your shoulders.” We have created a medical system where we have put all of this on the kids. Imagine if you’re a kid and you say, “Yes, this is it. I know this is the treatment that I need,” and then you find out 2, 3, or 4 years later that it’s not. Then there is so much pressure on them to continue, because we have allowed them to make that decision on their own, a decision that should have never been theirs in the first place. Mr. Jekielek: There’s the incredibly heartbreaking anecdote about the young girl who asks to have her breasts put back on after a double mastectomy. I don’t even know what to say about that, but horribly misled and abused comes to mind. Ms. Reed: It was a failure on the part of so many individuals to allow her to have that surgery. But the thing that just was such a gut check was on the backend. You have a patient calling within three months of surgery reporting this, and the surgeon couldn’t even bother to take the call or call them back. The person who actually removed this healthy tissue from this person couldn’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and call them back and hear their pain and acknowledge it. It was pushed off on myself and our nurse to do this follow-up. The hubris and the lack of willingness to see the harm that one did was horrible. Mr. Jekielek: What kind of accountability followed that scenario? Ms. Reed: There was no accountability. The university and the hospital administrators had no accountability. This made me realize that this was not an individual patient failure, this was a systematic failure, because this patient met the criteria. They had the letter from a therapist and had worked with the therapist ahead of time. They had met with the organization called WPATH [World Professional Organization for Transgender Health]. It just continued to show me that the whole machine was broken, not just an individual cog here or there. The only way the machine could spin was to take someone and put them into the treatment path. There were no off-ramps at any point. Mr. Jekielek: You offer a few examples where treatment was declined for some very arcane reason. But this is a systemic problem and everyone gets pushed in the same direction. Is it just that people believe so deeply that this is what everybody must do? There are financial and incentive structures and I’ve spoken with people on the show about that. Do you understand how this works? Ms. Reed: There are a few elements that are hard for individual doctors within these systems to pause. At the center that I worked in, there were basically eight people on the team. There were only two individuals that touched every single chart. The two of us that touched every patient chart and saw every patient started picking up on the trend lines pretty quickly. We were seeing the harms, seeing that a significant number of patients were not doing well, and seeing the 30 percent loss in the follow-up rate. We were having patients start and then disappear. The doctors were seeing the patients who started on a treatment and came back three months later and said, “Oh, it’s wonderful” and then six months later said, “Oh, it’s wonderful.” There were so many patients that they did not even see. A small number of the patients would go through and be happy. But we were pretty much seeing this 30 percent, 30 percent, 30 percent. It was 30 percent saying, “This is great. I’m happy now. It was 30 percent that were having no change in the short term, either for better or for worse. Then 30 percent were really struggling and falling apart. Obviously, the treatments were immediately harming them. Initially, that was almost okay, because you could focus on that 30 percent that seemed to be doing well. The longer I was there, with the patients that at year one were doing well, year two were doing well, year three were doing well, you started to see by year four they were not meeting what we would consider the goal of adolescence, which is growing up. We start them on a puberty blocker at age 13, and the thing we were saying about this treatment is, “We’re making you a happy, healthy kid.” What do we expect from a 16, 17, or 18-year-old? We want them to be getting a driver’s license, maybe having their first job, maybe starting to think about college and maybe starting to progress outside of having a room full of stuffed animals. We want them to be achieving the goals of adolescence, and then move into young adulthood. Even that 30 percent that we were claiming were good were still struggling behind their peers. I was also seeing that their identities were not staying consistent. These were kids who were initially claiming that they were a girl or a woman. Four years later their identity had shifted to some vague non-binary status. The people that tout these treatments claim, “Oh, they’re just on their gender journey.” But as someone who’s been working as a social worker for years, I want to see people progressing through the stages of life, and these kids were just not doing that. I will concede that we have been transitioning humans for probably 40 to 50 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, we started some of these treatments with adults. All of the trans adults that I work with and that I’m friends with today, intuitively always understood their biological sex. They recognized that these treatments were changing their outward presentation to make them feel more comfortable interacting in the world. But they did not have these dissociative concepts about their identity. As adults, we have to talk to the younger kids and the younger cohort about the truth of what biological sex is, what the physical body is, and what can and cannot be changed. I’m a parent with kids who range from age 2 to 15. I’ve interacted with toddlers who will straight up ask you, “Am I a boy or a girl?” They rely on us to explain the reality of biology and sex to them, so that they can ground themselves in the reality of this world. This young cohort really struggles with this group of adults who are lying to them and saying, “No, trans women are women. You are a woman.” They struggle with coming into adolescence and into young adulthood with that narrative, and then coming up against the actual reality of the world, which is that your biological sex does matter. I do support trans adults who find that the best way for them to move forward is to medically transition and to present to the world as a different gender. I recognize that it helps some people. But what has never helped anyone is to try to create this upside down world where biological sex is ignored. For some of these patients, growing into adolescence and then into young adulthood brings this question, “Have my parents and these doctors been lying to me this whole time?” How does that lie affect someone trying to become themselves? Mr. Jekielek: We’re bringing up a whole generation of kids who are insecure in their identity, because they’re told they can be whatever they want it to be. They are told that it’s a spectrum, and you can change it from time to time if you feel like it. Ms. Reed: Yes. Children need a solid foundation, a grounding, and something to fall back on. You go out and explore, but you still have that foundation. If you do not have the foundation, and the foundation of your own physical body in space and time, of course the mind is going to become fractured and then struggle. Mr. Jekielek: How many patients did you see over the three years that you worked there? Ms. Reed: I worked there for almost four-and-a-half years. Nobody is keeping good records and nobody is keeping good data at gender centers in the United States. To actually have a dialogue, we need solid numbers and solid data. Since I left the center, this is one of the things I have been advocating for. I saw close to 1,200 individual, unique patients in my tenure, and we medicalized a significant majority of those. You can look back at the original first pediatric center that opened here in the United States referred to as the GeMS [Gender Multispecialty Service]. Some of the data that I heard was that they were open for five years. In the first five years they medicalized 70 patients total. What is happening now in these centers is this rapid, very quick treatment. Mr. Jekielek: Do you reflect on your own participation in this process for these 1,200 patients? It just must be a difficult thing to deal with. Ms. Reed: It is. I’m a mom and my kids know very little about any of this. But if anything, I hope that my kids can take away that grownups have to be able to acknowledge that they made a mistake. I recognized that mistake probably by the second year of my tenure, and then I spent probably two years within the system trying to see if we could shift the care. We would have case conferences and bring forward patients. I would advocate and say, “This patient does not meet criteria. I have a lot of concerns about this patient. Can we just put a pause on this?” I found myself almost begging or arguing in the case conference. We would have young patients who had experienced sexual abuse or assault. I would ask, “Before we give this patient testosterone, can we ask them to do six months of trauma therapy? Can we see if we could help them to address the trauma first, before we do this irreversible change?” I spent a number of years trying to advocate in that way, and that went nowhere. Then there was this weird fear that if I left, I would simply be replaced by somebody even more ideologically driven. Then there was this liminal space where I thought, “If I stay then potentially I could help some of these kids in some way.” But I was complicit. I worked in an industry that was harming children. The thing that I have to grapple with every day is making amends for that and trying to address the wrongs that I participated in. Mr. Jekielek: On this show, I’ve had a number of people in similar situations. They realized they were part of something that had huge problems. Then they came out and blew the whistle, and then had to grapple with it. That’s a rare thing and should be lauded. We live in a society where a lot of people have been complicit in things they’re not very proud of and will have to deal with it. But hopefully, as a process of healing, they will be admitting such things to themselves. How do we do that? Ms. Reed: It will be a process, and it is about being intentional. The part that I struggle with the most is when people come up to me and say, “Thank you so much for what you’ve done. You’re a hero.” No. I should have done more, quicker, sooner, and differently. A lot of this is asking for grace, giving myself the room for grace, and being willing to ask others for grace. Now I find myself getting really close to a number of young people who have detransitioned, who went through these treatments and are grappling with the medical harms. One of the things that we all can do as a society, and especially doctors in general, is to acknowledge the person in front of us, what we have put them through, and not turn a blind eye. I can’t go back and change the past but I can change every day in my future. That means listening when somebody reaches out to me and wants to sit down with me and tell me their story. I have detransitioners reach out to me and ask me, “Jamie, will you read through my medical records?” Because they know I understand how to do that. We read through the records together and we talk through what I see from the insider’s point of view. I give them a space to be heard and I hope to walk with them in that journey. Because I can’t go back and change it, but I can at least do that and be side by side with them. Hopefully, I can help others, not ignore their existence, and see them as people. I also want to ask the medical community to be brave, acknowledge their existence, recognize them for who they are, and look at what we need to do now. Mr. Jekielek: What you’ve done, you have to live with. But every day is a new day and things can change in an instant if you make that choice. I expect that there are a lot of people out there now that are thinking these kinds of things. I expect you’re probably even talking to some of them. Ms. Reed: I am. Mr. Jekielek: There was a very thoughtful and appropriate process that you went through, which was to become a whistleblower. Let’s talk about this for people that might be thinking about it, and understand that there is some sort of recourse. Ms. Reed: Yes, whistleblowers are a very interesting group of people. You find whistleblowers across all industries. At this moment in time, this industry is going to continue to see a number of them. One of the things that I found really powerful was looking at Britain. There was a clinic called Tavistock in Britain, and there were a number of whistleblowers that came out of that clinic. There were a number of them working together within this bigger group. In the United States right now you have all of these tiny clinics, where if you are feeling concerned or are thinking about being a whistleblower in one of those clinics here in the U.S., you’re going to feel really alone, because you might be the only one on your team. It took so long to get that affidavit at the AG’s office and work with the free press. It took months and months of background work. It was about finding a team, building a team behind me, and having really long in-depth conversations about, “What are you willing to risk? What do you want to risk? What do you want to see happen out of this?” One of the things that I am working on building right now is a coalition of other lesbian, gay, bisexual and adult trans people. We’re calling ourselves the Courage Coalition. We’re trying to build places for other whistleblowers to go, knowing that so many of the people that work in this industry are going to be people like myself, LGBT, knowing that you can land in a place where we can help you find legal representation, and knowing that other people have come before you. The biggest fears that I had of becoming a whistleblower is that I would be completely alone, isolated, and have to step off a cliff, basically. Mr. Jekielek: You would lose your livelihood. You mentioned that you’ve got five kids. Ms. Reed: Right. There are legal protections for whistleblowers, and there has to be. There are so many industries like this where you have to open up a channel for people to come forward and say, “There are harms.” One of the biggest areas for whistleblowers is medicine. With some other industries that are really dangerous, like finance, there are mechanisms in place. Part of it is just being able to link people to the right attorneys and to the right support so that they know that they can be protected in their jobs and so that they have that safety moving forward. We are really working to build that specifically for this industry. Mr. Jekielek: What is the first step for a person who is watching and is thinking to themselves that it’s time. What should they do? Ms. Reed: We’re hoping to fully launch in a month-and-a-half. We will launch a website and launch a safe place to contact. Part of this is documentation, which is tough. You can have a story to tell, but we do live in a situation where you have to have documentation behind you. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve got to have the receipts, as they say. Ms. Reed: You have to have the receipts, which means collecting emails, collecting documentation, and learning how to redact things and scrub out what’s called PHI, private health information, scrubbing things out while still keeping the narratives, the stories, the evidence, and the proof. But one of the things I’ve learned is that your employer is not a safe place to do this. Even if you just Google and look up just general whistleblower statutes, you probably don’t want to go to your internal HR systems. You’re going to need outside support for this. We’re in this really interesting cultural zeitgeist right now. There are so many things about this moment in time, because we have things like social media. We have kids with cell phones at ages 7, 8, and 9 watching an algorithm that pushes them to endless TikTok videos of trans influencers. One of the biggest myths that is being propagated is that suicide will be the final outcome. If we do not affirm or give these treatments, you will have individuals who are committing suicide. I hate to say this, but even the Ohio governor fell for it. But the data doesn’t show this to be true. Again, it’s one of those moments where we have put children in control. We have created a scenario where you literally just gave the script to the kid for how to talk to the adult. If they didn’t already know it, now they’re going to get in the car and they’re going to know exactly what to say to their parents. Children need adults to be adults making decisions, and guiding and leading them. At the end of the day, nobody was the responsible one in these centers. The therapist would write a letter thinking that the endocrinologist was making the decision. The endocrinologist would say that the therapist wrote the letter. Then they would all go and say, “But the parents are making the decision.” Nobody is stepping forward and being responsible, because if somebody started to do that, we would have to recognize that there are patients that we would have to say no to. The thing that was so challenging was that nobody was ever told no. You cannot have a functional medical diagnostic determination if everybody always gets a yes. It’s just not statistically possible. Mr. Jekielek: This is a social contagion. You mentioned a lot of your patients were young girls probably caught up in this social contagion fueled by TikTok, and fueled by social media and the need to belong. You’re not going to be giving medical advice here, but as a parent who might have a kid in this situation, what should a parent do in general? Ms. Reed: This is so challenging. I remember one particular case from when I was screening all of the new incoming families and kids. There was a parent telling me the story where their child went to a summer camp. We think we’re being great parents. We pay the money. We give them this extra cultural thing to do as your artsy, theater summer camp. Day one, Monday morning, the camp counselor put everybody around the circle to do the pronouns. He was telling these kids, “Go around the circle everybody and say what your pronouns are.” This was a five-day camp. By the end of Tuesday, the twelve-year-olds had already said that their pronouns were now they/them. Every day, it was the pronoun game. Every day, it was all about your identity. This is how malleable our children are. By the end of Friday, that child was trans-identified, within five days. The parents recognized it. They said, “On Monday, they weren’t thinking about this at all. But by Tuesday, they were non-binary. By Friday they were trans.” The mom said to me, “I guess I have to support this or else my child will kill themselves.” Mr. Jekielek: They had already bought into this. Ms. Reed: The parents already knew that was the only response they should say. It is so insidious right now for parents. I’ve heard of parents who have literally moved their children out of this country. I know of parents who have been pulling children out of school and homeschooling. I recognize for individual parents, that might be the thing they have to do for their child. But we all have to be willing to go to the school board meeting and say, “Please explain what is happening in our schools.” We have to go to the camp counselor on the Monday morning of the theater camp and say, “Can we have a conversation? Are you going to ask all of these twelve-year-olds what their pronouns are at the beginning of this camp?” Everybody is afraid that if they do that, they will be immediately hit with, “You’re transphobic. You don’t understand. You’re anti-LGBT.” I will tell you as somebody from the LGBT community, it is not anti-LGBT to not be indoctrinating children into this ideology. The kids also told us, “This is a trend.” I had a patient tell me, “This is the new goth in my school.” Figure out what’s going on in your school district and go to the school board meeting. If you walk into a room and everybody picks up a name tag and starts writing their pronouns on it, be willing to say, “No, I’m not doing that.” If you work in a business and everybody’s putting their pronouns at the end of their name you can say, “No, thank you. I’m not participating in this.” You can do that in a loving, caring, and kind way. I just want people to know that you are not a bigot and you can still be supportive of adults who are lesbian, gay, bi, and trans. You do not need to feel like we need to indoctrinate the whole world into this. We need to go back to being able to acknowledge that people have different opinions and it is okay to say, “Hey, we don’t agree on this, but that’s cool. Thanks for sitting down and having coffee with me.” Mr. Jekielek: Jamie Reed, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Reed: Thank you so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jamie Reed 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/S0120JamieReed Epoch Original DVD collection:

The threat of a third world war is now growing. Leaked war plans reveal that Germany is preparing for such a scenario. NATO is launching military drills for a potential third world war, as it’s suspected Russia may expand its conflict into other countries. Iran, meanwhile, is rallying proxy forces to start terror wars, as it nears a red line for war with Israel over its nuclear enrichment programs. In China, CCP leader Xi Jinping is launching military purges, which are suspected of being war preparations over Taiwan. And elsewhere, North Korea and Venezuela have renewed hostilities and are accused of planning regional wars. 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/3OcB9YM Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A newly released set of documents exposes that Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, was actually lying when trying to defend herself in public. Meanwhile, Congress has just launched an investigation into Ms. Willis’s alleged affair. This is throwing a real wrench into the RICO case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia, which has been pushed by Ms. Willis against President Trump and 18 of his associates. 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 allegedly flagged online purchases and payments for potential terrorism and extremism. This included searches for keywords like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and even extended to purchases of religious books. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of the House Judiciary Committee issued a letter detailing the allegations of political and religious surveillance that is supposedly being carried out. 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/4b5oH6K Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

In a wild turn of events, John Anthony Castro, the man who has been chasing former President Donald Trump around the whole country—suing him from state to state in order to get him kicked off the ballot—has just himself been arrested for several alleged felonies. Last week, Mr. Castro was arrested on federal tax charges, and according to federal prosecutors, he was charged with 33 counts of helping others prepare false tax returns. The allegation here is that Mr. Castro was running a virtual tax business that was giving his customers tax returns far beyond what they were owed. In response, Mr. Castro pled not guilty to the charges and said in a statement that he gave to Newsweek that they were retaliation by the government because he dared to challenge President Trump. And so essentially, Mr. Castro’s argument here is that the Justice Department under the Biden Administration is politically retaliating against him because he dared to challenge Donald Trump. 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

“So, we landed in Kabul. This is a long time ago, long before the Taliban. And the airport official just smoothly took my American passport away and said, ‘No problem, madam. We'll return it to your family.’ Never saw it again. And then I discovered that my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children.” Phyllis Chesler was born into a Jewish-American family. In 1961, at just 20 years of age, she traveled as a new bride with her husband to Afghanistan, where she entered into a traditional, Muslim household and was quickly stripped of her rights, seen as the property of her male family members. After finally escaping back to the United States, she became what she calls a “politically-incorrect feminist” who advocates for the rights of women and girls, and speaks out against “faux feminists” in the West, who have failed to support the Oct. 7 victims of Hamas’s rape and sexual assault, and remain silent on the gender apartheid afflicting the Arab–Muslim world. Watch the clip: “She called me up one day, maybe a year later, and said, ‘Do you want to help rescue girls and women from Afghanistan?’ I said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call my entire life.’ And we did. That’s what we did. It was a group of grassroots feminists who undertook that holy task, and we got 398 out with no help from the government,” says Dr. Chesler. “Israel is fighting the West’s battle by itself—it really is—for the kinds of freedoms from tyranny that the West has been standing for, was founded for, and is now not holding on to.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (54 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0116PhyllisChesler Epoch Original DVD collection:

A new model for the future of the world includes an agenda to end all personal privacy. The narrative is that if you haven’t done anything wrong, then you have nothing to fear—a narrative that would be all too familiar for anyone who has lived in a communist society. Yet even though there are proposals to more deeply enact this model globally, the world—and even Americans—are already living in a state of sweeping digital surveillance used by government and law enforcement. 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/3O7kbuZ Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

Former President Donald Trump’s trial in New York came to a head this week, as the presiding judge wrote an email using all caps to his lawyers, warning them that if President Trump wants to speak on the case, he better not mention the attorney general, or he will be kicked out of the courtroom. 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