The IRS has just announced that it is waving the failure-to-pay penalty for approximately 5 million American taxpayers. If you are one of the nearly 5 million taxpayers who owe back taxes for the year 2020 and/or 2021, if your total tax liability is less than $100,000, if you received an initial notice from the IRS informing you of the fact that you owed taxes, but then you never received a follow-up notice—then you qualify for this relief. 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

Special Counsel Jack Smith wants the DC appeals court to not hear any motions and to drop any decision on whether former President Donald Trump had presidential immunity for the Jan. 6 case. This could have sweeping impacts—not only on the many criminal charges against President Trump, but also on potential future charges against President Joe Biden and other former presidents. This is currently going to the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC, and oral arguments on the case are set for Jan. 9. 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/3NRx0JI Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

Inflation is the hidden tax that we all pay—on top of all the other taxes we already pay. As the Federal Reserve pumps more currency into the system, the result is that the government can fund more of its wars and social programs with deficit spending, while the actual value of each individual falls through the floor and everything at the supermarket becomes increasingly more and more expensive. That’s all on the negative side. On the positive side (if you can think of it that way), people who receive Social Security will soon be seeing larger checks thanks to an inflation adjustment. Specifically, the Social Security Administration announced that a new cost-of-living adjustment will be made to Social Security payments. 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

“In middle Nigeria, they are attacking—frequently—the Christian villages and townships in the Middle Belt, and that’s gone on for some time, and the attacks are ruthless. And I’ve been to the villages that have suffered an attack from the Islamist Fulani herdsmen, and homes are still burning.” In this episode, I sit down with Baroness Caroline Cox, a member of the British House of Lords and founder of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust. “We have a mandate to heal the sick, feed the hungry, care for the oppressed … Ask God, each one of us, what He wants us to do to fulfill that mandate,” says Baroness Cox. We survey the Baroness’s humanitarian work throughout the globe, and discuss the current political conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which has recently escalated into a dire situation. Watch the clip: “I became so concerned about what was really happening to the people from Armenia in this little land of Nagorno-Karabakh, that that began my engagement with that whole area,” says Baroness Cox. “The Armenians are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. All the ones that have had to flee, 100,000 from Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia, they’ve had to leave everything behind.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (22 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1230BaronnessCox FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Baroness Caroline Cox, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Baroness Caroline Cox: Thank you. It’s a great privilege to be here. Mr. Jekielek: The privilege is mine, in fact. I’ve been following your humanitarian work for at least two decades. Let’s start there. Please tell us about yourself. Baroness Cox: All I ever say about myself is I’m actually a nurse and a social scientist by intention, and a Baroness by astonishment. I was not born a Baroness. I was appointed to the House of Lords by Margaret Thatcher, and I was the first Baroness I had ever met. But it’s quite a shock because you find yourself in the House of Lords, which is like the upper house of your Congress. I thought, “How do I use this privilege?” Then the idea came that it’s a wonderful place to be a voice for people whose voices are not heard. That’s how I tried to use my role there in the House of Lords, largely with humanitarian aid work for people suffering oppression and persecution and largely unreached by other aid organizations. In a different vein, I work on behalf of Muslim women in the United Kingdom who suffer from only having Sharia marriages and not legally-registered marriages, and that leaves them very vulnerable. Those are the two threads. Most of my time is with humanitarian work with our partners on the front lines of faith and freedom. Mr. Jekielek: The people I remember are the ones who take very public, principled stands on issues that are decidedly unfashionable, and you stand out in that view. With the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, especially in the early years, the hate propaganda was thick and a lot of western media outlets were basically picking it up. There were very few people that were saying, “Irrespective of all that, this is wrong.” Thank you for that. Baroness Cox: It’s a great privilege. I happen to be Christian and we have a mandate to be associated with people suffering oppression and persecution. That is a great privilege because they are often heroes and heroines on their front lines of faith. Mr. Jekielek: You have been working for a long time on the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and the atrocities inflicted by the Azerbaijanis. Just recently there was a huge change in the reality of this particular region. I want to make sure I say it correctly, Nagorno-Karabakh. Baroness Cox: Well done. Mr. Jekielek: You’re in D.C. to talk about this, so please tell us about it. Baroness Cox: Indeed. Armenia was the first nation to become Christian as early as 301 AD. There are some of the oldest Christian churches and traditions in the world in Armenia. Then Stalin with his Salami Tactics cut off part of ancient Armenia, Christian Armenia, and stuck it into an oblast inside Azerbaijan. That little oblast or bit of ancient Armenia isolated in Azerbaijan is called Nagorno-Karabakh. It has some of the oldest churches in the world. But relatively recently, Azerbaijan has increased its persecution of the Christians living in that little land, and it’s been on and off for many years. In December of last year, Azerbaijan cut off the road which links Armenia to this little land of Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan. It’s the only route by which medical supplies and food could come in. Armenians were suffering very badly in Nagorno-Karabakh for much of this year. I’ve seen a photograph of one man who died of starvation. I’m sure many people suffered really seriously; elderly people, babies, and pregnant women. Then Azerbaijan upped the aggression against the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh when it began bombing them. It has bombed them before, but then bombed them again. The Armenians really had to flee for their lives and this began the process of what is legitimately called ethnic cleansing. Over 100,000 Armenians had to flee from Azerbaijan into Armenia itself, taking only what they could carry. They couldn’t take their possessions from their homes and just flee into Armenia, and that was just very recently. That ethnic cleansing has left that little land of Nagorno-Karabakh bereft, and only about 40 Armenians are still there. It is a very serious and tragic situation. It’s a very difficult situation and 100,000 Armenians have had to flee from their homeland into Armenia. Armenia is not a big country nor a wealthy country, and it’s now had this huge influx of people. There is another aspect which is very serious and needs a lot of prayer, if I may say so. Azerbaijan has also captured and imprisoned quite a lot of innocent Armenians. There were some from the previous, short war in the year 2020, and there were some prisoners of war from that time. But more recently, they have abducted and imprisoned civilians and some leaders that I know personally. There needs to be a lot of pressure on Azerbaijan to release those prisoners that they are holding illegally. Mr. Jekielek: Because the changes that happened recently are dramatic, what is your involvement in that region? Also, please tell us about your organization, HART [Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust], which goes to places that the Red Cross will not go to. Baroness Cox: Very briefly, how HART became involved with Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh goes way back, because I’m very old, a long time ago. I was at a very big international human rights conference in Moscow. It was probably the first human rights conference to be held in Moscow after the emergence of Russia from the Soviet Union. There was a very famous person there, and her name may be familiar, Yelena Bonner Sakharov. Her husband was a very famous human rights activist, Andrei Sakharov, who had passed away. Yelena Bonner Sakharov was a wonderful, inspirational person who was passionate about human rights. She told us about the situation in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Long story short, I was asked to lead an international delegation down to the area. It was the first time that I had visited Armenia. We visited there and heard about what the people were suffering in this little land of Nagorno-Karabakh. We actually did go up and walk across the border with no prior permission. It was a bit risky going into Azerbaijan, but we always have to hear two points of view. If you don’t get two points of view, a lot of the media won’t cover you, because they would think it was partisan. We actually did walk across the border into Azerbaijan, which was interesting. We were carrying some white flags, which was also interesting, but we survived. That was my first time, and I became so concerned about what was really happening to the people from Armenia in the little land of Nagorno-Karabakh. That began my engagement with that whole area. I have since traveled there many times. I don’t count, but I’ve been told by those who do count, that it’s 88 times into Nagorno-Karabakh, and 90 times into Armenia. There were two times that I couldn’t go into Karabakh. Mr. Jekielek: It might not be obvious to people why there is this hostility. Do you have a sense of why? Baroness Cox: Unfortunately, Azerbaijan has a track record of hostility and of brutal treatment. President Aliyev of Azerbaijan has declared his intention to annex Nagorno-Karabakh entirely, but also to annihilate Armenians who are living there. More recently, he has threatened to invade Armenia itself. Azerbaijan is extremely wealthy with oil and other resources, has very well-resourced military capacity, and they’re already building up quite worryingly along the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It has carried out military offensives against the Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh and it is extremely serious. But President Aliyev has said that Azerbaijan will occupy Armenia itself, along with Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He has actually said that Lake Sivan, a beautiful lake historically inside Armenia, would belong to Azerbaijan. It is important to challenge President Aliyev’s lies with the truth. Mr. Jekielek: It’s a kind of a land grab then. Is that how you view it? Baroness Cox: Certainly with its intention, Azerbaijan has already succeeded in taking Nagorno-Karabakh and driving the ethnic Armenians out. In September, not so long ago, I was in Armenia and visited a long-established Armenian town called Goris, which goes up against the border of Azerbaijan. From that town, up a hillside you could see an encampment by Azerbaijan that was already there. There were three Azerbaijan encampments there with impunity. They are really getting away with encroaching into Armenian sovereign territory with impunity, and that’s very worrying. Mr. Jekielek: What is your intention here? Baroness Cox: We’re trying to raise both aid and advocacy. As I mentioned earlier, the Armenians are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. The 100,000 that had to flee from Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia had to leave everything behind, so they are in great need. But we also have one particular focus in that we have a hero, and I call him a hero of peace. His name is Vardan Tadevosyan and he established a rehabilitation center inside Nagorno-Karabakh. The rehabilitation center that he developed with his staff was so superb. It became internationally renowned as a center of excellence and people came from around the world to see it. When I was there, not long ago, there was someone there from Japan who came to see it. People from Africa also came to see it. Vardan had to leave, which was heartbreaking, but he hopes to re-establish another center of excellence inside Armenia itself. That’s going to need funding. We are trying to raise money for a new rehabilitation center for people with disabilities. It will be a replacement for the one that is stranded in Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia itself. It will actually be very good for Armenia’s reputation as well. It’s very, very precious. That’s the humanitarian side. On the advocacy side, we are trying to encourage nations and pressure groups and people who respect and cherish freedom and truth to be advocates for freedom and truth, and to call Azerbaijan to account for its appalling annihilation of the Armenian existence in the little land of Nagorno-Karabakh and their threats to extend their role into Armenia itself. We are here for advocacy, and also advocacy for those people who are imprisoned in Azerbaijan who desperately need to be freed. Mr. Jekielek: What has the response been? Baroness Cox: Here? The response has been wonderful. People have received us very graciously and responded very positively. I do raise these issues in the British Parliament. I know they have been raised in the U.S. Congress. I hope that we will receive funding that is desperately needed for the rehabilitation center and for the Armenians who had to flee, leaving everything behind them. We need aid and advocacy. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about HART, your organization. What does it mean to go to a place where the Red Cross won’t go? Baroness Cox: I was appointed to the House of Lords in 1983, I can’t believe it, 40 years ago. In the early decade, I did a lot of work for Poland, because Poland was in the very dark days of martial law in those days. I did a lot of work for a very good organization, the Medical Aid for Poland fund. We took in medical aid and went in many times on the trucks speaking for the Polish people who were suffering at the hands of communism. That country emerged, praise God, into freedom in 1989. Then I did a lot of work in Russia with Soviet orphans who were having a rough time and helped to establish programs for enabling children to be kept in care homes or homes for orphaned children. Then I decided that I wanted to diversify, so I founded HART. It stands for Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust. HART was established to provide aid and advocacy for people suffering persecution and oppression in areas not reached by other major aid organizations, either for political reasons or security reasons. I have great respect for the big organizations like the UN, but they can only go in with the permission of a sovereign government. If a sovereign government is victimizing a minority within its own borders, and if it doesn’t give them permission, then they can’t go in. We do spend quite a lot of our time going in unofficially. We work with local partners and they are the heroes and heroines. On the security side, most of them are in war zones or conflict zones of some kind, and it’s quite dangerous getting there. Other aid organizations are quite rationally a bit nervous about going in. I can understand that because of their staff and their whole raison d'etre. But we do go where it may be politically incorrect and where it may be dangerous. A lot of our partners are in conflict zones in areas where they’re not supported by their national governments. We do provide aid and advocacy to the many who are suffering violations of human rights. Mr. Jekielek: Do you have one particular success story that you would like to share from all these years of doing this work? Baroness Cox: That’s a good question. Yes, I think we do. In one or two of the areas where we worked with HART, we now no longer need to work there. Because when we first started there, the population of civilians suffered from the criteria which HART tries to address. One of those early areas was in northern Uganda. We went there in the dark days when the Lord’s Resistance Army was active and attacking civilians. It was hell on earth, I can tell you. The first time I went there with a good colleague, it was really dangerous getting there, and it was dangerous when we were there. But we ask the local people, “What’s your priority?” We always ask people their priority. We don’t tell them what we’re going to do. We ask them because they know their own priorities. They said, “Please help the orphans. There are so many orphans because the parents have been killed and have had to flee.” They were just little skeletons. Long story short, we managed to provide food aid and other aid for those orphans. We also helped find parental care for those orphans in a holistic way. If you go there now, I can’t believe it. Here’s just one little vignette. Those kids are now teenagers. Recently, there was a football tournament in Africa, and a lot of African countries took part. A little team from our orphan program took part and they won the tournament. They were so talented that the United States chose one of those teenage football players to go to the states to develop in a proper, professional football program. Britain also selected another young player. Going from little orphans who were like little skeletons to being such competent football players in their teens that they were actually selected to represent their countries and go to other countries for training is an example. We no longer need that orphan program now. It has been successful, and all the orphans have been happily placed with families. That was a very happy outcome to a very tragic situation. Mr. Jekielek: We get so caught up in the many big issues, but the little small wins for these kids makes all the difference. Thank you for sharing that. You do advocate for places where you can’t easily inspect the situation. You were involved in the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China. You’ve actually taken your own government to task around the forced organ harvesting issue. Baroness Cox: I mentioned aid and advocacy, and they are obviously closely entwined. But there are issues where we do need to defend freedom and fundamental values, and that’s part of a Christian mandate, and also part of HART’s mandate. One of the areas where we border between the controversial and the fundamental principles is Nigeria. We do a lot of work in Middle Belt Nigeria. The Islamist Fulani always make a distinction between Islam and Islamism. Islam means Muslims, our Muslim friends. Islamism means the Islamists, and they are the ones who carry out the brutal attacks. In middle Nigeria, they frequently attack the Christian villages and townships in the Middle Belt, and that’s gone on for some time. The attacks are ruthless. I’ve been to the villages that have suffered an attack from the Islamist Fulani herdsman when the homes were still burning. I have seen the corpses before they’re buried, and it is a hell on earth. On one occasion when I was there they were just recovering from an attack. I met a young mother and she had tried to flee with her little six-year-old daughter, but the village had been surrounded by the Islamist Fulani. They couldn’t escape and they were caught. They slashed her across the shoulder with a machete, and then they cut her little daughter’s throat. She fainted after having been attacked by the machete. When she woke up her little six-year-old daughter was lying dead next to her, and inside the little daughter’s mouth was her mother’s finger. They cut her mother’s finger off and stuck it inside her mouth. This is a heartbreaking land. Those attacks on Christian villages in Middle Belt Nigeria are still going on. We always ask the local people and they said that the children of these one-and-a-half million people displaced from these villages and little townships are desperate for education. We have the Roads to Hope education vans, and we take educational supplies to those kids who are displaced. You could see the joy on the kids’ faces when these education vans arrived. It’s not just books, it’s computers and all sorts of things they need for proper education. Here’s hope for the future, and what a privilege to be able to do that. We’re now just diversifying into providing healthcare vans for the displaced people in Middle Belt Nigeria. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve covered this whole situation extensively. It’s hard to fathom another one of these realities that people just don’t know about. Maybe they don’t want to know about it because it’s so horrific and it continues to this day. Baroness Cox: Absolutely. It’s happening while we’re talking here today. Mr. Jekielek: Baroness Cox, it’s such a pleasure to speak with you. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Baroness Cox: Those of us who have freedom and those who have relatively plenty, we do have an obligation to share what we have with those people who are suffering and dying from starvation or from lack of medical care. We must learn to look beyond our comfort zone and to be alongside those people. Obviously, in prayer, we have a mandate to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and care for the oppressed. My passion would be for each one of us to ask God what he wants us to do to fulfill that mandate. Mr. Jekielek: Baroness Caroline Cox, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Baroness Cox: It’s been a privilege to be with you. Thank you for letting me share the pain and the passion and the privilege of being able to make a little bit of a difference. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Baroness Caroline Cox and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (22 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1230BaronnessCox Epoch Original DVD collection:

About 2 weeks ago, there was a legal victory for gun owners in the ongoing battle over the 2nd Amendment. Specifically, an organization called Gun Owners of America secured a partial—but significant—legal victory in their effort to repeal New York’s so-called Concealed Carry Improvement Act. And even though this was a New York case, the ramifications of this decision will be felt in blue cities and states across the nation. 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

While most Americans were focusing on rising inflation, the wars in Israel and Ukraine, and all of the lawsuits filed against President Trump, one issue seems to have flown under the radar: the fact that both China and Russia have been stockpiling massive amounts of physical gold. Moreover, it’s not just Russia and China—looking across the entire world, it seems like most central banks are in the process of increasing their stockpiles of gold. In fact, according to an Oct. 31 update by the World Gold Council, global central banks collectively bought an “astonishing” 800 tons of gold in the first three quarters of 2023. This is a 14 percent increase in gold buying compared with the same period last year. However, it’s not just nation states: ordinary citizens are also in the process of loading up on gold, evidenced by the fact that (in a recent earnings call) Costco executives revealed that they’ve sold $100 million worth of gold in the last quarter alone. 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 EU institutions—the way they’re structured, the way they interact—it's not only undemocratic, it's downright anti-democratic. And on top of that, it’s not a mistake they made. It is by design.” In this episode, I sit down with EU parliament member Christine Anderson. She represents the Alternative for Germany party and is part of the Identity and Democracy Group in the European Parliament. Everyone that is not in support of whatever globalist agenda is being advocated for or pushed at the moment is given the label “far-right,” says Ms. Anderson. We discuss the current cultural and political threats facing Europe, from surging immigration and anti-Semitism to censorship, along with the erosion of national sovereignty and identity. “We're so overrun, and it's almost like we have these parallel societies,” says Ms. Anderson. “On top of all of that, we are being taught to hate our own way of life, to hate our culture. Why would anyone want to integrate into a society that hates itself?” Watch the clip: Ms. Anderson believes the hope for Western democracies lies in Eastern Europe and America, where the people have learned to fight for their freedom. “They have learned to defend it and they have an understanding that it needs defending on an everyday basis,” she says. “The Western European spoiled brats—it’s kind of like freedom/democracy fell out of the blue sky on one fine day and boom, there it was.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 3 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1223ChristineAnderson FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: MEP Christine Anderson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Christine Anderson: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Welcome to Washington, DC. You've been speaking about the coronavirus pandemic and all the draconian measures that were associated with it. We have a select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic that has been doing an inquiry. There is similar activity in the European Parliament, as well as the European Citizens' Initiative, which you pointed out is actually making some progress. Please tell me about that. Ms. Anderson: First of all, there was a committee set up in the EU [European Union] Parliament. Unfortunately, it was not an inquiry committee. It was just a special committee so we lacked certain competencies to actually compel someone to show up for the committee. Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission, chose not to honor our request and they didn't show up. The title of the committee was, “Lessons Learned from Covid.” The thing is they were not interested in taking a look at where they went wrong. Was it okay for us to violate fundamental rights and to infringe upon them? No. What they were actually trying to look at, and what they did ask was, “Where did we fail to get the people to do what we wanted them to do?” That's what they were looking at. You can see from the report that came out of that committee and its findings, despite all the lies we exposed, and despite all the narratives that we uncovered, they only served one purpose—that being to break people and force them into compliance. Despite all of that that we uncovered, they repeated every single lie in that report. With this European Citizens' Initiative you were mentioning, these are seven brave citizens. They just decided they would not tolerate this anymore, at least not without putting up a fight, and that's what they did. It's an instrument that the EU Commission provides for citizens. That is their somewhat desperate attempt to uphold the facade of being a democracy. You need seven citizens from seven different member states and they can petition the EU Commission. The hurdles they have to take on are rather high. They have to submit it, the EU commission looks at it, and then they can decide, “We won't accept that or we will, or we will strike parts of it.” Then they have to collect a million signatures. Once all of this is done, the only thing that these seven citizens will be entitled to do, and the only thing that the commission is obliged to do, is to have them come in and present their case. That's it. The EU Commission does not have to do anything. They're not obligated to act on it or anything like that. Mr. Jekielek: Yet, you seem excited about it. Ms. Anderson: Absolutely, yes. Because it is nevertheless a great way of raising awareness of what's going on. People will be on the streets having to collect these signatures. There are conversations going on, so it's just one more way of spreading the word. This time it's semi-official, because it is a European Citizens' Initiative. Yes, we are hoping it will raise awareness. We are hoping that with all of this talk about granting the WHO governing powers, we will actually be able to stop that. Mr. Jekielek: People imagine that the European Parliament works much like the federal government would in the United States, but it actually works very differently. Please give us a picture of that reality. In fact, that's part of the reason why you wanted to become an MEP [Member of the European Parliament] in the first place. Ms. Anderson: EU institutions, in the way they're structured and the way they interact, are not only undemocratic, they are downright anti-democratic. On top of that, it's not a mistake they made. It is by design. The most important issue here is the division of power. That is like a fundamental principle in every democracy. You divide up the powers. That’s not the way it is with the EU Parliament or EU institutions. Let's say the German government wanted to pass a law. If the Bundestag, which is the democratically elected representation of the German people, said, "No, we will not give it a go. We will not vote for this. We don't want this," the story would end right then and there. But now, all the German government has to do is pretty much take that law and bring it to the EU institutions. In the council, which on the EU level is actually the legislative, they will pass the law at the EU level. In the council, it's the members of the national executive that are sitting at the EU level passing laws. There is no division of power. They passed the very same law that they failed to pass in Bundestag in the council because it's themselves passing it there, and then it has to come back. It has to be put into a law in the national member states. This has nothing to do with democracy. To make matters worse, up until a few years ago, all the decisions in the council had to be reached unanimously, and they're trying to get rid of that. Again, let's say the German government is wanting to pass a law. The Bundestag says, “No,” so they travel to Brussels. Even if the respective minister votes no on that, if he's not in a majority, then he will just be downvoted and the law will be passed anyway. What does that mean for the German people? They cannot run their minister out of office, because he did what they wanted them to do, he said “No.” The other ministers that voted on that law, they never voted for them. Mr. Jekielek: Basically, they have no recourse. Ms. Anderson: No recourse, exactly. That means nations ruling over other nations. Mr. Jekielek: The people that are anti-EU in Poland will say, "It's Germany and maybe France that really run the show." Isn't Germany actually in a good position here? Ms. Anderson: We need to take a look at that. What does that mean when people say Germany is running the show or France is running the show? In Europe, you will have a lot of people say, "Americans are running the show." Are we talking about German people or are we talking about the German government? Are we talking about the French people or the French government? Are we talking about the American people or the American government? At this point, it's not the people anymore. The people are not running any show anymore. It's the governments, but they appear to be puppets for whoever is actually calling the shots and pulling the strings. It's not the American people and it's not the German people, because the people all over the world are pretty much sitting in the same boat. We are up against the very same powers trying to infringe on our rights and trying to take away our democratic principles. That's what we're up against. Mr. Jekielek: Before you went into politics, you were actually a stay-at-home mom. First of all, what motivated you to jump in? You came in with this idea that the EU was not a place that you wanted or a structure that you wanted to see. Ms. Anderson: I've always been interested in politics, even as a kid. I remember I was like seven or eight years old and I used to watch these debates in the Bundestag. I just loved the way they came back and forth, and there were some serious verbal injuries inflicted upon each other. I was just fascinated by their presenting the arguments and doing stuff like that. I also remember when I was nine or ten years old, we lived close by to the eastern German border, so we would pick up their TV signals. Religiously, I would watch The Black Channel every Monday night which came on at a quarter-past-eight. It was pretty much scenes in Western Germany and they would comment on them. For example, there was a festival and people were standing in line to get a bratwurst. Their spin was, even in Western Germany, people are standing in line for food and they may not get their food. It was so fascinating even back then, how you could take facts and spin them in such a way that would fit your narrative. Then there was the subprime crisis in the United States in 2007, and the devastating effects it had on all economies around the world. I said, "What is going on?" We did a little research. The kids were in a place where I did not have to do everything for them anymore. Once you start going down that rabbit hole, there is no going back. I've always voted for the Christian Democratic Party in Germany and the libertarian party, because you have two votes in Germany. In 2005 I still did so, but in 2009 I could no longer vote for them. I voted invalid. That political homelessness that I experienced, I never would have thought that it would get to me, but it did. Not knowing who I was represented by anymore, and not knowing who would be my voice in politics anymore, that really was a horrible feeling. In 2013, I heard on TV a new party was being founded and said, "What is this? EU-skeptics and Euro-skeptics?” I turned off the TV and researched the party. I filled out an application for membership and joined the party. It was actually an act of pure self-defense, becoming a member of a party and getting involved myself. Because the people I had trusted to do that for me I could no longer trust, so I decided to do it myself. Mr. Jekielek: The AfD [Alternative for Germany] is very often characterized, certainly in America and in a lot of media in Europe, as a far-Right extremist party. But that's not what you found in your research. Please explain briefly, what is the AfD actually all about? Ms. Anderson: The AfD is not far-Right. It's just that we have been right so far, and the people are beginning to realize that. Any party that criticizes the government, questions the narrative, or questions the current thing is considered to be far-Right, or even Nazis and all these other negative connotations. As soon as you start advocating for the people, which is the job of elected representative, you will have to oppose the globalitarian misanthropists. There is a conflict of interest. Then they will throw whatever they have at you to prevent people from even listening to you. That's how it's working. When you look at my party's program, it says pretty much what it did in the program of the Christian Democrats, the former conservative party in Germany, and what it said in the program of the libertarian party, which is the Free Democratic Party. We just stuck by our convictions and what their positions were 10, 15, and 20 years ago. Mr. Jekielek: Elon Musk popularized this graphic at one point, which showed that he stayed in one place as the Left shifted to really far-Left. Is that what you think happened here? Ms. Anderson: Yes. Looking at the Christian Democrats in Germany and Chancellor Merkel, the head of that party, who would have thought that the former conservative party would pretty much steal the topics from the Greens? It was that party that shut down all nuclear power plants in Germany, because of something that happened at the other end of the world. The German nuclear power plants were top notch in terms of security, the facilities and all of the things we made sure that they were safe. Now, we shut them all down, because of something that happened at the other end of the world. We're now buying the nuclear power from France and Poland, which are not up to the security standards that the German nuclear power plants had. Then you can look at marriage for all. It was the Christian Democratic Party actually passing that in the Bundestag. It's like they really took over from what the Greens were advocating for. But what they are saying about my party, apparently we have moved one notch more to the Right. We have moved to the Right so many times, I guess we have been coming out on the Left side again. It's insane, but it's a narrative. It's about defaming us and it's trying to get people to not listen to us. That's what this is about. Mr. Jekielek: What would you say is the most controversial platform position of the AfD? Ms. Anderson: Where do I start? They're bashing us for our stance on immigration, which actually isn't immigration. It's an illegal invasion at this point. We're talking about millions and millions of people here. They're bashing us for this, and saying that it is all racist. Then there is the transgender madness, so it's pretty much whatever the narrative is. We pretty much just look at human beings as they are. We have to make sure that our environment, our world, and our societies are for human beings as they are. That is pretty much always the problem with the Left. They think of this utopia, this perfect world, which actually is a dystopia. But the human being does not fit into that utopia, so they have to change the human being. They have to create this new human being that will fit in whatever utopia they're dreaming up. Mr. Jekielek: As you're talking about this, transhumanism comes to mind. Ms. Anderson: Actually, you don't even have to go there, it’s just something very basic. There's all this talk about xenophobia. People who are afraid of strangers are like despicable racists. Where did that come from? Looking at this, we literally raise and teach our children to be afraid of strangers. Why do we do this? To protect our children, because our children do not have the means to distinguish if this person means well or if this person will harm me. What is that? It's a mechanism of survival, actually. As they grow older, they learn how to distinguish and they learn how to read faces and all of that. But that does not necessarily hold true when we're talking about people that come from other cultures. We don't know their traditions or how they go about doing things. To be afraid of strangers is actually a positive mechanism of survival. Take the next thing—loving your own more than others. That is not despicable. No, that is how it was ensured that the human race would survive, because otherwise we would have been extinct. Can you really blame a mother for loving her own child more than the neighbor's child? Of course you can't. Does that mean that she hates the neighbor's child? No, it doesn't mean that at all. Does it mean that she won't feed the neighbor's child if the neighbor's child is in need? No, it doesn't mean that at all. It may come down to making a choice, “Will my child survive or the neighbor's child survive?” Of course, she will always pick her own child. If that was not fused within our DNA and instincts, then we would've been extinct a long time ago. These are just very basic things that human beings are about. But yes, they are trying to change and shift this. Mr. Jekielek: The AfD and more and more people in Germany have been accused of being xenophobic. There has been this huge influx from sub-Saharan Africa, millions and millions of people. The concern is that unless those people are assimilating to the culture, that can create a huge problem. There are these huge free-Palestine protests that we've been seeing since October 7th. In London there were half-a-million people. What do you think about that? Ms. Anderson: It's actually quite interesting to have seen that, because all of the elected officials and politicians are now saying, "What? We imported antisemitism." I thought, "You think?" This is what has been going on and now they're seeing it. They're almost flustered. "How could that have happened?" If you import millions and millions of people from cultures that have deep-rooted antisemitism, that is what you get. That's exactly what you will get. In Germany, they're already spinning it in a way to shift the blame away from those that are actually out on the streets, literally calling for the genocide of Jews. They are trying to shift the blame, take it away from them, and once again blame the Western societies. In Germany, they came up with this narrative, "It is not their antisemitism. It's our antisemitism because we have failed to integrate them." Seriously, this is how you spin this now? Mr. Jekielek: Was there an effort to integrate? In Canada and America, with this idea of multiculturalism, it was seen as a racist to even think about that. How could you try to assimilate them to Western culture? Ms. Anderson: First of all, for the ones that a society should integrate, the prerequisite would be the people wanting to be integrated. In the '60s and '70s, there were a lot of Turkish people coming. They wanted to work in Germany and they did work in Germany. The idea was they would come and stay for some time, work, and then go back. But that didn't happen. Now, we are so overrun and it's almost like you have these parallel societies. Why should they integrate? On top of all of that, we are being taught to hate our own way of life and to hate our culture. Why would anyone want to integrate in a society that hates itself? It's insane, and it's absurd. On the altar of diversity and kindness, we're actually destroying our free and liberal societies. Mr. Jekielek: In many Western democracies right now, many people have been shocked by the level of extreme antisemitism that has been displayed, to the point of advocating for genocide and death. Are you arguing that this is a result of not having assimilationist policies? That's what I'm trying to understand. Ms. Anderson: It's more than not being able to assimilate certain population groups. There just was a hearing in the Senate or Congress, and they were asked a simple question, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your rules of procedure of harassment? Would that be considered harassment?” The representatives of these universities were not capable of simply saying, "Yes." They were rationalizing it by saying, “It depends on the context." Congresswoman: At MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no? MIT representative: If targeted individuals, not making public statements. Congresswoman: Yes or no? Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? MIT representative: I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus. Congresswoman: But you've heard chants for intifada? MIT representative: I've heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people. Congresswoman: So those would not be, according to MIT's code of conduct or rules? MIT representative: That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe. Congresswoman: Ms. Magill at UPenn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate UPenn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? Ms. Magill: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes. Congresswoman: I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment? Ms. Magill: If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment. Congresswoman: So, the answer is yes. Ms. Magill: It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. Congresswoman: It is a context-dependent decision? That's your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context? That is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer yes to, Ms. McGill. Is your testimony that you will not answer, yes? Ms. Magill: If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment. Yes. Congresswoman: Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide? Is the speech not harassment? This is unacceptable, Ms. McGill. I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate UPenn's code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Ms. Magill: It can be harassment. Congresswoman: The answer is yes. Dr. Gay of Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Dr. Gay: It can be, depending on the context. Congresswoman: What's the context? Dr. Gay: Targeted as an individual, targeted at an individual. Congresswoman: It's targeted at Jewish students and Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Dr. Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into- Congresswoman: Is it antisemitic rhetoric? Dr. Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct, amounts to bullying, harassment, and intimidation. That is actionable conduct and we do take action. Congresswoman: The answer is yes. That calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct. Correct? Dr. Gay: Again, it depends on the context. Congresswoman: It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board. Ms. Anderson: What context do you need about calling for the genocide of a people? Yes, that is harassment. There's no question about it. You don't need any context. They were not capable of doing that, so it begs the question why? It might be Islamophobia. The ones that are not capable of considering the calling for genocide of the Jews as harassment, they are the ones that are afraid of Islam, because they know perfectly well what representatives of Islam are capable of. Remember the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo? We also had it in Denmark. There were flags burning all over because someone dared to come up with some character for Mohammed. These are the Islamophobes, the true Islamophobes. Mr. Jekielek: Casting a whole blanket across the entirety of the religion is way too much. Is that what you're saying? Ms. Anderson: It's the ideology that I fight, it's not the Muslims. They just want to live their lives. It's like we went back to the incremental steps. First, you put your daughter under a scarf, then it's a niqab, then it's a hijab, and then it just moves along. We are seeing that in the Western democracies actually, especially in Europe. Mr. Jekielek: When you're talking about the presidents of these Ivy League schools, this is all happening in a context where misgendering someone on those campuses is considered violence. Ms. Anderson: Exactly. Mr. Jekielek: That is very overtly seen as something almost worse than harassment. Ms. Anderson: Right. That's actually what I was driving at, the cognitive dissonance. You can look at a very simple question that any 3-year-old can answer, “What is a woman?” But when you ask that question of a politician, especially here in the United States, they seem to be having problems answering that question. Speaker 7: Can you provide a definition for the word woman? Speaker 8: Can I provide a definition? No. Ms. Anderson: The only answer to that question would be a woman is an adult human female. They're not capable of giving that answer. They're mumbling, and that's cognitive dissonance. They know perfectly well what the answer to the question is, but they don't want to give it out of fear of stepping on a very small minority's toes. Rather than stepping on the toes of 3, 4, or 5 people, they would sooner step on the toes of 98 percent of the people. I had a meeting with a senator, and the way he worded it was actually quite interesting. It's almost like they're working their way through a maze. But it is considered harassment to misgender someone or to take objection when a man shows up in a woman's restroom. That is considered harassment, or even worse, possibly even a hate crime. But yes, calling for the genocide of Jews, that's just somehow fine now. I don't think so. Mr. Jekielek: People don't know that part of your political activity is being a women's rights advocate. Ms Anderson: Yes. When it's about women's rights, it cannot be about the rights of biological males who think they are women. That is a conflict of interest, and it will not work. Just look at sports. Women are being deprived of their achievements they have worked so hard for. But there is just no way that a woman could possibly take on a man in any competition, for that matter. What are we even doing here? They mess up our language. They're coming up with these new words, because whatever language you have, like the generic masculine, they claim it is suppressing women and they're not seen and they're invisible. An interesting note on that is to actually look at the Turkish language, for instance. The Turkish language doesn't know gender. It just has the same word, so perhaps maybe they don't have that problem. It's a highly equal society, correct? Well, I think not. It has nothing to do with the language. But they're screwing up our language to make women more visible. But at the same time, they're not even capable of answering the simple question, “What is a woman?” They are not capable of protecting women, or honoring women’s safe spaces. Now, biological men have to be allowed in all kinds of women's spaces. This is actually destroying all the achievements that women for decades have fought so hard for. It's just erasing women. A few years ago there was a huge article in the New York Times on menstrual hygiene products. In the entire article, they never once mentioned the word woman, women, or girls, none of that. They referred to them as menstruators. I was so appalled by that and thought, "Seriously, menstruators?" That's what we call women now, because 0.2 percent of the population might be offended? No, it's equal opportunity for women, not equal outcome. That's a whole other issue. Equal opportunity for women, yes, I'm absolutely all for that. However, what I don't want is women's quotas because that is actually benevolent sexism. What they're saying by doing so is actually that women are too stupid to get anywhere, so the state needs to facilitate it and make laws so they will be advanced. It's actually telling me I'm too stupid to get anywhere without the state's help. No. Thanks, but no thanks. Mr. Jekielek: The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action here in the U.S. not too long ago. This has been a big issue playing out. You mentioned this word, menstruators, and we were talking about dehumanization a bit earlier. That word strikes me as profoundly dehumanizing, under the guise of being humanizing. Ms. Anderson: What it actually does too, is to reduce women to bodily functions. Another term is cervix-havers. Seriously? That is stealing our identity. They're not even stopping at that anymore. They're stealing our sexual identity, which makes us who we are. It’s the core of who we are. Mr. Jekielek: You've said, “they,” a number of times throughout the interview. Who are they? Ms. Anderson: When you look at every single Western democracy, you have pretty much the same agendas being pushed. The elected governments, they all seem to be reading from the same script, sometimes even down to the same wording, "Build back better. Safe and effective. No one is safe until everyone is safe. Stay home." The whole shebang. When I say they, I don't necessarily mean the elected governments, because I consider them just to be puppets of whoever is putting forward these agendas. I don't know who they actually are, but that's not the point. I don't really care, because the only way that I can change anything is by going after the elected officials. That's who I have to contract with. I elected these people, and they're responsible. They're accountable to me, but I don't know who's above them. I need to understand and I need to know, “Why does my government, that was democratically elected, why do they do that? What's in it for them?” That's the thing, and that's what I'm interested in. Mr. Jekielek: There are all sorts of characters. We hear about the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, and the Club of Rome. You hear about all sorts of things, but people have their theories. But you're saying it doesn't actually matter that much, because it's the elected officials that you are targeting. Ms. Anderson: Exactly. There is no constitution in the world that would grant me the right to take down the WEF. I have no connection to the WEF whatsoever. It's my government who is allowing the WHO to overtake their governing powers. They need to fix this. Mr. Jekielek: The UN is one of the groups that people point to concerning their Agenda 2030. Do you view the UN as an entirely unaccountable body? Ms. Anderson: Who are they exactly accountable to? For instance, could the German people sue the UN? It's actually what the German government is allowing the UN to do. Whatever goals or whatever measures the UN proposes, it is still the government that has to come up with the legislation and put it into a law. The UN does not have governing powers. But they are trying to fix that now, at least when it comes to the WHO and the international health regulations. For instance, they want to change that and they kind of have to change it, and I'll tell you why. Because what they also figured out during Covid is they would have loved to impose much stricter restrictions on everyone. But they couldn't, because we are democracies and our elected officials will be up for reelection. If they violate fundamental rights, if they infringe upon them, if they impose lockdowns on people, then the elected officials might not get reelected. With the change of the international health regulations, which would then grant the WHO governing powers to call out a pandemic and then seize the governing powers, it is actually providing plausible deniability to the elected officials. Now, they can say, "We never would have done that. We would not infringe upon your rights. We would not take it away from you. It's the WHO that is doing it." That's how this is working here. In a way, it's also working like that with the EU institutions. The governments in the member states tell their people, "We wouldn't do this to you. We would not come up with this legislation that infringes upon your rights and takes away your freedom. It's the EU doing this." Mr. Jekielek: There's an avoidance of responsibility. One of the criticisms is that the U.S. Congress has ceded a lot of their legislative ability to unaccountable institutions; the administrative state, different agencies, and experts. There are certain legal doctrines, like the Chevron deference that allowed for that to happen. Everyone says, "It wasn't me." But in the end, as things get really bad, who's to blame? Ms. Anderson: Yes, exactly. It's about removing the democratic process further and further away from the people, so that the people will no longer be clear on who actually made what decision. Who can we hold accountable? Even if they knew, they are now getting to a stage where it would be impossible for the people to hold them accountable, because they never elected the person that made that decision. That has been happening under the guise of doing something for the greater good. They have pretty much taken away freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. With this whole climate madness, we need to save the planet now. In the Netherlands, they're seizing the land. The farmers are no longer allowed to grow crops on their land. They have to relocate. You just pack up a farm like you would a two-bedroom apartment. No, it's not working that way. In Ireland, the farmers have to slaughter 50 percent of their cattle because they found out that cows fart and burp, and this is now killing us. They are actually taking away everything that we held dear and everything that made us into who we are, whether it's our cultural identity, national identity, or sexual identity. We already talked about that. These are democratic principles. What they're trying to achieve is pretty much to transform our free and liberal societies made up of free individuals into this malleable, mindless mass, that can just be shoveled around to wherever they need us and to serve their best interests. With taking away the food from us, they want us to eat bugs, but they're still going to have their steaks. This framing is going on with the gaslighting in the media, and the citizens are being lectured to rather than the citizens forming an opinion. The government will actually have to implement what the people want. But it has turned the other way around. It has nothing to do with democracy, none whatsoever. Mr. Jekielek: We have some interesting developments in terms of politicians being elected who have a very different view, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. What do you make of that? Ms. Anderson: We're seeing that pretty much in all of the member states in Europe, because for decades now, the EU has been pushing policies that go against the people's interests. You can see our side, the people's side, growing stronger. Geert Wilders winning the elections in the Netherlands was phenomenal. Geert has actually been around for quite some time. They did just about everything they could to defame him and to stigmatize him. They called him every name in the book, but here we are. He won the election. You also see that in other countries and even in the Western European states, where it's kind of starting. Mr. Jekielek: I keep thinking about this far-Right moniker, because there is another newly elected president, Javier Milei, who they call far-Right. Today, if you look at who is being called far-Right, it's comical how it's being used. Elon Musk is far-Right. Ms. Anderson: Everyone that is not in support of whatever globalist agenda is being advocated for or pushed at the moment, is given the label far-Right. The very first big protest that happened against the restrictions because of Covid happened in Berlin on August 20th, 2020. The vast majority of protestors participating in that protest were actually Left and Green-leaning, if not Left or Green. They protested, had a good time, and they met a lot of people, as will happen. Once they came home, to their astonishment, their TV told them that they were Nazis and Right-wing extremists. They said, "Who, us? But we're Left. We're Greens. We're the good guys. They call us Nazis now?" That actually led to the fact that they, for the very first time probably, asked, “What about all the others that have been named Nazis? Maybe they weren't Nazis either, and they were just made out to be Nazis.” The mindset is a different one in Eastern European countries for a very simple reason. They have lived under totalitarian rule, and it hasn't been that long ago. They remember and they recognize the mechanisms. They recognize how totalitarian regimes go about doing certain things. They recognize the language, and they recognize the gaslighting. Therefore, it's not really working in the Eastern European countries. That's actually where we have the most resistance, in those countries. I have been saying that for quite some time. From what it looks like, unfortunately, I think I will be right. Europe will actually shrink down to a core Europe, and geographically you will find it alongside the Eastern European countries. I think Western Europe is done with. There is no way of undoing what has been done over the last decades with the mentality of the young generation. They are spoiled brats, and do not put any value on things such as freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. They think if we censor hate speech, or call free speech hate speech, and if we can just eliminate all of that, then we will be living in a better world. They do not realize what censorship actually does to a society. That is the very first step any totalitarian regime will take in order to control every single aspect of a human being's life. Mr. Jekielek: Germany has very strong anti-Holocaust denial laws. With these rules, while you can talk about the Holocaust, it makes it difficult or potentially legally problematic to talk about the process of the Nazis coming to power. Please explain that. How could that be? Ms. Anderson: In Germany, we have in our penal code which does carry a jail sentence to deny, glorify, or trivialize the Holocaust. With denial, no problem there. You do not deny the Holocaust. You just don't go there, let alone glorify it. The problem comes with the trivialization of the Holocaust. What we're seeing now is trivialization of the Holocaust. If I were to point out the incremental steps that were taken by the Nazis back then to turn this highly sophisticated and highly educated and highly civilized society into this hellhole, pointing that out, and then pointing out the parallels to what we may have seen in the last three years, that would be considered a trivialization of the Holocaust. To me, this is just staggering. How are we supposed to live up to the promise of "Never again," if we are not allowed to look at what the Nazis did to get where they eventually got us? Nazi Germany did not start out by rounding up people and transporting them off to camps. That was the endpoint. It started with little, incremental, and seemingly inconsequential and insignificant steps. But it was getting people used to a certain idea and then building up on that. If we're not allowed to teach the next generations what these steps were, then it will happen again. Now, who would be interested in people not knowing how it began and how they did it? It would only be the people that are up to doing it again. They would not want anyone to know about it. But yes, that is now considered trivialization of the Holocaust. The argument is that by pointing out, "We are not there yet. We are not in that fascist totalitarian regime yet," that is trivializing the Holocaust. No, I'm terribly sorry. I will not go there because it is a process. No one in their right mind would deny a pregnancy with the stupid argument, "The baby isn't born yet." We need to understand how they did it. How did it work? When you really look back, it took the Nazis five years, by the way. They came to power in 1933. Mr. Jekielek: Democratically elected, I might add. Ms. Anderson: Democratically elected. Absolutely. It took them five years until they were capable of pushing legislation and passing legislation. Mr. Jekielek: Is it a surge or people just feeling justified in being grossly antisemitic, and calling for, "From the river to the sea." Do you think that could be codified in society again? Ms. Anderson: To be honest, I don't know. I don't know where this is going. But just to think that people would be so nonchalant about this. I really don't understand how young people, especially in the Western democracies, take to the streets and chant, "From the river to the sea." You could ask them, “What river are we even talking about here?” They wouldn't even be able to name the river. It's just the current thing to do, and it’s virtue signaling. Even the EU Parliament is not capable of standing up and saying, "No, we will not be apologetic about what Hamas did." They have not found it necessary to finally stop funding the Hamas political system and funding school books, which are full antisemitic slurs and openly call for the death of Jews. The EU is funding these school books and we haven't stopped. Once again, the hypocrisy is staggering. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the word nonchalant. I am thinking of Mattias Desmet's book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, as related to this current thing, the nonchalantness. Ms. Anderson: It’s like the term, “the banality of evil,” coined by Hannah Arendt. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. You said, "They have no idea what river it is." They might not even fully grasp that they're chanting about eliminating the Jews from this entire piece of land. People find it difficult to see how that rhetoric translates into actual genocidal behavior. History is rife with this, yet you can't imagine something like that could happen. Ms. Anderson: As Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, "The truth often evades being recognized, due to its utter incredibility." That's pretty much what happened in Nazi Germany too. It was so unimaginable, but yet it happened. Even most Jews did not believe what they were about to experience, because it was unimaginable the extent of the atrocities that were afflicted upon them. They couldn't grasp it. They thought, "It's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen." But yet, it did. Whenever you think that this is so far off that this won't happen, it is just because you cannot imagine it will happen. Mr. Jekielek: To do that we have to accept that we as human beings are capable of terrible things. Ms. Anderson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Even if we think we're a good person and would never do that. But history shows us that lots of perfectly normal people, not psychopaths, have done absolutely terrible things. Ms. Anderson: Every human being is capable of doing the most terrible things to our fellow men and inflicting pain on our fellow men, given the right circumstances. Certain criteria have to be met, and it's been proven with the Milgram experiments, and the Asch conformity experiments. That is just who humans are. Unless you are willing to accept the fact that you too are capable of doing horrible things to your fellow man and embracing that side of yourself, you will have no mechanisms to keep it in check. It has to really be a conscious decision to not do it. But if you think, "It's not going to happen because I'm so pure and I'm so great," you will have nothing to keep that dark side in check. We need to revisit who we actually are. There's a good side and there's an evil side. It is a conscious decision to not let the evil side prevail and come out. Mr. Jekielek: I'll mention Solzhenitsyn's famous line, "The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart." Ms. Anderson: Yes, exactly. Mr. Jekielek: We have to be aware of that. You don't have a lot of hope for Western Europe, which is a difficult thing for an elected official of a very prominent Western European country to say. What do you see as the path forward, if you don't see a good future? Ms. Anderson: I wouldn't go as far as saying I have no hope for Western Europe. But we do have antisemitism by the millions in Western Europe. I don't see anyone willing to really take a hard look at this and say, "What do we need to do to undo this?" It's not that I don't have hope. I have just come to terms with the fact that we will not be able to undo that. There will always be Europe, but it might be a little smaller. My hope actually lies with the American people, because the American people have much more of a concept of freedom. It's not like that in Europe. We like freedom, but it doesn't have the same significance as it does for the American people. My hope lies with the Eastern European countries, where we will actually have a Europe as we know it, and how I want it, anyway. My hope also lies with the American people. It was just a couple of nights ago when we had this event going and it just suddenly hit me. I realized, “This is the United States of America, the land of the free and the land of the unlimited possibilities. I am being asked to come here to speak about freedom to Americans." It really hit me. It was such an honor that I would be allowed to do that. But we need the American people to just stay the American people and uphold that concept of freedom that is deeply rooted within America. We need that if we want to save all the peoples around the world from this tyrannical system that they're about to impose on us. Mr. Jekielek: One final thing as we finish up. You mentioned earlier that people say that this globalist transhumanism actually came from America. If you see the hope for the future, is it perhaps ironic that you see it coming from America as well? Ms. Anderson: It depends on setting the stage and gaslighting people and manipulating people. Yes, that seems to start in the United States. I'm talking about safe spaces for minorities at universities, including that students should no longer be exposed to certain topics, even though they're required. Overprotecting students came from the United States. Mr. Jekielek: The safety-ist culture is what you're talking about. Ms. Anderson: Exactly. In a lot of ways the stage is being set in the United States and then swoops over the planet. When it comes to flooding societies with illegal immigrants, it seems to come from Europe, especially Germany. Depending on what aspect you are focusing on, something starts here, and some things start there. The thing is this, you do not have to get a society ready for infringement on fundamental rights in China. You don't have to get society ready for taking away freedom in North Korea. But you do have to do that in the United States and in the Western democracies. This is where you have to set the stage. You have to frame certain concepts like fundamental rights are now privileges that a government can grant or withhold depending on how you as a citizen behave. That is a stage that has to be set in the United States because the concept of freedom and fundamental rights is so profound and deeply rooted within all of the American people. That's where you have to attack it. Once you get that going, then it's a walk in the park to get all of the other Western democracies to just fall in line. Mr. Jekielek: It looks really dark for Western Europe. What do you think about America? Ms. Anderson: Actually, it is not quite accurate to say it's looking very dark for Western Europe. It will be different. Like I said, it may be a little smaller. What do I think will happen to the United States? I truly believe that the American people, with their concept of freedom and fundamental rights so deeply rooted within them, will actually be fine. I don't see states dropping out or any of that. The American people have learned to fight for their freedom. They have learned to defend it, and they have an understanding that it needs defending on an everyday basis. Whereas, with the Western European spoiled brats, it's like freedom and democracy fell out of the blue sky one fine day, and boom, there it was. No, it did not happen like that. Our forefathers had to wrestle it from the former elites. They literally spilled their blood over this, but now they no longer put any value on this freedom and democracy. But I think the Americans will be fine. Mr. Jekielek: I hope you are right. Christine Anderson, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Anderson: Thanks for having me. I had a really good time talking to you. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining MEP Christine Anderson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 3 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1223ChristineAnderson Epoch Original DVD collection:

“The human rights abuses and the crackdowns on dissent and all of the terrible things that you see in China? Our elites love those things.” In this episode, I sit down with Seamus Bruner, co-author of “Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life.” “The [World Economic Forum] members control more than the entire GDP of the United States, more than the GDP of China,” says Mr. Bruner. “So, they're more powerful, economically speaking, than pretty much any country in the world.” Mr. Bruner breaks down the American billionaires at the heart of the swamp, and separates fact from fiction as to how much money and control globalist oligarchs really wield. Watch the clip: “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which is making these technologies—I don't think it's a coincidence that they are funding study after study on universal basic income. And a universal basic income, I mean, do people think that they’re going to get a UBI of a million dollars a year and get to live the lifestyle of the very wealthy? No. It’s going to be approximately $20 to $30,000 a year,” says Mr. Bruner. “There won’t be a way to climb up. What America is so loved and cherished for is the ability to climb the ranks and build a life for yourself. It will be this more impoverished class.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (43 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1219SeamusBruner FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Seamus Bruner, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Seamus Bruner: It's always a pleasure to be with you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: It's been a few years since we talked about Fallout, your book with John Solomon. Your current book, Controligarchs, delves into the realm of what five or ten years ago would be considered complete conspiracy theories, except that I am very familiar with your work. You're extremely meticulous and everything you do is very well documented. Before we continue, how did you get into all this? Mr. Bruner: I studied political science in college. I'm ashamed to admit that I wanted to go into politics or possibly even lobbying. I'm less ashamed about politics, more about lobbying. I studied Mandarin in college, and thought I might want to be a lobbyist for China, that's how naive I was. I thought, “That seems like a profitable endeavor.” Then I volunteered for this gentleman named Peter Schweizer, who your viewers are probably familiar with. It was just one book by Peter Schweizer, titled, Throw Them All Out, that disabused me of all notions of being a lobbyist or being in politics. I just found it was so much more fun to follow the money and expose the corruption, because I've always been passionate about exposing government corruption. I am eight books later with Peter Schweizer here. Working on the Clinton Cash book was one of my favorites, and also exposing the Biden ties to China. We found the Bohai Harvest billion dollar private equity deal. We really blew the lid off of the Ukraine Burisma story that would be in the book, Secret Empires. I wrote my first book, Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption, when I got to the end of several Schweizer books. I thought, “How on earth is this allowed to go on?” Time after time, we found that the Department of Justice and the FBI were the beating heart of the so-called Swamp. When we saw conflict of interest waivers granted to Hillary Clinton, or Queen for a day immunity protections when her aides were testifying, we found that the DOJ was also a big problem. I wrote that book and I got hooked up with John Solomon for Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties. That was a really eye opening book. That was before Russia invaded Ukraine. We essentially predicted that if the policies of appeasement from the Obama administration were not rapidly reversed; things like the Russian reset, the Uranium One deal, and other deals that we gave to Russia in 2009 and 2010, then there would be a big conflict. Sure enough, there was. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s touch on that for one moment. You argue that the policies of appeasement are actually what led Russia to do what it's doing today. People on the conservative side will say, “Just give them Ukraine and that will be fine. It's just because we're aggressors with NATO that they're doing that. We might as well just give them Ukraine. That would be great and we'll be friends again.” Mr. Bruner: Appeasement never works with strong men. They just take more and more and more, and that has been shown time and again. Ronald Reagan and other great men have said, “Peace through strength.” Mr. Jekielek: That is not necessarily obvious to everyone. It’s certainly obvious to the Poles and the Czechs who I was speaking with recently. I want to know, who are the controligarchs? Mr. Bruner: The controligarchs are a group of billionaires, but they're not like your average billionaire. There are over 3000 billionaires in the world. But this is really a group of maybe 20 to 30 globalist thought leaders, not American thought leaders. These are globalist thought leaders and they have this vision for the future that is not something you want to be a part of, but I don't think we're going to have a choice. Mr. Jekielek: The pandemic was the largest upward transfer of wealth in history. You can actually qualify this, so please do. Mr. Bruner: With the characters in this book, that's right, it absolutely was. The middle and lower classes lost more than $1 trillion, and the billionaire class added several trillion to their personal net worths. I totalled it up, and the characters in this book were worth approximately $659 billion in 2019. These are men like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and even Elon Musk makes an appearance. I stopped tracking it in 2022, and by then it was over $1.25 trillion in personal net worth. Nobody can even fathom $1.2 trillion. Mr. Jekielek: How did you pick the 20 or 30 people that you mentioned out of this larger group? Mr. Bruner: I started with the Forbes list of billionaires and started at the top. You have Elon Musk at the top, on and off with Bernard Arnault, of Moet/Hennessy/Louis Vuitton, and went down from there. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg is right up there, and Jeff Bezos is right up there. This was not supposed to be some anti-capitalist screed. I'm a fan of capitalism, but these guys are not like your average capitalists. Klaus Schwab features prominently in the book. We were unable to find precisely how much Klaus Schwab is worth, but we know that he has a palatial estate beside the World Economic Forum in Davos. He has coined the term, stakeholder capitalism, which is not at all like free market capitalism. It's much closer to the state-run capitalism they have in China. Mr. Jekielek: We've been covering these issues quite a bit. We have Roman Balmakov's recent documentary, and we have the “Shadow State,” another documentary. You trace the relationships of people who are controligarchs, and some who are not. What did you find? Mr. Bruner: I studied the previous billionaires and oligarchs in American history, the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies. I came across the Rockefellers and this book came out of the pandemic. I had heard of the Rockefeller Foundation. I had heard a lot about Bill Gates and the vaccines, and a lot of it sounded like conspiracy theory. I thought to myself, “I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to see what the Rockefeller Foundation is all about. I'm going to see what Bill Gates' apparent obsession with vaccines and global health is. Is he really just this kind philanthropist who wants to save the world from disease and death?” It didn't really jive with the stated warnings from Bill Gates that we are overpopulated. I was wondering how could saving more lives lessen the threat of overpopulation? Then you see the so-called conspiracy theories about always trying to depopulate the planet. I just wanted to get to the bottom of that. It really all started with the Rockefellers and the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s about 150 years ago that John D. Rockefeller made the first billion dollar fortune in America. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about the Rockefeller Foundation and what its mandate has been. Mr. Bruner: John D. Sr. was the best oil man in history. Nobody could get oil out of the ground better than he could. Nobody could develop more uses for the various byproducts of petroleum, and he was just an expert at that. He had a son, John D. Jr. I've read through all of the biographies that are quoted extensively in the book, the ones that were given great access to the Rockefeller archives and to the family. John D. Jr. really struggled, as a lot of children of enormously wealthy people do. He asked, “How could I ever fill these shoes?” The Rockefellers had an advisor, Frederick Gates, no relation to Bill Gates. Frederick Gates warned that if your money is growing too fast, you have to find ways to get rid of it or else it's going to swallow you up. Therefore, John D. Jr. really became the great philanthropist of the family, but the things that he started pouring money into were maybe not so great. They were really prototypes for Bill Gates. There's some great overlap in what the Rockefeller Foundation of today is doing with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They partner on a lot of initiatives, including just last week, a digital ID initiative sponsored by the United Nations. I went through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of 990 filings, the IRS nonprofit annual reports, and I crunched the numbers. I found that the Rockefeller Foundation has been investing in global health for about a century. They set up the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1904. They began studying viruses and vaccines. I thought, “This is an interesting coincidence.” The Rockefellers learned that having these global health programs gives you a lot of power around the world. If you go into an African nation and claim that you can cure malaria, they will essentially turn over the keys to their kingdom. This is where this controligarch model was born, where you do well, and then you do good. Then Standard Oil would go in and extract resources from the countries that had these diseases, and it made them much more rich. You see that with Bill Gates today. Of course, a trillion has four commas, and a billion has three commas, and it's very hard to read these things. You have to count; one, two, three, and then say, “Okay, that's a billion.” Then the wealth transfer remains ongoing. It is happening in the form of inflation where just unfathomable sums have been printed, which dilutes our dollar. It doubles your cost of groceries, in some cases. It doubles the cost that you are paying. Where did that money go? We've seen that much of it was fraudulently taken from the public coffers via the CARES Act or other legislation. The Biden administration signed this Inflation Reduction Act, which is very prominently featured in the book. How much money from that is right now going into a lot of these green tech companies that benefit the bottom line of these billionaire characters in this book? The wealth transfer remains ongoing, because of the investments of these controligarchs into these green companies. Now, they often sell their stake before the company goes belly up. But the money from the taxpayers goes into the company that increases that character's bottom line. Then the dollar value is diluted when money is printed to also capitalize these companies. You're losing money in two different ways there. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain exactly how this inflation actually benefits them. You did dedicate quite a bit of time to this, and it's not necessarily obvious to everyone. Aren't they losing money as well, because the value of those dollars is going down? How does inflation actually benefit the one percent? Mr. Bruner: When the Inflation Reduction Act, which I should say is inappropriately titled, sets aside $400 billion to invest into green companies, one particular green company will say, “We need $10 million.” One of Bill Gates' companies, TerraPower, has gotten a hundred million dollars in taxpayer funding. I call it welfare for the oligarchs. It is corporate welfare that increases the value of their investments. They subsidize any losses and all of the profits are then privatized. This is a really remarkable thing that I talk about in the book. Mr. Jekielek: You're not saying that the inflation itself is making the money, it's the activity around the inflation or in these laws that is doing it. Mr. Bruner: Milton Friedman said there's only one thing that causes inflation, and that is the government increasing the money supply. When the government allots hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, and we get a $1,600 check, many of these green companies get multimillion dollar checks. Then those green companies grow in value and increase the holdings of their investors, such as Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos is heavily invested in these same kinds of technologies like Rivian, and George Soros is also invested in Rivian. Where do they actually see the returns on that? George Soros dumps his Rivian stock shortly. Rivian, this electric vehicle company, announces that they have received taxpayer funding to bring a new electric vehicle to market. Investors put their money in when the stock is low, the stock raises and every announcement of more funding from the government raises the stock. The government is invested in this product, and the value goes up. Then when there are signs that maybe this isn't going to be a great investment, the investors will sell and capitalize on those gains. By the way, the taxpayer funding never gets refunded, so that's how we lose. Our money is devalued. It is invested into a company, and if the company wins, the profits from that are put into the pockets of their investors. Mr. Jekielek: A common theme with controligarchs is that there is a lot more going on that meets the eye. This is what fuels the conspiracy theories. But in a lot of cases it's a lot simpler, as you're already alluding to. It just could have to do with money and control. Please tell me about that. Mr. Bruner: With the book, Clinton Cash, this is one of the main reasons I loved that project so much. I was younger then, and was given the intern work of crunching the numbers. I was good with spreadsheets and digging into the weeds. Peter told me, “Why don't you go through the Clinton Foundation documents, the 990s, and total up how much money the Clintons have?” It always starts with really basic questions, “How much did they make and what did they get paid for?” I went line by line through these IRS filings and the speech payments from Bill Clinton, and I put them all into a spreadsheet. I called it the Clinton Cash Trail, because we're following the money here, and that method has just paid dividends. I built a cash trail for every investigation we went on, whether it's with Burisma and the payments that Hunter Biden received, or some $31 million that the Biden family received from the highest levels of Chinese Communist Party intelligence. You just put the payments into a spreadsheet and you total them up. It is hard, but it's actually simpler than it sounds. I did that with the controligarchs. I started with net worths and just calculated how much money they made over the course of the pandemic. In many cases, they doubled up or nearly doubled up. In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg was worth about $68 billion. I just checked earlier today and he's now close to $119 billion, so that is quite a large jump. Elon Musk was probably one of the largest jumps. He's anywhere from $200 to $250 billion. He was down around $20 billion before the pandemic. Now, it's not directly because of the pandemic, but from various factors. In the case of Facebook, everybody was locked at home and Facebook saw two billion people daily, and it was never that way. Facebook never had two billion people on their app every single day. But during the pandemic, it shot up to about two billion. That drives the ad revenue and drives the growth of the company, and thus the bottom line of the owner. That was the beginning thesis; these guys have done very well throughout the pandemic. There seems to be a lot of conspiracy theories and depopulation stuff going on with Bill Gates. I'd love to separate fact from fiction. Mr. Jekielek: We know Amazon did really well during the pandemic for obvious reasons, and a lot of big business did very well during the pandemic. A lot of small business was decimated because of the way the rules were constructed. The decisions that were made were terrible for society. Some people say, “This is all an arrangement by these incredibly affluent people to give themselves more wealth and more control.” Other people say, “This was just really gross incompetence and hubris that yielded these kinds of results.They just decided to ignore the underlying science and the voices of reason.” Where do you land on that? Mr. Bruner: I don't think they are that stupid. I don't think Bill Gates is too stupid to know that masks don't work. Most people realize that, if you're breathing out of a mask and it's winter and you can see your breath coming out. Of course, Dr. Fauci said maybe there’s a droplet here or there. Then you look at China's zero-Covid policy, which they praised. They said that China was being very effective. It had no effect really, and it was totally tyrannical. Then you see the censorship that comes out of the misinformation of the pandemic, and it is entirely too convenient. I don't have Klaus Schwab saying, “We're doing this for control.” But then he says that the pandemic presents this great opportunity for a reset of capitalism, and he says that we'll build back in a greener way. You think, “Now, what does Covid have to do with green energy?” Is Bill Gates ignoring the underlying science because of some... Mr. Jekielek: Deeply held belief. We see that a lot. You think that the world works a particular way and you want to make sure that everyone does it right, but they don't have it right. Maybe we need to encourage them to understand things correctly, even though it might be incredibly financially beneficial. Mr. Bruner: There was a professor at MIT, Joseph Weizenbaum, who had this great quote where he talks about the Silicon Valley guys, people like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates who got their start designing programs, writing software code, and building worlds on the computer. They were essentially the gods of the worlds they constructed. They would fine tune and tinker with the code and it would produce a certain result within their system. But they have now tried to take that ability from the software world and exert it in the real world. Now, they just turn the dials and ask, “If everybody were to just give up meat,” with no idea what the ripple effects might be. Meat is a great example. They are about to slaughter tens of thousands of cows in Ireland, ostensibly because methane is going to end the planet, or at least in the words of representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It's stuff like that. It may just be hubris, but it does happen to benefit their bottom line. Mr. Jekielek: The subtitle of Roman Balmakov's new film is, “Will You Eat the Bugs?” They believe that is an actual solution to the climate crisis. Where do you land on this? Mr. Bruner: They're incredibly nutritious and they don't produce any methane. Bugs are actually a very green food source. No, in all seriousness, the largest edible insect farm in the world is going online this December, and one hundred thousand metric tons of edible Mealworm powder will be shipped all over the world. Bill Gates, of course, is a major investor in several insect-based protein companies. Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are also investing in this food. Why would they do that, if that's not on the agenda? Mr. Jekielek: Let's switch gears. You've looked into the American oligarchs’ forays into communist China long before I was fully aware of this. Please tell me about that. Mr. Bruner: That's right. In fact, part of this project grew out of Peter Schweizer's last two books, one being, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. The thesis is that the elites in America, whether it's on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley or in Washington, look the other way on the human rights abuses and the authoritarian style of its communist government. They just see China as this big money making opportunity. That is certainly true. Companies like Amazon have gotten very wealthy selling Chinese-made goods, by and large. Yes, there's certainly a profit motive in doing business with China. But it was during the pandemic that they were praising China's response to the pandemic. Anybody could see that China's response to the pandemic not only did not cure Covid in any way, it was extremely destructive. It just so happened that the people who were pushing this policy put a lot of money in their pocket. That's just entirely too convenient. From there, I went back and asked, “When did Klaus Schwab, who is very complimentary of China, first start loving China?” It goes back to the 1970s. I thought, “Why don't I find out when these characters started loving China? With Rockefeller, I was stunned to find that Standard Oil first sold its first kerosene products in China in 1879. That's roughly 70 years before the Chinese Communist Party was even founded. The Rockefellers and Standard Oil have been doing business with China ever since the formation of the Chinese Communist Party. Then you get to the World Economic Forum and they boast very proudly on their website how economists from Davos and from the West went to China and helped Deng Xiaoping with the reforms that opened up China. Henry Kissinger, of course, was instrumental in opening up relations with China. It started to look more and more like China was a hybrid model of communism and capitalism that was coaxed and helped along by Western economists. Now, Klaus Schwab wants to form a very similar system that he calls stakeholder capitalism. It has the elements of censorship on dissent and cracking down on dissent. It is a government that is watching you everywhere you go with the digital ID. Ultimately, the end game chapter is a CCP-style social credit score system where if you post the wrong thing you get online demerits. Just last week, Congress passed a kill switch for every new vehicle after 2026. Ostensibly, the government needs to be able to shut your car down for national security reasons. But it's not exactly clear why you would need to be able to shut someone's car down. It sounds like something that China would want to be able to do. Time and again, when you see the human rights abuses and the crackdowns on dissent and all of the terrible things that you see in China, our elites love those things. They praise the crackdowns. They say, “China is our adversary in America, or maybe they are our competitor in America.” China is not the adversary of Silicon Valley or Wall Street. It's really their partner. Mr. Jekielek: I'm becoming more and more of a free speech absolutist, but that's not exactly true. I've actually been studying the First Amendment, what it means, and what is protected speech. The First Amendment is actually a lot more than free speech. It's freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, and freedom of press. These are the core human rights. When I see those being abridged, that means everything is going to be abridged. Mr. Bruner: You're absolutely right about that. The pandemic showed that those rights, like freedom of association, were obliterated. People were arrested and pastors were arrested for holding church services and that violated freedom of religion too. But your freedom of speech was curtailed if you questioned the so-called science. These are core principles of America that were essentially done away with a wave of a wand. A lot of people will think, “Well, the pandemic is over. I've read about the pandemic and it's over.” No, the pandemic was a blueprint for the future. There will be crisis after crisis after crisis, and then there will be climate change. Klaus Schwab is the one who built the bridge from the pandemic to climate change. He says that we have to rebuild in a greener way. If you question climate change, you're called a denier, of course. They're using climate change in the same way that they used Covid to change our behavior and change our way of life. Gavin Newsom in California has announced that they will be banning gas-powered vehicles. In Europe, they're banning certain types of fertilizers. This is why the Dutch farmers were protesting. It's effectively a takeover of the energy industries that run our lives. Energy touches on everything; health, food, and information. Information is possibly the most critical industry that should not be tightly controlled, as you said, with you being a free speech absolutist. If you can't freely share information because the Big Tech platforms are always trying to clamp down on everything in concert with the government, you're totally in the dark and you've lost everything. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned Elon Musk as one of these characters, yet his position on a number of issues, like free speech, seems to be very different. Why do you include him? Mr. Bruner: I applaud Elon Musk for all he's done with Twitter and just being one of the lone dissenting billionaires out there who's using his wealth to help the people share information on X, formerly Twitter. But he is certainly a true believer in climate change. He's built his fortune on Tesla, which is an electric vehicle company. This is one of those ironic things. There is tons and tons of research and studies that show that at the end of the day, electric vehicles are just as polluting as gas-powered vehicles, due to the pit mining of the lithium, to the entire production of the batteries. That requires a ton of energy. I don't put Elon fully in the oligarch camp. In the book, some of the initiatives he funds are mentioned. He's got a technocratic streak, and his grandfather was really the godfather of technocracy in Canada. Technocracy holds that the elites, the engineers, and the scientists are much better at making decisions than the people. Technocracy is an inherently undemocratic system. Elon shows this technocratic streak with Neuralink, one of the things that we get into in the book. Its ambitions seem slightly dystopian with psychic text messaging or whatever they're trying to work on. Mr. Jekielek: It is dystopian, but it’s all about people with disabilities. You can imagine incredible breakthroughs with this technology. You have people learning how to speak just using their thoughts through these interfaces. There are many benevolent examples of the use of these technologies. Mr. Bruner: Yes. Those are the thin edges of the wedge. Who could be against a paraplegic person receiving the ability to walk? But that is not the end goal of technologies like Neuralink. There's a company, BlackRock Neurotech, which is putting microchips into brains. Elon Musk, when he describes Neuralink, the things that he appears most excited about are the uploading. He's claimed to have uploaded his brain to the cloud. Ultimately, these tech guys, they have this ambition to live forever. They all speak about it, that mRNA technology is something that can really extend life. Have you come across any of this World Economic Forum visionary Yuval Noah Harari's writings or teachings? Mr. Jekielek: Of course. Mr. Bruner: Harari says that it's going to be a new class caste system. Not everybody's going to be able to get the bio-upgrades and the live forever, microchip-type thing. There is going to be a class that can have that, and a class that cannot have that. Mr. Jekielek: And maybe a class that doesn't want to have it. Mr. Bruner: Yes, of course, and a class that doesn't want to have it too. As long as it's an option, then that's no problem. But with AI, we don't really seem to have a voice in how fast this technology is speeding up. It doesn't seem like there's even time to have a conversation about it. Study after study shows that the AI revolution is amazing and you could find a cure to a disease. But what if the result is that 40 percent of the U.S. workforce cannot find a job and is just relegated to welfare and poverty. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which is making these technologies, is funding study after study on universal basic income. With universal basic income, do people think that they're going to get a UBI [Universal Basic Income] of $1 million a year and get to live the lifestyle of the very wealthy? No, it's going to be approximately $20,000 to $30,000 a year. There won't be a way to climb up. America is so loved and cherished as a place where one can climb the ranks and build a life for oneself. But there will be this more impoverished class. Mr. Jekielek: This is being sold as just inevitable, so you have to come up with a solution. Mr. Bruner: Inevitable, and nobody gets a vote. That's one of the things the book really gets into. I've tracked the politicians for over a decade, but the thing about politicians is they're elected and therefore they're accountable to their voters. None of the people in this book were elected. Klaus Schwab wasn't elected. Bill Gates hasn't been elected as the leader of public health. He just assumed that role because of the amount of wealth he has accumulated. If they're not elected, then they're not accountable. You can't really have a society where the leaders are not held accountable. Mr. Jekielek: You've mentioned the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab a number of times. I've heard a wide range of ideas about what this is and how much influence it truly has. What did you find? Mr. Bruner: By now, everybody has heard of the World Economic Forum and Davos. Like you, I heard a range of things that sounded like conspiracy theories. Again, I followed the money. I decided to add up the market capitalization of the World Economic Forum members and found that the top 25 members, companies like Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook, are worth $10 trillion. That doesn't include BlackRock, which is the largest asset manager in the world and central to a lot of the World Economic Forum initiatives. BlackRock has approximately $10 trillion under management. You add in State Street and Vanguard, the other largest asset managers, and it puts the value of the companies that fund Davos, with leaders like Larry Fink or people on the board of the WEF, at over $20 trillion now. The WEF members control more than the entire GDP [Gross Domestic Product] of the United States, and more than the GDP of China. Those are the top GDPs in the world. They're more powerful, economically speaking, than pretty much any country in the world. I thought Davos only popped up on the radar a few years ago. It actually has been around since the 1970s or just after Klaus Schwab left Harvard. He was a pupil of Henry Kissinger when Kissinger was at Harvard. He goes and sets up this European management symposium that becomes the World Economic Forum. But then I found these abiding connections to an organization called The Club of Rome. There's a famous book that The Club of Rome sponsored called, The Limits to Growth, which really precedes global warming and global cooling, and it’s certainly before climate change.The Limits to Growth says that there is a finite number of resources. Everybody has heard this. There's a finite number of resources on planet Earth, and if we continue growing at the rate we're growing, we're all going to run out of resources and we're all going to die. It's a Malthusian point of view, which is we're running out of resources and therefore people need to sacrifice. It's also very advantageous to the people who subscribe to its view, and it's been adapted over time. If you read, like I did for this book, every Club of Rome report dating back to The Limits to Growth, they always amend them. You can actually see this progression from overpopulation, to global cooling, to global warming, then to the holes in the ozone layer. Finally, we arrived at climate change, which is perfect. Because whether the temperatures go up or down, whether there are more storms or less, or whether there are droughts, it's always attributed to climate change. That gets back to the thing I said about it being unfalsifiable—no matter what the climate does, it's human caused. There's one particular Club of Rome report that states, and I'll sum it up in a short quote, "The enemy of humanity is humanity itself." We went looking for a common enemy that could unite all nations. At the time, we found that overpopulation would unite all nations, and that the enemy of humanity is humanity itself. That organization was the beginning of the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum and the Club of Rome co-sponsored events. The leaders of each organization would be the keynote speakers for the other. There is this deep relationship between an organization that's founded on overpopulation, and the organization that's now leading the climate change debates. The United Nations is a frequent partner of the World Economic Forum, and is a frequent partner of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It sounds kooky, but you can look at their websites, and they certainly do have an agenda. It's called Agenda 2030. The Digital ID is going to roll out in 50 countries within five years according to the United Nations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Yes, crises equal opportunities in the world for Klaus Schwab and these types. Mr. Jekielek: I always try to leave time to talk about possible solutions. What do people like you and I do? Mr. Bruner: We need to spread the word, which is so important. Shows like yours and organizations like the Government Accountability Institute are so important for us to put the information out in succinct ways. We're talking about thousands and thousands of pages that one has to read. Nobody has time to do that. Step one is to read the information, share the information, and share documentaries like Roman's, which was a fantastic documentary. Share The Epoch Times, and share our work. Read this book, because information is the first step. You need to see the playbook that these individuals who want to reshape all of society have put out there very publicly. But it's also in hard-to-find places. In terms of your health, you need to be very conscious of what you're eating, what you're funding, what you're putting in your body, and what you're putting in your mind in terms of the information and the apps like TikTok or Instagram. You need to be watching what your children are watching, and making sure that they're not consuming things like this. You really need to take more responsibility over your life and the life of your family members. Make sure that they're not just slipping into the dystopian present. The hard thing about all of this is that they make it very convenient. These controligarchs make it very convenient. Mark Zuckerberg is working very hard on this Metaverse. It hasn't really taken off yet, but Microsoft is also working on this augmented reality. Of course, Apple is working on its Vision Pro. We haven't yet seen what long-term effects are of living in cyberspace and just living on your devices. But we're starting to see that, and it does not look good. Mr. Jekielek: You're saying go back to the basics. Mr. Bruner: That's exactly right. Yes, go back to the basics, and I think we are seeing that. We see a craving for authenticity and the real world, not AI, and not living on the computer. Anytime you just go outside and spend a good amount of time outside, you very often feel better. Mr. Jekielek: Seamus Bruner, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Bruner: Thanks, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Seamus Bruner and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (43 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1219SeamusBruner Epoch Original DVD collection:

“What the study shows is that when you put a pseudouridine in where a uridine should be, the ribosome jumps or misreads messenger RNA. And as a consequence of this, it results in a bogus protein being made. So instead of making spike protein, it makes a nonsense protein that is possibly toxic.” In this episode, critical care physician Dr. Paul Marik breaks down a new study published in Nature medical journal on ribosomal frameshifting associated with the COVID-19 genetic vaccine. “There's no one reading this paper who couldn't understand what a fundamental disaster this actually is because it challenges the whole premise of the mRNA platform,” says Dr. Marik. We also revisit the various issues surrounding the vaccine, from DNA contamination to spike shedding. Watch the clip: “The pandemic is over. There's no reason to continue vaccinating. And I think we need to put a stop to these vaccines and honestly, scientifically, objectively, [and] transparently evaluate what's happened and where we are,” says Dr. Marik. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (24 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1218PaulMarik Epoch Original DVD collection:

In a win for former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declined special counsel Jack Smith’s request to fast-track his Jan. 6 case. This means that, almost certainly, the timetable that Mr. Smith was shooting for—getting the trial started one day before Super Tuesday—has now been thrown out the window. The reason this matters is because the Jan. 6 trial that Mr. Smith is pushing for in Washington is not about the facts of the case. With a D.C. jury pool, it’s pretty much a given that President Trump will be found guilty. And so instead, this is a race against time. That’s why Mr. Smith and his team of federal prosecutors have been so adamant about starting the trial on March 4—one day before the Super Tuesday primary elections. Doing it this way will not only put a damper on President Trump’s ability to campaign in the primaries, but it’ll also hinder his ability to campaign for the general election. Furthermore, if the trial gets delayed too long and if President Trump gets reelected, that would mean that the entire thing has to be delayed further by another four years—because President Trump wouldn’t be able to stand trial as the sitting president of the United States. 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

Nearly three full years after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court has finally agreed to take on a case related to the nearly 300 defendants facing charges tied to that day. This case may have huge ramifications—not only for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit but also for almost everyone else who has been charged with “obstruction of Congress,” which includes former President Donald Trump himself. Now, let’s break down the legal issues at play. 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

“It wasn't so much what the jury was allowed to see, but what they were not. We even talked about this body camera footage—this is about an 18 minute interaction with George Floyd that day. It's 90 seconds in the end that the jury is allowed to see in trial.” In this episode, I sit down with Emmy Award-winning reporter Liz Collin, producer of the new narrative-busting documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis.” “I went to the Minneapolis Police website, where they've always had their manual online for years, and there are two pages that are mysteriously missing from the manual at that time. So, I knew that something more was at work here,” says Ms. Collin. She breaks down what really happened the day George Floyd died, what the media left out, and what evidence was withheld at the trial. “To manipulate a story like this, to hide things from the public, it's really a testament to poor leadership I think as well, that nobody was willing to just stand up and speak the truth,” says Ms. Collin. She says that despite millions of people having already viewed her documentary, not one mainstream media outlet has reached out to her for an interview. Watch the clip: “I think there's so much more to that encounter that people in power didn't want people to know,” says Ms. Collin. “I've just never seen corruption on this type of level before in my career.” Watch the full documentary "The Fall of Minneapolis." 🔴 WATCH the full episode (37 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1216LizCollin FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Liz Collin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Liz Collin: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. Mr. Jekielek: You've made an astonishing film. You've liberally used body cam footage from the police officers involved in the arrest of George Floyd, including Derek Chauvin, that was withheld for a long time. Most of what is in your film is now public domain, yet you put it together telling a very different story than the world is aware of. Please tell me about your background. How did you get into this so deeply? Ms. Collin: I like to say this isn't a story I ever set out to tell. I never wanted to or wished I had, to be quite honest. I was a member of the mainstream media for nearly 20 years. I worked about 14 years of that at a CBS station in Minneapolis where I was an anchor and reporter. At the time this all unfolded on May 25th, 2020, I was married, and am currently still married to the former union president of the Minneapolis Police Department. But I, my career, and our family got caught up in all of this. More than anything, I was so troubled as a journalist seeing this unfold because the media really was privy to all of this information, public information as you point out. Instead of actually trying to get at the facts of the case, and push back against some of these narratives that we knew simply were not true, there was this fear that permeated the air in Minneapolis and across the country as well. You had to go this one way and not even bother to care about facts and about what we saw happening with our justice system. That's just a bit of the background of how I got here a few years later. Mr. Jekielek: You knew basically the day after these traumatic events transpired that something was really off. Ms. Collin: It was really the very next day after this happened at 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis where George Floyd was arrested. For the very first time, you have the mayor and the chief of police, holding multiple press conferences. I knew the chief called in the FBI that very night, just hours after this unfolded. Clearly I had a very unique perspective with my husband's job. But as a reporter, you have them holding press conferences and saying things like, “Whatever happened there at 38th and Chicago with George Floyd, this isn't a part of police training. We've never seen this maneuver before.” Speaker 3: What I observed was not training that I ever participated in, and none that I observed other officers participating in. Ms. Collin: As a reporter, I went to the Minneapolis Police website where they've always had their manual online for years, and there are two pages that are mysteriously missing from the manual at that time, so I knew that something more was at work here. They also said that George Floyd had never been arrested before, and that Minneapolis police never had anything to do with him, which was also not true. A year earlier in 2019, he was the subject of an undercover drug investigation. If you play the body camera footage next to the body camera footage in 2020, they are eerily similar as to what played out. But more than anything, it was the body camera footage from that incident in 2020 that they hid from the public. That has never happened before in any type of critical incident. This is the point of body cameras on Minneapolis police officers that taxpayers paid for years ago, to increase transparency. Again, all of this was hidden and manipulated, and I knew that very early on. Mr. Jekielek: With respect to this body cam footage being withheld, you knew about that because your husband was head of the police union. That's some of the first people that get that footage, correct? Ms. Collin: Right. He knew something was obviously off here too, because the union wasn't allowed to view this. It was ultimately withheld for about two-and-a-half months altogether. To this day, most people have never seen that entire encounter with George Floyd, which is why we wanted to start the film with just that. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think the footage was withheld for so long? Ms. Collin: There's so much more to that encounter that people in power didn't want people to know. You have George Floyd who is very resistant from the very beginning. George Floyd is talking about how he can't breathe long before Derek Chauvin even arrives on scene. Speaker 4: I told you, man, I can't breathe. Ms. Collin: You have a black officer who arrests George Floyd that day. Alex Kueng is black. That didn't fit the narrative, and he'll be the first to tell you that in the film as well. You also have George Floyd who's pulled out of a cramped vehicle at the time, but yet he says he is claustrophobic and can't be put into the back of a squad car. You have Thomas Lane who calls for an ambulance 36 seconds after George Floyd is placed on the ground. I should say that George Floyd himself asks to be placed on the ground because he does not want to get in the back of that squad car. George Floyd is also saying again and again that he didn't take anything and he's not on anything. I should also say regarding this MRT [Maximal Restraint Technique], they make reference to it in the body camera footage as well. Speaker 5: Let's take them out and just- Speaker 4: [inaudible]. Ms. Collin: There's a reason that they tried to keep it hidden. Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about that briefly. It is called maximal restraint technique, correct? MRT is standard usage. It's in all the manuals, and people are trained in it. You have multiple police officers talking about that. Then you have footage of the chief of police on the stand saying that that method, which apparently Derek Chauvin used in literally a textbook way, is not part of what police officers in Minneapolis do. When you saw that, how did you react to that? Ms. Collin: There was so much of this that I kept saying, "They're lying. They are lying." I first put a book out about all this called, They're Lying: The Media, The Left, and the Death of George Floyd, and this film is based on that. But I really couldn't believe all along that this dragged out not just for months, but for years, and how people were so quick to lie and then go along with it, and nobody seemed to want to call them out. You have the chief of police under oath say that MRT is not a part of police training. Speaker 6: I must ask you, is this a trained Minneapolis police department defensive tactic technique? Speaker 7: It is not. Ms. Collin: You have the head of training, then Inspector Katie Blackwell, who says the same thing. Speaker 6: Is this a trained technique that's by the Minneapolis Police Department when you were overseeing the training unit? Speaker 8: It is not. Ms. Collin: This is not just recently. This is training that dates back decades. We found a police training manual from 1993 that specifically talks about MRT, and the trial transpired 10 months after the death of George Floyd. But that really sent a message about the damage that lies can do. Mr. Jekielek: Something that's also very stark that not a lot of people know about, but I think an increasing number have more recently, is that there were multiple autopsy reports. Ms. Collin: Yes. That's why we wanted to lay this out in the film the way we did. Just to give a sense of the timeline, you actually have George Floyd's autopsy finished within 12 hours of his death. Speaker 9: George Floyd was a healthy young man. Ms. Collin: Keep in mind, this is long before any buildings burn in Minneapolis or across the country for that matter. But then all of a sudden you have the FBI involved in interviews with the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker. You also have prosecutors involved interviewing him multiple times as a week goes by. Again, this is all part of public documentation as this narrative changes a bit from the original findings 12 hours after his death, and we wanted to go into that a bit. The point of the film here isn't so much that this is what you need to think about this. It's more like, “Here's all the information that was kept from you. Please question why it was kept from you. Then you can go ahead and decide for yourself.” You have no strangulation marks, there was no asphyxiation, no bruising to the neck. You have three times the lethal limit of fentanyl in George Floyd's system. You have George Floyd who has a tumor, and there are still questions as to why more testing wasn't done on that tumor. He has 75 percent blockage in one artery going to his heart. He recently recovered from Covid. We had many medical professionals for the book and film review his medical records, and they all describe him as a ticking time bomb in a way. There is so much going on. However, you have the official autopsy from Dr. Andrew Baker released on the same day that George Floyd's family releases what they call an independent autopsy. That's what the mainstream media went with. They called it an independent autopsy, but these two medical examiners were essentially bought and paid for by George Floyd's family, and they were released on the exact same day. One should also wonder why that was. Mr. Jekielek: Did they have direct access to George Floyd's body? Ms. Collin: No, they did not. It was not an actual official autopsy. The only official autopsy on the body of George Floyd was conducted by Dr. Andrew Baker. There's some grand jury testimony where he's asked if he faced any pressure to change his autopsy or come to a certain conclusion when it came to his autopsy. He asks to first consult with his lawyer before he can answer that question under oath as part of that grand jury proceeding, and then comes back two hours later to answer the question. There's a lot of things that happened that the public wasn't aware of. Mr. Jekielek: This is a quote from testimony, “And Dr. Baker, he said to me, ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn't match up with the public narrative that everyone's already decided upon?’” Then he said, "This is the kind of case that ends careers." Ms. Collin: He's ultimately admitting very early on how much pressure his office is facing. I think that pressure spread all over the justice system, the police department, the public, and the media. Everybody was able to feel it, because it was certainly palpable at that time. But yes, you're right, that testimony comes from an actual deposition that recently came to light that talks more about the pressure that they were facing. In fact, we now know because of those depositions that the two prosecutors who were basically the head of the use of force department within the Hennepin County Attorney's office, did not want to charge the three other officers at all. They said morally and ethically, they didn't feel comfortable going forward with charges. This is when you have the Attorney General of Minnesota swoop in and take over the case. He ultimately charges the three other officers with aiding and abetting murder all within that week. It was so chaotic. A lot of people aren't aware of what was going on each and every day, and that's why we wanted to lay it out the way we did. Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk a little bit about current events. Just a few days ago, the Supreme Court has refused Derek Chauvin's appeal. Ms. Collin: Yes. The judge, in the case, Peter Cahill, did not allow the MRT training slide to be used in trial. You have the appeal that was really based on this change of venue that was not granted. Keep in mind, Derek Chauvin is being tried within Hennepin County 10 months after the most damaging riots in Minneapolis history. You have this jury that is not sequestered, paraded in and out of this courthouse every day that has barbed wire all around it. National Guardsmen are there on scene each and every day. We talk about the message that sends, through Derek Chauvin's current attorney. But the U.S. Supreme Court was only taking a look at that appeal based on that change of venue situation. There are still some more legal maneuvers here that they will look at. They did consider the U.S. Supreme Court taking this case to be a long shot, and obviously figured it was worth it. It sounds like his attorneys were not too surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take the case. Mr. Jekielek: It would seem that all of this evidence that was not considered in the trial should be considered at some point by someone. Ms. Collin: Yes. That's what I say about this case too. It wasn't so much what the jury was allowed to see, but what they were not allowed to see. We even talk about this body camera footage. This is about an 18-minute interaction with George Floyd that day. It's the 90 seconds at the end that the jury is allowed to see in trial, and that's it. Obviously, we've talked about it being withheld from the public as well. You have George Floyd's criminal history, which is very lengthy and dates back decades. That is kept away from the jury. Also, you have the arrest in 2019 when we talked about how similar his behavior was to what happened in 2020. For the most part, the jury isn't allowed to see much of that either. Mr. Jekielek: The other thing that just happened is that Derek Chauvin was actually stabbed in jail. Do you have any information on that? Ms. Collin: This was so troubling on so many levels. It was eight days after we released the film and we did so with little expectations. But amazingly, millions of people had seen it already at that time. We got this terrible news about Derek who's in a medium-security facility in Arizona where he's been without any problems for 15 months now. We got word that he was in stable condition. But the person that was giving word to the media was the actual man who put him behind bars in the first place, the Attorney General of Minnesota. Keith Ellison is the very first person to make a statement about his health condition. His own family wasn't aware of what happened to him, and they were in fact told several days later. We just know that he's in stable condition. At this point, there's very little that federal authorities have said about it, but they have said that he will survive, thankfully. But there are still so many questions surrounding that, for sure. Mr. Jekielek: I keep thinking back to the chief of police and the head of training testifying that this standard technique that people are trained in every year is not a part of their approach to policing. Ms. Collin: That's why we are where we are in Minneapolis now. You have a department that had nearly 900 officers at the beginning of May of 2020, which has dwindled to barely 500 at this point, three years later. But you had so many lies. Perhaps these leaders were so focused on Derek Chauvin and these other officers, they thought they could feed them to the wolves in a way, not really realizing the ripple effects that those decisions would have. That's why we wanted to give a voice to these other officers in the film too, because they had never shared their stories before. Minneapolis really lost the best of the best when it comes to their police department, people who had served 20 to 30 years. This obviously isn't how they wanted to end their careers. They would go to work each and every day, not even worried about losing their job, but actually their freedom in the wake of all of this. That's hard for a lot of us to imagine, to have to face such a thing each and every day just going to work. They loved this job. They believed in serving and protecting, and it's pretty heartbreaking to hear from them. Mr. Jekielek: One of the big stories in the film is the loss of the third precinct, or giving the third precinct to the mob. Ms. Collin: A lot of people weren't aware this was a planned surrender of the third precinct. This is after the rioting had gone on for a couple of days in Minneapolis, and as crazy as it sounds now, they thought that giving this building to the mob would stop the rioting. None of the cops who got word of this plan thought it was a good one. Of course, they had to follow their chain of command in this instance. They talk about how earlier in the day they're allowed to collect their personal belongings out of the third precinct. A city bus pulls up and they can pull out all of their personal belongings and evidence involved in cases and such, if you can even imagine this scene. Then that bus is supposed to come back and get them later in the evening when they give the go-ahead to give up the building. This is in the film when they're basically running for their lives. There's no real exit strategy. They have to meet this bus about a half mile away as they're running through the street and being struck with rocks and bottles, which they discuss at great length. Then the bus is actually late to pick them up as they're waiting there to get a ride to their next location. It's really just absolutely horrific that this even happened in our country. Again, this was the reason why many officers left in the wake of all of this. Mr. Jekielek: You've been in the media for 20 years. You've won a number of Emmys for some of your investigative work in the past. How does this investigation compare with others you've done? Ms. Collin: This is another reason that we wanted to go forward with this—we're all still paying the consequences of those lies to this day. Again, not only in Minneapolis, but you can pick the city, and that seems to be the case. I really am a believer that if the truth was told about this very early on, it just didn't have to happen. Perhaps there would've been some fallout legally involving other things, and those would have been conversations. But instead, to manipulate a story like this to hide things from the public is really a testament to poor leadership where nobody was willing to just stand up and speak the truth. I've never seen corruption at this level before in my career. For a long time I thought, “Okay, somebody else is going to do something about this.” But I knew that I also had a very unique perspective and I needed to do something. Mr. Jekielek: Have you seen, “Who Killed Michael Brown?” Ms. Collin: I actually have not, although it's on my list. I've heard of it. Mr. Jekielek: It reminds me of this other excellent film, which I would recommend people watch. The theme is there's a prescribed narrative. Ms. Collin: With my backstory, I never considered myself a political person at all. I really lived to be a journalist from the time I was five or six years old. It's what I wanted to do. But this really became a fight against evil that I saw right before my eyes. It seemed like something I'd never seen on this scale before. That was something that truly bothered me. It made it all the more important to ask, “Is this what we want our justice system to look like?” Alex Kueng speaks to that. Again, he's the officer in prison for three-and-a-half years after being on the job for three days, the black officer who arrested George Floyd. But he speaks to that and says, “Don't fall for this race bait that the media peddles, and be a critical thinker.” The street justice doesn't get us anywhere. Do we really want our justice system to be ruled by the mob? It's something that every citizen of this country really needs to think about. In the book, I talk more about my personal story with what the media was doing, because I saw it where I was working. We had mandates put in place very early on after this incident with George Floyd. Half the people we interviewed for the news had to be non-white or from a protected class. I was the only one saying, "So, we are now implementing racism?" But I really couldn't wrap my head around how we felt, and how we were going to shape things and do things differently. There were certain terms we couldn't use. We couldn't use the term rioting. You had many reporters obviously standing in front of burning buildings, talking about how moving these peaceful protests were in the wake of all this. But changing language and pushing this poison, in my opinion, on the public to think in a certain way really became quite dangerous. Mr. Jekielek: There was a qualifier added whenever you were doing the reporting. Ms. Collin: Yes. As I said, I was married to Bob for several years before all of this with no issue, but the mob certainly came after me and our family also. But I saw that the station where I work came to the mob too. All of a sudden there was a disclaimer in every story about the Minneapolis police that I'm married to the union president. The anchors would say that on the air every time they would talk about Minneapolis police. That had never been done before. I didn't think I needed to start a newscast each and every night with who I was married to. What woman in this country would be told to do so? I was never allowed to anchor the news again. I was demoted as soon as the incident happened with George Floyd. I finished out my contract, but basically in a closet for the last couple of years. I could certainly see how the mob ruled the day in the media as well. Mr. Jekielek: It's astonishing, given that you were at the top of your game. Ms. Collin: Yes. I'm a Minnesota native. It's the station I grew up watching. I was the highest rated anchor in the Twin cities on the weekends. It was kind of the dream job that I had landed and I loved it. Although I certainly saw the media changing during my time there, but never on this scale with seeing how much information we decided to hide. Mr. Jekielek: With Officer Kueng, you have his mother saying that she’s really worried that he'll come out a changed person, and she wants him to remain himself. Speaker 10: My greatest fear is that it's going to change who he is. I just don't know who he's going to be when he comes out. Ms. Collin: That was really the point of the film. We really wanted to give a voice to the people who had their voices silenced in all of this. That is what's so sad. You have Alex Kueng's story, for example. This is a kid who grew up in North Minneapolis, and he dreamed of being a police officer. His mom was a longtime Minneapolis educator. She worked in several public schools in Minneapolis. This was the kid you wanted to be a cop in Minneapolis. Here he is, three days later, being thrown in prison. When I talk to him, I'm almost more bitter than this guy is. But he says that this isn't going to be the end of him, and he has a very good outlook and attitude. It tugs at your heartstrings even more, because you're just aware that there are a lot of really good people who got caught up in this. If the truth was told, it just clearly did not have to be this way. Mr. Jekielek: What was the most shocking thing you discovered in your investigation? Ms. Collin: Gosh, that's hard because as I said, I just kept shouting that line, “They're lying,” over and over again. I lost my faith in humanity a bit through all of this. I'll be honest, I'm a bit naive and think that people really do want to be good people and do what's right. So, to me, that was shocking. Still to this day, I'm not sure how many of these people can sleep at night and feel good about what they allowed to happen. Minneapolis is really a shell of its former self. It was a lovely city before, but now you have skyrocketing crime, and crimes that never happened before in this Midwestern city. There are record homicides. Carjackings weren't even reported in Minneapolis before all of this, and now there are hundreds that transpire each and every year. Just how many victims were created along the way through all of this? I will say it's been heartening that people believe in the truth and that this film has done as well as it has. Another reason we wanted to offer it for free was so that you have no excuse to not watch it. The truth should be free. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me more about the making of the film. You said you're offering it for free. Generally, it is difficult to make films for free. How was it made? Ms. Collin: Yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time. How hard could it be to make a free film? Through the book and some different book talks, we started crowdfunding. We said, “We're going to go ahead and put this documentary together. It's a pretty low budget. We didn't want it to come off that way, but for many of us, it was just a passion project. We were obviously volunteering our time to put this together. I worked as the reporter you see on film, but also as the producer of the film laying it out. I had a wonderful director, JC Chaix, a former police officer. He really felt strongly about this, and he's an educator also. Then we have a very young guy, Josh Phelan, who took on the shooting of all of the interviews. He did the editing and the soundtrack. It really was just the three of us that put this together. We were able to raise these funds in a pretty short amount of time actually, just a couple of weeks. We knew once we locked in the price, we said, “All right, we will cover our expenses and we'll push this out in November for free. Mr. Jekielek: It’s an astonishing feat, for that level of effort. Ms. Collin: Thank you. I was close to a lot of these people too, and obviously had access. Putting the book out first helped people have the courage to come forward. Sometimes that can be scary to be in front of bright lights and on a camera. Putting the book out gave them a bit more courage to say that they would sign up to do the documentary with us. Mr. Jekielek: How were you able to get in touch with Derek Chauvin? Because I know that he was very uninterested in communicating with the media for a long time. Ms. Collin: We really saw how the media portrayed him early on just as this monster. He was really built up to be something that is so unlike who he really is. He's a very small, timid guy, a little shy and quirky. I obviously didn't know him before this. He's basically kind of my size, 5' 6”. He was built up into this character. I just approached him as somebody who was willing to listen to his side and give him a voice. This is someone who had served the city of Minneapolis for 19 years. He had 18 complaints in his past. So much was made of that, but it is actually a very low record of complaints. One was a written reprimand for report writing. They were so minor. I'm not here to say there aren't bad cops, or that there aren’t bad doctors. But it's amazing to me what the media can do, with their power to turn someone into that. Actually, he was thankful that somebody was willing to put the truth out there. That was the same with the other officers as well. I was someone who didn't see them right away as the bad guy, because there was so much more to this story. Mr. Jekielek: You've been watching from the inside what's been happening with the media. How did you see that manifest? Ms. Collin: Social media became a part of the scene with the media. We're obviously competing all of a sudden for ad dollars there, and we became beholden to big pharma. I felt like that was several years ago. You could see where the ad revenue was coming into mainstream media. That's why I did feel comfortable going into independent media. Because it just felt like at the end of my career, we were just fine with pushing propaganda, and not pushing back at all. Again, they're shaping our words and telling us who we can interview, and what they need to look like. Mr. Jekielek: Is this something that you saw progressively happening before? That's the thing I wanted to clarify. Ms. Collin: Yes. I would say probably five or six years before all of this, then it just kind of kept snowballing. We were hiring journalists right out of college rather than letting them work their way up. That's because salaries went down because ad revenue went down for media stations. All of that was hand in hand. But no, this certainly wasn't just after George Floyd. Covid was a huge eye-opener for me as well. It was not so much what we were telling the public, but what we were not telling the public. Again, we were privy to information through people who were calling us about certain issues, but we just didn't care to reflect a certain side of the story. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Fauci revealed certain things when he was talking about changing the guidance he was offering around masks. Initially, he said, "You shouldn't wear them." Then he said, “You should.” He basically said that we did it because we wanted to make sure that there wasn't a run on masks. This exposed the idea that the policymakers don't tell people the truth, they tell the people the thing that will elicit the correct behavioral response. Is that something that you have thought about? Ms. Collin: Absolutely. You saw these mantras being created in the wake of George Floyd by Black Lives Matter that we would be living on the right side of history. That was something that was repeated over and over again. In all of these specific things when it comes to language and how they were selling this to the public, it was very evident. They said that policing is racist and it's rooted in racism. We heard that again and again. It doesn't matter that George Floyd was arrested by a black cop. But if you go back and see some of these things they were selling early on, it's very evident in the film exactly what you're speaking to. Mr. Jekielek: There's a number of people you show in the film who actively talk about and then double down on saying, “Our intention is to dismantle the police completely.” Speaker 11: Our commitment is to end our city's toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department. To end policing as we know it. Mr. Jekielek: One particular councilwoman was doing interviews about this topic and explaining that police would be replaced by social workers. Nobody in the communities that require the most policing actually want that, because they can imagine what it would look like. Ms. Collin: Minneapolis has always been a very blue city controlled by Democrats for decades, but they have moved into electing outright socialists for their city council. Part of their agenda is dismantling the police department, and they really believe in that. The woman you're speaking about, she decided not to run for city council after that, but she certainly did damage. She was doubling down on dismantling the police department, which I would say they ultimately did. She moved out of town. She sold her house in Minneapolis and left, and lives in another city in Minnesota now. Many of these leaders that were pushing this on the public, they're all paying for the consequences, and many of them have moved out of Minneapolis at this point. This became the perfect place for this to happen. You had the perfect people in the perfect positions for this to play out, whether it be the Attorney General of Minnesota, the governor, or the mayor of Minneapolis, also an outsider who was hand-plucked to come to Minneapolis in the first place. But Minnesotans really are very good and honest people. I knew that I wasn't crazy to believe that this simply didn't have to happen the way it did. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish? Ms. Collin: I would challenge people to share the film with as many people as possible. I say that millions of people have watched it already. Not one mainstream station has yet to reach out for an interview, but that is the state of affairs we are at in the media, and it is sad to me that it's come to this. But don't be afraid to engage in these conversations, especially when the facts are on your side. We have to be able to talk about this, and I hope this does change some hearts and minds. But again, decide for yourself after you're able to see things that you haven't seen before. Mr. Jekielek: Liz Collin, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Collin: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Liz Collin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (37 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1216LizCollin Epoch Original DVD collection: