“At a time of tremendous vulnerability for Xi Jinping’s rule, at a time where we have tremendous leverage and he's in a position of tremendous weakness, we choose not to exercise that.” Watch the clip: In this episode of “ATL:NOW,” I sit down with Bradley Thayer, director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy and co-author of “Understanding the China Threat,” for a deeper look at events at the APEC summit in California last week. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (20 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1122BradleyThayer Epoch Original DVD collection:

"Bad people sometimes make correct arguments, and good people often make wrong ones. There's kind of no relationship between these two.” It’s a logical fallacy to say a person’s arguments are all bad simply because they are a bad person, but that’s precisely how cancel culture is destroying productive debate, says Greg Lukianoff. He’s the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author, with Rikki Schlott, of “The Canceling of the American Mind.” “One in six professors say they've even been threatened with investigation or actually investigated,” Mr. Lukianoff says, according to a FIRE survey. Watch the clip: In this episode, Mr. Lukianoff breaks down the nature of poorly formed arguments, how they became a dominant form of public discourse, and how to restore meaningful discussion and free speech. *Big thanks to our sponsor Patriot Gold Group! Check them out here: http://www.patriotgoldgroup.com/p/epoch 🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 9 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1118GregLukianoff FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Greg Lukianoff, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Greg Lukianoff: I'm thrilled to be here. Mr. Jekielek: We're living in a society where people are asking whether we should even continue with this idea of free speech. I have the right person to talk about this with. This is obviously a big question, but how did we get here? Mr. Lukianoff: The first thing I always explain about freedom of speech, and it's the reason why my Substack is named, “The Eternally Radical Idea,” is the normal situation in human history is that the censors win. In every generation, people rise up to oppose freedom of speech, and they're usually the winners. It's actually historically strange to have an extended period in which free speech is even appreciated, let alone actually practiced. I was pretty lucky to grow up in the '80s and '90s at a time when free speech law in the United States was improving practically every year. Free speech culture was definitely something that was almost taken for granted as being part of the society, and it was particularly one of the main things that liberals believed in. I'm still a Democrat to this day. But growing up, being on the Left meant being pro-freedom of speech, and I've been horrified to watch that change. You need work, teaching, discipline, ideals, and philosophy to maintain freedom of speech. If you don't have that, then censorship gravity takes over, pulling us down, and reverting towards the norm, which is that people in power get to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable speech. Unfortunately, we have been drifting in that direction for some time. But I don't want to pretend it's merely just a natural process, and there's nobody who's actually pushing this along. In my book, Canceling of the American Mind, written with Rikki Schlott, we call this the anti-free speech movement, which actually began just one year after the free speech movement on college campuses. In 1965, Herbert Marcuse, the famous guru of the Left, still mistakenly adored by some people, wrote an article called, “Repressive Tolerance,” making an argument that was presented as if it was somehow sophisticated. But it was saying nothing more sophisticated than if you want to have a truly free and equal society, then you have to silence the bad guys. In his opinion, the bad guys are the so-called Right, the so-called conservatives, and the regressive-Right, which he thinks is everyone else. The good guys, being the people who mostly agree with Marcuse, and the people on the Left should have free speech. But in order to be truly free, we need some kind of dictatorial government with vast and sweeping powers to punish the people who are regressive in the name of some abstract ideal. Honestly, this is not just a terrible idea, but a really ancient idea that essentially we should let the philosopher kings be in charge of freedom of speech. Nobody else should have it. Mr. Jekielek: When the pandemic hit, the philosopher kings took over very quickly. Mr. Lukianoff: Yes. We have a whole chapter on Covid and cancel culture. One of the points we make is how much authority did to undermine credibility itself, and how much cancel culture played a role in that. We give the example of Jennifer Sey, who was an executive at Levi Jeans. Famously, she's also an advocate for educating kids, and particularly disadvantaged kids. I believe she has two biracial children of her own. In response to the lockdowns, when she said, "This is going to be a disaster for children and especially for disadvantaged kids," she was essentially forced out of Levi's. There was this huge uproar about it, saying that this was offensive and this was racist somehow, and that this was something that she really had to apologize for. They fairly quickly offered her a severance, which she refused to take because she wanted to keep talking about her case. Now, freedom of speech doesn't just attach to when you are correct on something. The fact is, in order to get to good ideas, you need to bounce every idea off the wall. We need to be able to do 20 bad ideas in a minute in order to get to better ideas. But it is especially galling when it turns out she was dead right on. Now practically every expert says, "Yes, of course, that was profoundly harmful to children, especially disadvantaged ones. The learning losses are colossal." She was canceled for an opinion that actually turned out to be right. Now, people aren't stupid. They watch this happening, and it really undermines their faith in expertise. We give multiple examples of how, during Covid, the authorities did themselves no favors by acting with an unwarranted level of certainty, instead of just leveling with the public and saying, "There are things we know. There are things we don't know. This is what we think at the moment. We could possibly be wrong." They thought that they had to clamp down with an iron fist or else everything would go crazy. But that's not the way democratic free societies are supposed to think about this. I always give the example of the lab leak theory. In March 2020, people started talking about the fact that there is a novel respiratory virus lab in Wuhan, and maybe this could have actually been a lab leak. Some people even speculated that maybe it's a bioweapon that got out. The immediate response was, “No, that's absolutely false. We know that's false. That's not true. We know it came from a wet market.” This was also the response of some of my very highly educated friends. Again, people aren't stupid. They're watching this and thinking, "Okay, I know a couple things here. I know that I don't know if it's a lab leak. But I also know that you don't know it's a lab leak, but you're acting as if this is written in the sky." Was there some secret super investigation of Wuhan, which the entire world was let in to see? Because unless that happened, which of course it didn't, they don't know this. It was one of those things where working without epistemic humility in the knowledge that they have, experts really shot themselves in the foot. It's one of the reasons why, as we demonstrate in the book, faith in experts and faith in institutions has plummeted partially because of big mistakes that they made and a lot of the intellectual arrogance on their part. Mr. Jekielek: I love that term that you use in the book, epistemic humility, which was not a thing at the time. Let me just comment very briefly and this is very relevant to, The Canceling of the American Mind. There was a letter, “Proximal Origins,” published in Nature magazine. Essentially, the letter was an argument by prominent scientists saying, "There is no way that it's a lab leak. It's clearly natural." I knew enough to know that this was just preposterous. Most self-respecting biologists probably thought the same, but for some reason they didn't say anything. I even called a friend of mine who had been a vaccinologist back in the day and asked, "Did you see this?" He said, "Yes, I wrote to them, but I got no response." What are your thoughts? Mr. Lukianoff: Pretending that you are certain about something has advantages. Then people actually think they are decidedly smarter than other people. Mr. Jekielek: But here's the thing, if you're an academic, Nature magazine is the pinnacle of biology-related publishing. Mr. Lukianoff: We saw this coming for a long time. I've been defending free speech on campus for 22 years, and I sometimes get credit for being able to predict things before they happen. I started working on the book, Coddling of the American Mind, with Jon Haidt in 2014. With these same habits that are threatening campus freedom of speech and academic freedom, which are expressed in semi-medicalized language with lots of cognitive distortions, lots of catastrophizing, and what cognitive behavioral therapy tells you not to do, we were saying that this will be a disaster for academic freedom, for free speech, and for the mental health of young people. It turned out not only were we right, it was terrifyingly more serious than even Jon and I thought it would be. We thought we would see a little scholarly dip in young people's mental health, but instead, it was plummeting. I do get frustrated because I've been warning about the problem on campus for such a long time, and it was getting clearly so much worse from 2017 on. 2020 and 2021 were the two worst years that I know of for academic freedom and free speech on campus since the law was decided on in 1973, and probably even before that. Looking at the best historical models we have, there have been more people fired from 2014, which we have seen as the start of cancel culture, to this past July. It's twice the number of the standard estimate of people fired during McCarthyism. One in six professors say they've even been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for their academic freedom. Nine percent of students, basically one in ten, are saying that they have been investigated for their speech. There's no meaningful comparison to that. They didn't investigate students for their speech at all up until probably the '80s, as best as we can tell. I do sometimes feel like I'm screaming in the void. Then later, people will say, "Yes, he might have been right about some of this stuff." No, it's really coming. You can see it as it works up, and it's wreaking absolute havoc on all of our knowledge-producing institutions. Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about cancel culture for a moment. The common response to a person's being canceled is, "No, this is a reasonable response. This is just accountability." What is the distinction? Mr. Lukianoff: First, I should give our definition of cancel culture, which is very simple. It's the uptick of campaigns to get people fired, de-platformed, or otherwise punished for speech that would be protected under the First Amendment. We explain this in the appendix as an analogy to public employee law, and as a way of bringing in a tremendous amount of nuance and common sense to a definition that we wanted to keep short. In the definition we say, “Starting in 2014 and accelerating in 2017..,” but we kept out of the definition, "..and going completely off the charts in 2020 and 2021." This is our definition of cancel culture. When people say, "There's no such thing as cancel culture. There's just an accountability culture," I have a very hard time taking that person seriously after that point, because generally, it tells me that they don't know a lot about the topic. You're not going to finish, Canceling of the American Mind, believing that any of them deserve punishment. Even if you thought some of them deserved consequences, you're not going to think that in 90 percent of the cases. People don't bother to look into it. They basically think it's all like Harvey Weinstein being punished. Harvey Weinstein, by the way, wasn't canceled. He wasn't canceled for protected speech. He was arrested and sent to jail for serious ongoing crimes. It's a pat answer, and it usually means people aren't willing to look into it. It's nothing more sophisticated than saying, "I don't know a lot about it, but I assume all those people had it coming." As someone who's looked into so many victims of cancel culture, I often struggle to understand, “How is what they said even controversial today?” Mr. Jekielek: As to the person who is doing the canceling, we frequently describe them as woke. We're talking about critical social justice ideology. Mr. Lukianoff: Woke is just kind of an insult that you're not really sure what it means. Tim Urban's term is perfect because it's self-explanatory, and it is a social justice fundamentalist. Mr. Jekielek: I hadn't even heard of that. Okay, new usage. Thinking about the social justice fundamentalists, they believe in microaggressions. You were talking about Marcuse's idea, repressive tolerance. It was arcane and difficult to read that particular essay compared to how pleasant and readable your book is. Mr. Lukianoff: He has the temerity in that poorly written article to take on John Stuart Mill. I thought, "John Stuart Mill was smarter than any of us." He spoke Greek at age three, for goodness sakes. He was able to write one of the best arguments for freedom of speech ever written, but also in riveting, clear prose that would win a court case for you today times 10. Mr. Jekielek: The social justice fundamentalist writings are deliberately obtuse so that only the people who are the initiates, the elect, as John McWhorter would say, can understand. The social justice fundamentalists really believe that the speech of professor Mike Adams, a terrible situation that you chart in the book, was actually violence against them, and that they were somehow harmed. Yet, at the same time, according to their twisted logic, they themselves can use any means including actual violence to fight back against that. That logic comes directly from Marcuse. John McWhorter says, "Let's just make sure these people are nowhere near the reins of power. We have to treat them with compassion." I agree with that, but that's not the situation right now. It's just the opposite. Mr. Lukianoff: They already have the reins of power, particularly in higher ed. The realization that most people think they're doing the right thing is generally true. It's funny that sociopath was once the preferred term for psychopath, and I only discovered later that they mean the same thing. Recognizing that there are people like that in the world is key. I had one very unfortunate interaction with a sociopath, and it was not pleasant. We have to remember that people like that do exist, but most people aren't like that. In this case, they're taking people who otherwise are of goodwill and trying to improve the world, and indoctrinating them with hyper-oversimplified ideas about the world. They are giving them a history that is entirely slanted, and then challenging them to make activism part of their life. They get this pretty much from K-12 on up. There's an Aldous Huxley quote that explains one of the reasons why I can't feel too much sympathy for people who are in these cancel mobs. He points out that if you want to create a successful social movement you should give people permission to be cruel to other people. They should also feel righteous indignation when they do it, and feel good about themselves when they're actively being mean, because that will attract people in droves. Unfortunately, it’s true, and it has been true historically. A lot of times a social justice fundamentalist, when they're going after a professor or a fellow student, will usually refer to an abstracted idea of someone who is less powerful, and who might theoretically be harmed by these words or these ideas. Usually, they're not arguing that they are harmed by this because somehow that doesn't sit right. They have to be doing it on behalf of someone else in the abstract. But it gives them permission to be incredibly cruel to people in the real world. Mr. Jekielek: I saw people reacting to the Hamas massacre in Israel. Before any reaction from Israel, there was this strange, incredibly cruel reaction. Mr. Lukianoff: Obviously, our book was written long before October 7th, 2023. It had the misfortune of coming out shortly thereafter when all the news coverage was on the atrocities going on in Israel. It was really horrifying to see highly educated people and people at Harvard immediately take the side of the people who were, at the time, still raping people, still murdering people, and still kidnapping innocent civilians. I'm a First Amendment lawyer and a true believer. You have the right to have offensive points of view. I will defend your right to have offensive points of view, and not because I necessarily think those opinions are good. But it's good to know if someone actually thinks that, or worst of all, actually thinks that Hamas was right in their attack. That is an immoral belief, but you're entitled to it. If you have that belief, it's better that I know what you think. For the actual kind of mentality that would see this, and then right out their heads make it this hyper-simplified story of good versus evil, somehow putting Hamas in the role the oppressed, these people who are engaged in rape and torture, it takes a lot of indoctrination to get to that point. In Coddling of the American Mind, we think that the mentality that leads to this oversimplified good versus evil way of thinking about things is what we call common enemy identity politics. We believe very much in common humanity identity politics, widening the circle of what we are as a people in order to bring more people in, so that we can be friends on equal terms and create a community where people look different and worship different gods, but nonetheless think of themselves as part of the university community or America. Common enemy identity politics has been much more successful on campus in the past several decades. It's like that Aldous Huxley quote, "Who am I allowed to hate? Because honestly, that's a lot more fun." By the way, it lets me win arguments without actually addressing someone's arguments at all. In Canceling of the American Mind, we talk about cancel culture being the nastiest approach to winning arguments without actually winning arguments, which means not actually convincing anybody and not actually defeating someone in an argument. Right now, we are literally arguing like junior high school students. I believe this more strongly even now because my co-author is a generation Z young woman. When I talk about cancel culture really starting around 2014, she makes the point, "No, I grew up with cancel culture." Cancel culture was exactly what happened to the first generation of teens, especially girls, but also boys, who had social media in their pockets. They immediately figured out a way to bully people, not by standard bullying and calling them mean names, but by pointing out their moral infirmities. You could now use the anti-bullying system to punish the person that you wanted to punish, and then claim they were actually the bully or they were actually the regressive thinker. Unfortunately, there is a weird kind of twisted fun to this process. By watching someone suffer, and particularly if you perceive this person as bad, then by all means they deserve whatever they get. That nasty habit and the New Age version of enlightened bullying made its way to campus in 2014 in large numbers, when Gen Z started hitting higher ed in large numbers. I don't want to blame this on just Gen Z, even though the cancel culture does tend to follow them along, partially because these are habits and techniques and tactics that they learned from a very early age for appearing to win arguments without actually winning arguments. One of the reasons why it really accelerated, particularly in elite higher ed, is because elite higher ed already believed its job was to cultivate and create activists, instead of scholars. In Unlearning Liberty, my first book back in 2012, I wrote, "We should be cultivating scholars, not activists." This is an entirely different mindset and this dirty little secret of why things got so much worse on campus. Administrators were pretty happy to have some students who were more into the idea of passing new speech codes and creating new exceptions, and in some cases helping organize shout downs. That is what happened at my alma mater, Stanford Law School, where a DEI administrator met with a huge number of law students for hours. As we talk about in the book, they showed up for a speech from a Fifth Circuit judge. I always emphasize this because that's a big deal. That's one step below the Supreme Court. About a fifth of the class shows up to shout him down. They do it for precisely 10 minutes, and then the DEI administrator comes out of the crowd. By the way, there were multiple administrators there. In advance of the judge coming, they had promised that if there was a disruption, the administrators would give the students one warning and then ask them to come out. What they did instead, to respect the letter of the law, but definitely not the spirit, was to let him be shut down for 10 minutes. Then the administrator gave a preplanned, pre-prepared, seven-minute speech on whether or not the juice of free speech, the juice of having Kyle Duncan there, a Fifth Circuit judge talking to law school people, was worth the squeeze of the pain that he had caused the community. By the way, these are her terms, I would never use this kind of language. I thought, "I went to Stanford, for God's sake. We had conservative judges there routinely.” It was a forced situation where they were claiming the horrible pain of having a speech there, which they never even had to go to. Administrators were playing a role in this and encouraging the students that they favor to protest. One case involves someone on our board, Sam Abrams, at Sarah Lawrence College. He wrote an article in The New York Times pointing out that administrators are even more politically homogeneous than the professoriate, which is crazy because the professoriate is incredibly politically homogeneous. But he wrote this in The New York Times. This is not controversial data, and this is something that has been pretty well established for a long time. It did show that it had gotten worse. Then strangely, even though he didn't mention students at all, students started protesting and demanding that Sam Abrams be fired. They vandalized his door. They took over the president's office, which actually you should never take all that seriously because that means they were allowed to take over the president's office. A lot of these presidential office takeovers are catered by the university. They will literally have food for the students occupying it, and that takeover becomes a formal part of what you're doing. Mr. Jekielek: The activism itself is performative. With the BLM protests or the protests that are happening now, I couldn't figure out why these things look so different to me than other protests in the past. There are a few different things. One, if there's some kind of institutional power behind the protest, it is more like a Red Guard or Brownshirt thing than a protest. The Truckers Convoy in Canada was a real protest. Mr. Lukianoff: Yes. To pick on my alma mater again, I found it so funny these students are acting like they are big rebels. I thought, "Congratulations. This is the popular point of view at Stanford. You have the will of the people, and are essentially rejecting someone who might be a dissenter. Somehow, nothing's going off in your head that this makes you the bully. This puts you in bad company historically." Many times the students are misled to believe that this is unpopular locally and that's why we can't have it. No. If it's unpopular locally, that's probably why you need to hear it. Otherwise, you're just living in an echo chamber and you're creating tighter and tighter walls for your echo chamber. This is precisely the kind of thing that higher education should be eroding. It also should be teaching us habits of argumentation that actually get us towards truth, which is why we spend an awful lot of the book talking about cancel culture as just one among many rhetorical techniques to not argue. What's crazy is that higher ed isn't just not teaching students how to have productive debates that actually get somewhere. They are allowing and even facilitating habits of dismissing people by identity. For example, they find out if someone has done something bad in their whole life, and therefore their opinion is no longer taken seriously. Campuses shouldn't be within 1,000 yards of these kinds of poor rhetorical tactics, but they are actually teaching them. Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. It's not just encouraged, but it's the way it's done today. You have 10 of these different ways of arguing that allow you to avoid having a reasoned discussion. Looking through them, this is just what everybody does right now. It's very rare to have an actual conversation where there's some level of disagreement, and you're trying to figure out the truth of the matter. Mr. Lukianoff: Yes. One way to avoid a discussion we call the grifter. We set it up nicely in that we have the first chunk that we call The Obstacle Course, which are standard logical fallacies, which includes accusations of bad faith. Someone is a bad person, therefore they have bad opinions. This is what we talk about as the fourth grade on truth in the book. In this case, it's an accusation. The word that best epitomizes this is the grifter, who says, “I've defended thousands of students over the years. I'm second to none in terms of defending faculty and student rights.” People who know nothing about my work will immediately say, "It's a grifter talking about this stuff." Unfortunately, you call everybody grifters that you don't want to listen to. This is just an assumption of bad faith and just an insult as a way to avoid actually engaging in any serious way. Mr. Jekielek: I often wonder whether it’s also a projection, because the person themself has bad faith, so they assume you do. Mr. Lukianoff: The next one I want to talk about is what we call hypocrisy projection. If you start looking on the interwebs, you will see this everywhere, particularly X and Threads. By the way, we get this both from the Right and the Left sometimes. When FIRE [Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] takes a case when we're defending a Lefty, which is often, you'll have someone from the Right come up and ask, "Where were you in this case involving the Right?" We say, "Here's the lawsuit we filed on behalf of this professor. We're quoted to the following 20 things here. You only care about one side of the political fence. You projected that onto us because you can't grok the idea that there might actually be consistent defenders of free speech. We watch the same thing on the Left. Time and time again, people will be accusing, "Where are you in this case that I just learned about where a Lefty got in trouble?" I say, "First of all, how about you do something to help that professor? Second of all, do your homework. We commented on this a month ago, and here are the letters that we wrote." One time someone actually did this, citing a FIRE document, saying, "FIRE is not going anywhere near this." I said, "You're literally citing a document that you didn't even know was actually produced by a FIRE FOIA request." Hypocrisy projection is one of these really lame and embarrassing techniques that we tend to use in the age of social media where people want to just dub you bad, dub you a hypocrite, dub you a grifter, so that they don't have to think. Mr. Jekielek: A quote from Solzhenitsyn appears at least twice in your book, "The line between good and evil goes through every human heart." Please tell me about that. Mr. Lukianoff: I thought our society was improving in our moral sophistication maybe 20 years ago, and that increasingly our art, like in TV shows, for example, moved from typically good vs. evil, heroic characters or even just good characters who are kind hearted to more exploration of people who were really bad in a lot of different ways, but also showing the weird relatability and humanity that they had in themselves as well. I thought we were moving to a level where if we take human nature seriously, there is good and evil inside of all of us, and that essentially we do have complicated motives. Things are oftentimes more morally complicated than we think. There are genuine moral dilemmas where your only choices are situations that might be truly awful and only slightly less complicated. Somehow, as we seemed to be progressing that way, everything went entirely in the reverse. In Coddling of the American Mind, we call this the third great untruth. The untruths are the ideas like if the worst guru in the world was giving you the stupidest advice you ever heard in your life that would really make you miserable. It would be advice that disagrees with ancient wisdom and with modern psychological thought. The first three great untruths that we cover in Coddling are, one, “What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.” Two, “Always trust your feelings,” which sounds nice, but it's terrible advice. As someone has said, “Your feelings are data, not directions.” Three, “Life is a battle between good people and evil people exclusively.” In this book, we introduced a fourth, which is, “No bad person has any good argument.” That essentially means if I can magically declare you bad, I don't have to think about any argument you made, even though I know full well bad people sometimes make correct arguments and good people often make wrong ones. There's no relationship between these two. Mr. Jekielek: The four great untruths provide a very interesting and valuable framework, if you remember to ask, “Am I engaging in any of this right now? Mr. Lukianoff: Actually, for me, it comes from a family habit. My family is Russian and British, very different cultures. My mom, being an Irish girl growing up in Britain, has an exaggerated sense of politeness. With my father, being polite is a form of deception. Russians sometimes pride themselves on being brutally honest. Actually, once you get used to it, you kind of like it. But sometimes you can't be both polite and honest. In our family, we all have the civil libertarian kind of personality, and we don't like being told what to do. We are all very independent. But there was one way where we could get through each other's defenses. I remember my brother going to my sister Alexandra one time when she was really mad about something and saying, "You know what, Alex? You know what you should do with that anger? You should push it all together. Every morning when you wake up, you should look at it and remember that you're doing this." Basically it was making the point, “I'm going to give you some terrible advice to immediately point out that what you're doing is foolish. I know you won't listen to me if I give you positive advice, but if I say, ‘At least don't do this incredibly stupid thing,’ you will start to see it.” I actually like the technique of negative advice because I don't want to run your life. But if you believe that only good people have good opinions, you know that's not true. It also leads to a silly situation where you're trying to prove your side good and the other side evil, which is arguing like children. Mr. Jekielek: At the beginning of your book, you start off with an allegory. It's a mythical society that removes all these fallacious ways of making arguments and people actually have truth-seeking discussions and find incredible truths. I was half wondering, “Could this be real?” It actually brought a tear to my eye because we're so far from that. Mr. Lukianoff: I love allegory as a way to bring people in and as a way to explain a larger premise. The story that we set up in the beginning was about the sorceress, Pandora, who has a society that is doing terribly and everyone is at each other's throats. She removes the ability to make ad hominem arguments from their mouths or do anything other than address what the person's actually saying. At that point, they have to argue towards the truth. After 100 years of this, the place becomes known as Knossopolis, the city of knowledge. It's the richest, most influential city in the entire world with the greatest university that has ever been established because all arguments are productive. They all argue towards the truth. But then as her magic starts to wane, her two granddaughters come. She's trying to convince them to unite the increasingly alienated east side of the city and the west side of the city. She says, "You have to help me, girls. My magic is waning. You just have to persuade people to argue this way." Her granddaughters say, "No thanks, Granny. We want to win. We want your kind of arguments locked away so that we can win our arguments, because we can win arguments every single time with these things. We don't care about the truth anymore. It's about defeating the other guy." They both feel that way. Of course, it destroys Knossopolis. That feels like what we're doing as a country right now. A great way to make free speech useful and a great way to tame and moderate your thoughts is trying to figure out actual solutions to sticky problems in the real world. But if you remain totally in this silly oversimplification of good vs. evil, that my side is good and your side is evil, and with all of these ways of dodging rather than addressing the substance of someone else's arguments, you're going to be wasting time and cognitive energy. In the case of cancel culture, you're going to be ruining lives. You're going to destroy trust in expertise, because nobody thinks they're going to be honest, and rightfully so, when you could actually be fixing things. Mr. Jekielek: I think of it not as much as you think you're good and you think they're evil, but that you think my way is good and their way is not. Mr. Lukianoff: I don't know if I agree with that. The Right thinks the Left has bad ideas. The Left thinks the Right are bad people. Being more from the Left than the Right, I can attest that things very quickly go to, “These are morally bad people. These are racist troglodytes,” rather than listening to the actual arguments that they are making. Whereas, the Right will point out there are still people who think Lenin and Mao were great. But it is now morphing to a stage where both sides actually think the other side is either stupid or evil. Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about the perfect rhetorical fortress vs. the efficient rhetorical fortress. Mr. Lukianoff: Those were things I started talking about in 2015 when I noticed that, particularly on my side of the political fence, there were terrible ways that we were learning to argue without arguing, and always dismissing the people we are debating. A lot of them were, again, just kind of lazy techniques. I dubbed it the perfect fortress at first because so much of it was coming from academia. You had all these wonderful academic ways to discount somebody on the basis of their race, gender, or sexuality. There are also rhetorical techniques that say if they get mad in public, you can dismiss them. If they've done anything bad in their lives, you can dismiss them. We go through about 14 different steps for the perfect rhetorical fortress in the book, and we give examples each way. Step one is magically declaring someone Right-wing even if they're not. Then you don't have to think about them anymore. Mr. Jekielek: Incredibly effective, it seems. Mr. Lukianoff: Incredibly effective. The way you can tell how effective it has been is that people are now accusing the ACLU of being Right-wing and The New York Times of being Right-wing when they do anything the Left disagrees with. Mr. Jekielek: Like Noam Chomsky, as I recall. Mr. Lukianoff: Noam Chomsky, yes. They say, “All the people in Harper's Letter are just Right-wing or Right-adjacent.” I say, “Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky? Do you even know who signed that letter?” Usually, they have no clue. They just know it's bad somehow. Step one, they can basically eliminate 99 percent of the population. It doesn't matter if they're actually conservative. Then we get to the demographic funnel which asks, “Are you white? Are you cisgendered? What is your sexuality?” We follow this down the rabbit hole, and only about 0.9 percent would still be considered valid in some sense. But here's the thing. Even if you're in that 0.9 percent, but you have the wrong argument—surprise, you don't count. Because then the argument is, and this is brilliant, they say that you have internalized misogyny. You have internalized racism. You have internalized transphobia. This is amazing and you can always run out the clock. Coleman Hughes, who is a brilliant, black, independent, 20-something podcast host, has this great quote in the book, "Listen, I'm always being told the most important thing about the validity of my opinion on any number of topics is the color of my skin. But then as soon as I give my actual opinion, if people don't like it, then I am told I'm not really black." I checked on this. I asked all of the conservative and moderate black authors that I know, "Have you been told you're not really black for your opinions?" All of them have, including John McWhorter, Jason Riley, and a number of other people. Mr. Jekielek: I recall Larry Elder becoming the black face of white supremacy, according to the LA Times. Mr. Lukianoff: That is exactly right. What's particularly galling is these are oftentimes highly educated, affluent white people telling black people that they're not really black if they don't happen to like their opinion, while at the same time kidding themselves that somehow they're on the side of minorities. But actually, when you fall down this rabbit hole, none of this actually matters. This is just about protecting dogma. This is about winning arguments without winning arguments. Then, there is the one that says that you can’t get angry in public. That gets used against people a lot. That got used a lot against Judge Kyle Duncan and the San Francisco Chronicle. A number of critics actually said that Duncan was really mean to the students who were shouting him down. The students shouted many horrible things. They actually said, "I hope your daughters get raped." I would be angry too if someone was shouting me down like that. He was also angry on behalf of the students who invited him who couldn't hear a word that he was saying. It's all cheap and it doesn't get you anywhere near the truth, but it can make you feel like you have defeated somebody. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of this cancel culture movement, as you said, comes from this Left godfather, Herbert Marcuse. As you point out, the Right also has created a kind of fortress that it uses at times, but it works differently. It's worth exploring that. Mr. Lukianoff: We're nonpartisan. We call out cancel culture on the Left and on the Right. We spend more time on it with the Left, because in the institutions we're talking about, it's more from the Left. That's higher education and elite corporations. But when we talk about cancel culture from the Right, we give a number of examples, including going after journalists for being anti-Trump. We talk about there being four steps to the efficient rhetorical fortress where you can, just like on the Left, dismiss somebody for being conservative. It doesn't matter who you count. You can dismiss people on the Right for being liberal, woke, Lefty, or whatever you want to call it. I've seen this used against people who are very far to the Right, and suddenly finding out that they are woke in order for someone not to listen to them. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, for sure. Is this like adopting the weaponry of the enemy? Mr. Lukianoff: It is kind of, and we call it the efficient rhetorical fortress because it just has four levels. You don't have to listen to anybody who's woke. You don't have to listen to journalists, even if they're conservative, if you don't like what they have to say. You don't have to listen to experts, even if they're conservative, if you don't like what they have to say. At the most extreme, you don't have to listen to people who criticize Donald Trump. We give three chapters on this, which is about proportionate, because we have many more chapters on threats from the Left. But we do point out that the rising tendency to want to use the illiberal tactics of the Left, advocating for laws that might be unconstitutional, is the wrong way to tackle this. Mr. Jekielek: I never thought I would be thinking this much about free speech. I thought about it in the context of being a student of communist China. There's a very extreme version of what we see happening here that is happening over there, including genocide. I have not looked at all the things that you have looked at as a free speech lawyer. Is it okay to promote Holocaust denial? I find that reprehensible. Mr. Lukianoff: It is. Mr. Jekielek: It's an important part of history because we don't want to repeat that. Mr. Lukianoff: True. Mr. Jekielek: There are multiple reasons not to deny that history. Since that time, I've started calling myself more of a free speech absolutist. But then I realized, I'm really a First Amendment absolutist. Deciding that certain things can't be talked about means that someone else will use that for their own ill. Mr. Lukianoff: Absolutely. You should always imagine that weapon in the hands of your worst enemy. When it comes to limitations on freedom of speech, always assume it's going to be used by your worst enemy because it probably will at some point in the future. But at the same time, bad laws can come back to bite you, and they almost certainly will, depending on who's in charge. To me, it's not the most compelling reason for freedom of speech. I want people to care about freedom of speech, even if they think, "I'm never going to be punished. I'm safe forever, but I still don't think those people should be shut up." Part of my own idiosyncratic idea about freedom of speech is called the pure informational theory of freedom of speech, which is me being fancy and trying to make it sound a little more musical. It is basically as follows; the project of human knowledge is to know the world as it is. You cannot know the world as it is unless you know what people really truly think and why. You're kidding yourself if you think that people being silent about their opinion is somehow making you safer. It just means there's evil in the world that you don't know about. Here is one example that I give. If you believe that the world is controlled by lizard people who live under the Denver Airport, I'm comfortable with saying, “You're absolutely wrong.” However, if my girlfriend, my uncle, or my new buddy actually thinks that, it's really a good idea that I know that information. That is very important information. If a substantial portion of a society believes the lizard people theory, that is incredibly important for the world to know. A lot of times, people will try to skirt freedom of speech by saying, "Then there is no protection from falsity." They seem to be under the impression that truth is easy to know, which it certainly is not. It's an ongoing, never ending process, as Jonathan Rauch calls it, “Small-L liberal science.” There is no truth in saying that these people just believe in conspiracy theories. The fact that people believe things that are wrong is incredibly valuable information to know about your world. By the way, if you're that certain that you actually know everything about your world, and that you know when everybody else is wrong, you're probably kidding yourself. Mr. Jekielek: If people have something that they don't want to hear or they don't believe or they're deeply against or they just maybe think is really wrong, and if that opinion can be seeded disproportionately through the society and have an impact, you have freedom of reach, but you don’t have freedom of speech. I don't really care if someone thinks something alone, but if all these other people believe it because of this megaphone, it’s not good. With social media, there are actual disinformation campaigns coming from foreign powers that have serious repercussions. All of this is this big mishmash mixed together. Mr. Lukianoff: I'm more afraid of the people enforcing what misinformation and disinformation are than the disinformation/misinformation itself. That's what people have to remember. When you're evaluating freedom of speech, one of the most important arguments for it, besides the pure informational theory, is what the justification for censorship is and what will actually be done if the powers that be are allowed that power. It's one of the reasons why the First Amendment is stated as, "Congress shall have no law." They keep this entirely out of the hands of power. Right now, we're seeing a campaign largely based on genuine misinformation/disinformation campaigns sometimes coming out of foreign governments that some of the research indicates are not really all that successful in tricking people, although there are some limited successes here and there. But they are not tremendously significant because people aren't as stupid sometimes as people think. But because that problem exists, the idea is that giving that power to the government or the people in power will somehow solve the problem. I say, "Do you want to make authority the final arbiter of truth?" Because we've played that game before, and actually for most of human history. This is something that Jonathan Rauch talks about, the fundamentalist model of freedom of speech, where essentially the chief, the big guy, or the people in charge get to decide what truth is, and that you dissent at your own risk. Mr. Jekielek: If there's ever been a more obvious case study, it is how we dealt with Covid. We have it right in front of us why this can never be allowed. Mr. Lukianoff: I see lots of examples of this. Right now you're seeing a real campaign to go after people who will argue for something that was once entirely universally accepted—that biological sex is real. I talk about how this destroys faith in expertise, as in the case of an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, Carole Hooven, who wrote a book called, T, about testosterone. The idea that this would be controversial is something that I wouldn't have believed 10 years ago. She went on Fox News to promote her book. She's a lovely woman. She explained we should be kind and compassionate towards trans people, and we should even use their pronouns. We should definitely do everything to be inclusive, but we can't pretend that biological sex isn't real. It has real scientific meaning, and things like testosterone have real implications that are profound. Immediately, a DEI administrator at Harvard starts calling her out for it. Then students won't take her class, and there's a petition against her. We don't actually count her as a successful cancellation in our giant, “Scholars under Fire Database,” because she did leave voluntarily. She got so depressed because friends were turning on her and Harvard did not have her back. The only person who really did was our advisory council member, Steve Pinker, and a couple other friends at FIRE did try to defend her. But what should have happened in those circumstances is the president of Harvard should have stood up and said, "Wait a second. No, we don't have orthodoxies here. This is absolutely within her rights, and this is the kind of dissent that we should be allowing." But what does that do to faith in expertise on this topic? It utterly destroys it. Then if everyone hears from Scientific American, that biological sex is a spectrum, nobody's going to believe you. They think, “What's the alternative? Oh, that's right. The person who said the alternative, the one that we've always believed for as long as we've been talking about this, that biological sex is real, the last time they said something like that, they got canceled." This did not happen just one time. We're talking about over 1,000 times just on campus. We're talking about many more times when it's applied to students. We go through the book talking about this in journalism, publishing, medicine, psychotherapy, and even in comedy. Mr. Jekielek: Greg, you've done a lot of cases related to campus free speech, and that is what FIRE does. Please tell me about what your organization is. Also, we both signed The Westminster Declaration. What does that mean to you and why do you think it's important? Mr. Lukianoff: FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, was founded in 1999 by a Right-leaning libertarian and a Left-leaning libertarian to defend freedom of speech and academic freedom and due process on college campuses in 1999. Unfortunately, it was a much bigger lift than they expected. One of the founders, Harvey Silverglate, thought this would be all taken care of in 10 years. He makes fun of himself by saying, “Actually, it's much, much worse.” But over the years, we've been able to save countless professors and students from being punished, kicked out, and expelled from their jobs for their speech. In 2022, we rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to make the point that we're expanding beyond just the campus. We now litigate cases for defending free speech rights all over the country. We also have a research department which is second to none. We do a campus free speech ranking, which everyone needs to check out. It's a 13-factor examination of 248 schools and I'm hoping one day to be able to afford to get it to 500. We do 13 factors, including the largest student survey ever done on campus freedom of speech about whether or not you can speak freely on a campus and, on the darker side, whether or not the students think that violence is acceptable in response to speech. The answers there will horrify you, depending on the campus. We also include a large database of professor cancellations, student cancellations, de-platforming, and speech codes. Harvard, by the way, finished dead last this year. They tried to say this was a stunt. I said, "No, you earned your score. You're dead last." Mr. Jekielek: That's astonishing. Mr. Lukianoff: Meanwhile, what could really help the situation on campus is for people to exit these Ivy League universities, because all of them did poorly. The second to last was University of Pennsylvania. Third to last, interestingly, is Washington DC's Georgetown University. Fourth to last was University of South Carolina. That's the interesting thing about following the data. Sometimes it takes you to surprising places. But we knew that there were a number of issues there. In the top 10, there are a lot of technological universities you might not even have heard of. UVA [University of Virginia] actually made the top 10, which we were pleased to see. The University of Chicago does quite well. If all these students who are currently finding the academic or even personal environment at Harvard and Yale just completely scary and a place where it's difficult to actually disagree with people took their kids and actually spent their money on competitors like University of Austin or, for that matter, sending them to Michigan Technological University, it would send a badly needed message, particularly to elite colleges, that they're not invincible, because right now they still do think they're invincible. Mr. Jekielek: When you published the ranking, a number of people reached out to me because they know that I'm a fan of Hillsdale College. Hillsdale has the Academy of Science and Freedom which fosters free inquiry and science. We have Martin Kuldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas pushing that forward. You flagged it as a school of concern or warning, which was unexpected. Why was it flagged? Mr. Lukianoff: Yes, Hillsdale is really annoyed with us, because we call them a warning school. I want to be clear, warning school means that it's not a school that contractually promises free speech in the same way that a public school would have it. They have caveats about not allowing this speech or that speech, which the president, to this day, still adheres to. That's all we need to know. The warning does not mean this is a bad school. I should be very clear that I actually think Hillsdale is a great school. When it comes to the polling that we did on the environment for freedom of speech, we have other Christian colleges that don't promise freedom of speech. I think Baylor was among them. We have a list of other colleges that don't promise free speech on our warning list. A lot of them, to be clear, are excellent schools. But Hillsdale was up here in terms of how good the environment was for free speech according to their students, and then everything was probably a standard deviation below it. They do really well in our ranking, but they're warning schools because they don't promise full freedom of speech. All we're saying is that if you go there, the contractual promises of free speech are not as strong as you would have at most other colleges. I'm perfectly happy to say that students report that it's a great environment for debate and discussion. But unless and until they change some of the policies, we're going to call it that. But it's not the insult that they think it is. Mr. Jekielek: Great to hear. Regarding the Westminster Declaration, I generally don’t like signing things, but there was nothing there that I could disagree with. I thought it was very important in this climate. Please tell me why you think this is important? Mr. Lukianoff: The Westminster Declaration makes a point that should be obvious and shared by practically everybody—that government leaning on social media companies to censor, to do the dirty work of the government for them, and to go after disapproved opinions is wrong in the United States, and could be of questionable constitutionality. I've seen some horror stories, particularly coming out of my mother's country, Britain, about how much the government is willing to lean on social media companies. Of course, we've seen horror stories coming out of the United States about how much social media is willing to lean on companies. There are even worse examples coming out today about how extensive the jawboning by the government was against places like Facebook and Twitter. One thing that's been really disappointing in the First Amendment community is the decision from Missouri v. Biden that said, “No, there are serious First Amendment issues when the government jawbones or pressures a social media company to censor people for them.” Now, the criticism of the initial decision was that it was a little too vague and a little too loosey goosey. But then it got up to the appellate court level which made it much clearer and a much better ruling. We are still seeing First Amendment people saying, "This is going to limit the free speech rights of the government.” I reply, "To what? Pressure people to censor the private actors?" We should all be applauding this ruling. We at FIRE think the Missouri v. Biden decision was completely right, and we of hope it gets vindicated all the way up to the Supreme Court. Mr. Jekielek: Although at the moment, it seems like the government is still allowed to collude with social media companies for the time being until this is decided, because for a while there was an injunction that prevented that. I find that curious. Mr. Lukianoff: Something that has really changed on the Left and it is why I call myself a liberal but not a progressive. There were always these two arms on the Left. One was the more working-class version, which loved civil liberties, and might think that universal health care would be swell, even if some of the ideas on that were half-baked. But they really didn't trust government power. They wouldn't trust the CIA, and didn't trust government power. There was a little bit of a libertarian aspect to it as well. On the more elite side, and here's where my reverse class snobbery comes in, it tended to be the rich kids who said, "Lenin was right. The people who believed in the philosopher kings were right, that essentially we'd be much better off ruled by people like us, people who think they are geniuses and actually have a better understanding of truth." That's a much more authoritarian vision of the world. I hesitate to use this word, but in some cases they even seem to go totalitarian with the idea that you should have correct beliefs and we can more or less police that. We see this going on currently on campuses today with DEI statements. The idea that you can't get a job in higher ed in many cases unless you fill out something that is a clear political litmus test very much goes into the realm of your private beliefs excluding you from being part of the all important marketplace of ideas that is higher ed. Mr. Jekielek: You dedicate a full third of your book to solutions, which is actually incredibly useful, because there's so many people right now feeling rather despondent. The first solution I came across was to bring back the Golden Rule. Please tell me about your solutions. You have solutions for corporations. You have solutions for parents. I'll say right away that I love the book. People should read it and we'll encourage them. Why the Golden Rule? Mr. Lukianoff: We're pointing out that we already have mechanisms in our society, older sayings and older ideas, including ancient ideas like the Golden Rule, that already exist, in order to have a free speech culture. That's one of the reasons why we point out old idioms, like everyone's entitled to their opinion, walk a mile in a man's shoes, and treat people as you wish to be treated. These are all brilliant pieces of wisdom that you and I grew up with. But Rikki, my 23-year-old brilliant coauthor, did not grow up with them. She didn't hear these idioms and expressions. It's good to remind people that we have some of the framework in our very recent past that could help us practice free speech culture. But I do want to be very clear. We spend a third of the book talking about potential solutions, because we think it's hard to get out of this. We don’t think, “Ta-dah, we're done, we fixed three things.” Particularly when it comes to higher ed, and particularly given the current skepticism about higher ed, now is the time that we push for major reform. A lot fewer jobs should require a bachelor's degree. We should be investing heavily in low cost, high rigor alternatives, and be funding and looking into every experiment under the book. We should really be de-bureaucratizing universities, because how much that bureaucracy poses a threat to academic freedom and free speech is badly underappreciated. Mr. Jekielek: What about bringing back apprenticeships? Mr. Lukianoff: I would love bringing back apprenticeships. Those are exactly the kind of solutions we need. I would love for people to not go to college until they're at least 20, because right now they're taking advantage of students' lack of experience in the world when they get to campus and create a false picture of what the world looks like and what regular people are really like. You sometimes can end up with a caricature of the evil person from the countryside or evil person from the city for that matter. Then you actually meet them and you think, "This was who I was taught was regressive?" Mr. Jekielek: Greg, a final thought as we finish up? Mr. Lukianoff: I've been doing this a long time, and it definitely can be hard to stay positive. Sometimes people will point out, "You seem so positive." I say, "I'm positive about the future of free speech for only one reason. Free speech works really well." Societies that practice free speech have a huge advantage over other societies. They're more creative. They also find out where the problems are in a way that closed societies literally can't. But I don't want people to think I'm optimistic about the future of higher ed. If we don't do something, and if we don't rethink how we're doing things, this will just come back and end up worse very soon. Mr. Jekielek: Greg Lukianoff, it's such a pleasure to have you on. Mr. Lukianoff: Thanks so much for having me. This has been tremendously fun. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Greg Lukianoff and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 9 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1118GregLukianoff Epoch Original DVD collection:

Two weeks ago, Japan became the first country in the world to approve a new type of self-amplifying mRNA (sa-mRNA) vaccine. A company called Meiji Seika Pharma released a statement on Nov. 28, announcing that it has been given government approval to manufacture and market their Kostaive sa-mRNA COVID vaccine. What is a self-amplifying mRNA vaccine? “Normal” mRNA vaccines work as such: a strand of modified mRNA that contains a sequence for making the spike protein of the SARS-COVID 2 virus is protected by a layer of lipid nanoparticles, which dissolves in the process of getting the mRNA strand into the body's cells. Once this RNA strand is delivered into the cell, the cell’s machinery takes it, manufacturers the spike protein that’s encoded on it, and that spike protein ultimately leads to the immune response. That’s an extremely simplified version of how that process works. However, these new self-amplifying mRNA vaccines take this whole process a step further by integrating the genes that are needed to replicate the RNA. 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 leap-frogged the typical judicial process, and he directly asked the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved and rule on whether or not former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted. And while the trial itself is set to start sometime in March, right now there are a ton of behind-the-scenes machinations that are playing themselves out on both sides. In order to make sure that this trial starts right in the middle of the primary election cycle, Mr. Smith leapfrogged the typical judicial process, bypassed the appeals court, and submitted a request directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. 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

“When I turn on my TV and I see groups of students yelling 'Gas the Jews!'—that's not freedom of speech. That's something else. That's calling for murder. That's supporting killing innocent people. How can we be supportive of that?” In this episode, we sit down with Tabia Lee, a former DEI educator at De Anza College in California. She was fired after refusing to follow the college's woke social justice orthodoxy. Today, she is trying to reform California’s mandatory ethnic studies high school curriculum, which she argues is infused with extremist ideology, including antisemitism. Watch the clip: “I never thought I would see something like that in America—the support of terrorist groups and terrorist actions from our students,” Lee says. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (42 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1114TabiaLee FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Tabia Lee, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Tabia Lee: Thank you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: We've had good reactions to our last interview. Since that time you've taken on a number of new roles. You're working on revitalizing ethnic study curriculums and bringing in new ideas and vibrancy. Please tell me about that. Dr. Lee: Yes, I am very happy to be working as director for the Coalition for Empowered Education. In my capacity there, I am serving as director of education and building a nationwide network to help teachers learn about different approaches to ethnic studies. We are working to counter the current default approach, which is a liberated ethnic studies model. We are also supporting teachers in engaging more humanistic and holistic pedagogies around ethnic studies and gender studies, which are important areas which have come into the mainstream. They used to be fringe things on campus, but they're definitely mainstream now. We are currently seeing the fruits of their labor with the many protests across the world at this time. Mr. Jekielek: Let's dive in. What is this liberated approach that you are describing? Dr. Lee: This is where we have a subversion of language. When you hear the word liberated, you think of people being freed and freedom. But really what we're seeing in this model is a critical social justice-infused understanding of liberation, ethnic studies, and gender studies. What do I mean by that? A critical social justice approach is one that really emphasizes privilege and oppression and power in every interaction. It sees racism and race in every disparity or human interaction. It encourages us to focus on our checkboxes of identity. What are our racial checkboxes? What are our ethnicity checkboxes? What are our gender-based checkboxes? Then certain people are elevated into positions of being able to speak on matters and others are supposed to be silent and let their representatives speak for them. Sometimes it's called standpoint epistemology. It is this idea that because of who I am, you and I could never fully understand each other because my gender and my race is influencing and impacting everything that I've experienced. I have a unique knowledge that you do not have. Therefore, I should be deemed the authority on any issues relating to those race and gender checkboxes that I occupy. I will always be in that particular caste or state or understanding of the world, which really focuses on division. If we can never truly understand each other because of these checkboxes, and if I have this secret form of knowledge that you could never know because of your standpoint and the checkboxes that you have, how do we ever get to know each other? How do we understand each other? How do we work together based on that division and understanding of each other? Mr. Jekielek: In this model, certain races are elevated and certain ones are not. It's curious how that works. Dr. Lee: The critical social justice ideologues have what they call a matrix of privilege and oppression, and sometimes they call it a matrix of domination. It's unfortunate, but our students are being taught to identify themselves on these matrices and to interact and engage with each other based on these positions. It really flies in the face of a more classical social justice approach, which would recognize human agency, free will, and the individual experience. Now it's a focus on group experience and group representation. It's a focus based on these claims that America was founded by white supremacy culture, and some other things that people may not have even heard of. When I hear white supremacy, I usually think of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and people of that nature. But after being called a white supremacist when I was in my former DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] role, and then trying to figure out what were these people saying and where were they coming from, I discovered this whole framework of personality characteristics that are being attributed to white culture. It's very degrading and demoralizing for all other people, because supposedly if you're not white or not supporting white supremacy, then you need to be the opposite of those characteristics. That actually means not being on time, not being objective, and not looking at the written word as an important thing. These are the characteristics we're told we should rail against in the critical social justice framework, and that we all have a responsibility or duty to stand in solidarity with those who are oppressed. The definition of who is oppressed and who isn't is very strange. We're seeing it manifested in the pro-Hamas protests on the streets and some of the social media posts that have been made by these liberated ethnic studies professors who are writing this curriculum. They may influence entire future generations because this is what's being promoted as the model. My work with the Coalition for Empowered Education involves raising people's awareness that there are other ways to understand ethnic studies. To understand ethnic studies or gender studies, you don't need to be anti-American. You don't need to put people in checkboxes and focus on privilege and oppression. There are other ways to study and appreciate what different cultures and ethnicities and groups have brought to this grand experiment. We can do it in a way that is not going to destroy the very fabric of civilization and tear it asunder. Mr. Jekielek: Basically, you are talking about real diversity and real inclusion. Dr. Lee: From a classical perspective, equity is fairness, but that's not the way that critical social justice proponents are understanding it. They are understanding it as equality of outcomes in our schooling, in our education, in our economic system, in our social system, and in every way, instead of focusing on equality of opportunity. I'm really thankful to John McWaters, one of the scholars helping to frame that for people. Anti-racist work has always existed, and gender-based work has always existed, but there are different waves of it. The first and second waves were really focused on equality, and now we have this third wave that is very different. It's a very different feminism than grandmother's feminism. It's a very different anti-racist effort than your grandparent’s effort. Mr. Jekielek: It may seem bizarre to people that this would be connected with pro-Hamas protesting. You observed some very interesting things while at De Anza. Essentially, you realized that antisemitism was baked into this ideology. Please break that down for me. Dr. Lee: At De Anza, I came face-to-face with modern antisemitism. That's why I try to educate people on the connections between antisemitism and anti-Zionism because they're deeply connected. I agree with Rabbi Sacks and others who have really made it clear that anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. On university campuses, we can quibble about what antisemitism is and what definitions we use. But in some places, there are no definitions and it's very intentional. People refuse to adopt the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition. They refuse to adopt any definition of antisemitism, even when students have directly asked for it. De Anza was one of those places. Instead of making a resolution to support the Jewish students' request to define antisemitism, so that the university could act on the deeply entrenched antisemitism there, the student government ended up condemning Israel and talking about the wrongs that it had done and why it was overreaching. They called it a subtler colonialist state and made references to apartheid, things that weren't even related to what the students were asking for, which was a place where we could understand and come to a common definition of antisemitism as a learning community. These were things that took place before I arrived there, but it definitely colored my entire experience there. I was a member of the Equity Action Council. Some of our local Hillel representatives came and requested that the Equity Action Council make the environment more inclusive of Jewish students, faculty and staff members. They pointed out that we have a website that mentions anti-racism and which says, "We stand against anti-racism, and here are some resources." They said, "We see you have Black Lives Matter on there. We see you have stopped AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] hate. Could you add something saying that you also stand against antisemitism?" I went back with my team members and my supervising dean to talk about those recommendations that were given to us, and the response I received was very telling. I was told that it was not important for us to look at these issues, that the college had also received recommendations from CAIR [Council on Islamic Relations], and that they hadn't followed up on those either. I said, "Let me see those recommendations too, because I genuinely want an environment where every student feels welcome to be their most authentic selves." Those recommendations were never shown to me. I don't know if they really exist. There were a lot of instances where things were hidden and not shown, even when I made direct requests. I was told that it wasn't important for us to focus on Jewish inclusion, because Jewish people are white oppressors. The role of faculty and staff was supposed to focus on decentering whiteness. If we did discussions or talks around Jewish inclusion, that would not be decentering whiteness. I said, "That shows a misunderstanding of the Jewish diaspora and its diversity. How can you say that Jewish people are white oppressors when it is such a diverse and global group?” My supervising dean and my fellow staff members never had an answer for that. They just said, "No, we're not going to do that." I asked if I could have a budget to bring in speakers, because I had no budget. Although I was the director, I never knew my budget. All of those things were withheld from me. I went ahead and did it anyway. From the needs assessment conversations, and from everything that I heard from people who came to address us directly, I knew that we needed to address this as a community. Unfortunately, I didn't get the support that was needed, not just from my direct supervisor and the folks who were working directly with me, but from the institution as a whole. The summit that I organized wasn't even publicized to students. It was suppressed and didn't appear on the calendar. But then two weeks after the five-week summit that I ran, there was an event with topics including things like anti-Israel fill-in-the-blank, and anti-Zionist activism. Those were highly publicized to the students. When they log on to their online canvas, a learning management system, a pop up would say, "Come to this meeting." Our events weren't publicized in that way, and they weren't included on the calendar. They weren't pushed out to the students. Sometimes we donate to our former university because we have fond memories of how it shaped us as scholars, of the work that we did there, and of how inclusive it was. But many of these institutions have changed and now they're drastically different. If you are donating to your institution just as a tradition, I encourage you to take a look at what is really happening. See what is happening in these ethnic studies and gender studies programs, and see what they are promoting to students. If it's infused with this critical social justice ideology, does that align with you and your values and what you want to see in the world? These protestors that we're seeing in the streets, they're not popping out of nowhere. They're coming from our colleges and universities. They're supported by faculty that used to be fringe, but are now mainstream, and it's happening in every discipline. You might think, "I'm in the STEM area," or, "I'm studying philosophy.” It has nothing to do with that. Every single discipline on campuses has become infused with this default perspective, and that's why I speak so much about it. Prior to a couple of years ago, folks didn't have the language to describe it. They felt something was wrong, but they couldn't say the words, "Okay, this is a critical social justice ideology." Giving people the language to describe this is key. Some people call it cultural Marxism. Some people call it critical race theory. Critical social justice is one name that captures the gender studies aspect, as well as the ethnic studies aspect. This is so crucial to understand, because those checkboxes are guiding the new order that some people would like all of us to live under. But some of us are questioning it. Mr. Jekielek: Are these protests happening at De Anza as well? You're essentially saying that this is something you would expect. Dr. Lee: Yes, and it is happening throughout the Bay Area as well. Some faculty on campus are offering their students extra credit to be political pawns and do pro-Hamas rallies in the streets. The slogans that are being used are the same slogans that I took to my dean and tried to get her to act on when the student government at De Anza made their resolution condemning Israel. When they were asked to define antisemitism, they came up with that kind of anti-Israel action instead. The Jewish students who brought forth the resolution attempting to define antisemitism were shouted down and told, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Many people haven't heard that statement until recently. Turn on your news and you can see protests where students are chanting that slogan. Jan, I want to believe the students don't know what they're saying. They are implying that from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine will be free. That means the obliteration and destruction of Israel. That means that the state of Israel will no longer exist. It's such a dangerous thing to say. Many of the students don't know the geography and the political implications. It sounds like a rhyme and they're joining in together. They feel like they're part of something, and like they're making a change. We've seen these liberated ethnic studies faculty members who are writing the curriculum for the state of California come out and post similar statements on their social media. They have celebrated these brutal terrorist attacks. They have made statements that this is all the result of systemic oppression and systemic racism. You hear all of these terms and equivocation for terrorism. I never thought I would see something like this in America—the support of terrorist groups and terrorist actions by our students. How are we even seeing these things on the streets day after day? As a professor, I want people to have free speech and freedom of expression and academic freedom, but where is the line drawn? When does it become hate speech? When we call for the obliteration of an entire country and an entire people, is that too far? Each time I see these student groups coming out and saying these hateful comments, supporting hate speech, and supporting Hamas, a known terrorist organization, I wonder to myself, “Why are these deans quiet? Why are the presidents of these universities quiet? Is this representing their institution? What does their silence mean?” We're often told by these critical social justice ideologues that silence equals violence and complicity. Then what does the silence of these institutional leaders mean? Mr. Jekielek: All of a sudden, they do seem to be standing up for free speech. That almost seems like a new thing. Dr. Lee: Their silence means, “We tacitly support what's being said because we're not making any statement to the contrary.” Then the students are getting that affirmation again. They think, "This is what we all stand for. This is what we should be standing for if we're committed to social justice." But that's not the social justice that I've taught my students about and that I've been committed to my whole life. It concerns me because if you think back to 9-11 and the terrorism that took place here on American soil, there was no celebration from student groups and educational institutions. There was no belief that this was okay, and that the acts that took place because of hundreds of years of American imperialism and colonization in the Middle East. Why is there marching in the streets to support Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy the West and the way of life that enables these students to protest and to make these statements? I wonder if the students understand and recognize that they would be the first to be tamped down on if Hamas had its way. We can see the potential destruction of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. It is the one place where you can be yourself. You can be an Arab Israeli citizen, you can be a Mizrahi Jew, and you can be an LGBTQ+ person freely without being beheaded. Yet, we see these students holding up banners that say "Queers for Palestine." Over there they would be beheaded in an instant. They are considered despicable, and they would be despised. Why is this taking place? What has happened to our educational system when we see our students out there promoting anti-American sentiment and supporting terrorism? What are the dangers to us as a society as a result of that? Where are we heading with that, and why? How has it gotten so far along? It used to be a fringe thing, but now this is mainstream and students are being told that it's normal to support terrorism. That concerns me a great deal because I'm someone who loves our country and loves this nation. This is a grand experiment, and it's not perfect. We will always have things to work on. We are human beings trying to realize these aspirations that were set out in the founding documents. Some people want to destroy and shred those documents and then lead us into what? What kind of system will we have when the republic is destroyed, as so many people are calling for? In good conscience, I can't support that. It worries me a great deal, and we don’t understand the danger of embracing these kinds of ideologies. This is everywhere. It's at our doorstep, and we all need to take a look into what's happening in our schools. Those are the breeding grounds for many of these toxic ideologies. Are you really safe in a world where our youth are being corrupted, and their minds are being destroyed with terrorist propaganda and anti-American sentiment? Mr. Jekielek: Both you and I recently reviewed a clip of Hamas leadership explaining what their intentions are. This information may shift some minds of people that don't actually understand what they've signed up for when they join these protests. Dr. Lee: Yes. That Hamas leader said, “Anything we do is okay because we are the victims.” That is the mentality of these individuals and of this worldview. If you have the oppressed status or victim status, any action you take, no matter how immoral and how brutal, is okay. Mr. Jekielek: Including October 7th-type action, as he says explicitly. Dr. Lee: Yes, and they are justifying that and feeling proud about it. Then you can see our students celebrating and saying, "This is okay because our teachers and our faculty members and our mentors told us that this is the response to oppression." This is the response to all of the words they use, like settler colonialism and apartheid. These things aren't rooted in any objective reality or history, but students have been taught this and they parrot it back. They're not learning the whole picture. They're not learning about the actual history of the region. They're not learning and understanding indigeneity and what that means. They're learning a twisted version that supports a terrorist vision of the world, and that is very toxic and dangerous. We need to start taking a closer look at it because it's not just learned professors in the small liberal arts college anymore. We're also seeing this in our medical professionals. We're seeing this in our athletes. We're seeing this in every aspect of life on the campus, and also off the campus in civic life. It's really deeply concerning to see our teachers and healthcare professionals proposing and stating this toxic ideology. They think of their patients and students as either victims or oppressors, and that people should receive certain levels of care and others should not because of their oppressor status or victim status. What kind of world are we headed when our doctor or our teacher doesn't look at us as an individual, but as a group representative, and that we should be held accountable for everything that group has done historically, whether it's objectively true or not? It's based on a toxic narrative that's being taught over and over again. When I turn on my TV and see groups of students yelling, "Gas the Jews," that's not freedom of speech—that's something else. That's calling for murder. That's supporting killing innocent people. How can we be supportive of that? They say that it is because of systemic oppression. What is that? Mr. Jekielek: I've observed there's a conflation of the idea of protesting against war. Some people are just very committed to being anti-war, and against various types of Israeli policy, like the Gaza Invasion. They simply do not like the current Israeli leadership or believe that Israel should be allowed to exist at all. Can you speak to this? Dr. Lee: Unfortunately, we have lost a lot of our understanding of world history, historical events, and the chronology of the world. Whenever Israel is attacked, there is an immediate call for them to stand down and to not defend themselves. I have a big problem with that. I am not someone who supports war, but to say that a country doesn't have a right to defend itself or that they should immediately begin diplomacy does not make sense. Over 200 hostages have been taken, and we have this situation of just brutal terrorism. I find it so interesting that Israel is held to different standards than every other nation in the world. We see these statements coming out of the United Nations and other organizations, and they're always the same. Why is that? It's the deeply rooted antisemitism rearing its head, and it's really visible to so many of us. That is creating an environment of fear and intimidation for Jewish students on campus, and not just Jewish students who are Zionists. Because sometimes people say, "It's just about the Jewish people who are Zionists." There are many people who are not Jewish who are also Zionists, and who support the right of Israel to self-determination. These environments are toxic, not just for Jewish students, but for all students, and for freedom and diversity of viewpoint as well. We're seeing students who are holding up their flags in support of Israel being attacked by students holding Hamas flags and Palestinian flags. That's not okay. We're seeing students being locked into the libraries of their schools. It's easy for some people to say, "That's just those students. They're just a small number and it doesn't affect me." It does affect you. Those kinds of environments where we see exclusion and we see authoritarianism advancing doesn’t just stop with the Jewish people. It marches onward to the next group, and then the next group. People need to understand that part of history, because that part of history is now repeating itself. Some of us are unaware. We don't have the knowledge of history so that we can say, "No, we don't want that kind of world again." But we are rapidly heading in that direction. Mr. Jekielek: This ideology is manifesting in the medical profession, where there is disparate treatment of different identity groups by doctors. Dr. Lee: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about that. Dr. Lee: Yes. This is encouraged in their medical training and in their certificate programs. They are not focusing on medical competency or compassionate care anymore. There is an infusion of critical social justice ideology. We have doctors and medical students participating in die-ins and lying on the ground to protest this idea or that idea. They are lying on the ground and pretending to be dead. Why do we see our medical professionals going out to pro-Hamas rallies and having that be part of their practicums? How does that help them to be more compassionate doctors and to serve their patients? What about the Jewish patient or the Zionist patient, or fill-in-the-blank patient that doesn't fit the narrative of these critical social justice ideologues? When they come to that medical professional for care, do they get a different kind of care? We've seen some statements made by medical professionals on social media, very out in the open, that celebrate the acts of Hamas. How is that keeping us safe? Even some of the high leadership in the American Psychological Association are coming out and saying they want to classify the Zionist perspective as a psychosis. There's all kinds of toxic things happening under this ideology. There are attempts to redefine what is psychosis and what is competent care. Mr. Jekielek: With doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists, even if someone is the worst criminal, you provide them with care because they're a human being. But this new ideology is a complete undermining of that. Dr. Lee: Yes, and I fear for the patients who will be under the care of people who have been trained in these ideologies. How could they ever see the person sitting in front of them as an individual? They have been taught and have accepted that the person in front of them is a representative of their gender checkbox, their race checkbox, or the intersections between those different identities. Some of them are more oppressed than others. These are the professions that should be focused on the compassionate care of the individual. In the case of educators, it should be teaching the individual child that's right there in front of you. Mr. Jekielek: There are a few groups that you've written about recently, like White Coats for Black Lives. Dr. Lee: White Coats for Black Lives has chapters in over 100 American public and private universities. Sometimes we think, "They're not in the public school. My child's in an elite private university." They are there too. There is no space where this ideology hasn't crept in and captured the higher levels of administration and faculty, who are then impacting students. Behind all of these student groups are the faculty advisors who encourage them, who support them, who give them extra credit to go out to political rallies, and who influence grades based on what they say and what they write, but if it aligns with the ideology or not. That is so saddening. What happened to critical thinking? What happened to the ability to do the research and scholarship that we used to value in our educational institutions? Now, it's this expression of fidelity to the orthodoxy. That's the most important thing. That's more important than knowledge or innovation. The things that you're doing with your peers should all be focused on uplifting the oppressed instead. Who defines the oppressed? The answer is these ideologues. How do they define them? Sometimes it is in ways that aren't rooted in any objective reality. It's rooted in their need to spread antisemitism, and anti-women, anti-American ideas throughout the society. Mr. Jekielek: The concept of decolonization has been mentioned again and again over the past weeks. What does that actually mean? Dr. Lee: It is explained by critical social justice ideologues as the decolonization of our minds, our ways of understanding the world and each other, and our ways of being in the world. Because supposedly, our minds have been colonized due to our constant oppression and our experience of living in a nation that they claim was founded under white supremacy, and that now has a white supremacy culture. At De Anza, when people would do their workshops, they would talk about this decolonization of the mind and of our learning spaces. That means that all the white supremacy culture characteristics that were identified, like being on time, being objective, and all of these other personality characteristics and traits, we would actively work to not embody those things and not support people who promote those characteristics. Concerning this whole idea of the settler colonialists, it really speaks to an ignorance of the geopolitics, the history of the region, indigeneity, and who is actually indigenous to Judea and Samaria. It is willful ignorance of these facts. These are documented in history books and in the research we have done on thousands of years of human history. It's not like, "Oops, we just don't know." It's a misrepresentation of history that is very intentional, and it aligns with the antisemitism that undergirds it. Mr. Jekielek: What does decolonization mean in the context of the Israel-Hamas war right now? Dr. Lee: From the social media posts we are seeing from these liberated ethnic studies folks, it means what the Hamas terrorists did on October 7th, and also before and since that time, are justified because they were oppressed. That's the natural reaction to oppression. You don't see me engaging with that a lot, Jan, because it's malarkey. It's a bunch of gobbledygook. It's not related to objective history or facts, and it's not rooted in objective reality. It's a fantasy that has gone widespread. It's a virus that has gone into the minds of our youth and our faculty who are in the streets violently yelling and screaming, “Free Palestine.” What about freeing Gaza from Hamas? No one is talking about that part. This is a battle that involves global ideas and world civilization. If you don't understand the connections between the only democracy in the Middle East and America, and why it's important for America to always stand with Israel, then I have some questions about that. Some people say, "We're just against war. We just don't want any war to happen." Great. What do you do when your nation is attacked, when your citizens are brutalized and murdered in their beds, when your children are kidnapped, and when your Holocaust survivors and elderly people are taken? Do you sit down and chat with the people who did it, or do you have another response? If you are sitting down and chatting, what does that tell this organization of terrorists who is saying, "We've done it, and we will do it again and again"? They're not going to stop and they will not stop with Israel. This will come here as well. It saddens me to see our young people in the streets laying out the welcome mat for their own destruction. Mr. Jekielek: In 2001, immediately after 9-11, I knew a young guy who said, "America is reaping what it sowed." I am wondering if there are now more like him that have been taught or indoctrinated in this way. We have this open border where at least seven or 8 million people have come across. You really have no idea who many of them are. You would imagine that people that wish America harm would push their people through there. If there is a terrorist attack, how many people would be like that young man I just mentioned? Dr. Lee: These are very real and pressing questions. You have people that are calling for the dismantling of America, American culture, and American society. After you destroy everything and dismantle it, what's next? Many people can see that coming to our doorstep, and these students are celebrating that? I hope we don't have to learn the hard way like some other nations and peoples have had to learn. I've had the opportunity to speak with people in post-Soviet nations. Everyone should take a gap year and travel. People with their Queers for Palestine signs, just go to Gaza and see how you're received with that sign. If you got to see the world from the perspective of people who are living in those oppressive environments, then your perspective would maybe change a little bit. Mr. Jekielek: Tabia Lee, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Lee: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Tabia Lee and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (42 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1114TabiaLee Epoch Original DVD collection:

“We took a selfie together and we just said, ‘Love and peace from Miss Iraq and Miss Israel.’ And we posted it and we went to sleep. And then, the next morning when I woke up, basically my phone was blowing up with messages from the Miss Iraq organization, from my family, from strange numbers, and I didn't know what was going on.” Sarah Idan grew up an Iraqi Muslim under Saddam Hussein and represented Iraq in the Miss Universe beauty pageant in 2017. She never imagined that a photo would ultimately force her family to have to flee the country. “During that time, I was getting all the antisemitism, all the hate that you would get if you're a Jewish person. And I had no idea what the Jewish people had to deal with until that moment,” says Ms. Idan. Today, she is a human rights activist who speaks out against antisemitism and Islamic fundamentalism. Watch the clip: “They do not seek to free the Palestinians. They seek to eradicate the Jewish people. They seek to eradicate Israel. And then after that, they would come after Christians, they would come after everyone, because this is the mentality of radical Islam. They want to take over the world, and we keep saying that. And when we say that, we get labeled as ‘Islamophobes,’” says Ms. Idan. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (55 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1107SarahIdan FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Sarah Idan such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Sarah Idan: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: We wanted to set this up for quite some time before this Israel-Hamas war broke out. You have an absolutely fascinating backstory and a lot to speak to on this topic. I want to start with your childhood. You grew up in Iraq, and spent some time in Syria. What was that like? Ms. Idan: I was born in Iraq in 1990. From 1990 until 2003, it was a very different era than what came later. That was the time I lived under the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, and the whole country was indoctrinated by the Ba'ath Party. Every day we heard “Death to America. Death to Israel,” from Saddam on TV. Even when you go to school or with the graffiti in the streets, it says that everywhere. It was so much propaganda that was against the U.S. and Israel at the same time. In school it was the same thing. Whenever the teacher walks in and instead of saying, "Good morning," we all get up and we say, "Live long Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq." That was our greeting to each other in class. It was the same thing when we raised the Iraqi flag on Thursdays. Every Thursday in school, we had to sing all these songs about liberating Palestine and defeating Israel. It was a crazy time. Of course, under the sanctions and all of that, life wasn't easy. We had an electrical power schedule and a water schedule. We would go for days and not have any electricity and not have any water, so we had to conserve. It was just a really difficult life under Saddam. On top of all of that, you didn't have freedom of speech, and you didn't have freedom of thought. You basically had to worship Saddam and love Saddam. Anything that you would say against him could get you in trouble. Even if a child tells a joke about Saddam and someone hears it, then they would tell the intelligence services. Then the intelligence services would go to the family and interrogate the family, "Why is your child telling jokes about Saddam? Are you against Saddam?” That happened to my family because my dad used to be a part of the Ba'ath Party until 1990. He was a military engineer and he built many bases around Iraq. He was a high senior official in the Ba'ath Party. But during the Iran-Iraq War my dad started having different opinions. He felt like Saddam was going into a different direction. When the Halabja bombing happened, my dad started looking for excuses to leave. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 my dad said, "That's enough. I'm not invading another country. I'm not going there." He spoke to a couple of his close friends and they were able to come up with an excuse, saying that he had back problems and he couldn't serve anymore. But from that time until the moment when Saddam was taken out by the U.S., we were interrogated every now and then. Saddam was really tight in the way that he ruled Iraq. In every neighborhood and on every street there was an officer who lived on that street. They had a list of every family, how many people were living there, what year they were born, and what they did for a living. They used to come to us every month, kind of like the census, to check on us and talk to us. I remember one of our neighbors used to hate us and always ask my dad, "What's going on? Are you against Saddam?” They went through all of that. When the U.S. came in, my family, along with many other families, were so happy because it was the moment of liberation. To be honest with you, no one thought it would happen. Even when the U.S. came in and was bombing Iraq, we thought this was just going to be another bombing, and it will end with nothing, because we know how powerful Saddam was at the time. No one believed how easy it was to invade Iraq. I remember the day I was playing soccer with my friends on the freeway and all of a sudden, I saw this convoy come in. I am saying on the freeway, because no one was moving around, there was nothing happening. It was wartime. It was just us kids playing soccer in the street. Then I saw this U.S. convoy come in and my mind couldn't even register what it was. We thought it looked like an alien invasion or something. They got out of their tanks and started giving us flowers and candy and pamphlets saying, "We're here to help you. We're not here to kill you." One of the funny things on the pamphlets was, "If you know any Ba'ath Party member, you need to turn them in." I took the pamphlet to my family and we all just bursted into laughter, because all Iraqis were Ba'ath Party members. I was the only one in my family who was not. Because after age 13, you have to register in school, and they came in before I was 13-years-old. I was the only one not registered as a Ba'ath Party member. We were making jokes that I was going to turn them all in. That should tell you how much the U.S. was not prepared and how much they didn't know about what was going on in Iraq. That was one of the mistakes that led to the civil war and why Iraq was in such trouble when the U.S. came in, because they didn't even know the simple information on the ground. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the sanctions were really difficult. You often hear these sanctions caused perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths, and they were actually war crimes committed by the U.S. How do you view that? Ms. Idan: I view it differently than most people. I think that Saddam was a monster. He was killing his own people and he was threatening the entire world. He was threatening to invade other Arab countries. He was committing genocide and using chemical weapons against the Kurdish people. The mass graves that he hid and we found out after the war had thousands of families and children buried alive. It was anyone who opposed him. It wasn't just the U.S. that put sanctions on Iraq, it was also the UN. Many countries did that to curb his behavior to get him to stop, but it didn't stop him. Sadly, the Iraqi people were paying for that. But what else can you do? How can you stop someone from gaining more power? You cannot feed the monster. You have to cut off the supplies and you have to fight them. To me, this is very similar to what's going on right now with Hamas and Gaza. People are wondering, "Why is this happening"? It's literally the same situation. Whenever Hamas gets funding from anyone, they don't even give it to the people of Gaza. They use it for weapons and they use it to become more powerful. It was the same situation with Saddam. Mr. Jekielek: In these authoritarian regimes, there is always a portion of the population that has this freedom bug, like your family. They decided, "No, this isn't for us,” and tried to figure out how to deal with it." But there are also a lot of other people that go along with it. Then there are some that are actively involved and enthusiastic about it. Ms. Idan: That is true. But in Iraq, the majority did not want Saddam, and this is something that we all knew. It was a very small portion that wanted him, and they were the people who felt protected by him. They were mostly the people who worked for him. Normal Iraqis didn't have any rights, didn't have any freedom, and lived in poverty. We were watching this dictator on TV wearing fur, smoking his Cuban cigars, and living the good life, while we were starving. How can you respect such a person? This is not like in some countries where it's half and half. In Iraq, the majority definitely did not want Saddam Hussein. Mr. Jekielek: Eventually you made it to the U.S. and you also were involved in the Miss Universe competition. Please tell me about that whole picture. Ms. Idan: I came to the U.S. when I was 19. When I was in Iraq, I worked for the U.S. military as a translator. When you work for the U.S. military, they give you a special immigrant visa. That means once you arrive in the U.S., you will receive a green card that is valid for 10 years. After five years, you automatically become a U.S. citizen. While I was in the U.S. I participated in one local pageant that was for the Iraqi community. It caught the attention of the Miss Iraq Organization in Iraq and they called me back to participate in Iraq. At the time, I was already going back and forth to see my family. After that, I went on to the Miss Universe competition. In the beginning, I was so happy, and I couldn't believe it. I knew the only reason I won the pageant was probably because I spoke English, and they wanted someone who could speak English and answer questions. At the time, there were about 93 countries represented. The year I went was the first year for Iraq to come back to the Miss Universe pageant after 45 years. It was a big deal for all the fans, for the Miss Universe staff, and all the people involved. All the girls would come to me and say, "Oh, my god, Ms. Iraq, that is so amazing." Ms. Israel was maybe one of the only people that did not approach me and speak to me. One day we had a photo shoot and she saw me. I waved at her to say hi and she just stood there awkwardly. After that, she came to say hi and she said, "I'm sorry, I wasn't sure whether I could speak to you. They told us not to approach the Arab countries." I said, "Who told you?" Then she showed me her sash and it said, "Israel." I said, "Why?" She said, "I don’t want to get you guys in trouble, or maybe you don't want to talk to us." I said, "No. I have no problem with you being from Israel. If anything, we're all here together. We're setting a good example for the young girls around the world. We need to take pictures and show them that we're ambassadors for peace." That's what we did. We took a selfie together and said, "Love and peace from Ms. Iraq and Ms. Israel." We posted it and went to sleep. The next morning when I woke up my phone was blowing up with messages from the Miss Iraq Organization, from my family, and from strange numbers. I didn't know what was going on. I had posted on Instagram and then I had just gone to sleep. They kept us really busy at Miss Universe. We would wake up at 5am and be on our heels, not even our feet, from 7am until sometimes 11pm. I woke up that morning and started reading the messages. One was from the Miss Iraq Organization, saying, "What did you do? Delete the picture. Delete it." I got tens of calls from them and from my family. My family had already received death threats. I spoke with the director of the Miss Iraq Organization and told him, "I did nothing wrong." He said, "That's not how people see it. You don't represent yourself. You represent Iraq, and Iraq doesn't have diplomatic relations with Israel, so you need to delete the picture. You are sending a message that you are against Palestinians." I said, "That is not true. We need to show that there should be peace between our people." I said, "I'm positive there are many Iraqis who believe in what I believe in." He said, "Okay, if you don't delete the picture, then I'm going to talk to Miss Universe right now and have them fire you from the competition. We will tell them that we took the title from you so that you can't compete." At that moment, I had to basically negotiate a way to keep the picture and stay in the pageant. In my life there's one thing I have learned, if anyone tries to force you to do something, that's always evil. If they try to force you to be quiet about your own beliefs and ideas, that's very evil. That's fascism and dictatorship. That is why I left Iraq and why I came to the United States. I was very angry and I did not want to be silenced when he was telling me that. I told him, "Listen, the picture has been posted. If I delete the picture right now, people will think that I have a weak character and that I do not stand behind my own beliefs, and it will send a bad message. I will probably not even make it to the top ten in Miss Universe, so I need to stick with my message. But what I can do is make another post and say, 'I do not support the Israeli policies in the Middle East, and this is not political statement.'" He said, "Okay, let me write down this statement for you." It was that I support the Palestinian cause and all of that. That's proof of how in the Middle East, if you go against what you are being told, they will fight you and force you into compliance, while pushing their own narrative. At the time, when I made that post, my family had to leave Iraq after three days. I remember speaking with them and crying. I was telling them, "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for anything bad to happen to you." They said, "No, Sarah, it's okay. You're doing amazing, and keep doing what you are doing. This is not about you. This is literally about our people and our country. We're just going to leave. We're going to go somewhere safe, and just keep doing what you are doing." Thank god, if it wasn't for my family being so supportive, I wouldn't even be able to continue. But my family left Iraq, and I continued with Miss Universe. The day we finished filming with Miss Universe, I went back to LA and deleted that statement they had forced me to post. In my life, I had never experienced anything like this. I've only felt danger when I was in Iraq during the Iraqi Civil War. While working with the U.S. military, I felt danger. But I had never felt danger in the U.S. That was the first time in my life I felt danger in the U. S., because I had messages saying that people would find me and they were also making death threats. That was definitely scary. At the same time I was receiving all of that, it became not only about me, it became about the Jewish people as well. All of the sudden, people started their conspiracy theories by saying, "Her last name is Jewish. Her first name is Jewish. She was born in Tel Aviv. She served in Mossad and she worked for the CIA." They started posting pictures of me in the U.S. military uniform. During that time, I was getting all the antisemitism and all the hate that you would get it if you were a Jewish person. I had no idea what the Jewish people had to deal with until that moment. After that, I was invited by the American Jewish Committee to go to Israel. That was the first time I was exposed to Israel. It was definitely an eye opener for me when I went to Israel, because I realized that everything I had been told about Israel was a lie. I didn't even know they had Muslims, Christians, and people from all over who all coexisted peacefully. When I looked at Israel, I felt it was like a mini-United States in the Middle East. It is amazing, because you have mosques next to synagogues and churches. I just wish that we had the same thing in other Arab countries. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that the vast majority of the population was against Saddam and that type of rule. But when you took a photo with Miss Israel and posted it with a message of peace, that led to threats to your person and all sorts of denouncement. Why do you think that happened? Ms. Idan: To be honest with you, in the beginning, I couldn't understand why, and I was trying to figure it out. I came to realize that many Arabs and many Muslims were brainwashed that the Jewish people are inherently evil and that they were cursed. They keep quoting chapters from Hadith or from the Quran that said they were cursed by God. They are descendants of pigs and monkeys, just horrible, horrible things. During that time, I felt it was definitely political and came mostly from people who supported the Iranian regime, or Sunni radicals who supported the Muslim Brotherhood. But after the events of October 7th, now I see what's going on. I realize this is worse than what I thought before. Before, I was more hopeful and I just thought it came from extremists. But from what I see today, it's coming from almost everyone, and it's a really frightening time. Since I've posted about the massacre that happened in Israel, I have lost all of my Iraqi friends on social media. They all unfollowed me, and they all attacked me. Some of them launched campaigns against me. They are Iraqi activists who have millions of followers. The funny part is that those people are not even allowed to go back to Iraq, just like me, because they speak against the Iranian regime. They are secular Muslims, but they still post horrible things about the Jewish people. I never understood the extent of antisemitism in my community until these recent events. Mr. Jekielek: We can talk about what happened on October 7th and its aftermath in a moment. Before we go there, let’s talk about the time you spoke at the UN, because the UN plays a strange role in all of this. Please tell me about that. Ms. Idan: I was invited by an organization called the UN Watch. They asked me if I wanted to speak about what's going on in Iraq and I said, "Yes." At the same time, I asked, "Can I also speak about what's going on with Israel?" I felt these two messages were equally important. When I went to the UN, it was at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, and I sat there for hours. I was listening to what the other countries were saying, and what they were discussing. The entire time, I couldn't believe what I was hearing, and I was just laughing. I said, "Is this serious"? I was asking the organization that brought me, "Are those people serious"? And they said, "Yes, this is the United Nations." The level of corruption that's going on inside the UN is just crazy. Because I am Iraqi, I know exactly what's going on in my country. To hear what the Iraqi, Arab, and other representatives were both saying and denying in front of me was just appalling. I thought, “What is the point of speaking here, if I feel like the body of the whole United Nations doesn't care? I felt like it's just to show that they are voting. But the whole thing seemed like a joke to me. I felt that most people didn't even want to be there and it was all just acting for them. It was definitely disappointing when I was talking about the issues, not only about Israel, but also when it came to Iraq. Because at the time, we had the Iraqi Revolution, which was also called the October Revolution. This was the Iraqi people protesting that they wanted clean water to drink, jobs, and a normal life. Iraq gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year from humanitarian aid from the UN and other countries, but the Iraqi people don't see any of it. It goes directly into the pocket of the Iraqi government that is actually working for the Iranian regime. Those are the issues that I was speaking about, and the Iraqi representative denied everything, and then their motions were carried. They are taking money from China. You have China and Iran sitting there, who used to be the head of women’s rights. That's my experience. Mr. Jekielek: What was the message you wanted to convey? Ms. Idan: I just wanted to relay the voice of people like me. I just wanted to relay the voice of the Iraqi people who are fighting to get basic human rights and better living conditions. I wanted to convey as well the voice of the Arabs and Muslims who wanted to end the war with Israel and who wanted to establish peace with Israel. Secular Muslims who don't want to live under Islamist rule and the Israeli people share a lot in common. We share the same views for democracy and for the future. We also share the same enemies. I wanted the world to know that we support peace with Israel for these reasons. In my speech at the UN I said, “Iraqi migrants believe that their government shows more loyalty to Iran than its own people. It named streets after Khomeini, who murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. I ask the UN, why has this council never adopted a single resolution for the human rights of the Iraqi people? How could you elect a government that oppresses its own people as a world guardian of human rights? Thank you.” Mr. Jekielek: We're almost getting up to the present here. What did you think of the Abraham Accords? Ms. Idan: When the Abraham Accords happened, I was at the White House, and I watched the signing. When I received an email from the White House saying, "We are inviting you for the Abraham Accords," I cried and I couldn't believe it. I did not expect that it would happen so soon, but I was so happy. Just being in DC at the time and speaking with representatives from the Emirates and from Bahrain, and watching everyone sitting together at the same table speaking about peace was so amazing. Some of our media tried to distort that image and try to make it seem like it was about an arms deal and about money, which is insane. They don't understand the significance of establishing peace between the Muslims and Jews, especially after hundreds of years of war between us, if not thousands of years. It was the first step for the Arab countries and Israel to come together to try to build a new generation, a new future for the entire area, and to fend off the enemies and the radicals. With the massacre that happened on October 7th in Israel, Hamas admitted they've been planning it for two years, and I think it was because of the Abraham Accords. They realized that if the Arab countries and Israel came together, there is no way that they could spread their hate for the Jewish people and that they could never end Israel. They also realized that this would probably be the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime. This is why Khomeini supported them with weapons, with intel, and with everything. They did this on purpose. They wanted to do something giant like 9/11 that would provoke the Israelis, so that the Israelis would respond and try to take them out. When the Israelis responded like they did, and they bombed Gaza and they sent their military inside Gaza to go after Hamas, this is exactly what they wanted. They wanted to show Israel in a bad light, not just in front of the world, but in front of the Arabs and Muslims. They could then say, "Look who the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Bahrainis are trying to make you be friends with. They are your slayers. They are the people who hate you and want to kill you." They succeeded with the current campaign that I see right now on Arab media like Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera is even paying influencers with millions of followers to post propaganda, even fake videos changing the narrative, and denying that the massacre happened in Israel. They definitely succeeded in convincing the average Arab and Muslim that this is Israel's fault, and let's try to stop the Abraham Accords. Mr. Jekielek: How do you explain all the video that we have that was actually taken by the Hamas terrorists themselves? Why would people think that? Ms. Idan: Why would Hamas murder Jewish people in cold blood? Why did ISIS murder Yazidis and Syrians and even Muslims in cold blood? It's literally the way that they were brainwashed to follow their leaders on the road of Jihad. They see it as Jihad. "If I kill for the sake of Jihad and the sake of Allah, then I will go to heaven." It's even worse when it comes to the Jewish people. I know the mentality of the Islamists because I lived with them when I was in Iraq. Even though they hate Christians and believe they are infidels because they worship God and the son of God, their hatred for the Jewish people is more than their hatred for any other religion. They truly believe if they kill a Jewish person, they will go to heaven for killing that Jewish person. They have this ideology. I keep seeing this everywhere in comments and videos and with people speaking that this is a prophecy, that in order to bring the Messiah, which is the Mahdi for them, they have to kill every Jew. They have to end Israel. Mr. Jekielek: Why the humiliation? I'm not even going to describe the things that were caught on camera, but it seems like a step beyond killing. Ms. Idan: Yes. When I posted about the Israeli women being raped by Hamas, the messages that I received and the comments were saying, "You are next. We will do this and that to you," and they were very explicit in their description. In the beginning, I couldn't understand. How can you be a Muslim, but then excuse raping women? But then I understood, after reading message after message, that for them, it is part of Jihad to take sex slaves. They believe that women represent honor. They think, “If I rape your women, then I take your honor away.” This is what I understood, because they were telling me that in their messages, "I will do this and that to you." I thought, "What do you get out of this? How can you hate me? How does that make sense"? But then I understood from their context, they believe that they will take your honor by doing that and break you spiritually and mentally. It's a very barbaric and monstrous ideology. That's just the sad reality of it. Mr. Jekielek: Since we're talking about ideology, let's talk about what is happening on campus in the U.S. now. You hear the chants, "From the river to the sea." We've heard, "Gas the Jews." A lot of these people that are chanting these things are not Islamist. Ms. Idan: What is happening on campus has been going on for a while now. Basically, a lot of these groups are supported and funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and by people with a lot of money. These are not just movements on campus. I actually went to one of their meetings at UCLA and they kicked me out, but I just wanted to observe and see who attended these meetings. It was people who were 40 to 50-years-old. Some of them looked like they were Salafi Jihadists, with the beard and no mustache, and bringing their wives. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. If this is about people on campus, who are these people that are coming on campus? Why are they holding these meetings in secrecy and not allowing other students to come in? It is only for the people who belong to this movement. Sadly, they are using the pain and the tragic history of many Americans. They are mostly people on the Left who stand against racism and who support movements like Black Lives Matter. Those people feel like they have been oppressed for a long time in the country. They tell them the same thing, "We are being oppressed in Palestine by those European Jews who came from Europe. We share the same pain, and we share the same history." They tell them that there is segregation and apartheid. Sadly, they managed to convince many people who are just filled with anger who want to have a cause to support and believe in. But they haven't really spoken to people from Israel. They have never been to Israel. They keep shouting, "Apartheid, apartheid." When they say that, I think, "You've never been to Israel. Because if you had been to Israel, you would know there is no apartheid. When you see Muslim women wearing a hijab walking besides Jewish men wearing a kippah, you know there is no apartheid." But sadly, they have convinced them somehow. But it has gotten to a really scary level right now. I've been watching videos. In one of them, every time I see this image, I get so angry. There is a woman holding a sign that says, "We want the caliphate back," which means the Islamic state of ISIS. They are holding these signs on U.S. campuses. Women who are not wearing a hijab are cheering. Women who have full freedom here are holding these signs. Do you know what women went through in our countries? You have full freedom here in America, and you support the genocide and you support the oppression of our women. Thank god I was not on campus that day. If I had seen those women I would have picked a fight. I don't think I could even contain my anger if I saw women wearing whatever they choose to and having full freedom, and then holding signs supporting Hamas, and holding signs supporting radical Islamists. They come from a place of privilege and ignorance, and they are in denial. They need to speak to people who have experienced radical Islam—people like me, not those people who are born and raised in the United States, and believe that Hamas is a Palestinian freedom movement. They need to speak to people who know Hamas, who have lived with the mentality of the people of Hamas. We know what they stand for. Because we know the name Hamas, Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamia, means the Islamic Resistance Movement. It's not the free Palestine movement. The same thing with the group called Islamic Jihad. It's called Islamic Jihad, it’s not called Free Palestine. They do not seek to free the Palestinians. They seek to eradicate the Jewish people, and they seek to eradicate Israel. After that, they would come after Christians and they would come after everyone, because this is the mentality of radical Islam. They want to take over the world, and we keep saying that. When we say that, we get labeled as Islamophobes. We are just fed up at this moment. But I hope after what's going on right now and they see how the Jews are being attacked in the U.S., in Europe, in the airports and everywhere, I hope that somehow, they will wake up and finally listen to us. I am Muslim. I just don't believe in radical Islam, because radical Islam had me displaced from my country. For two years, I had to live in Syria when radical Islamists took my home, because we were not the right kind of Muslims for them. This is what people here don't understand. They've lived their whole life in the U.S. and they believe they know what oppression is. It's time that people like me and Muslims who really know the danger of radical Islam, it's time for us to speak out. We need to speak out and we need to look after the Jewish people. We need to tell them that we are with them. We will support them because we both share the same fight. If they come after the Jews, then they will come after every single one of us who will not bow down to them and obey. Mr. Jekielek: You're a Democrat and I know you've been critical of congressional members like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib. What is your reaction to how they're treating the situation? Ms. Idan: First of all, I knew that they were going to be against Israel. Their money comes from the same people who support Hamas. On the Right, they're against the squad. They're against the squad, because they're on the Right. But when it comes to those on the Left, they don't know about this. They don't understand the geopolitics, and they don't understand the history of the Middle East. When I say Muslim Brotherhood, they don't even know what the Muslim Brotherhood is. There needs to be an education about all of this. Maybe it's time to educate and add these classes in our schools in the U.S. to teach the people about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and about the enemies of the United States, so that people can make informed decisions before they blindly support politicians because of identity politics. They look at Ilhan Omar and Rashida and they see women of color. They see Muslim women and they think we need more of those people in our government. I completely support that. We just need people who actually represent the United States. The majority of Americans don't know about this. They don't speak Arabic and they don't watch the Arab news. They don't understand what Al Jazeera is saying about the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, about the Qataris, or about Erdogan. They have no idea what is going on. They only see someone who represents a minority and then they support them. When this minority person says something and then the Jewish people speak against them, they think, "They're just attacking her because she's Muslim and she's a woman of color." That is not true. There are many people of color in Congress like Ritchie Torres who support Israel, because he knows the real story. I decided to run for Congress because I felt we need that sane voice, the voice who actually cares about America, the voice that loves this country and doesn't want to see us divided, and doesn't want to see us being torn apart or infiltrated by Islamists. In the last couple of months, many of my Democrat friends, some of whom said they would vote for Biden, are now saying they're not going to vote for Biden because of what happened, not only with Afghanistan, but what happened with Iran and sending $6 billion to free the hostages. It's really sad, because we've been warning the Biden administration. We know the same people who worked for the Biden administration are the same people who worked for the Obama administration. The Obama administration made the same mistakes. Thank god some of them got caught, like Rob Malley. He's under investigation right now. He's on vacation, as they say, but it's way deeper than that. It's time that we do more digging to see why a party that cares so much about personal freedom and supports LGBTQ rights would give money to the Iranian regime, who stands against all of that. On top of that, a government that literally threatened to wipe out America and Israel is just an evil government. Today, more Democrats are waking up, as they see how all these bad policies in the Middle East are unfolding right now into a bigger and bigger disaster. I watched an interview of one of Hamas leaders. I believe it was translated by memory, and a lot of people saw that. They asked him, “Why did Hamas take American hostages and not just Israeli hostages?” He said, "Why not? The U.S. is our enemy. Biden just gave $6 billion to Iran, so why not? That's a good thing for us, and maybe we'll get some money." This was all over social media and everyone saw this. This is the result of bad policies. You should not be negotiating with terrorists. You should be fighting terrorists. I hope it will be a wakeup call for the people in the Biden administration, whether they're doing this being aware or unaware. I hope this will be a wakeup call that we cannot continue with the soft approach in our policies to the Iranian regime and to radical Islamists. The more that we show we are ready to have a conversation with them, the more they feel they are empowered. Then they want to make more demands and they want to make more threats. Mr. Jekielek: There's a number of Muslims and prominent people that are saying they are now experiencing Islamophobia in this current environment. You mentioned that word before. Do you agree with that? Ms. Idan: I honestly don't see any Islamophobia going on right now. If there really is Islamophobia, then you need to blame it on the source, and the source is radical Islam. If you are a Muslim and you're experiencing Islamophobia, that means you need to stand up right now and say, "I do not believe in Hamas and I do not support Hamas. I do not support the ISIS ideology and mentality." If you are storming airports and attacking Jewish communities and having riots in front of the Israeli embassies, you are sending a message that you are pro-radical Islam. When you shout, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," that means the eradication of the Jewish people. When they shout, "Ya Yahud Khaybar Khaybar," and all of these radical Islamist terms that they use, fight the source, and show that you are against radical Islam. It's time right now. It's time for you to speak and say, "I do not support Hamas. I support the Palestinian people. I support their right to exist and to reach a two-state solution." Stop saying that Hamas are freedom fighters. Stop excusing their behavior. Stop excusing the genocide that happened on October 7th. Don’t pretend that it didn't happen, and this was all AI images, and deny that there were 40 babies murdered. Of course, you'll have Islamophobia if this is your approach. The American people and the world are watching your behavior. Everyone is scared of you right now because of your behavior when you are shouting and when you go on the streets wearing masks covering your face. Why do you need to cover your face? Show your face. If there is nothing criminal about you and you feel you are righteous, show your face. Mr. Jekielek: In these authoritarian societies, there is always a group of people that are against the regime, some people that just go along, and some people who are enthusiastic supporters. There are a variety of views around Gaza, for example. Some people will say, "The Palestinians are all Hamas." Other people will say, "Hamas has 30,000 fighters and they're actually oppressing the Palestinian people." There are also variations on that. Can you speak to this? Ms. Idan: In the beginning, I thought that Hamas was oppressing the Gazans, and that there were people in Gaza who were against Hamas. I thought it may have been 50-50, as the research has shown. It's kind of strange, because what happened in Gaza with the bombing and all of that, Hamas is weakened right now. This is the moment for the Gazans who are against Hamas, against the eradication of Israel, and who are against the ISIS mentality. This is their moment to have a revolution. You literally have the Israeli military on the ground and who can have your back. You are no longer isolated. If they are truly against Hamas, then this would be the moment to be against Hamas. But sadly, maybe the majority is not. Maybe the majority does support Hamas or wants Hamas around. This is just what I think. I'm not on the ground in Gaza, but this is what I am seeing. Mr. Jekielek: These are complicated realities because there is always this indoctrination that is constantly happening. A lot of people in Gaza are dying now because of the Israeli attack and the ground offensive. That's not going to create a lot of sympathy for Israelis. Ms. Idan: But that's the thing, this is war. Israel went to war. We've seen it over and over and it has happened in many countries. We've never seen an outrage about civilian casualties. This happened in Syria and Iraq under ISIS. The U.S. bombed many areas, and so did the Iraqi army and the Syrian army. Bashar al-Assad killed maybe half-a-million of his own people in the war against ISIS, but we did not see any outrage about that. It is because they don't want to tell the world about what really happened. For example, when the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF] attacks Gaza, they throw out pamphlets. They tell the people, "Leave this area." They say on loudspeakers, "Leave this area." They always give them time to leave. But we've also listened to recordings of people from Gaza telling the IDF that Hamas would not let them leave. They were being held there. It's a really sad situation. At the same time, I can see why Israel had to go to war. They cannot just keep quiet, and they cannot just allow Hamas to bomb them every week with thousands of rockets, because the world doesn't want to see Israel go to war with Gaza. There is an outrage, but the outrage is misplaced. Instead of directing your outrage against Israel, who is trying to rid the world of Hamas and these evil people who are oppressing and hurting not only Israelis, but also Gazans, you need to direct your anger to Jordan and Egypt who are not allowing Gazans to come to their country. These are Arab Muslim countries. Why aren't you demanding for Hamas to step down? When you keep showing solidarity for the people in Gaza and attacking Israel, that empowers Hamas. They know exactly what they are doing. They're using their civilians. There was even an interview in Qatar of the main leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, saying, "Yes, we will sacrifice our women. We'll sacrifice our children. We'll sacrifice our blood to hold Israel accountable." They don't care about killing their own people. It's a very tough situation. But then again, the same thing has happened over and over in history. When there is war, there are casualties of war. People need to look at this logically, and they need to look at the greater good, which is to remove Hamas from Gaza. This is not about the displacement of Gazans like many fake activists and many corrupted Arab news media are claiming. It’s like Al Jazeera saying, "This is Netanyahu's or Israel's attempt to remove the Gazans, so they can take over Gaza." Israel was never interested in Gaza. They gave Gaza back in 2005. But because of these constant attacks and the danger that is growing, they cannot keep living in fear just to please the world, so they have to eradicate them. Once Hamas is removed, then Gazans will go back to their homes. If Hamas doesn't exist in Gaza, it will be even easier to get humanitarian and financial aid, because then many countries and organizations will know their money is not going to radical Islamists. It's actually going to rebuild the city, and it's actually going to the Palestinians. Mr. Jekielek: Sarah, this has been a fascinating conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Ms. Idan: Some people were warning about World War III. Yes, that is a possibility, but I don't think we should live in fear. It's time that we stand up for the Jewish people and for the minorities. It’s time that we stand up for people like me who are Muslims that are being threatened by radical Muslims. It's time to say enough of living in fear. We need to have the courage to fight those people, and that's what the American people and what any nation should focus on. You can look at what's going on in Europe with all these riots, with people being masked and attacking government institutions. We just have to fight for the greater good. We have to preserve democracy. We have to preserve national security. This problem has been going on for many years, and we have been warning about it for many years. Activists like me have been warning about the danger of radical Islam, and now we're seeing it. Mr. Jekielek: Sarah Idan, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Idan: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Sarah Idan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (55 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1107SarahIdan Epoch Original DVD collection:

Three days ago, in Louisiana, enough evidence of illegal voting was uncovered—such that a state Supreme Court judge completely nullified the results of an election. His rationale was that enough ballots were cast illegally to change the outcome of the race, and therefore, the entire thing just has to be redone. About three weeks ago, on Nov. 18, there was an election held for sheriff in Caddo Parish—located in the northwestern part of the state. After about 43,000 people voted, the official results showed that the Democrat, Henry Whitehorn, had won the election by a margin of just a single vote. By law, that slim of a margin requires an automatic recount. John Nickelson was pushing for this recount to be done by hand; however, the local Board of Elections claimed that a hand recount would take too long, and so instead, a machine recount was conducted. This machine recount discovered three extra votes for both candidates, meaning that the recount still showed the Democrat winning by 1. However, perhaps smelling something fishy, Mr. Nickelson pursued the case further. And in so doing, he filed a lawsuit over in the district court, seeking to challenge the results. 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

"Roe v. Wade was overturned, and now the states are—rightfully so—deciding for themselves whether or not abortion will be legal or illegal, and several states made it illegal. So, what happens to those abortion clinics? So, they have gone from being abortion mills to gender confusion factories. And now you can go in there—don't have to tell your parents. 'Everything's fine, we'll give you a breast binder, we'll give you drugs, and we can even set you up for surgery.' It's a new economy for them." Kimberly Fletcher is the president and founder of Moms for America, a national movement of mothers fighting for liberty, family, and the Constitution. "If you can't show it on TV and you can't air it on the radio, then you can't have it in the classroom. So, that's a pretty simple standard. It's already a standard that’s set by the FCC [Federal Communications Commission]. You can go to fcc.com, and you can see what is the standard. We have parental guidance, we have ratings on movies, we have literature that says, ‘Okay, this is for this age. This is for that age.’ Why don't we have that in schools? Why is parental guidance in schools taboo?" says Ms. Fletcher. We dive into the problems with America's education system and discuss "Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities," a new EpochTV documentary film that explores the harms associated with gender ideology and transitioning minors. Watch the clip: "You think that you're sending your children to school and they're going to get the same things that you got when you went to school. You're going to get history lessons. You're going to get reading and writing and classical literature. And what I was seeing was a lot of sex. They had these books on sex and they were literally introducing sexual concepts to children as early as kindergarten," says Ms. Fletcher. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (49 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1104KimberlyFletcher FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Kimberly Fletcher, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Kimberly Fletcher: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here with you. Mr. Jekielek: Kimberly, I'm very excited that The Epoch Times had the opportunity to partner with Moms for America on the Gender Confusion resource that you have created. We combined it with our, “Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities,” documentary and we just had this amazing panel discussion. I'll direct our viewers to check that out once they watch our interview. I want to publish this little clip at the beginning of the interview to explain this resource. Please tell us about the film as well. Ms. Fletcher: Absolutely. We put together the Gender Confusion booklet after our Parental Rights Guide booklet. We also did several other booklets to empower our parents on what issues are facing their children. The gender confusion issue has just skyrocketed. Parents are very concerned and want to know where this is coming from, what their children are being exposed to, and what they can do about it. That's really what the booklet is about. It explains everything behind this movement and its agenda, what the children are faced with in school and in the culture, and how they can address this to protect their children. When the Gender Transformation film came to our inbox, I said, "Oh my gosh, this is the film that is going to change this conversation." “Gender Transformations: Untold Realities,” is the perfect name for this much needed film. I'm encouraging parents everywhere to watch this film and share it with your pastors, with your doctor, with the school board members, and with the teachers. The film makes it really easy for us to explain what the situation is, because it directly talks about a mother and her child and what she and her daughter went through. It also talks about all of the facts behind where this is coming from and why it is such a danger to our children and our culture. The combination of the film and the resource guide and then being able to do the gender confusion panel event that we did together is the launchpad for pausing this conversation and turning it back to where it needs to go. Mr. Jekielek: The Epoch Times is partnering with Moms for America on your Gender Confusion resource. It is very powerful, succinct and useful in combination with our Gender Transformation film, which we just premiered here in DC, alongside a panel of people that you brought in. The film is the incredibly powerful story of Abigail Martinez and it is heart-wrenching. You can essentially see the process that her daughter went through. This was compiled through knowledge from actual detransitioners that appear in the film. It's a nice summary of a whole lot of information that we weren't able to put together to date. Gender confusion, as it's called, is not just among the kids, but it's in our society. We don't really know what's going on. Ms. Fletcher: It's a really hard subject to process because no one would believe that this is actually happening to children. But you can see it in this story of a mother and a child—this is a real mother, a real daughter, and a real story. Speaker 3: My name is Abigail Martinez. It has been three years and 164 days since I lost my daughter, Jaylee. I miss her every single day. Let me tell you how she died. My daughter was murdered by a gender ideology. CPS took my daughter when she was 16 years old. It was held by her public school counselor and LGBTQ group rights and another trans-identify girl. My daughter was taken from her loving home because the state of California claimed I was abusive for not affirming her trans identity. I lost my daughter over a name and pronouns. Even after I promised to call her a male name, it wasn't enough. My daughter was not a boy trapped in a girl's body. She had mental health issues. Against my consent, my daughter was given testosterone instead of therapy. The LGBTQ group used her to raise money for them. “Look at the poor rejected trans boy,” they said. Why are there so many transgender in foster care? Because of this, they take them from their families, tell them to run, then steal them. Parents are given one option to treat their distressed child—affirm drugs and remove their healthy body parts—or else lose your child. The abuse claim against me was finally dropped, but it was too late. The damage was done. Then my daughter was in horrible mental and physical pain. My daughter knelt down in front of a train. She was murdered by gender ideology. I beg you, stop pushing gender ideology. I don't want any parent to feel what I feel every day. Affirmation is not good for the health, safety, and welfare of any child. Ms. Fletcher: This is not the only story, you can see several in the film. We've also had moms reach out to us, and we've had teachers reach out to us who are very concerned about what they're forced to teach the children in the classroom. They don't want to teach this to their students. When they feel that way and they want to tell somebody, they are afraid, because they'll lose their job or they'll lose opportunities and advancements, so they're really in a very difficult place. The fact is, there are a lot more people that are opposed to this than there are that support it. But they don't know that they're not alone. That's one of the things that we wanted parents, teachers, and school board members to know, you're not alone. If we unite together, we can stand against this and protect the children. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about this incredible resource that you have developed. Before we go there, Moms for America has been around long before this issue, correct? Ms. Fletcher: Yes. I founded the organization in Dayton, Ohio in 2004. Largely, it was because of two different events that happened. One was 9/11. My husband was stationed at the Pentagon on 9/11 and through a series of miracles, he came home safe that day. But that was the day that changed me. I started to ask questions, “How did we get here?” I also asked, “Where are we going?” That literally was the day that I went from being patriotic to being a patriot. I went on an exhaustive research journey after that, looking at everything I could get my hands on about America's history and heritage. I started to go to school board meetings and city council meetings. I ended up running for school board in 2003, and that was when an entire world opened up to me that I did not know was happening. You think that you're sending your children to school and they're going to get the same things that you got when you went to school. You're going to get history lessons, you're going to get reading and writing and classical literature. What I was seeing was a lot of sex. They had these books on sex and they were literally introducing sexual concepts to children as early as kindergarten. I couldn't understand why they had these books in schools. I asked those questions and I got a lot of pushback. That is what got me on the path of trying to help parents understand what was happening in the classroom. For two decades I was trying to convince parents, “This is what's happening. You need to be aware of this.” They just looked at me like a helicopter parent with a tinfoil hat, until 2020 came around. Then they were seeing this in their own living rooms on their own computers, while their children were having classes. They were seeing what their children were being exposed to. The teachers were telling the parents, “Don't watch this.” What? That's when parents started to realize that this was real and that we needed to stand up against it. Mr. Jekielek: As early as 2003, this was already in the classrooms. How prevalent was it? Ms. Fletcher: There's a book that a lot of parents have actually purchased or pulled from the library. They're bringing it to all these events to help other parents realize this is what our children are being exposed to. The main book that they use is, It's Perfectly Normal. It's a book that is filled with graphic designs, pictures, and drawings of naked individuals of all different ages. It shows a young girl masturbating and explains how to do it. It has a boy giving oral sex to another boy. There are graphic pictures of all of these different things. The parents said, "Oh my gosh, have you seen this book?" They were showing it to other parents. I said, “Did you look at the publishing date?” It was published in 1994. They have had this in classrooms from kindergarten to sixth grade. It has been pushed specifically for elementary school for 30 years now. They started the Genderbread Person graphic 15 years ago. If parents haven't seen that yet, they need to. Look it up online, and you'll see it, because your children have seen it. If they haven't seen that one, then they may have seen the Gender Unicorn, because they decided that the Genderbread Person was too masculine, so they moved to the Gender Unicorn. They're using these beloved story characters to get into the hearts of children, and put these radical ideas and confusion into their hearts and minds. They call it a classical way to teach children gender identity. It goes to the heart, to who you love or are attracted to, to your brain, to what you feel like, to your genitals, and to what you were born with. They create this whole conversation around this brochure that's created by a man named Metrosexual. You can't make this stuff up. Mr. Jekielek: You've been at this for some decades, probably longer than a lot of people that are watching right now. Why do you think this is happening? Ms. Fletcher: I can talk about what I know from history as to why it's happening. You can look back at how the biggest, most heinous, evil despots in our lifetime did it. They took over countries, cultures, societies, and whole nations through the children. Mao did it, Hitler did it, and Stalin did it. When you go back and you read their own words, they will tell you that if you want to own the future, you go after the children. They're creating a lot of confusion among the children so that they are not sure who they are anymore. They are being disenfranchised from their parents. Our schools are literally teaching our children every day to hate their country, hate their neighbors, hate themselves, question who they are, and to disenfranchise from their parents. The whole goal of this ideology is to destroy the republic. They want to take away the last bastion of freedom in the world. How do you do that? You do it by creating a nation of citizens who don't know what America is about, that don't even understand their own identity, and who are willing to follow any ideology that's thrown their way that sounds good. They're using the teacher's unions to do this. The school system has become the most powerful conduit to get to the children in order to create the future that they want. It's more than just the National School Board Association. The National School Board Association that declared us to be domestic terrorists has an affiliate in every single state. Then there's the Superintendent's Association, the Law Director's Association, and the Principal's Association. All these associations are paid for with our own tax dollars from district funds. These districts are pushing these agendas that are coming from the teacher's unions. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of people think that everything you're describing is really crazy. But when people started openly questioning the idea that parents should direct the education of their children, that was astonishing to me. The Virginia governor's race was possibly lost on that issue. This has somehow become an acceptable point of discourse. It feels like we've crossed the Rubicon on this issue. Ms. Fletcher: No one is going to love your children like you do. The government wants to step in and say, “We're going to manage your child's life.” If they don't like what you're feeding them, or the church that you're going to, or if the child decides they want to transition, the government says, “We are going to step in and we're going to protect that child from the parent.” That's really where we are right now. The first time that this really hit the airwaves in a public way was about 8 to 10 years ago, and I do not remember the woman who said it. I think she was someone who did media commentary. She did this video and she was just straight-faced and had no problem saying this. She really believed it. She said, “They're not your children. They're our children. The children belong to the community.” No, they don't. These are our children and we are going to raise, teach, and nurture them. That is our right, and that is our responsibility. We saw the direction this was going in a very dramatic way a few years ago. In 2017, we wrote a document called, “The Declaration of Mothers,” and it clearly states that parents' rights are fundamental and supreme. Fundamental is a legal term. When we use that term, then the courts, the school district, and everyone has to acquiesce to the parents first. This is the parental rights law that we at Moms for America are pushing and promoting. We want to make sure that every state has it listed that parents' rights are fundamental—that we have parental rights and it is fundamental. No government agency can replace a parent or a family. The goal for all of these organizations, whether it's a church, a government institution, or a community organization is to support the family—not regulate, restrict or replace it. That document was entered into the congressional record in 2018. We are serious about making sure that everybody understands that parents' rights are fundamental, and we are going to exercise them. Mr. Jekielek: Child protective services are now looking at parents who refuse to follow the gender-affirming care model which the school is involved in. Presumably there is some rule where the government can step in when parents are supposedly being abusive. What is that line and how do you define that line? Ms. Fletcher: If a child is being neglected or physically abused, that is the line. The problem is that they're trying to redefine abuse as not doing whatever the child wants. If you are not transitioning your child, if you are not accepting the pronouns, if you're not using the pronouns, if you are not adopting their new name, then you are now abusive. The schools have gone way out of their way to keep this information from parents. I have had numerous conversations with teachers, administrators, and with parents who have been in this situation where the teacher is being told, “Do not tell the parents if the child decides that she is now a boy.” This happened in Nebraska in the middle of a cornfield town. This is happening everywhere. When people think it's just in California or New York, it's really everywhere. This is happening everywhere there is a teacher's union, and every school district has a teacher's union. Teachers are being bullied and intimidated because of these absolutely unconstitutional, illegal actions that schools are taking. But they're doing it in the name of care, and that is what's confusing to people. When you say things like gender-affirming care, you think you're showing love and compassion, when you're actually confusing these children at a time when their frontal lobe isn't even fully developed. Your frontal lobe is what determines all of your decision-making capabilities. That is not fully developed until 21 to 25-years-old. We are asking seven-year-olds to determine whether or not they're a boy or a girl, and 14-year-olds to determine whether or not they want to have their breasts or genitals removed. This is absolute child abuse. If you want to talk about abuse, it's not being perpetrated by the parents. It's being perpetrated by the system. Mr. Jekielek: When you say the child's right is supreme, two things come to mind. Number one, a lot of kids like to be rebellious and that's just part of life. Number two is that they don't know a lot of things. The family provides that. But in this situation, you're saying that now the system gets to decide. Ms. Fletcher: Right. There is a mom in Maine who found a breast binder in her daughter's room. She asked her daughter, “Where did you get this?” She said, “I got it from the school counselor.” From that situation, we became aware that school districts across the country are being given money from the federal government and state governments to create this type of so-called care in the schools and the classrooms. They are hiring full-time counselors or part-time consultants to come in, whose sole responsibility is to transition children. Their goal is to complete the transition in two weeks. That's their goal—a two week transition. Mr. Jekielek: It sounds like their purpose is to transition people who aren't even thinking about it. What do you mean exactly when you say this? Ms. Fletcher: It's gotten to the point now where a boy who doesn't make the sports team, maybe he would be more comfortable as a girl. A student maybe is feeling alone and withdrawn, and doesn't feel like they're connecting with the other kids in the class. Then a teacher may recommend that they see a counselor in the school. They automatically ask them the question, “Do you feel more comfortable as a boy? Would you be happier as a girl?” They say, “I don't know,” because they're confused. Nobody is addressing what caused them to get to that point. Nobody is asking, “Why do you feel uncomfortable in your body? Why do you feel disconnected from your peers?” Nobody is asking those questions. They just go right to, “Would you rather be a boy? Would you rather be a girl?” Mr. Jekielek: You're basically saying that this is being pushed as the solution to whatever these confusion problems might be. Ms. Fletcher: Yes. It's covering up whatever the underlying issue is, and we have seen this multiple times. This mom in Maine became so concerned she went to the principal and said, “This isn't okay.” He sided with the counselor. She then went to the school board meeting and addressed it there. The child is doing much better now. But back then, the child was confused. The kids in the class started asking her questions. They had been supporting her in this, and it was creating confusion for this child. Somebody asked me a couple months ago, “Where did it all come from? Did we just not see it before? Was this gender identity crisis always there and now it's just coming to the surface?” No, it's being manufactured, and they have the solution. They have to create the problem, because the solution comes with money. Where the money really takes root and where they really maximize their income is when they actually do surgery. It starts with the transition question. Then they put them into these clubs where everybody makes them feel like they're a part of something. They all start to commiserate about their issues. They say things like, “I want to be a boy. Nobody accepts me. They should accept the fact that I'm a boy now. They don't accept my pronouns.” That's all they talk about. A lot of these kids have been physically abused, emotionally abused, and sexually abused. Some of them are on the spectrum, some of them have been bullied or intimidated, and some have felt neglected. They're preying on kids who have concerns and problems and issues and challenges. We should be helping them move from victimhood to survivorhood. Instead, we're making them into bigger victims, and into a place where they just can't seem to escape. One of the detransitioners that we had on our podcast told us that at the time this was happening, the people who should have protected them, who they trusted the most and who should have loved them, abandoned them and pushed them through the pipeline. Now, they're struggling with a relationship with their parents. They think, “How can I have a relationship with a parent who did this to me? Why didn't they protect me? Why didn't they tell me the truth?” Jan, that's the reason why this film is so powerful. Because you can see this for yourself and you can show this to your children. You can have your teens and your preteens sit and watch with you, so they can see the truth. They have to know that this is not okay. The parents need to know you're being lied to. Some of the parents are just doing this because they really feel like they're caring for their children. But you can see in this film the process of what this mother and this daughter went through. All the kids in this school were being taught that this is what you need to do. In reality, you need to protect them and make them feel good about themselves. But what about why are they feeling this way? No one is talking about the root cause. They're just masking it with this ideology. It has become a billion-dollar business to torture and mutilate children. It needs to stop. This film is the way that we can turn the conversation. Mr. Jekielek: The theme that comes up in a lot of American Thought Leaders' interviews is the fusion of this unreal ideology with powerful financial incentives. You can see this discussed in the general health freedom movement. In the film, Jennifer Bilek talks about this as well. Are you seeing this too? Ms. Fletcher: There is incentivization on multiple levels, and we can just go back to the bathrooms. The federal government decided that you needed to have boys and girls in the same bathroom. You can't dictate to any school district or state or county what to do with their money. The federal government has no authority whatsoever to do that, and neither does the president of the United States. But what they can do is bribe and blackmail us with our own money. We send in our tax dollars and then they use those dollars against us. Our tax dollars are largely paying for the tyranny and oppression when all of these things come about. The federal government will say, “If you have a co-ed bathroom, and locker rooms for boys and girls that are coming together in the same place, then we're going to give you this bundle of money.” The school district says, “Free money, okay.” They take the money and then they have to hire all these lawyers to figure out how to spend it, which costs them more money. They're actually spending money outside of what they're getting from the federal government to figure out how to spend the money that the federal government gave them. It sounds convoluted, because it is. The money will go to the school district. They go to the law directors and say, "We have this money. This is what they said we have to spend it on. How do we do it?" The reply is, “You're going to have to have open sex bathrooms.” Suddenly parents start to show up and say, "No, we're not okay with that." They've already received the money, so what are they going to do? Give it back? I was very impressed with a superintendent in Georgia who was a hero. I wish I could remember his name, but he was a hero superintendent. They're not all bad, and there are some really good ones out there. He said, “Keep your money. We don't want your money. We're going to protect our children. We're going to have bathrooms for boys and bathrooms for girls.” There is a very, very small part of our society that suffers from gender dysphoria. There is a very small portion of society that does deal with this. How do you deal with this? You don't change the laws and the policies and make every child in the school feel unsafe because one child doesn't feel comfortable in either bathroom. Every school has at least one bathroom that they can use in the teacher's lounge and in the nurse's department. In Arizona, this just happened. They were trying to push this policy where the boys and the girls had to go in the same bathroom, because one boy decided that he wanted to be a girl, and the girls were afraid of him. He was very big and they were intimidated. I know when men go into the bathroom, they don't have a problem exposing themselves. Women are much more private. When you go into a women's bathroom and they have five stalls and there's a big line and one of the stalls doesn't have a door, those women will stay in line and wait for a stall that opens that has a door. They will not use that stall that doesn't have a door. Women are already very private, and then you're bringing in a man or a boy into the bathroom, making them feel very uncomfortable. These girls in Arizona showed up to the school board meeting and said, “We're not okay with this.” The school board realized they had to do something, because they were getting pressure from everywhere. They were talking about doing this policy and they were on the cusp of passing it. These girls said, “Okay, we have to do something. We have to stand up against this.” They decided to line up at nine o'clock in the morning outside the nurse's bathroom, and there was a line of 40 of these girls. They took pictures and videos and they made a statement, “We're going to stand in line and we're going to wait for this bathroom, because this is the only bathroom in the school where we now feel safe.” Mr. Jekielek: Yes, I recall that action. It's remarkable because it was a student activity, which we don't see as much. Your group has been quite involved in all sorts of actions, not just in this gender realm. I want people to know more about what Moms for America is all about and what you're doing. Ms. Fletcher: We're very concerned about our freedom and the future of our country for our children. Our motto is from Thomas Jefferson; “Adore God, have reverence for and cherish your parents, love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself.” We could all agree on those things; the Golden Rule and common sense. What Moms for America is about is empowering moms, promoting liberty, and raising patriots. We are a national movement of moms reclaiming our culture for truth, family, freedom, and the Constitution. Sometimes that means standing on the border and saying, “Moms and children are the first line of defense for everything coming across this border, and this is not okay.’ Sometimes it's standing up in the school boards and saying, "This policy is not all right and we're going to stand against it." But the core of what we do and the most important thing that we do is teach what America is about. Our signature program is the Cottage Meeting Project. We're forming moms groups all across the country where they can go through this series in their home or online. It's really giving them a classical arts education, teaching them the true story of America, what their rights are, where they come from, and how to effectively exercise them. That's a game changer for them, and we hear all the time that it's life changing. Mr. Jekielek: Is this the Mama Bear Training? Ms. Fletcher: The Mama Bear Training is an extension of that. The Mama Bear Training is where we help them understand history. We go through the history of the three main despots of our time. Most people in this country are just deceived. Those who want to destroy the very fabric of our nation and tear down the republic are the real enemy. When people realize this they can then say, “We just have to combat this. We give them all the resources and tell them about our booklets. We talk to them about going to school board meetings and branding themselves so that people will recognize them. We make it about staying local and we make it about moms. Be positive, but be strong. When you go in and you're just angry and yelling at those people on the school board, you're creating enemies before you know who your friends are. Therefore, we encourage them to create relationships. The cottage meetings are all-inclusive. You learn this important information about what America is, why it's worth fighting for, what your rights are, and how to exercise them. We give them the tools to do that through the Mama Bear Training, and then they can walk into those school boards. We're not just flipping school boards, and we're not just getting new people into those positions. We're actually moving school board members in the other direction. Topeka, Kansas, just did an article on us. They interviewed the state director for the teacher's union. They asked her, “What do you think about all the changes in the school boards with these parents coming in?” She said, “We fear Moms for America because they're moving people in the wrong direction.” It’s not because we're showing up yelling, but because we are using truth and facts, just like you guys do at The Epoch Times. That is why I love The Epoch Times. I am literally a walking commercial for The Epoch Times. I tell all these parents, “If you want to know what's really going on in the world, and if you want to know what's really happening in our own country, go to the real news source, and you will find the truth.” I know they're hungry for it and seeking it. We have also become a clearinghouse for all those trusted news resources. We do the homework, we test them out, we find out what are the best resources, and then we make them available to parents. They know that when they come to our website, they're going to find things they can trust, and news sources they can believe in. Mr. Jekielek: You went from being patriotic to becoming a patriot. What do you mean by that? Ms. Fletcher: We almost changed our third pillar. Our three pillars are; empower moms, promote liberty, and raise patriots. We almost changed that pillar because it has been weaponized against us, and they have made it a bad word. They say, "The J6ers, they're patriots. People who are nationalists, they're patriots." America isn't about geography, and it's not about rocks or villages. It's an ideal, and patriotism is loyalty to that ideal. Here in America, that ideal is freedom, equality, justice for all. That's what patriotism is. Aren't those values that we should all unite behind? You brought up a really good point about monetization, and you can look back in history at the slavery movement. The people who made a lot of money on slavery just looked the other way. They didn't want to know. A patriot will not look the other way. A patriot will make the sacrifices, will take the hits, will stand up for the truth, just like our founding families did. It wasn't just the Founding Fathers. It wasn't just the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, because they knew that when they put their names on there, it was putting their whole families, their wives, their children, their homes, their property, and everything on the line. I've read about those women and I've read their own words. They were telling their men, “Get out there and sign that document.” It was Mark Twain who said, "A patriot is scorned and maligned. But once the thing is accomplished, then everybody wants to be a patriot." Because then there is no sacrifice involved, and there's nothing to lose. Mr. Jekielek: In the panel, you mentioned the story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It's actually a very powerful lesson, isn’t it? Ms. Fletcher: It is, and it's something that everybody can understand. For anyone watching who does not know the story, “The Emperor's New Clothes,” you can look it up online. It's a classic story by Hans Christian Andersen. I'm encouraging parents to read it to their children every night, because they will start to recognize that when something isn't true, you have the power to stand up and speak out. I would highly recommend that parents find good stories like that where you can have conversations. We sometimes don't want to have to have these conversations with our children, because we want our children to keep their innocence, but their innocence is actually being stolen from them. We need to have tough conversations with our children. We may lose our children if we don't have these conversations. We need to be at the crossroads when they come home from school and say, "Hey, how was your day?" Don't settle for the answer, "Fine," and then they just walk away. No, don't settle for that. You could say, "Tell me about it. What did you work on? What did you talk about?" Be at the crossroads in their lives. It is worth the time and the sacrifice. You will save your children, because then they will be able to stand up for themselves. Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on this story, because it’s really about power dynamics, isn't it? The emperor is all powerful and no one wants to say anything, even though they all know that he is wearing no clothes. Maybe some of those people actually believe him. Over the last few years, some of us are very susceptible to believing things like that. But most people will say, “This is weird, but I'm not going to say anything.” Ms. Fletcher: Nobody wants to be the person that raises their hand and says, "This is not okay. Something is wrong here." Mr. Jekielek: But the moment someone innocently says, "There's something different going on here," it allows others to say, "Okay, then I can say it now." There is a strange dynamic today that demands we accept absurd ideas. You just don't feel like you can say anything, because of that fear of ostracism. Obviously, you have a different view here. Ms. Fletcher: People don't realize that they're not alone. That's why “The Emperor's New Clothes" is such a great story. All the people in the town are saying, "He knows he doesn't have clothes on, right?" Then they say, "Wait a minute, maybe we're just not seeing them." The king was convinced that he was wearing clothes. These two carpet beggars come in and say, "We're going to sew you some new clothes." Then there's nothing and he's getting paid to wear nothing. It was one little child in a crowd of people who said, “The emperor's wearing no clothes.” Suddenly everybody says, "Oh my gosh, he really isn't wearing clothes." It just takes that one person. Mr. Jekielek: I wonder if “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is even available in some libraries these days. We keep hearing about these crazy conservative people wanting to ban books. That term is very much like the “Don't say gay” Florida bill, which had absolutely nothing to do with don't say gay. But it was very, very good marketing, because you wouldn’t want to stand against that. Banning books is very similar, but we're not talking about banning books. At the same time, perhaps there are all sorts of classics that aren't available in children's libraries anymore. Ms. Fletcher: We're not the ones who are banning books. They are. The people who are pulling all the classics out are saying, "We don't want to have those books in here because it talks about this or it talks about that," or they're just purging them and not letting us know. Classic literature like that story and several others taught us valuable principles. They were simple classic books like Charlotte's Web. It's really hard to find these anymore. They're certainly not having them in schools and classrooms for the most part. They're reintroducing other things like It's Perfectly Normal. When children read and hear these stories, it changes them. If you want them to know what good looks like, you need to show them what good looks like. If you just tell a child to be good, how are they going to know what that means? Whatever we're feeding them through these books and stories that they're hearing, that's what they're going to take in. That's why this agenda is so dangerous. We have been working really hard to find ways to protect the children and empower the parents. One of those ways is our FCC Standard bill, and it passed in Texas, Louisiana, and Virginia. We have 12 states that will be introducing it through our moms in the next session. It's very simple—if you can't show it on TV and you can't air it on the radio, then you can't have it in the classroom. That's a pretty simple standard. It's already a standard that has been set by the FCC. You can go to fcc.com and you can see the standard. We have parental guidance, we have ratings on movies, we have literature that said, “This is for this age. This is for that age.” Why don't we have that in schools? Why is parental guidance in schools taboo? Why can't we rate something and say, "According to FCC standards, this would be a no-no. This is not appropriate." I'm not saying put the FCC Standard in the bill. The bill doesn't say FCC standard. It just follows the standard that the FCC has set. If parents want to find out more about that, they can go to fccstandard.com and it has all the information about the bill. It even has the federal language that talks about grooming. Planned Parenthood is perfectly happy with skipping in and taking over when a teacher feels uncomfortable teaching a lesson. Planned Parenthood is touting the fact that they can transition a child and get it solid with one consultation—one consultation at Planned Parenthood. One of the things that Abby Johnson brought up when we spoke with her was, “What are you going to do when suddenly your economy is crashing? Roe v. Wade was overturned, and now the states are rightfully deciding for themselves whether or not abortion will be legal or illegal. Several states have made it illegal, so what happens to those abortion clinics?’ They have gone from being abortion mills to gender confusion factories. Now you can go in there, you don't have to tell your parents, and everything's fine. They say, “We'll give you a breast binder, we'll give you drugs, and we can even set you up for surgery.” It's a new economy for them. Mr. Jekielek: What do we actually know about this? Has this been documented? Ms. Fletcher: Yes. There are several stories that have come out about this. There are Planned Parenthood representatives, operatives, employees who have openly spoken about it and have been caught on camera. We have been told by teachers and counselors that they are being told that the goal is to transition in two weeks. Mr. Jekielek: Does that mean to have them accept this new identity? Ms. Fletcher: Yes. They go from questioning to, “I am now a boy,” or "I am now a girl,” contrary to what they actually are physically. Then when someone then tries to tell them anything to the contrary, they now have this person as their advocate. There is a true statement in the medical and mental health industry that whoever gets to you first becomes the expert, which is why parents need to get to their children first. Because once they go through that two week transition, that person becomes the expert and they won't listen to anybody else. Everyone else becomes the enemy. That person will start to tell them and reinforce this idea, “They're not accepting you, so they don't care about you like I do.” It's called grooming. Mr. Jekielek: Whoever gets to you first becomes the expert. Does that mean that parents have to get to their kids first on every single issue? Ms. Fletcher: Parents need to have constant conversations with their children and be at the crossroads of your children's lives, so that you can see warning signs. We actually have a video that we put together about that. What are the warning signs to look for when your children could be in that situation on any subject? They start to become withdrawn. They spend more time in their room alone. They decide that they're not hungry. There are various different warning signs. The goal is to create that relationship with your children before the warning signs even happen, but you also need to recognize the warning signs when they start. You can have conversations with your children without actually conversing by reading books and stories to them. There's another really great one by Matt Walsh called, Johnny the Walrus. Every parent needs to read that book too. It's a cute little board book. It talks about how Johnny decided he was a walrus. Suddenly the world says, "Mom, that's not just something he's playing with. It's not just a game. You need to accept that he is a walrus." In reality, this is what's happening to parents these days. This is actually what is happening. My five-year-old granddaughter thinks she's a butterfly. Should I send her up to the top of the roof and say, “Fly away, little butterfly?” It's our responsibility as parents to have those conversations where we're introducing the truth, so that they can recognize the lies and deception. They won't always recognize the lies, even when we're laying that groundwork of truth. Sometimes they're going to fall prey to it. That's why we have to have that continued relationship. There's a great quote that says, "Mothers write on the hearts of their children things the world can never erase." Whatever we write on the hearts of our children, that is what will stand against the world, and it will stand the test of time. Mr. Jekielek: This has been a fascinating conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Ms. Fletcher: I would encourage every parent out there to watch, “Gender Transformation: The Untold Stories.” I want to reiterate that again. The more people that see this film; pastors, parents, doctors, and teens, the greater our standpoint will be. They'll be able to see the truth, they'll be able to see reality, and we'll be able to turn this conversation around. Mr. Jekielek: Kimberly Fletcher, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Fletcher: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Kimberly Fletcher and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (49 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1104KimberlyFletcher Epoch Original DVD collection:

Food prices are skyrocketing in grocery stores around the world, and some world leaders say it’s due to climate change. Their solution is Agenda 21, the United Nation’s 100-year long master plan for humanity and the 21st century, which is broken down into shorter 15-year plans. The current plan is Agenda 2030, which aims at “transforming our world for sustainable development” according to the UN. Agenda 2030 is now being implemented across the world. In America, it is implemented as the Biden administration's 30x30 agenda, a plan to take 30 percent of America's land completely out of production by the year 2030, resulting in small farmers and ranchers being forced off their lands. In other countries like The Netherlands, Dutch farmers are forced to shut down due to the government’s “green policies” that limit nitrogen emissions. In Sri Lanka, farmers are fighting for their survival because of the government’s ban on synthetic fertilizer. While we are seeing a global war on farmers, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations are pushing people to eat bugs as a solution to reduce climate change, world hunger, and save the planet. Why are world leaders and even celebrities suddenly pushing edible bugs? Should the government control our food? What would a world be like without farmers? “No Farmers No Food: Will You Eat The Bugs?” is an Epoch Original documentary exposing the hidden agenda behind global “Green Policies,” the untold stories of farmers forced out of business, the disruption this will have on our food supply, and why edible bugs are suddenly being pushed to the fore as a "Global Green Solution." EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” host Roman Balmakov traveled around the world to over 25 locations and interviewed over 50 farmers, scientists, and experts in the United States, The Netherlands, and Sri Lanka to get to the truth behind this global agenda and investigate the coming global food crisis that is being ignored by the world’s media. History has a tendency to rhyme. In the 1950, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong sold the “Great Leap Forward” to the public under the banner of progress, but his policies led to the largest man-made famine in history, with over 50 million dying of hunger. The UN’s “green policies” appear to have the hallmarks of a new “Green Leap Forward”, they might sound good on paper, but in practice they undermine our food security, property rights, water rights, and represent an existential threat to our liberties as free citizens. A famous quote reads “Who controls the food supply controls the people”. This documentary is important for everyone to watch, not just for knowing what’s on your dinner plate but also to have the knowledge to prevent another man-made famine in the future and protect your freedoms and liberties. Watch the video: More details Here: https://www.epochtv.shop/nofarmersnofood DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/no-farmers-no-food-documentary-dvd Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

"You may be surprised what's happening in your backyard if you start peeling back the layers." Alexia and Jason Preston are hosts of the Utah-based podcast, “We Are The People.” They’ve been exploring how institutions like the Chinese Communist Party, the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations have been influencing local politicians and policy for decades. "It's really not to see what people want. It's how to get the programs they want passed through, so then they can bring it to legislators and say, ‘Well, 98 percent of the community wants walkable communities, so they want smart cities.’ So, they're shifting perspective in that way and shaping perspective," says Ms. Preston. "You're seeing programs roll out in a way that it is really testing the public to see just how much will be allowed to roll out in Utah." Watch the clip: "We need to stop. We need to look at where we're heading as a nation, where we're heading as states," says Mr. Preston. "Is this technology that can be used for good or bad—is this going to lead our children towards a safer future? Or is this potentially going to lead them to a future like China?" 🔴 WATCH the full episode (38 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1031JasonAlexiaPreston FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Alexia and Jason Preston, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Alexia Preston: It's great to be here with you, Jan. Jason Preston: It's very good to be here, thank you. Mr. Jekielek: I don't talk about Utah very much on the show, but when you contacted me I got very interested. You typically think of Utah as a very conservative state. You don't think of it as a place where there's a lot of experimentation with things like 15-minute cities, digital IDs, or other modern innovations that comport with a more top-down vision for the world. You have been looking at this closely. Alexia, what's going on? Ms. Preston: Jason is originally from Utah, and I come from the East Coast. Utah is a very unique state, and you would think that Utah is a conservative red state. We quickly learned that it's actually in a very interesting transition period, and there are a lot of these pilot programs going on. There is a lot of shadow government in the form of regionalism stepping in with programs such as smart cities. Many people say we elect Republican, but we govern Democratic. These programs roll out in a way that it is really testing the public to see just how much will be allowed to roll out in Utah. One of the programs is the 15-minute smart city. We've had confrontations with the governor where he has flat out denied these are in existence. Governor Cox: I don't know what you're talking about. There's no such thing as a smart city. Stop making up stuff to try to make me look bad. Mr. Jekielek: Meanwhile, he's hosting luncheons that are showcasing how we could be the first smart state. Governor Cox: And allow us to continue to lead the nation in technological advancements in smart cities. And really, there's no reason we can't be the first smart state as we use these partnerships. Ms. Preston: It's an interesting contradiction. We moved there thinking that it was going to be conservatively governed, and yet it’s now leaning in a much more progressive direction. Mr. Jekielek: Maybe this is just a great interest in technology. People that are interested in doing things this way, they're not thinking of imposing authoritarian control. They're just thinking, "There is this great new technology. Why don't we use this to make people's lives better?" Mr. Preston: You're right. We have a lot of legislators who are thinking they're doing what's in the best interest of the state. Klaus Schwab talks about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. If you don't really understand who Klaus Schwab is, what the World Economic Forum is, what their objectives are, and you just hear that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is about introducing more technology, I'm sure it can seem innocent. Too much of that power in the hands of the wrong people can be dangerous. If things go south, what happens with the next crisis in the hands of the wrong person? That's what my concern is. We're really moving down this road very quickly. I don't think any of the public is having any conversation about it, or is even as aware of what's happening. That’s my concern. Shouldn't we have some public conversation about what is happening here? Mr. Jekielek: Utah is a very Mormon state, and Mormons put a very high value on autonomy. This is why they are in Utah in the first place. What you are describing doesn't make sense. Mr. Preston: Yes, it's interesting. I do legislative research, and I work all around the country. When we moved to Utah in 2017, I was excited, because part of the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that the Constitution is literally inspired by God, and that God directed the Founding Fathers in creating it. We came from Florida, where you saw Florida standing up against the federal government and really pushing back. We thought, “We're going to Utah, Let's go on with this trend.” We were shocked at once when we got to Utah, because we were really expecting that mindset. Then all of a sudden we saw how soft they were on immigration, and how their elections were ranked so poorly. The more issues we started to see, the more we got involved, and the more we got ingrained in Utah, we went from being very naive, thinking that this was the great patriotic state, to realizing that they were setting themselves up to lead the nation in the wrong direction. Ms. Preston: But it hadn't always been like that. If you go back to the seventies, it was people like Ezra Taft Benson, who was not just church leadership, but was also political leadership. There has been a gradual shift over time. Some of the programs in our state like Envision Utah have used religion to shape the thinking and the mind frame of the state, and subvert the state with some of these programs. Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about that. I was looking at some of the literature that Envision Utah has put up on its website. They're speaking very transparently about getting people to conform to their policies, by using people’s existing ways of thinking. They're actively engaged in doing that. Mr. Preston: We've had James Lindsay and Trevor Loudon on recently, and they really started digging into everything that’s going on. James Lindsay said, "This state is one of the best examples of subverting people's values." This state was so strong for property rights, and so strong for the Constitution and constitutional principles. This is the last state you would expect to see pushing regional governments. This is the last place you would see pushing special districts. This is the last place you would expect to be pushing digital ID, mail-in voting, ranked-choice voting, and all these progressive things. What Alexia and James Lindsay are really getting to is that you even see Envision Utah bragging about how they have subverted Utah. They even publish their studies, and they've put money and marketing into understanding people's values with focus groups. Then they say, "Okay, here are their values." They've done such a great job that there are articles explaining what they have done, which they call the Utah Model. They are now trying to use it to teach other governments how to do that in other areas. Mr. Jekielek: Regional governance doesn't sound like a bad thing. That sounds like something you might actually want, but you made it sound like it's something you don't want. Please explain that. What is the Utah Model? What does it mean? Ms. Preston: The Envision Utah process is how they use focus groups and plan what's important to Utah, so they can shift messaging and determine what is going to stick. Essentially, it's really not to see what people want. It's how to get the programs they want passed. Then they can bring these studies to legislators and say, "Well, 98 percent of the community wants walkable communities, so they want smart cities." They're shifting perspective in that way, and then shaping perspective. This is something that has been creeping in for the last several decades. We're seeing that with Envision Utah, and through other groups that are using public opinion to create policy. Mr. Preston: John Crist came out to Utah to do a comedy show in June. He posted his story on Instagram, and we reposted it. He said, "What has happened to Utah? Has any state given up and flown the white flag so fast? This state used to stand up and it used to be so conservative. Now there's a gay flag on every corner. They just threw up their hands and gave up." You have a lot of very good people with very good values. But the problem is that certain values have been elevated and pushed through the media as higher values; the values of tolerance, belonging, acceptance, and love. The values of truth and protecting our children are not talked about. The values of liberty, freedom, property rights are not talked about. They only elevate their selected principles. What happens then? You have a lot of these great people thinking, "We want people coming to the state to feel loved, to feel welcomed, and to feel safe." Mr. Jekielek: That's a good thing. Mr. Preston: It is a good thing. It is a good thing to be loving and tolerant, but the problem is what's behind that agenda. That flag is not about kindness and love. There's a much darker side to it. The challenge is that people are not seeing that. Ms. Preston: You asked why we think regionalism can be a bad thing, because it does sound like a good thing on the surface. We look at it through the lens of shadow governments and pushing boundaries, not just pushing boundaries in the progressive way, but literally overstepping boundaries, and creating these new forms of government. A perfect example would be the first model of a smart city called The Point, which is right on the border of Salt Lake and Utah counties. In terms of governance there is not necessarily going to be a mayor or a city council. It is a mix of these unelected shadow governments that will be the authorities. Mr. Preston: When you say shadow government, not everyone will understand that. Ms. Preston: We actually have hundreds of them. Some of the most well-known ones in Utah are the Utah League of Cities & Towns, and the Wasatch Front Regional Council. They are unelected officials, but they are the ones behind this. We've even done shows with Trent Staggs, mayor of Riverton, who is running for Mitt Romney’s Senate seat, now that he has resigned. He has acknowledged that these are the ones that are creating policy and writing legislation behind our elected officials. Mr. Jekielek: How did they get into these positions of power in the first place? If they are unelected, who appointed them? Mr. Preston: You can look at it as a special district, and basically, it's a corporation that has bought this land. We'll talk about The Point, which formerly was a prison at the point of a mountain in Utah. You have a public-corporate, public-private partnership that is building this. But the problem is that it's not part of any existing city. You have former mayors, former politicians, and high profile people that sit on this board. That's what she refers to as a shadow government, because they're not actually an elected government. They are making these decisions, "Here's what we're going to do with this land. Here's how we're going to develop it. We're going to have everything within walking distance.” It's also coordinated with the state, but this new form of government is completely unconstitutional. It is similar to Disney in Orlando, although Disney didn’t really own that property. In general, people are starting to realize this type of thing may be a bad idea. But in Utah, that's what we're pushing forward—more of this type of government. Mr. Jekielek: It is basically a completely privatized municipality that has some government influence. Is that correct? Mr. Preston: Yes, it's almost more like a corporation that has a board. Initially, the people who live there would be able to elect people to that board. It blurs the lines of the constitutional government our Founding Fathers gave us. That's a huge red flag, especially when you're putting in the elements of a smart city with more surveillance and more digital ID. That's to me the recipe for disaster. That is not the type of country our Founding Fathers intended for us to be living in. Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and the UN are very big on these regional governments. What is the World Economic Forum? It is basically the same thing— unelected leaders creating a self-proclaimed government. Ms. Preston: Then you add in the emergence of technology and the influence of technology. It said that Utah is the birthplace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. You have this technocratic, authoritarian government coming in and putting through legislation and policy. Mr. Preston: That's what they're calling it. There have actually been a few articles in Deseret News about Utah being the birthplace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Interestingly enough, the author of that article is actually a board member of Envision Utah. Ms. Preston: Also, representatives of the major media outlets sit on the board of Envision Utah. Mr. Preston: One of our concerns with Envision Utah is that you have several governors on that board. You have the media on that board. You have some of the biggest business players in the state on that board. You have church leadership on that board. Mr. Jekielek: I want to break down these new technologies and understand how far this development of a smart city has gone. Is it simply just an idea? Is it just pre-planning that has been done, or has construction begun? People will say, "These are technologies that can be used for good," which indeed they can. You made the point earlier that things could end up in the wrong hands. Looking at the American Constitution, the idea was that things had to be set up carefully, because they could get into the wrong hands. You have to take it for granted that it will happen. How do you set up a system where things do not go very dark, very quickly, when that happens? Mr. Preston: Yes. The thing that concerns me is what's going on in China with their social credit system. You can look at what happened during Covid. It was shocking to see how quickly we gave up our rights and freedom, and how aggressively those were trampled on. There is a growing swell of people that are not very trusting of the people in power right now. I can imagine Rome before it collapsed when all that power was being accumulated in the hands of those very few people at the top. I imagine it attracted some of the worst at the very end, because there was less control. People can sense that. People are frustrated with where we are politically as a country. We feel like we have lost control of DC. You've got the FBI saying that mothers standing up at school board meetings are domestic terrorists. It's frightening to have a president who stands up with two Marines behind him and says that anyone who really got behind our last president is a threat to this country. There are a lot of red flags about where we are heading as a country. It's clear that we are putting our children in a very dangerous situation. It is our responsibility to stop this. We need to look at where we're heading as a nation and where we're heading as states. Is this technology going to be used for good or bad? Is this going to lead our children towards a safer future, or is this potentially going to lead them to a future like China? The World Economic Forum, the UN, and China are arms of the same octopus. They're not competing with each other. They have the same end goals. Again, the term Fourth Industrial Revolution was coined by Klaus Schwab. It should be concerning to people that we have unelected leaders in our own backyard saying, "Utah should be the birthplace of this." Mr. Jekielek: There is also a lot of interest in Chinese Communist Party relationships in Utah. Please tell me about that. Ms. Preston: Yes. There was actually a great article that came out from the Associated Press. It's hard to get truthful reporting because of the media reporters and publications sitting on Envision Utah. But the Associated Press came in, took a deep dive, and looked at the 25 percent of our legislators that have known Chinese ties. They have tried to pass CCP-friendly legislation. There are personal business trips that these legislators are taking to China that can go completely unaccounted for. There's no need for reporting them in Utah. This opens up the door to all types of backdoor deals and discussions that are really not in the best interest of the state. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of churches have ministries in China, which is something the CCP can use to its own ends. Mr. Preston: There is a gentleman in Utah named Taowen Le. The Associated Press and the FBI spotlighted him as a national security threat with clear ties to the CCP. He came to Utah in 1989, and was baptized a year or two later. There have been several of these individuals that have been very engaged in working with our legislators. There was a legislator back in 2021 who wanted to condemn what China was doing with the Uyghurs. We all know what is happening to the Uyghurs is one of the biggest human rights abuse issues in the world right now. I thought, "That's a great thing for one of our legislators to do. Hat's off to him.” Taowen Le sends him a text message and says, "Don't be so hasty in condemning China. You should think of this in the same way members who are not part of your church condemn Joseph Smith, the original prophet of your church." He used that strategy. Then he says, "Pray to God and seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit before you make this decision." Pray to God and ask the Holy Spirit if condemning China for what they're doing to the Uyghurs is right? Guess what? The resolution failed the next year. Someone else tried to make a similar resolution and it went nowhere. Yes, they even use religion. Was this legislator a bad guy? No. He was trying to do the right thing. But there are these China-Utah relationships that the Associated Press talked about. China said that there is no state where they have greater influence, or where they can push legislation forward or stop legislation they don't like. This was a clear example. Mr. Jekielek: That is very telling, because even at the federal level, very pointed resolutions have been passed about forced organ harvesting against the Falun Gong practitioners and also the Uyghur genocide. But somehow, it's impossible to pass that in your state legislature. Ms. Preston: Even in the school system, the children are encouraged to write letters to Xi Jinping, and they are happy when they get a message back. They praise him for being a cool grandfather. You see how the narrative and perspective shift in Utah is even in our schools and our education system, not just in the legislature. Mr. Jekielek: Run this by me again. Mr. Preston: It was basically that one of our schools sent some letters. They were Happy New Year's letters to Xi Jinping in China, and he sent a letter back to this school. We had two state senators; one from the Senate floor talking about how exciting it is to be acknowledged by Xi Jinping, and another one on his conservative radio show gushing about how Xi Jinping is noticing these Utah students. Other people commented saying, "This is basically exactly what China wants, to be able to use this type of PR to show that to their own people, and to show what great leadership they have." This is one of the most brutal dictators they have had in decades. Mr. Jekielek: It's basically what you would call propaganda, which can be used to demoralize dissidents. I know a number of dissidents who had this type of propaganda video played for them, and then they were told, "Look, you think the Americans are going to help you? No, the Americans are on our side." Mr. Preston: We had one representative, who after being taken to China and spending some time there, came back and put together a resolution expressing solidarity for the CCP after Covid was released. Ms. Preston: Something similar happened in Wisconsin, but it got shut down for being propaganda. Mr. Preston: They tried to pass something in Wisconsin, and the Senate president blasted it as a piece of propaganda. In Utah, we're pushing this stuff out. But Wisconsin sees this stuff and says, “It's propaganda.” I've been concerned about China for a long time. We have been feeding this wolf that is climbing the hill to take us down. The strength that wolf gets comes from us feeding it through trade deals. When Trump got in, one of the things I was most thankful for is he started turning off the money train to the communist party. What do our reps do? They reach out to the Chinese press and say, “Utah is not like America. Utah has a long friendship with China.” Why are we doing this? They have animosity towards us, and they're looking to take this country down. Why are we fueling it? Mr. Jekielek: I want to hear more about this specific 15-minute city that is in development. I also understand there is a pilot project happening around digital ID as we speak. Ms. Preston: Legislators actually shut down the bill that would put forward digital IDs, so we would have to give credit to them. Mr. Preston: It was interesting what happened when they tried to pass that about a year or two ago. Ms. Preston: They have tried it a few times, but then it just got shut down every time. Mr. Preston: We had a ton of grassroots conservatives show up and say, "No way." To our legislators' credit, they said, "All right, we're not passing digital ID." Ms. Preston: Then just earlier this year it came through as a pilot program. The state typically keeps pushing out the sunset date on these pilot programs until they just come to be. They worked around the legislators to put this forth. You can't have some of the infrastructure for these smart cities without having digital ID. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain how this works. The legislature said no multiple times, but now there's a pilot program. Mr. Preston: The governor. Mr. Jekielek: How does that work? Ms. Preston: The governor just signs it into law, and basically it’s a backdoor around the legislators. You even have people from the county commission level that are involved. It's confusing to us as well. Things like this that should follow a proper path essentially get backdoored into law. But that's just one of the examples. Other initiatives that have been signed into law are things like license plate scanners, and even just putting up new streetlights. It seems pretty benign, but these are things that you need to create the infrastructure of a 15-minute city, or smart city. But they all equate to this surveillance state that you'll need in order to govern a 15-minute city. Mr. Preston: If you go to utah.gov there is a citizen portal, which is the background for your digital ID. You can look in there, and it says personality type, where it has each individual's personality. Mr. Jekielek: For actual individual people? Mr. Preston: Yes, it is their interests and their likes. Ms. Preston: They create an actual avatar for each individual, and they have the infrastructure there that they're creating for this internet of things. Mr. Jekielek: For anyone that's seen the film, The Social Dilemma, we know they create these virtual avatars and colloquially say that they know more about us than we know about ourselves. You're saying the same thing is being built on the government website with respect to personality and interests. Mr. Preston: I don't want them dialing up my girls' personalities and their interests. Why does the government need to know that about my daughters? Why do they need to know that about my wife? Why do they need to know that about me? To me, that's an absolute abuse of privacy. I want the government out of my life, and not knowing my personal tastes, my likes, my interests, and my habits. Again, that is tied to your digital ID. That is tied to digital currency. What are we doing? This is actually not Utah, and this is not who we are. Most of the people in Utah would not be okay with this. Even with the focus groups out there, even with the rebranding, if people knew what was going on, and knew outright what was happening, people would stand up and say, "No." We've been focusing on our own backyard in Utah. Your listeners should be asking, "What is happening in my backyard?" Because you actually have control over that. You might be surprised at what is happening in your own backyard if you start peeling back the layers. Mr. Jekielek: During Covid, one of the silver linings was that people got to see what was being taught to their kids through Zoom. They were appalled and it motivated them to say, "We don't want that." It's almost like they were forced to look at it. In this case, it may well be that there are very troubling things being sold in a very pleasant disguise. How did you both get into this? Please tell me about yourselves. Ms. Preston: Jason has worked in legislative research for some time now. In 2022, we both got fed up with what was going on in the state, even before pulling back the layers and seeing some of these other programs. Mr. Jekielek: In 2017, you moved to Utah. What was your motivation? Mr. Preston: We moved for our family. It was a family decision to move, so our kids could be where we needed to be. This was when things were going bananas politically, so obviously, we were very attuned. By 2021, we realized a red wave was coming again. You can remember the Tea Party movement that happened when Obama was in office. That led to a huge red wave that eventually led to Trump. Even before Trump, during Obama's second term, there was a massive house cleaning in the U. S. Senate. By 2021, we knew that there was going to be another massive red wave, although it got a little crushed. We just started looking around in Utah. I had been so frustrated. Every time I would sit with a legislator, I would ask them about the proper role of government and ask them about the Constitution. It was always disappointing. Because they would get up on stage and would say everything right. Then as soon as you asked them a few questions, you realized there was no depth. They didn't understand the principles of liberty. It was always a frustrating thing. I'm not a politician and don't have the pedigree for being a politician, but I love the Constitution. I understand the principles of freedom, and I understand the proper role of government. We felt very compelled to do this, and it was an incredible experience. Mr. Jekielek: You ran for Congress? Mr. Preston: Yes, I ran for Congress. That's when we really fell in love with Utah at a whole new level, because there are so many great people out there. I've had political conversations with people all over the country. When you get down to Florida, Alabama, and Texas, there are some just great ride-or-die patriots. In Utah, because of that culture where the Constitution has been inspired by God, it is literally in so many people's DNA that there is nothing more important than defending liberty. You have some people that literally would give everything for the cause of liberty. We met a lot of those people, and it was so inspiring. But in contrast, you can see what's happening in our state. We said, "What is going on here?" It just didn't make sense to have these two extremes. You have people who just love the Constitution and liberty, and you have a government that absolutely was not reflecting this. The more we got involved, we asked, "What is going on here in Utah?" All of a sudden, we realized that over time, this state had been subverted to some degree. Mr. Jekielek: You started talking about this on your podcast. Ms. Preston: We made the congressional run with great grassroots support. It was a really encouraging thing to go through. There was a resurgence of the grassroots that you haven't seen since Mike Lee's early campaign when he first got into the Senate. We took that momentum from the congressional run, and we rolled that into a local radio show, which was great. Doing the local radio show, we decided that we needed the message to go out broader than just the Valley. That became the We ARE the People podcast, which has been growing exponentially in the past year. Mr. Preston: We realized that we have an information problem. We have a lot of good people across the country who are blind because they don't know where to look. They don't understand the problems. We thought, "Instead of running for office, it is more important to let people see what is actually happening in our own backyard." That's where our focus has been. There are so many groups like the Utah Freedom Coalition and Defending Utah. We could go down the list of the incredible influencers and groups. Utah is a really an interesting place because you have some of the greatest patriots, groups, and organizations. Yet, on the flip side, it is the supposed birthplace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It feels like it’s ground zero. Mr. Jekielek: I've really enjoyed learning about this, because there's so much to know out there. Ms. Preston: What's nice about our program is the demographic that we reach is actually the younger generation. We have a lot of college age and young adults that have been learning about local politics through our program. That has been the really fulfilling part, actually knowing that we are making a difference in our state. We're also engaging a new portion of the population that previously might not have been that politically motivated. Mr. Preston: Our biggest demographic is young men. It's shifting a little bit older lately, and we constantly watch those numbers. It was 18 to 24, and now it's more 24 to 28. It's a shift that's happening organically. With a lot of these young college kids, the garbage has been pushed down their throats so far that they are starting to push back. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, I still want to talk about The Point, which is the 15-minute city that's in development. What is the status of that? Let's also talk about why this concept is so problematic, because it seems so efficient and helpful, at least in the messaging. Ms. Preston: They have demolished the prisons at the site, so they are full steam ahead with planning. They have monthly meetings which are open to the public for input. However, in the way they speak about it, they of course try to show the positive spin of it. But what we like to highlight, and what you've done so well before on your show as well, is that when these smart cities are rolled out, mostly in the UK, you can see what this actually looks like for the residents of those cities. It's very restrictive on when you can leave, if you can leave. It ties into your social credit score, like what we're seeing in China. It becomes a very restrictive lifestyle, but it's being sold as "Everything is so convenient. It's just 15 minutes away. It's a walkable community." It's definitely marketed to the population as something that is positive. But when you pull back the layers, it is a total surveillance state which is essentially tied to your social credit score. Mr. Preston: Initially, it probably will not be like that. Initially, it will be this cool, walkable city with minimal vehicles. The question is, with this framework, the next time there's a lockdown, what are they able to do with this? Everything becomes smart meters, smart this, smart that, and everything is controllable. What happens when you get on the wrong side of the powers that be? What happens the next time there is a lockdown, and you don't want to wear your mask, and you don't want to obey the government? What happens then? How easy would it be to restrict you, or turn off your freedoms, or your ability to leave that city? The way those smart cities are set up, it is the perfect breeding ground for exactly what they have been doing in China. It doesn't take a lot of imagination when you look at what is happening right now in China. When you jaywalk, the camera picks up your face or your gait, and your social credit score goes down. Then your friends know your score. If you hang out with somebody whose score is low, then your score goes down as well. Personally, I don't want this. Ms. Preston: The best way to look at it is technocratic governance vs. constitutionality. If we're living in a regime where we don't have the freedom that is granted to us in the Constitution, are we really even free? Mr. Jekielek: This is a foundational question of our time. Alexia and Jason Preston, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Preston: It was great to be here with you. Mr. Preston: We're very thankful to be here. We love everything you are doing at The Epoch Times. There is a huge need for real, honest media, and people are fed up with the mainstream garbage. The most important fight is information warfare, and you are leading the fight. Ms. Preston: There is so much to fit into such a short period of time. We try to dive into a lot of these things in our program. If anyone wants to learn more about smart cities, the associated legislation, and Envision Utah, we have a four-part series on that. Please come to our channel and check it out. Mr. Preston: A lot of the research that has come to us is through regular people, and that's the neat thing. We live in a day where the average person can make a huge difference. Who are we? Nobody special. We just got involved. We are doing what we can, where we're at right now. If your listeners are frustrated and want to get involved, they don't need to be elected to a political office to make a difference in the country right now. You can just dig in. Make a difference. Get involved. Anybody can make a difference right now. Mr. Jekielek: The local level is where to do it. That's what everyone is telling me. Again, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Preston: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Alexia and Jason Preston and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (38 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1031JasonAlexiaPreston Epoch Original DVD collection:

"From a very early age—kindergarten—we were taught that our parents are just biological parents. The real parents is 'the Party,' and Chairman Mao. And so, if there's a conflict between choosing your own parents or the Party, you should always, always choose the Party. And that's basically what the Red Guards did." In this episode I sit down with Xi Van Fleet, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. She’s the author of the new book, “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning.” "Communism is about abolition of private property. But I would say, more important than that, is the abolition of independent thinking. It's really, really about control of peoples' minds. And also, it's about dividing people. They don't want to rule over a united population," says Ms. Van Fleet. We discuss her childhood under Mao's regime, and what it was like to be subjected to brainwashing, re-education, and struggle sessions. We also examine woke indoctrination today, and how ideologues are adopting Mao's methods of re-writing history and destroying the nuclear family. Watch the clip: "Here, especially today in schools, you are supposed to go to 'trusted adults,' not your parents. And so, they do not say 'Party,' but it is very similar. They want to cut the ties between parents and children. Why? That's how you control the children," says Ms. Van Fleet. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (43 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1028XiVanFleet FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Xi Van Fleet, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Xi Van Fleet: Thank you. This is exactly two years after the first interview. Thank you so much for having me back. Mr. Jekielek: I looked at your interview from back then and it was a great piece. I will link to it for those that are watching our streaming service on the web. It was a powerful interview where you showed the remarkable parallels between what's happening in America and your own experience during the Cultural Revolution in China. It brought tears to my eyes listening to that interview, so thank you again. Thank you for referencing it in your new book, which we will talk about today. You really dug deep into understanding these parallels. I want to discuss your background; where you were born, what happened, how you came to America, and when you started seeing things that reminded you of your past in China. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. I was born in China and spent my first 26 years in Mao's China, which included my entire 10 school years. Mao cut it from 12 to 10 years, because he said that education was useless. My 10 school years were right during the Cultural Revolution. After I graduated from high school, there was nothing for us. There was nothing for the young people, so we were all sent to the countryside. To do what? To get our reeducation from the peasants. I worked in the countryside under primitive conditions for three years until Deng Xiaoping took power and opened up the universities. Through an entrance examination, I was able to go to college at the age of 19 and study English. After that I was given a job teaching at a teachers' college where I met some American teachers. In the early eighties, China started to open up and a lot of volunteers from America came to teach. I met a friend and she helped me to get an assistantship in America, so in 1986, I went to Western Kentucky University. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me what it was like during the Cultural Revolution and how you were involved. You shared quite a few fascinating anecdotes in the book. A lot of us here in the West have no idea what really happened. Ms. Van Fleet: In a word, it was chaos, and pretty much overnight, because everything was just turned upside down. Everything. School was closed because the teachers and administrators were ousted by the kids. I was in elementary school and I saw students attacking teachers. One day I was in the classroom and the teacher left a note on the blackboard, "No school for three days." Those three days lasted for two years. During that time, we were out on the streets every day, watching it unfold in front of our eyes; the Cultural Revolution, the struggle sessions, the parade of those being denounced, which eventually turned into violence and total chaos. We saw the cancel culture by the Red Guards. I saw them going to people's homes, taking out everything that was considered old or traditional and destroying it. I saw them brutalize people, stopping girls who had the incorrect hairstyle and chopping their hair off. It was absolutely chaos. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things you hear about the Cultural Revolution is that sometimes people were murdered, and there was no reaction from the regime. That emboldened people and it became a kind of a craze. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes, absolutely. The first killing in the Cultural Revolution was done by a group of girls in middle school. They beat and tortured their assistant principal and then eventually killed her. They were just young girls, ages 12 through 16, and they were actually a little scared. They reported this to the Cultural Revolution Committee and the answer was, "If she died, then she died." That emboldened the Red Guards and the violence then started to become commonplace. The Red Guards went after the so-called Black Class people and killed over 1,700 in Beijing in just one month alone. After that, chaos took over the whole country and even my province and city. Mr. Jekielek: You said overnight, you suddenly had chaos. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: But what was it that changed? Was there an edict? This is what we want to understand here. Ms. Van Fleet: It started with so-called peaceful ways to denounce people. To do that, they use big character posters. It's like today's social media. They wrote on a big piece of paper with big letters and put it on a wall so everybody could read it. My memory is that overnight, there were big character posters everywhere on campus, and people just went there to read them. I was too young, only in the first grade, and I could not understand the content. But I could understand that it was a denunciation of teachers and administrators. There were a lot of cartoons. I could figure out they were about how the whole system was bad and needed to be overthrown. That's how it all started, and it was absolutely overnight. On the street, you saw all sorts of slogans, all sorts of posters, and that was the starting point. From there, it eventually became violent. Mr. Jekielek: This can be difficult to understand because Mao already had power. Of course, there was the Great Leap Forward, which was disastrous and many people were aware of this, so Mao had received many threats. This so-called, “cultural revolution,” was his reaction and his opportunity to purge yet another group of people. Basically this was communists going after communists. Ms. Van Fleet: That is something very hard for a lot of people to understand. I have to tell you that it is also very difficult for me to understand, but it actually was a cultural revolution. It was a revolution against Mao's own party, the CCP. It was a revolution against his own institutions. Why? It was for maintaining his own power, because he felt like he was losing power. He felt like whatever that he had been doing for the past 27 years was not radical enough. He wanted to fundamentally transform China into a more radical version of Marxism, which then became Maoism. Mr. Jekielek: Your book is titled, Mao's America: A Survivor's Warning. Before we discuss it, you talked about participating in some of these struggle sessions. It's hard to imagine that reality. Please tell me what happened. Ms. Van Fleet: There were all sorts of struggle sessions. The struggle sessions were like a hurricane. You had a huge rally of people and those people who were denounced were standing on the stage, and they had to admit that they were the counter-revolutionaries. They were whatever label was put on them. Those were the big hurricane-type struggle sessions. But everyone had to go through it. It was not just something for those being denounced. We had what was called criticism and self-criticism. Everyone had to go through it, including kids in school. You had to denounce yourself by comparing yourself to Mao's Little Red Book, and then saying that you hadn't done enough and in this respect or in that respect. That's not all of it, you also have to denounce others. You have to say, "So-and-so, I saw one day you did this and that's not really what you should do according to Mao's instruction." That was routine. That's the kind of struggle session I have been through. It's a gentler, milder version of the real struggle session, but it was a way of life during the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Jekielek: But there's this one moment in the book where you describe yourself holding Mao's portrait up on stage and feeling so proud. Ms. Van Fleet: Everyone wanted to be part of it. If I had been just four or five years older, I definitely would have been part of the Red Guard, but I was too little at the time. I just joined my cousin who was in the real Red Guard and who was in this Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team. They came to my town so I joined them. They had to give shows everywhere they stopped, and I was given the task of carrying Mao's portrait to lead the team on stage. I was so proud of myself. It was something that swept everybody away. There are people who saw this and understood what it was, but a lot of people just didn't. A lot of kids felt like you just had to join. Just think about the 2020 riots where so many people joined in. Did they really understand what it was? But they still joined in. I saw the videos of thousands of thousands of people on the street thinking they were doing something great. Mr. Jekielek: Do you feel like you were brainwashed? Ms. Van Fleet: Absolutely. That is the result of brainwashing. I was too little to do any damage. But what about the Red Guards? They were absolutely brainwashed. They were brainwashed to the point that they believed their purpose of life was to follow Mao's instruction and do what Mao told them to do. Because of that, Mao was able to control them. The Cultural Revolution was really the revolution of the youth. Mao used them to take power, and Mao used them to destroy the traditional culture and all the institutions. It was all done by the young people. How could they do that? It is because they were all brainwashed. Mr. Jekielek: I am thinking about James Lindsay's book, The Marxification of Education, who also wrote the introduction to your book. We didn't realize how deeply this whole oppressor-oppressed ideology has been embedded in our educational system here in the U.S. and Canada. This is one of the big parallels you draw out. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. In China, there's a difference because Mao and the CCP had power. They totally controlled the educational system and decided what to teach. Of course, it was all Marxist and Maoist values. But here, a lot of people just don't understand this, because they were never taught the history of communism. The things that they hear sound good, sounding like you want to be inclusive and you want to be empathetic. You want to love and to accept. People like me who have been through the Cultural Revolution and who have lived under communism see through it right away, because the same thing was taught to us. But people here, they just don't understand it. It's deceptive, and a lot of people just accept it without understanding that what they're supporting is actually evil. Mr. Jekielek: What is the commonality between what is being taught today, and what was being taught in Maoist China? Ms. Van Fleet: In Mao's China, it was very simple. From a very early age and in kindergarten, we were taught that our parents are just biological parents. Our real parents are the party and Chairman Mao. If there's a conflict between choosing between your own parents or the party, you should always, always choose the party. That's basically what the Red Guards did. Many of them denounced their parents. Many of them reported their parents and that ended up with their parents being executed. Here in school, especially today, you are supposed to go to trusted adults, not your parents. They did not say that in the party, but it is very similar. They want to cut the ties between the parents and the children. Why? That's how you control the children. Mr. Jekielek: The current gender-affirming care ideology is the so-called standard of care that's being applied for many children in schools. The counselors will say to the parent in front of the child, "Would you like to have a dead child or a living child? If you don't go along with our approach, your child will commit suicide." The parent becomes the outsider. Ms. Van Fleet: Absolutely. They make it sound like it's the government that is the real protector of those children. President Biden: There's no such thing as someone else's child. No such thing as someone else's child. Our nation's children are all our children. Ms. Van Fleet: That's exactly what happened in China and I'm sure in all communist countries. Mr. Jekielek: Another thing that's very striking is the hostility towards accurate accounts of history. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes, that is always something that the communists do. In order to control the children, you have to rewrite history. In China, history was totally rewritten, and the history that I learned there was absolute fiction. Even today, I still have to detox from the oldest junk they put in my mind. Those who control the present control the past. When you control the past, you control the future. There are so many people here in America that don't see what you and I see, Jan. Why? Because they don't know history. Today, history is so whitewashed. In school, they are taught about the crimes of the Nazis, and the crimes of slavery. Few of them know about the crimes committed in the name of communism. There were actually more people killed under communism, but they were taught communism is about sharing. That is just one example of rewriting history. Mr. Jekielek: The proof is that young people view it as a positive system. There have been multiple surveys done on this, and it's astonishing. There is a Chinese expression, “Putting powder on the face of communism.” Ms. Van Fleet: Absolutely. I was talking to a coworker of mine and she said her new daughter-in-law calls herself a communist. I said, "Do you know what that means? Do you know that sounds like someone telling a Jew that they are a Nazi?" She said, "Really?" That is how bad things are, because they absolutely have no idea." Why? It's because they were taught that way. Mr. Jekielek: The people who are successful in society are labeled as oppressors by the Marxist system, regardless of whether they are oppressing anybody. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think? Ms. Van Fleet: That's actually the operating system for Marxism. How did they do that in China? They identified the rich as the problem for everything that China was experiencing. The goal was to eliminate the rich so that they can achieve equity. The rich were those who were successful people, and that included Mao's own father. Mao's father was a prosperous and rich peasant, and he described how his father got rich. He did not exploit anyone or oppress anyone. He was smart, made a lot of good decisions, and worked hard. In communism, wealth is the original sin and the rich are the problem. They are the reason for everyone else's misery. Here it's the same thing, and we see the same thing happening. The Chinese and the Asians in general, according to skin color, have now become white. Before we were supposedly people of color, but not anymore. We are now called white-adjacent. Why? There is only one reason—we're just too successful. They do not want people to be successful. When you are successful, you are independent and you are not easy to control. They like people to be dependent so that they can control them. But not only that, they want to create divisions between people. They really foment hatred and resentment towards those who are successful. Mr. Jekielek: You've said that the term racist essentially means the same thing as counter-revolutionary back in the day. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. Everything during the Cultural Revolution was about whether you were with them or against them. If you were not exactly in line with them, you were labeled counter-revolutionary. It is the same here. Sometimes you see people being called racist and it's just ridiculous. In America, the word counter-revolutionary is just replaced with the word racist; that bigot, extremist, or whatever phobia you use to cast people out and put them in the enemy's camp. Then they can denounce you and they can punish you. Mr. Jekielek: There is the correct ideology and you're supposed to know what that is. It comes down from the people in power. If you don't agree with it completely, you are labeled a counter-revolutionary, or today, you are labeled with any one of these other slanderous terms that are now being used. Ms. Van Fleet: In the early stage after the CCP took power, everyone learned the correct ideology very quickly, which said, “Being rich is bad. Looking rich is bad. Thinking like the rich is bad.” Everyone wanted to look like a proletariat, especially those intellectuals. Mr. Jekielek: Because the intellectuals were the next group to be persecuted. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. To think, act, or look bourgeois was bad, so everyone wanted to look like a proletariat. Today, it is the same thing here. Thinking white is bad, and acting white is bad. If you study hard, you are acting white. Then you will be cast out. Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about where you find these parallels. One of them is education. We just discussed how having the teachers follow this ideology was a really important element. We talked about a kind of Red Guard here that's functioning at the will of the ruling class. That's another feature. We talked about this antipathy to the nuclear family, which is another important commonality. What else do you think is important? Ms. Van Fleet: Communism is about the abolition of private property, but more importantly it is the abolition of independent thinking. It's really about the control of people's minds. It's also about dividing people, because they don't want to rule over a united population. They will always try any way possible to divide them. In China, it was relatively simple. They divide people by class, which was Mao's identity politics. They don't just divide you and say you are rich, peasant, or landlord—you get a label. You absolutely get a label, that label becomes you, and it's your identity. If you are categorized as the Black Class, which is the propertied class, you become an enemy of the state. That label and that identity becomes hereditary. That's so important to understand. It is passed on to your children and to your children's children. That's what we are seeing in America—identity politics. They divide people, subdivide them, and then subdivide them some more. They will never stop. Here in America, we still have classes. Bernie Sanders still uses class to divide people into the haves and the have-nots, into the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. By the way, that's exactly the figure that Mao came up with when he analyzed the Chinese population back in the 1920s. He said, "We have 1 percent against the 99 percent." Bernie Sanders came up with the same number and I don't think it's a coincidence. In America there is division by race, sex, sexuality, and during Covid, even the vaxxed and non-vaxxed. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. You make this very interesting distinction in the book where in China, it was the majority being set against a minority. But here in America it's the other way around. It's actually backwards. It's the minorities that are being set against the majority. Ms. Van Fleet: They know that is a disadvantage, because you are setting a small group against the big group. That's why they keep expanding the small group, and the list just keeps going on. We mentioned some already; race, sex, gender, sexuality, and age. If you are fat, you become a victim. The list just goes on and on. Why? They want to expand the minority. Mr. Jekielek: There's a feature of this that we're experiencing in the West, which is the weaponization of empathy. In general, people want to help minorities. We want to be positive towards minorities. That is one of the ways this whole ideology was snuck in. Ms. Van Fleet: Woke is really a weaponization of people's goodness—neighbors who want to love their fellow citizens and want to accept and want to be empathetic—and using it against them. Mr. Jekielek: Using a race as this tool for the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy is actually hereditary. You don't have a choice. You would have to take significant steps to change that. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. CRT [critical race theory] is really the most potent weapon for dividing people, more so than class. In China, we all look alike. People can know which class you belong from where you live or where you work, but you can get away from that in a public space, because nobody knows who you really are. But race is something that you wear. It's always there and it's much more potent than class. Mr. Jekielek: I've been thinking about the Hamas attacks on Israel that happened recently and the potency of hatred. In the Cultural Revolution, did people hate like that? Ms. Van Fleet: The whole thing was driven by hate. Communism is built on hate. Hate what? Hate the enemy. Who were the enemies? The party tells you so. The party tells you who the enemies were. When I grew up, we were taught that the Black Class was our enemy. Those who failed to follow the party in lock steps were our enemy. I mentioned that in my book. The word people in China is called renmen. The people who are condemned as the enemy are called diren, or class enemy, jieji diren. You either belong to the people, or you belong to the enemy. Once you become an enemy, you're no longer people. Your humanity was taken away from you, and anything done to you was justified. Does that sound familiar in today’s world? That is how they teach the children to think; black and white. Once the party condemns you as an enemy, anything can be done to you. Nothing is too much. Right now, we see people on the streets who support Hamas. Why? It's simple. They identify Israel as the oppressor, and Palestinian as the oppressed. Once that definition is made, it's very easy. It's very easy to justify anything that the oppressed will do to the oppressor, including terrorism and murder. That's how they indoctrinate the children. It is this black and white thinking based on oppressor-oppressed, the enemy or the people. Mr. Jekielek:Your book is fantastic, and I highly recommend it. Ms. Van Fleet: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: It's very important. The Cultural Revolution in China and what is happening in America are not the same. At the same time, there are striking parallels and you do a fantastic job at documenting this. It's a chilling reality. Could we end up in a situation like the Cultural Revolution in China, if our current trends here are left unchecked? I think your answer might be yes. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. Mark Twain said. “History seldom repeats itself, but it often rhymes.” Yes, China is not America, the time is different, and the culture is different. It's a mistake to compare them as if it's apples to apples. But history rhymes. When you look at the big picture and connect the dots, the exact same thing is happening again. Mr. Jekielek: You talk about you deprogramming yourself, and that is also an important piece. People will read your book and understand the extent of these parallels, and they're shockingly extensive. But what about your journey from being the proud holder of a Mao portrait to where you are today? What did that look like? Ms. Van Fleet: It has been a long journey and I'm still making an effort today. I am still in the process of detoxing. It has been gradual, and it has to do with my desire to assimilate. People now ask, “Why should we want to assimilate? We want multiculturalism.” My question is, “Why did you even want to come here? What made you want to come to America?” I wanted to come here because I knew America is great. It's great for everyone, for all individuals. It has been a journey, and it took me a long time to appreciate what makes America great. It took me a long time to even grasp the concept that our rights come from God. For the longest time, I thought our rights came from the government, because that's how I grew up. The government allows me to do this, and does not allow me to do that. A lot of people still don't understand this. They come here and they don't even bother to learn the history and the values of this great country, because they are discouraged from doing that. They were taught you should be proud of your culture and it’s multiculturalism that makes America great. No, multiculturalism is not what makes America great. What makes this country great is American values. Where do those values come from? They are rooted in Christianity, so that took me a long time to understand. I had to get rid of this idea that being rich is evil. It has really taken a long time. I just felt like they were rich because they exploited others. I have to say that probably just 20 years ago, I still believed this. I thought, “Yes, how can they get rich? The only way they can get rich is by exploiting the poor.” Today, that is something that the young people firmly believe. Mr. Jekielek: As that belief system has grown, the actual exploitation has grown, because all these things have a kernel of truth in them. Yes, there are some people that get rich that way. Yes, the system can be set up to be stacked against the poor. But the irony is that it's precisely in these communist societies where that dichotomy is so extreme. Ms. Van Fleet: Capitalism is not perfect. Of course, there's no such thing as a perfect system. But in capitalism, you have the choice to say no. You absolutely have the right to say no. They can give you an unbelievable low wage and you can walk away. Not in a communist country. Not in the communist system. You're stuck where you are. You have no freedom to make a choice. Mr. Jekielek: There is one choice in that system you have to make. But for some people, that choice is unconscionable, which is to become the model worker, the model communist party member. Then maybe you'll be advanced. Ms. Van Fleet: That's not a choice. How do you get ahead in the communist system? First of all, you had better have your roots being red, meaning you come from a good family background. If you are from a proletariat background, then you are in the red camp. That's the first step, and then you will have a head start. But if you are not, you still have a way to advance. First, you have to cut ties with your bad family and cut ties with your past. You have to denounce yourself. You have to give up yourself so that you are totally in line with the party ideology. Then you might have a chance to advance. Mr. Jekielek: That's chilling, because that's a parallel to our society today. Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. If you want to advance, you better go along with the current ideology, even if it's a lie. You actually know that a woman is a woman, and a man is man, but if you want to advance, you had better go along with the lie that says otherwise. Mr. Jekielek: Xi, as we finish up, you mentioned cancel culture a number of times throughout our conversation. That’s a key instrument of what's happening here, and what was happening back then. Please tell me about that. Ms. Van Fleet: I believe that the real goal for the woke revolution or the American cultural revolution is to change the culture and to destroy everything in the past—the traditional values, the traditional family, the traditional institutions— everything. The Cultural Revolution in China had the Four Olds that we talked about in my last interview; the old ideas, the old culture, the old customs, and the old habits, which had to be destroyed. Why? So that they could be replaced by Maoism. That's what's going on here today in America. They want to destroy everything that is traditional and replace it with the woke ideology, which is Marxist ideology. Only when they destroy everything and burn it down to the ground, can they build back, not better, but worse, and so that they can take power. Mr. Jekielek: I first became aware of you when you were speaking at a Loudoun County School board meeting. Let’s talk about what's to be done in our current moment? Ms. Van Fleet: That is a big question and a lot of people ask that question looking for a simple answer. There is no simple answer. The first thing that we need to do is understand what is really happening, and not everybody understands it. Not every conservative understands what's really going on. You can't fight back against something that you don't understand. That's why I wrote my book—to tell Americans that what is going on in America is nothing new. This has happened before in China during the Cultural Revolution. We need to understand that we can take the next steps to expose it. We also need to take action and get organized. I always tell people to start local. The first and most important thing is to get the right people on the school board. In order to win this war, we have to win back our education system, because those children are the future of this country. Mr. Jekielek: Xi Van Fleet, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Van Fleet: Thank you so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Xi Van Fleet 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/S1028XiVanFleet Epoch Original DVD collection:

"We had a situation in a time of peace where a thousand people were mutilated and butchered before the IDF responded. And yet, that ignited these people on the campus to root for the people who were murdering and beheading.” To make sense of the realities of the Israel–Hamas war, I sit down with classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson, bestselling author of a number of books including “The Dying Citizen” and the upcoming book “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.” Did Hamas miscalculate Israel’s response? Will Hezbollah intervene? What is Iran’s play now? And what do many in the West misunderstand about Israel and Hamas? Watch the clip: "A lot of people apply rules to the Jewish state they would never apply to any other ally. And that explains the schizophrenia that we have," Mr. Hanson says. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (53 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1101VictorDavisHanson FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Victor Davis Hanson, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you for having me on. Mr. Jekielek: Victor, I want to do a primer here on what's happening in the Middle East right now, what's happening with the Israel-Hamas War, how this all came to be, and how you view this from your unique military history lens. Mr. Hanson: It's multi-faceted. There were social, economic, and military precursors. You would call them long-term factors, and there were short-term factors. Long-term, Israel had reached a zenith as far as its own history in terms of affluence and leisure. Anybody who has gone to Haifa would be astounded by it, compared to an American city. I was just there, and it made San Francisco look pathetic in comparison. It really did. It was clean. It was crime-free. It was prosperous. People were out walking at midnight. It has a beautiful harbor. They had the Accords with the Saudis, the resurrected Abraham Accords. They were exuberant. You would meet Israelis in government and commerce, and they would say, "In the last two years we have 20,000 Gazans working for us. We haven't had any trouble. When they get injured, we take them to a hospital. We're teaching them methods of sophisticated agriculture. We're going to be friends with the Saudis." The Iran deal fell through, as we knew it would. That gave them certain assumptions that were impossible given their neighborhood, so they had a political disagreement in the fashion that we do. Perhaps Netanyahu is as controversial as Trump, so they're going through this political and civil war almost. But we're safe, we have Canada and Mexico, and we're away. They had the same type of dispute over the Supreme Court, where we had a million people in the street protesting the Netanyahu government. They had people that were not signing up or not reporting for their IDF [Israel Defense Force] reservist call. That's an extravagance that Western societies can afford, but not them, but they have lulled them into that since. That created a sense of unpreparedness that was known to Hamas. Iran, after the Biden administration came in and stopped all the sanctions, had $50 to $70 billion in additional oil revenues. We were giving them sanction relief. Obama had done that, but Trump had stopped it. They knew abstractly how much wherewithal Hamas was getting in terms of money, rockets, weapons, and maybe Hezbollah, but they didn't conceptualize that as threats to the IDF, in a way that they had not during the Yom Kippur war either. It was the same mentality, and that gave an opening for Hamas. That was one thing. The second was when Hamas went in there and thought, "We're going to attack in a time of peace when they think they are playing us off against the Palestinian authority. They think we want to be Singapore, they believe our rhetoric, and they're completely unaware. Then in the short-term we're going to go through the gate or the wall." It's not much of a wall if you look at it compared to what you think a wall is, or what the new Trump wall is in comparison. "We're going to do it during the holiday. We're going to do it early in the morning when they're not expecting it. We're going to be brutal in a way that no one's ever imagined before. We're going to decapitate. We're going to desecrate. We're going to mutilate. We're going to torture. We're going to engage in things that are unspeakable like necrophilia and rape.” “We're going to take hostages. We're not just going to take hostages, we're going to take young kids ages 2, 3, and 4. We're going to take elderly women, and we're going to do two things. We're going to be so pre-civilizational that we're going to shock them into terror. We've got to do something." They were just completely out of control. I know that this sounds unrealistic, but that was their mentality. The other presumption was, "We're going to be so depraved in our violence that we're going to make the argument that only people who were being exploited would ever reach that level of barbarity, and you made us do it." Third, they have a whole expatriate community of Middle Eastern people throughout Europe and the United States. They especially understood the new DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] on campus. They thought, "We can do all of this, and we won't get any global disdain, because the universities and the institutions of Western society are pretty much controlled by the pro-Palestinian Left." They were right in all those assumptions. They only made one mistake—they miscalculated the Israeli response. They looked at the first four days of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but they didn't look at the next 15. Had they done that, they would have realized that the response was going to be medieval, and that's what we're watching today. They are going to be destroyed. Israel's political parties have temporarily coalesced. People from all across the spectrum have united. They have come to the idea that there's no two-state solution, and you cannot make peace with people who do these things. Hamas overestimated their ability to shock the Israelis, or scare them, or terrify them, or win the approval of the world. That's what they were thinking, but there's still a lot of people in the world who are going to give Israel a green light. This is the first time in our lifetimes, and I'm 70 years old, that I don't see any restraint on Israel. I don't see a Western diplomat, or Macron, or Scholz calling them up and saying, "Listen, you've had five days of barbarity, we're going to cut your aid off," or Joe Biden saying, "You do this and do this." I don't see that happening, and that applies to Hezbollah and Iran as well. Mr. Jekielek: There are people rebelling even in the U.S. government because of the U.S. response being pro-Israel. Mr. Hanson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: At the same time, I've read some compelling analysis talking about how the U.S. empowerment of Iran may have played a significant role in this, simply because of Iran feeling like they are unchecked. Mr. Hanson: Yes. They had the financial wherewithal when the sanctions were relieved, and the disposable income to arm Hamas and Hezbollah to levels that no one had ever imagined would be possible, so they were riding high. Iran, at this juncture said, "We have new allies. We have the Chinese. We're selling drones to the Russians in the Ukrainian war. The Obama idea of a Shia Crescent of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, and Gaza is actuated. It's there now. In the U.S. government, we have Robert Malley, who's one of us." They would say, "We have people in the Department of Defense that he's helped insert there, and we have a non compos mentis president, that is probably being heavily influenced by Obama's Ben Rhodes-type of Iran deal." He is back in the news lately lecturing Israel. With Hamas and Hezbollah, Jan, your train of thought is they wouldn't do anything without the permission of Iran, and that's true. Iran was the other player. Just as Hamas has misjudged the geo-strategic landscape, and then the mentality in Israel in particular, so has Iran. This is the first time since the Iranian Revolution, some 43 years ago, that there's no restraint on retaliation to Iran. We have a huge force that's assembling off the coast of the Middle East. If Hezbollah or Iran were to attack that, Joe Biden would be led by events. He couldn't stop the response from the indignant American people, and that response would be existential to Iran, and they know that. It even applies to Hezbollah. They got themselves into a jam by the level of barbarity. If they had gone in there and taken two hostages or five hostages, we'd be back to the same old wash, rinse, spin cycle of the Middle East. But they were so exuberant in their depravity and exhilarated by it that it really changed the mentality of the players. If Hezbollah says, "If you go in one more day, we're going to send rockets." The Israelis' collective idea would be, "What are you going to do? Rape our dead? You've already done that. What else could you do? Behead babies? You've done that. Do your worst, and we'll do our best, and let's settle it." That's a very dangerous attitude to have, and that's what the Israelis have right now. That's why Hezbollah has not intervened so far, and it's kind of counterintuitive, isn't it? The consensus is if they use an inordinate or what we call disproportionate use of force in Gaza, that will infuriate Hezbollah, and then they will intervene with their huge rocket force. But classical strategy, the tragic view says that they will not, if they thinkBeirut ends up like Gaza City. They know that could happen very easily, and they really haven't recovered from the 2006 war with Israel. Anybody who predicts what might happen in the Middle East is usually wrong. My sense is that Iran and Hezbollah have found themselves in a position that initially they thought was so envious and so great. As they start to examine it in its fullness, they are not finding it so inviting. I don't think the Russians would ever intervene on their part, because they're stuck in Ukraine. I don't think the Chinese have any interest at all, other than keeping the sea lanes open, avoiding a theater war, keeping the oil flowing, and vicariously hurting the United States. Other than that, they're not going to intervene, not when they have a million Muslims in work camps themselves. As in Cold War, proxy wars, I don't see where their patrons intervene. I looked at what they have, their wherewithal, and I'm not that impressed with it compared to the United States, Europe, or even Israel. Mr. Jekielek: Back in 2016, one of Xi Jinping's top, top advisors said, "A good plan for America would be to keep America involved in multiple wars, with one of them ideally being a terrorist entity. That's how America can be destabilized and we can do what we want, and therefore America won't be focused on us." Mr. Hanson: That's what the Chinese are looking at. The only thing that's holding them back from attacking Taiwan are the logistical problems of crossing the South China Sea to get to Taiwan. It didn't work out too well for the Russians so far in Ukraine, and they're worried about something like that. They're worried about the financial part. But they do like the idea that the United States has exhausted artillery shell depots, and that Israel has sent them to Ukraine, that we're six years behind with our Javelin supply, that our fleet is shrinking, and that we're $33 trillion in debt. They like all that, and so they want all those pressure points. But they do not want to intervene and confront the United States, at least not yet. I don't think the Russians will do it, and I don't think the Iranians want to. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think about Iran making these small scale attacks on U.S. troops? Mr. Hanson: That's designed for two reasons. One, ultimately as Hamas erodes, people are going to say in the Shia world, and to some extent in the Sunni world, "Where were you? We took on the Jews. We took on the world. We were willing to behead Jews in Israel, and what did you do? You have all these rockets you talk about, but you didn't really start a war. Iran, what did you do? You funded the whole thing, it was your idea, and we're your proxies." Iran says, "We had some people attack in Syria, the Houthis sent some rockets, and we told some people in Lebanon to go." That's what they're doing, but notice that they have calibrated it just enough to say they're doing things to distract, but not enough to earn a righteous response, not yet, at least. Hezbollah is the same way. They want to maintain their credentials as the anti-Western, pro-Palestinian tip of the spear, but not to the degree that they're going to get in trouble with Israel and the United States. They're starting to look toward politics. They say, "Wait, there's a Democratic president and Left-wing people, and there's no opposition to them, because we know that conservatives and Republicans are always against us. At least with this president, we have the Left in the street being anti-war. But if the Left is ambiguous about the war, and the Right is for the war, we're not going to have that dynamic during the Iraq War with George W. Bush, with that huge anti-war movement." Then they look at Europe, and the Europeans are terrified now of radical Islam. They're looking desperately for the campus, but the campus is starting to incur a big backlash. The university presidents, the faculties, and the students have no idea what they have done with these demonstrations. Everybody has been living in la-la land and riding high, and now there's going to be some type of accounting. Mr. Jekielek: Let's look at the domestic situation for a moment. Recently, people have gotten some sort of clarity about these campus groups, which tend to be extremely Left-wing. But it seems odd on the face of it that Palestinian Islamist types, or people supporting that, would be on the same side as the far-Left. Mr. Hanson: Trans, gay, far-Left. Mr. Jekielek: Right, and you have these perplexing groups like Queers for Palestine. Mr. Hanson: It's perplexing because if anybody who was an American student went over to Gaza or the West Bank, and they got on a corner with a megaphone and said, "Hamas sucks," they would be shot. If they had purple hair, and they were trans with a ring in their nose, they would be shot. Then added to that, if somebody leaves the Middle East on a student visa or a green card, why are they leaving? They're leaving corruption, poverty, tyranny, autocracy—and they're going to where? The West, where they can be secure, prosperous, and free. No sooner do they get here, or they're here in the university, what are they cheering for? Those same governments, which is, "Hamas, one election, one time." That is an apartheid society, if you're not a Arab-Muslim. You are a secondary citizen if you're a woman. In their 1988 charter, it says, "Your duty is to marry, have children, and stay at home." They're cheering that, and so that doesn't resonate well with them. The American people are looking at all this, and they're saying, "Yes, we knew about affirmative action. Yes, we knew about woke. Yes, we knew about DEI, but we didn't really understand the mechanics of what it was producing, and we are creating monsters. The longer they're in college, the more degrees, the more that they think they're educated, the more callous and vicious and cruel they are.” We had a situation in a time of peace where a thousand people were mutilated and butchered before the IDF responded. Yet, that ignited these people on the campus to root for the people who were murdering and beheading. They were not saying the Israelis are committing genocide by retaliating, that hadn't happened yet. But their instinct, their training, and their ideology was so perverted and out of mind, that was their natural Pavlovian response. We can't have that anymore, and we have to look at how to stop that. People are going to say, "Donald Trump did it when he came in." An American voter is not going to feel, after what they've witnessed, that they want somebody from Gaza, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, or maybe even Egypt, coming to the United States on a green card and a visa. Because from the time they arrive in the United States, and are thankful and gracious because of the security and freedom and prosperity they can experience. But in about two weeks they're out in the street tearing down pictures of Jewish captives, and people know that. They're going to ask, “What created these very wealthy privileged kids to pour out at Harvard yard or UCLA, and chant rivers to the sea?” That is basically a euphemism for extinction. Maybe it's the fact that these global endowments now are $35, $50, and $60 billion. Maybe there's so much money for the Center for Palestinian Studies, or the Center for Diversity Equity, or the diversity, equity, inclusion czars at each school and university. Maybe we just better start looking at that, and the things that have been floated. Maybe we better get the federal government out of the student loan business, and let these huge endowments back their own loans. Maybe all these crazy studies majors would drop out. Maybe the moral hazard would be where it always should be—with the university. Maybe we should tax their endowment income, because they're not nonpartisan—they're actually indoctrination. If Stanford has a roughly $40 billion endowment, and they're getting $3 billion, and they spend $6 billion, maybe of that $3 billion, they're going to have to spend $2 billion in income tax because they're not a nonprofit as we define it, not after what's been going on at my campus. Maybe people are going to say, "We have to take a look at the tenure of these professors that say that Jews are pigs or excrement, or that we need to follow Jewish children around." At my university they say, "In my class, all you Jews go over there and take your property with you, so that you know what apartheid is like." Maybe we just have to say to the faculty, "Maybe you need a five-year contract. Here's what you're going to do. Here's the things you have to write. Here's what your teaching evaluations are. Here's what your peer evaluations are.” If they don't fulfill this, they're gone, just like a plumber or electrician.If you had a conservative House, Senate, and president that would be enacted, I'm pretty sure. The old arguments for the university were two-fold. They said, “We're creating a highly intelligent, highly educated 50 percent of the population, which is necessary for democracy. We're staffing the FBI and the civil service with educated people with BAs. More importantly, we have disinterested research. Our PhDs, our technology people, our law degrees, our businesses are the elite of the world, and that makes us the most competitive and prosperous society. This is thanks to the MBA program at Stanford, or the law school at Yale, or the political science department at Princeton.” Now people are looking at this and saying, "No, the Covid thing showed us how warped science is on the campus. No, climate change showed us that if you dare speak out and challenge a vaccine or climate change, you're going to be shouted down." When we look at the students, they don't know anything. If you gave them a map of the Middle East, they wouldn't know the difference between Aman and Tel Aviv. Yet, they're spouting and espousing these ideas, so they're failing at what they said was the price of this extremism. The schools say, “You don't like what we're doing, and you don't like the free speech area, and you don't like all these crazy ideas, but we help you because we turn out educated people, and we turn out the professions.” But that's not true. The people are going to say, "You broke the bargain, so we're going to call you on it." Mr. Jekielek: You're saying this has exposed the fact that a lot of these universities are creating activists instead of scholars. Mr. Hanson: It's like a scab. We all knew there was a putrid wound, but it was scabbed over. This Gaza thing tore it off, and they came out in their arrogance. Americans had no problem with one side saying they support Israel, but they do have a problem when you start saying from the river to the sea, or you start talking about genocide, or you start tearing down things at Cooper Union, with that picture of those students in the locked library, and people pressed on the glass windows outside. It was like a scene out of The Walking Dead, and they were trying to get in. It was scary. We haven't quite seen that since the 1960s or 1970s. It's going to get worse as this war goes on, and they have no idea what the public thinks of them. If you look at polls, most people have had a radical shift. They don't believe that higher education is a necessity anymore. The faculty rate as below used car salesmen as far as professions people have admiration for. They're committing collective suicide. Mr. Jekielek: Victor, I want to digress here. The term genocide is thrown around, and that what Israel is doing right now in Gaza is genocide. Words have meaning, but this word has been heavily adulterated. Black genocide is being thrown around, and also genocide against women. Does that word even have any meaning for us ? The State Department has decided that the Chinese regime is committing a real genocide against a group of people, the Uyghurs, but that all seems to have lost meaning somehow. Mr. Hanson: Genocide is from the Greek word genos, it means a tribe or a group of people, and the suffix means killing. We've seen it before with the effort of the Turkish government to try to destroy the Armenians as a people. We've seen it, as you said, with the Uyghurs. We've seen it, of course, with the Holocaust. It means a massive effort to kill thousands of people. But when they use that term for the Middle East, then you think Israel is engaged in a systematic effort to wipe out the Palestinian people. You say to yourself, "21 percent of Israel is Palestinian, and they have the highest standard of living outside the Persian Gulf, and they have more rights and voting. They have political parties. They form the opposition in a way that's impossible in Gaza, impossible in Syria, and impossible anywhere else in the Arab world." That's not fitting the definition of genocide. When you look at the conduct of war, if Israel wanted to conduct genocide, they wouldn't be phoning people or dropping leaflets to get away. The people who would be subject to genocide would not be forcibly taking their own people and putting them in front. For example, do people really who use that word think that in the Polish ghetto, Jews that were militant and resisting the Gestapo took other Jews and put them in front of them, assured that the Gestapo wouldn't shoot them? Did the Armenians who were fleeing the Turkish people, the militant Armenians that wanted to fight back, take other Armenian children and put them in and think, "Now, the Turkish people won't kill us?" Of course not, that doesn't happen. What the Israelis are doing doesn't fit any imaginable definition of a genocidal power. It's very funny too. There's a big debate going on, as you know, at UCLA. There's a chant, "Israel, Israel, you can't hide. We caught you in genocide." But the thing that I was curious about is that you have all these pro-Palestinian and Middle East immigrants, and students, and Leftists all saying, "We caught you in genocide," which is false. But they themselves have been advocating for genocide, because they have a phrase, "Palestine will be free from the river," meaning the Jordan River to the sea, the Mediterranean. That just assumes the complete liquidation of Jews in Israel. They're calling for it openly, and then they're saying, "We caught you in genocide because you had the audacity to go back and hit us in Gaza City after we murdered a thousand of your people. We're calling our parents up and saying, ‘I killed 10 Jews. Allahu Akbar. Come on, great.’" It's surreal, it's La La Land. They think this is going to get them empathy. Only a society that was completely morally bankrupt would give them empathy. There's something very sick going on there in this cult of hatred. Hamas has been autonomous, and Gaza has been autonomous since 2005. We are forgetting that the Israelis under Sharon said, "You export greenhouse industries, you're all getting out, it's not worth fighting with Gazans. It's yours, take it. You've tried it with Egypt, we tried it, you're on your own." They elected, as happens in the Middle East, a government, one election, one time, and they got Hamas. Yes, there are a lot of innocent Gazans. But the 1988 charter that predated that election says that they're not interested in negotiations. They're interested in jihad to destroy Israel, and they voted for it. Yes, it is corrupt. Yes, it's true, as a recent article in Foreign Affairs pointed out, the popularity of Hamas has declined. But was the popularity of Hamas declining because it was corrupt and didn't give services, or was it not sufficiently killing Jews? My point is this; this unpopular, supposedly hated government went into Israel. Israel was told if you bomb Hamas sites in Gaza, you're going to alienate the people and make them like Hamas, and they don't like them now. If they don't like them so much, why did hundreds follow through the hole in the fence? It’s like the irregulars that followed the Gestapo in Eastern Europe. They tagged along to rape and to loot, and to take captives. When they brought captives into the streets of Gaza, why couldn't you find one Gazan who intervened and said, "Don't desecrate that Israeli corpse. That poor woman is bleeding, do not spit at her." Not one, not one. The argument that there's a captive Gazan population that is furious at Hamas, and you're only going to drive them close to Hamas when they otherwise would reject them, I don't see any evidence for it. I see a lot of evidence that says, "I like Hamas now because they finally went and did something." That something is killing Jews on the offensive. They were giddy about it, and the people who support them in the West were giddy about it. Again, it took them a nanosecond to go, "Yes, fly the flags. You're killing Jews, finally. Now we can accept your corruption, and your bribery, and the miserable conditions because it was all worth it. You went into Israel and killed a thousand Jews." That's the mentality. Mr. Jekielek: It's hard to imagine an entire population of people could think this way. Mr. Hanson: There's a Western conceit that we project in a very paternalistic way about what they should think, and how they should. Why don't you just read what they write, rather than project what you think they should write. They have the 1988 Hamas charter, and they've altered it a little bit for political reasons, but it's all there. I will paraphrase the rantings of people in the gutter who say, "You stupid Westerner, you thought you were going to get Singapore. We're not interested in Singapore. We're interested in killing them, and pushing them, and that's what we teach our children from an early age." When you bring a little Jewish kid as a captive they're going to get other children to insult him while he's a captive, and that's deeply ingrained. The Western mind says, "Money coming from the Gulf, money coming from the UN, restored money from the United States, EU money, hundreds of billions of dollars in this small little enclave. It's going to be like Singapore that has a beautiful beach and the Hyatt Regency. It’s all going to be there. They can export fruit and vegetables to Europe in the winter." They're not interested in that. They're interested in destroying Israel, period. You can argue about why they became that way. There were mistakes made. But ultimately, they have never had anybody in the West say, "I will support you only if you have regular elections, and you stop this hatred of Jewish people. Then if you do that, we're willing to help you, but not otherwise." But we never gave them any conditions. Donald Trump came in and said, "You support terrorists, we're not giving you the $700 million." There was an outrage saying that he was cruel. I'm not necessarily happy about this fact, but Donald Trump came in and he looked at what we're talking about, and he said, "This man Soleimani is not only killing people in Iraq and subsidizing the strategies of Hamas, he's killing Americans and he did that during the Iraq War.” Trump took him out. Then they said, "You can't do that." Then he said, "ISIS is an abomination. We're not going to put one soldier on the ground to kill them, but we're going to bomb them heavily.” Then he said, "There's no reason why we would give any money to people who support terrorism. The $700 million is gone." Then he said, "For all practical purposes, they started these wars and then they lost the Golan Heights. They used it to shoot down on civilians. It's been in Israeli hands since 1967, and it's not going to go back." Then he said, "Jerusalem is the historical home of the Jews. It's Israel's capital, there's East and West," and at each juncture he did that. Our foreign policy establishment, the best and the brightest, the most sophisticated, the Robert Malleys of the world, the Jake Sullivans, the Anthony Blinkens, the Brookings Institute, all said, “If you do one of those things, you're going to blow up the Middle East.” Nothing happened. What blew up the Middle East? It was restoring the aid, lifting the sanctions on Iran, and agreeing to pay them $1.2 billion for each hostage. It was telling Israel, "You've got to do this. You've got to do that,"and intervening in Israeli politics. That gave the impression that the United States was favoring them, and that encouraged them to do what they did. It's a funny thing about the human mind, deterrence or the ability to warn somebody that you're unpredictable, maybe slightly crazy, but warn somebody, "We have the wherewithal that if you're foolish enough to start a war, in a cost-benefit analysis, you will lose, and we'll show you before you do it, how you will lose." That is a humane mentality and it saves life. Appeasement or mollification is when you think, "I just don't want to be harsh. I don't want to come across too bellicose." Weakness guarantees war. Human nature being what it is, we damn the people who keep the peace like Reagan, and we worship the people like Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama who cause wars. You know that as well as I do, Jan, about the Ukraine War. There was a reason why Russia went in during the Biden administration, and previously during the Obama administration, and previously during a weakened Bush administration when he went into Georgia, but not during the Trump administration. Mr. Jekielek: What does a ground offensive mean? As we're recording right now, that's what's happening. Mr. Hanson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Of course there's all sorts of predictions, but what does that really mean? This is a new thing. Mr. Hanson: Anybody who thinks they know what's going to happen the next day in the Middle East is crazy, because it's so volatile and unpredictable. But I think the Israeli IDF is trying to prepare Hamas and Hezbollah, and everybody into thinking that they're going to come in one dimensionally, with block by block Stalingrad-type fighting, maybe with a little bit of Fallujah and Mosul mixed in. I think we will see that when they go in, they will come back out. It's better to look at the Gaza Strip as a series of ink spots. They're going to come in, occupy an area, blow up all the tunnels, dispose of the Hamas apparatus, and then move out or move somewhere else. Their idea will be that each little ink spot will be unpredictable. They will have no idea from what direction, they might even come in from the West Bank. They may come from the ocean, but each little ink spot will incrementally, very slowly, methodically, insidiously will start to conglomerate. At any given day, the Hamas defenders will have no idea which neighborhood or tunnel of Gaza City is going to be targeted, and which direction they're coming from. That's much more likely, and that will be very long, drawn out, and expensive.But it will be much more sophisticated than everybody is suggesting, just one-dimensional and fighting street to street. Mr. Jekielek: At a cost of lives. Mr. Hanson: At a great cost of lives, yes. Is it a great cost of lives compared to Ukraine? No, it is nowhere near that. There are 800,000 dead, missing, wounded on both sides in Ukraine. I don't think this is extraneous to say this. If you came from Mars and you looked at Ukraine and Israel, you would say it's very bewildering that the Americans are telling the Ukrainians, "You need all the weapons you can get, and you must be disproportionate. We have to give you the edge in weapons." We are telling the Israelis, "You must reply proportionally. Don't do too much. Don't use your advantages to rub it in." They're telling Mr. Zelensky, "Given your extreme conditions, it's okay to cancel elections and declare martial law." They're telling Mr. Netanyahu, "You better be careful. We're watching every move. You have to have a coalition government. Do this, and do that." They're telling the Ukrainians, "You've got to hit back. You've got to be preemptive. You can take out the Black Sea Fleet. You can take out an oil depot. If you have to take out a bridge or a strategic road, you don't have to call the locals that live in that area and say we're going to bomb or send a rocket. There's such a thing as collateral damage." We tell the Israelis, "You can't have any collateral damage. You can't do that." I could go on and on and on, but it's schizophrenic. It can't be that Ukraine is existential. You would admit that what the radical Palestinians did, even the Russians didn't do in Ukraine. We have to be frank—it is anti-Semitic. People apply rules to the Jewish state they would never apply to any other ally, and that explains the schizophrenia that we have. Mr. Jekielek: By any report, a lot of anti-Semitism has come out of the woodwork. Mr. Hanson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Everywhere, frankly. Was it just there waiting, or is this a new thing? What's your view on this? Mr. Hanson: There has always been anti-Semitism, but what's new about this is a couple of things. On the eve of World War II, you had people in the United States, the American-first people, Father Coughlin or Charles Lindbergh, saying, "The Jews are going to get us in another war," or, "The Rothschild octopus is behind this." It came from the Right, and it was in a very crude fashion with rallies, and it was easily spotted and dissected. The institutions at that time were still center to Left, and they were the vanguards to spot it and to call it out. It was The New York Times, the major newspapers, Edward R. Murrow, and people like that. This time around, it's on the Left. The institutions are not the watchdogs, they are promoting it, so The New York Times and The Washington Post will print the false story about the hospital bombing in Gaza. More insidiously, it's coming from people under our new Obama-Biden progressive paradigm of DEI that has a binary ideology. The whole world, particularly the United States, is bifurcated into oppressors/oppressed, victimizers/victims, and colonialist/subject. In that breakdown, Israel is now constructed as white, capitalist, successful, and Western. The Palestinians are the victims, non-white, poor, and exploited. There is no nuance. People in the United States feel that they're subjected to the DEI industry. That's why BLM has posters of gliders glorifying mass death. That's why we have Palestinian students resonating with their chants of from the river to the sea. That's why we have trans people for Gaza. I've seen that poster. They feel that they're exempt, because as victims they are expressing anger at victimizers, and they're not anti-Semitic. But they are anti-Semitic. It's much more difficult than calling out a Charles Lindbergh or a Father Coughlin. Today, they're insidious because they say, "We are victims. We are immune. You cannot call me a racist because I'm black, I'm Chicano, I'm Asian, I'm gay, I'm trans. You cannot do that. I'm a student, you can't do that." Yet, we have to judge them by their words. Even Charles Lindbergh didn't support students chasing Jews into a library and pounding on the windows to get to them. Charles Lindbergh didn't openly side with people who were saying, "Destroy the Jews." It's more insidious, it's more dangerous, and the faculty is terrified. I've used that metaphor before. The faculty is Dr. Frankenstein. They created a Frankensteinian monster with their admissions, their immigration, their curriculum, and their Left-wing dogma. That monster is now devouring them, and you can see how these feeble presidents react. What would it take to get a college president to say, "On my campus, you're not going to separate students, or you will be fired immediately. You're on my campus, you're not going to call Jews pigs and excrement. On my campus, you're not going to say to go after Jewish children." Because we all know if a person substituted trans or black for the word Jew, or if you had some crazy white racist professor who said, "All the blacks are going to have to sit over there," that person would be fired immediately by that president. There would be no due process, and you wouldn't even worry about it. But the game they play is, "We're sober and judicious, this is a complex matter, and there's all sorts of issues involved." That's basically all a disguise for their anti-Semitism, and fear of what they've created. The lunatics are running the asylum on campus, and the administrators are terrified of them. Mr. Jekielek: Victor, as we finish up, there is a question on a number of people's minds, with all these factors at play, all this instability, and all these powerful players. The term World War III has been coming up, so what are your thoughts? Mr. Hanson: I've been reading a lot of these articles called 1939 Redux and World War III. There's the added force multiplier when people write that we're going to be in World War III and it's going to be nuclear because of Russia and China. There is also some mystery about Iran's nuclear status, Israel's nuclear status, and ours as well. There's a much greater likelihood of a nuclear escalation in Ukraine because that's right on Russia's border. It has historical grievances against Ukraine and vice versa. The people who are writing these articles are not grappling with it. They dismiss it out of hand, and say, “There's no chance there is going to be a nuclear confrontation.”I look at North Korea, and I don't think North Korea is going to use nuclear weapons. China is sending six warships to the Middle East area. Even in our bastardized state, the United States military could take them out 10 seconds if it wanted to. The U. S. has a huge fleet, and if it really wanted World War III, it would send a hundred ships. Then I look at their attitude about the Islamic world. China's got a million Uyghurs in camps. Russia flattened Chechnya, a Muslim province. I don't think there's any empathy from China and Russia to intervene against the United States. China wants the sea lanes open because 40 percent of its oil imports come from there. They both only have a vague sense that whatever America is for, they are against. They like the idea that there is tension. They want the United States to spend time, capital, labor, and munitions. They like the idea that we're supplying Israel, Ukraine, and we're almost empty of strategic reserves. I get all that, but I don't see the trigger. Would it be a trigger if they launch 100,000 rockets from Hezbollah? Then Israel does what? They level Beirut, and China says, "Don't level Beirut." No. Russia says, "Don't level Beirut," or Iran decides, "You know what? The United States is just too big for its britches. Biden is cognitively-challenged. They're disunited. We're going to sink that fleet. We'll have Hezbollah send 10,000. We'll send 10,000." They take out the U.S. Eisenhower, and the United States does what? I know Joe Biden would not want to react, but he would be forced to react. They would take out all of the Iranian new nuclear facilities and the power grid. They wouldn't bomb them, of course. Mr. Jekielek: Oil refineries. Mr. Hanson: Yes, the oil refineries especially, and then they would stop. I don't see that turning into a theater-wide confrontation. It would be terrible, but would it be like the 600 to 800,000 casualties in Ukraine? No. The mentality is baffling, I've never seen anything like it. We have something right at the doors of Europe, where we've never seen this level of violence, this level of death, this level of sophisticated munitions, and this level of nuclear threats. Every month somebody from Russia threatens to nuke us, or to nuke Britain, or they're sending weapons to Belarus, so that we'll have a tactical war, and no one says a word. I don't see the symmetry of concern, and I don't see the step-by-step progression that leads us to Armageddon. Mr. Jekielek: But perhaps for another talk we should discuss the threat that you see in there. Mr. Hanson: I do see it there. I'm very worried about Ukraine for a variety of reasons because you have an unstable dictatorship. You've got the greatest losses that Russia has experienced since World War II. You've got people in the West that are talking about sinking the Black Sea Fleet and hitting the Kremlin. We've had drones from Ukraine going in. All of that is perfectly strategically logical when you're attacked. I have no problem with the logic, but the logic only goes so far when you're dealing with a country that has 6,500 nuclear weapons. I've been attacked a lot for what I just said. They say, “Don't give into nuclear threats from Russia, that's what they want.” Okay, then don't give into World War III threats from Iran and Hezbollah. Mr. Jekielek: Victor Davis Hanson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Hanson: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hanson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (53 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1101VictorDavisHanson Epoch Original DVD collection: