Let’s jump into some other updates regarding the many lawsuits aimed at former President Donald Trump, starting over in Florida. In the classified documents case, there has been a battle raging between President Trump’s legal team and Jack Smith’s prosecution team regarding what documents President Trump will have access to while building his defense. And while Trump’s legal team is trying to gain access to as many documents as possible in order to build a solid defense, Jack Smith has been attempting to hide certain documents. 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

Commentary Every 26 seconds, a child is trafficked globally. An unapologetic documentary available on EpochTV uncovers the horrors of sex trafficking in the Iraq region and the devastating effects of poor foreign policy and terrorism worldwide. Through raw and intimate interviews, "26 Seconds–ISIS Sex Slaves," by Kelly Galindo, gives viewers a vivid glimpse into the lives of children and women who were captured and sold into the sex slave trade. It reveals the horrors of their captivity, along with the efforts of individuals and non-profit organizations who are committed to eradicating global sex trafficking. Modern Day Slavery There are more enslaved people today than at any other time in history, with sex trafficking being the most common form. The film takes viewers to Iraq, which, since the ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the aftermath of decades of dictatorship, has struggled to chart a democratic course for its people. According to the film, the U.S. decision to ban the political Baath Party disbanded the military and created a political vacuum and security void ripe for exploitation. After many tumultuous years, an extremist insurgency seized a third of the country. With the fall of the capital city of Nineveh province, Mosul, in 2014, the ISIS terrorist group carried out the genocide of Yazidis in the Sinjar area. Live footage details the expulsion and exile of the Yazidis from their ancestral lands and the imposition of ISIS ideologies onto the remaining population. ISIS declared itself a worldwide caliphate, claiming authority over all Muslims. Their main goal: to implement a global Islamic State. The decision was to agree with them or be killed. Testimonies from women and children detail how ISIS captured whole families, killing the men and elderly and abusing and oppressing the women and children. The documentary follows the efforts of pastors and international leaders to rescue victims through high-risk undercover operations. ISIS Sex Trade Victims attest to the merciless rape and torture of the women and children by ISIS members. The women said that ISIS told them whoever converted to Islam would escape such treatment, but even when civilians complied, they would simply be accused of not being Muslim at heart, and the abuse would continue. In addition to the abuse of the women, ISIS implemented aggressive strategies to recruit young boys into their Jihadist movement. The documentary, available on EpochTV, reveals how ISIS is disconnected from the Muslim religion, showing how areas such as the Kurdistan region are committed to respecting all faiths and ethnicities and allowing them to live together in peace. Once captured, many civilians would be taken to either Mosul or Ar Raqqah. From there, the victims would stand naked in front of soldiers to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Often, ISIS would buy a girl and then sell her again after a week or so. Some houses were run like brothels, with children as young as 8 years old being held. One victim said the soldiers would take babies as young as three months old. She said her son was only eight months old at the time they were captured. They would lock him in another room, handcuff her from behind, and abuse both of them. Rescuers say the sale of victims has also turned online, with even American traffickers participating. The documentary exposes the disregard for and abuse of the physically and mentally handicapped as well. The captors would sell their slaves to other friends and family members and exploit the families of the victims for money in exchange for their return. But often, when the families paid, they would not receive their loved ones back. Rescue Missions The rescue missions involve identifying money transfers and key operatives, then embedding undercover agents into ISIS communities to act as middlemen for money transfers and the smuggling of slaves. The slaves would be brought to safe houses and reunited with their families if they had any family left. Those interviewed say there are still thousands of missing people waiting to be rescued. The rescuers say that due to liberations taking place throughout Iraq, many ISIS terrorists are blending back into society and evading capture. Peshmerga and coalition forces were able to reclaim the city of Mosul from the ISIS, but local officials say the fight against terrorism is far from over. They call for ongoing commitment to prevent terrorism from taking root and thriving, as well as humanitarian aid to help take care of and heal victims. Refugee camps focus on offering necessities as well as mentorship and education to help heal and empower the children who have no families to go back to. They say keeping the girls busy with hobbies and education is the primary way to restore their lives and equip them to function and thrive again. The Significance of US Policy Decisions Kurdish Commander Gen. Bahram Areef Yasin, says the situation that exists today in Iraq and Syria is a result of the Obama administration's mistakes and has injured the United States' standing in the area. The film, available on EpochTV, says that the reality of the genocide perpetrated against Yazidi and Christian people should be a call to the world community and the U.S. government to lead the effort to put an end to ISIS and terrorism. According to the documentary, the United States has spent trillions of dollars fighting terrorism around the world since 2003. Although ISIS was defeated in Iraq in 2019, it has since emerged in other countries. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Biden administration resulted in the Taliban taking over. The removal of the U.S. presence in the area has led some to claim the war is now over. However, for some, their fight against terrorism is just beginning. The film says the hurried evacuation will result in the same kind of sex slavery of women and children in Afghanistan that took place in Iraq. Conclusion The documentary ends with a haunting reminder that 24.9 million victims per year are trafficked globally, with 115 children being sex trafficked during the duration of the film. It offers an eye-opening view of the actual impact terrorism and poor foreign policy decisions have on innocent people worldwide. The film also highlights the bravery and compassion of those committed to rescuing victims, as well as providing additional resources with tangible ways to get involved in the fight against human trafficking. Support the cause by renting and watching the documentary "26 seconds", your contribution helps the production team create more impactful content.

National Discussion Erupts on Child Trafficking Through Film ‘Sound of Freedom’ The film “Sound of Freedom” has sparked a national discussion on child trafficking. In this episode of Crossroads, we’ll discuss these stories and others, and answer questions from the audience. 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/ChildTraffickingRealities 26 Seconds–ISIS Sex Slaves, by Kelly Galindo Productions A new documentary 26 Seconds-ISIS SEX SLAVES will reach millions of viewers with worldwide distribution on Epoch TV, bringing this poignant and powerful documentary to a broad and diverse audience. 26 Seconds-ISIS SEX SLAVES is a dramatic feature documentary focusing on the horrors of global sex trafficking. Every 26 seconds, a child is trafficked globally. "26 Seconds–ISIS Sex Slaves" is an unapologetic documentary that uncovers the horrors of sex trafficking in the Iraq region. In raw and intimate interviews, the audience gets a shocking glimpse into the lives of children and women, which include vivid details of how each victim was captured or lured into the sex trade, the horrors of their captivity, and the commitment of each individual and non-profit organization in the fight to eradicate global sex trafficking. The documentary chronicles the effort of our experts and their teams to rescue victims as we watch through heartbreaking footage of women and children that were rescued. ISIS not only committed genocide, but abducted Yazidis and Christian women and children as sex slaves. This film will educate audiences and give voice to those who have been silenced. Human trafficking is the fastest-growing illegal industry in the world. There are more slaves today than at any other time in history. The economic benefits of selling women and children are irrefutable. While there can be complex cultural and economic motivations at play, the sex trade is predicated on one undeniable reality: Every day around the world, countless boys and girls are bought, sold, and raped. This is a timely reminder of the value of vigilance in the fight for equality and freedom. Watch the trailer here: https://www.epochtv.shop/26seconds Exciting News: We've just added a new free video! Check it out here: https://www.epochtv.shop/films-shows Trauma: The Ghost in Our Cells and Fascinating Ways to Heal It In a nation where nearly 70 percent of adults have faced traumatic events, the profound impacts of trauma and its deep-rooted mind-body connection are more pertinent than ever. Studies have shown that unresolved trauma can manifest physically, leading to chronic pain, fatigue, and even autoimmune disorders. Surprisingly, many people live unaware that their health issues stem from past trauma, illustrating the intricate intertwining of our emotional and physiological well-being.

Among the many legal challenges that former President Donald Trump is facing, is the RICO case in Georgia, wherein state prosecutors are alleging that President Trump led a conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Last Friday, there was a fascinating development in the case that perhaps revealed what the prosecution is really up to here in this case. There was a six-hour hearing in Fulton County, during which lawyers for the prosecution (as well as the lawyers for President Trump) argued about the timeframe of the trial. Here is the basic outline of what was revealed in this hearing: on the one side, you have Trump’s legal team trying to push this trial back as much as possible—ideally pushing it past the date of the 2024 election. And if President Trump were to win that election, the trial would effectively be pushed back for another four years after that. On the flip side, however, the state prosecutors are trying to set the trial date right before the election, and have the trial run essentially in tandem with the election, all the way through 2024, claiming that this will not impede President Trump’s ability to campaign. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

In a rather wild turn of events—which is sure to have massive repercussions in the coming year—a federal court has just ruled that former President Donald Trump is not immune from civil lawsuits that arise over what took place on Jan. 6. This means that besides all of the lawsuits that President Trump is already facing, the door has been flung open for civil lawsuits to be filed against him as well by anyone who can make the argument that they were victimized on Jan. 6. And so, in the coming year, look out for members of Congress, Capitol police officers, and maybe even attendees of the rally to file lawsuits against President Trump. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

“The Chinese Communist Party's real estate sector is in the process of collapsing right now … The real estate sector, the property sector of the Chinese economy is about 60 percent of the economy, it's where much of the wealth of the Chinese people is invested. And that wealth is going to disappear overnight.” To understand the root causes of China’s economic crisis and what its impact will be, I sit down with China expert Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. Besides its economic woes, China is also facing a demographic disaster. Even though the One-Child Policy has ended and the Chinese regime is desperately trying to encourage pregnancies, “there’s no way out of that demographic trap that the Chinese Communist Party has set for the Chinese people,” Mr. Mosher says. Watch the clip: “Regardless of what mix of economic incentives the government puts in place, regardless of how much they lower the interest rates or try to subsidize exports or engage in any of the other things that they would like to do, they can't make up for 400 million missing people.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (54 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1026StevenMosher FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Steven Mosher, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Steven Mosher: It's good to be with you today, Jan. You do important work. Mr. Jekielek: I appreciate that. It has been way too long since we last spoke, and it's been four years since you were on the show. You were one of the earlier guests on the show when American Thought Leaders first began back in 2019. We talked about your area of expertise, which is the demographic realities around China and Chinese Communist Party policy. We're going to talk about that today, but first, let’s talk about how this intersects with the current harsh realities of the real estate market in China. Mr. Mosher: The Chinese Communist Party's real estate sector is in the process of collapsing right now, and its collapse has taken longer than some of us expected. But when it happens, and it's beginning to happen now, it will take place much more quickly than anyone anticipated. The real estate sector of the Chinese economy is about 60 percent of the economy. It's where much of the wealth of the Chinese people is invested, and that wealth is going to disappear overnight. But what I really would like to start with, Jan, is how this works at the local level. I was in China back in 1980. I was the first American social scientist allowed on the ground in China to actually live and work among the villagers in China who were then living in people's communes that were dissolved the year after I left. I have been back many times since then. But my affection and my love for the Chinese people, especially for people living in the countryside, has never waned. I've always been fighting for them. Of course, they are the chief victims of the Chinese Communist Party. Everyone in China, aside from Communist Party members, is a victim of the Chinese Communist Party. But the people in the cities have been treated a lot better than the people in the countryside. Here's what happens in the countryside on the property side of the equation. You will have local officials coming in from the township, the county-level government, or even the next level up, which is the perpetual level, saying, "We are going to raze this village to the ground and we are going to build an apartment complex on the ground where it stood." They will give the local villagers little or nothing in compensation for destroying their houses and taking their land. That's why we frequently see riots in China that are put down by the Communist Party's riot police as people quite rightly object to having their homes destroyed. This is how it works. It's really a scam on the part of these local Communist officials. They will go to a local builder and a local bank and say, "We have this plot of land." They won't say they stole it from the peasants, but they did. "We have this plot of land and we would like the construction company to build a high rise apartment building on it, and we would like you, the local people's bank, to loan us the money to do that." They all meet in a back room somewhere and work out how to split the cash and the proceeds. The expectation is that these poor villagers who have had their homes destroyed will have no choice but to buy apartments to live in, because otherwise they would be homeless. Who benefits from this? It is the local officials at the bank and the construction company and the local communist officials who are all on the take. Who suffers from this? It’s the villagers who have suffered twice. Not only do they have their homes destroyed, they are then virtually forced by local officials to buy into this apartment complex and further enrich the corrupt communist officials. That's how the property scam works on the local level. You can magnify that to the prefectural level, to the provincial level, and to the national level. You can see how companies like Evergrande got to be the size that they are today. You can see how this is a giant Ponzi scheme and now China has overbuilt. They've got 70 or 80 million empty apartment buildings. This is a stock that would take a generation to sell down, even if they built nothing new, and there are now too few people to buy those apartment buildings. The economy, this giant Ponzi scheme built on this type of real estate development, is in the middle of collapsing right before our very eyes. That's why Evergrande has begun to declare bankruptcy and can no longer issue bonds, because no one will buy their junk bonds to build apartment buildings that no one will ever occupy. Mr. Jekielek: There's another element that we typically hear about, which is about the people actually investing in these apartments. On the one hand there is this appropriation, this taking of the land, and the building of these high rises and forcing people to buy in. The more well-known piece is the investment piece. Please tell me how that fits into the equation here. Mr. Mosher: I was talking about the 500 million people in the countryside and how this overbuilding occurs and how local corrupt officials take advantage of it. In the cities, it works somewhat differently, because the people in the cities are not generally going to have their homes destroyed in order to force them to buy new ones. There is a lack of investment opportunities in China, because people don't trust the stock market, which they think quite rightly is rigged by the government to produce certain returns and certain results. Everything can disappear overnight if the government regulations change or if the government comes in and expropriates the company. The people in the cities really only have one investment they can make with the money they're trying to save, and that is an investment in an apartment building. But they're not buying a completed apartment, and here's where the scam is. They're buying on speculation that next year they will be the owners of an apartment building, which actually has yet to be built. They put down a lot of money by way of down payments. They're paying a construction company to construct an apartment building in real time with their investment. This is now happening all over China in city, after city, after city. An apartment building will be half-constructed, and maybe the concrete walls and the roof are on, but none of the interior work has been completed. That is because the builder is going bankrupt, much like Evergrande, the second-largest developer in the country, is going bankrupt. What happens then? All of those thousands of people who invested their life savings in this dream apartment, will see their dream turn into a nightmare. They've lost their money. That's why in the cities we see gatherings of people outside of real estate development companies, outside of local banks, and outside of local party official offices protesting against what is actually the theft of their life savings. That is what happens in the cities. In the countryside, it's out-and-out expropriation and theft. In the cities, it's more subtle. But at the end of the day, you achieve the same end. You impoverish the people, and you enrich the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Jekielek: You describe this and other aspects of how the CCP treats its people as wanton destruction of human capital. That's very interesting and let’s explore that. But the common mantra that you hear again and again in legacy media and that is accepted as fact, is that the Chinese Communist Party has lifted millions upon millions of people out of poverty. They have this success, but despite this success, there are these problems. How does that square with your description of this wanton destruction of human capital? Mr. Mosher: The Chinese people have lifted themselves out of poverty. The Chinese people are the most industrious, intelligent people on the face of the Earth. Given half a chance they will improve their surroundings, and they will improve their living standards for themselves and their families. Under the reforms that succeeded the death of Mao Zedong and with the rise of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese people were given that half a chance. The Chinese people's communes were dissolved, and farmers were given their land back to farm their own crops and make profits from doing so. People in the cities were allowed to start small businesses and even larger enterprises. The Chinese Communist Party fed off all of this and took a large part of the wealth that was generated. As you probably know, the Chinese Communist Party's operations take about one sixth of the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] of the country every year. It is to pay the salaries of Communist Party officials and to provide them with housing, free meals, transportation, foreign junkets, and exclusive resorts in China. Another one sixth of the economy is taken by corruption. It's easily one sixth, and it may be more. Together, that is one third of the Chinese economy disappearing into the pockets and the overseas bank accounts of the Chinese Communist Party. But even with those headwinds, even with the corruption, and even with the oppression, the Chinese people were able to improve their lot. Those days are now over because Xi Jinping is a committed communist. He is expropriating the wealth of billionaires. The most dangerous place to be a billionaire in the world today, unless your name is Donald Trump, is to be a billionaire in China. They have been arrested, and they have been suicided. They tend to jump off the 14th story of a high rise apartment building, committing suicide. There are all kinds of ways in which Chinese Communist Party officials are now expropriating the wealth that very intelligent and hardworking, entrepreneurially-minded Chinese have managed to accumulate over the last few decades. Again, this ends badly. If you destroy the wealth-creating class of the country, you destroy the economy of the country. The other thing that enabled China's rise was the United States. Without U.S. financing, without access to the U.S. domestic consumer market, the largest market in the world, and without U.S. technology, stolen in most cases, China would not have been able to develop. I attribute the improvement in the living standards of the Chinese people to the hardworking Chinese people themselves, combined with the rather foolish foreign policy of the United States for the last few decades of enabling the rise of a Chinese Communist Party that wants to dominate not only its own people, but the whole world. Mr. Jekielek: That is true. You're going way back to the policies of the Great Leap Forward. I've heard many different estimates of the death toll from the policies of the Great Leap Forward. They're in the tens of millions of unnatural deaths, with cannibalism and all of these very extreme situations. Rising from that is not difficult in a sense, as long as you change really terrible policy. Mr. Mosher: I was living in Junan Commune in the Pearl River delta of Guangdong province, about 80 miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong. I speak, read and write Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese, and I got to know the people in the village. They told me that their lives were worse under communist rule than they had been before the revolution. They proved that by taking me out to a graveyard in the countryside where 400 people from the village were buried. These were all people who died in the famine after the Great Leap Forward, which destroyed agricultural production, which diverted manpower that should have been planting and harvesting crops, and that should have been building dams on the Pearl River, which promptly washed away during the spring rains. The 400 people from my village of a couple of thousand people were those who had perished in 1960, 1961, and early 1962 as a result of the biggest man made famine in human history. The estimate that I use, Jan, is more than tens of millions—it is actually about 50 million. That estimate comes from Chen Yichu, the former head of the Institute for Agrarian Reform in China under the old Communist Party dictator, Zhao Ziyang, decades ago. He surveyed all of the provinces of China and put together the estimate of 50 million people. That's just part of the death toll caused by the Chinese Communist Party. It was a result of Mao's policies and his drive towards overnight communization of the economy, which simply destroyed agriculture and led to the deaths of tens of millions. People in the cities didn't die in those numbers, they tightened their belts. But in the countryside, entire villages were wiped out. There are villages that no longer exist in China because every living soul died in 1960 and 1961. Mr. Jekielek: Please lay out for me how the CCP enacts this wanton destruction of human capital, again in the context of the very significant economic growth since that time. Mr. Mosher: When I was in China, the one-child policy began. Hands down, that was the largest destruction of human capital that the world has ever seen. Up until a few years ago, Communist Party leaders in China were actually bragging about having eliminated 400 million people from the Chinese population through forced abortion. In fact, back in 2012, in Washington DC, I was in a meeting with the former Minister of Health of the People's Republic of China, who claimed that number of births had been averted by the one-child policy. Now it turns out that you can't kill off 400 million of the most productive, enterprising, hard working people on the planet without doing severe damage to your economy over time. That is in fact what has happened. Not only is the loss of all those children a huge human tragedy, so is the forced abortions and sterilization of all of those women, who suffered greatly mentally and physically. But think about what that means now in terms of 70 million empty apartment buildings. The young men and women who would have married and started families and purchased those apartment buildings perhaps were killed decades ago. You cannot bring them back to life now. By killing off half of the last two generations, the Chinese Communist Party has killed off its future, literally. The only future that a family has is its children, and the only future that a nation has are its families and its children. The Chinese Communist Party, by far the biggest killing machine in human history, has killed off China's economic future by means of 35 years of the one-child policy. They didn't wake up to that fact until 2016. That policy effectively went into place in Guangdong Province in 1980 when I was first there, and it ended in 2016. Why? Because the Chinese Communist Party woke up to the fact that at that time it had a labor shortage of 4.1 million workers in the country. How do you create a labor shortage in the most populous country on earth? Killing off 400 million people will pretty much put you in that position. Since then, the Chinese Communist Party has been making increasingly desperate efforts to get the birth rate up. They announced a two-child policy in 2016, expecting a baby boom. They got a little tiny boomlet and then the birth rate continued to fall. It was a year-and-a-half ago they announced that they were moving to a three-child policy. They said to the Chinese people, the surviving young men and young women who had survived the one-child policy, "You can now be fruitful and multiply." The young people in China said, "No, we're not interested. You've told us for almost four decades that children are expensive, and that we should stop at one child. Now, you're telling us that we should have two or three. We're not interested." Marriage rates continue to decline in China and the birth rate continues to decline. The birth rate now is probably the lowest that we have seen in China over the last century. There were fewer than 10 million babies born in China last year. Even though there are very few forced abortions now in China, except for among minorities and persecuted groups, there are now many more abortions in China than there are live births, which again does not bode well for the future of the country. It's astonishing to me that Deng Xiaoping fell for the Western idea of overpopulation back in 1980 and announced a one-child policy, thinking that was going to be the high road to economic development, to China joining the first rank of nations, and to the Communist Party being empowered by economic growth to build a military capable of dominating the world. They thought that in the 1980s. Now, they're beginning to realize that they have in effect strangled in the cradle the China dream of world domination. Because with China's economy on the downturn, with China's population aging and dying more rapidly than any human population has in the history of the planet, the 21st century will not belong to China, in part because of the continued misrule of the Chinese Communist Party. But in large part it’s because of the killing off of half of the last two generations. I've made projections looking into the future that show that by 2070 or maybe as early as 2060, the population of the United States will probably be larger than that of the population of China. Communist parties always kill. Sometimes they kill slowly, and sometimes they kill quickly by execution. The one-child policy has been a slow death warrant for the Chinese people. By the end of this coming century, if the birth rate stays at around one per woman over her reproductive lifetime, we're looking at only having about 400 million Chinese alive down from 1.4 billion today. That's the achievement of the Chinese Communist Party—the killing off of the majority of the Chinese people over time. Mr. Jekielek: There's a whole school of thought in the West that would say that's a good thing, a Malthusian view of the world. I want to talk about that in a moment. Before we go there, please tell me about these statistics. Both you and I know, statistics coming out of the Chinese regime mean very little. Can you explain to me how you get your statistics, including that projection that you've just made? Mr. Mosher: Here's what the government is saying, and the Chinese Communist Party's statistics are always massaged for propaganda purposes, so you have to read between the lines. In fact, sometimes what they claim is exactly the opposite of the truth. In 2016, when they ended the one-child policy, they predicted that the total fertility rate, that is the number of babies born to every woman over her reproductive lifetime, would increase to 1.8 children, still below the replacement rate. Replacement rate fertility is 2.1 children. With 2.1 children, you have zero population growth over time. The population basically stabilizes. It doesn't grow, and it doesn't shrink. Then 1.8 would still be below replacement rate fertility, but it would be much better than it had been. But China's birth rate did not recover, and it continued to fall. The number of births that the government reports in 2022, and again, this comes from a Chinese Communist Party State Statistical Bureau, is 9.56 million children born. The State Statistical Bureau has now admitted that China has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. The official figure is 1.09 children per woman, let's just say about one child per woman over her reproductive lifetime. The fact they would admit that number, Jan, means that the real number is probably lower. The real number is probably lower than one. I say that because if you look at Hong Kong, the birth rate now in Hong Kong is 0.8 child per woman. That's less than one child per woman over a reproductive lifetime. and that's where China's population is headed. The other thing I would say is the population of China is smaller than the 1.4 billion claimed. I say that because officials at all levels get subsidies from the central government based on how many people they have under their control. Schools get subsidies based on how many students they have, and hospitals get subsidies based on how many patients they have. Everyone has an incentive to exaggerate the numbers to increase the number of state subsidies. If you look at real enrollment numbers later on in high school and in college, you see that the numbers of students enrolled are smaller than what you would expect from the official numbers. The population of China is somewhat below 1.4 billion even now. Clearly, there has been a systematic exaggeration of the number of births in China over the last few decades. For the first time since Mao Zedong's great famine in 1961, where we talked about 50 million people dying, China's population is actually decreasing from year to year. China is filling fewer cradles than coffins today, and that's a sad, sad fact. That means the demographic dividend that you got from having very few children, and from young people staying in the workforce, especially young women, contributed to China's rapid economic growth. It contributed to the military buildup, and it contributed to its strategic expansion. That demographic dividend is gone. Instead, as the number of working age people declines, we will see labor costs go up. China hasn't transitioned to a rich country yet. It is still a middle income country. You can say, “Japan got old, South Korea got old, and Taiwan got old." A lot of countries in the world have gotten old over time. We see that in Europe as well. But all of those countries got rich before they grew old. They grew rich before they grew old, which meant they had the resources to continue to prosper even as the population was aging and the workforce was starting to level out and shrink. China doesn't have that luxury. China is still a middle income country, and it is still relatively poor. Hundreds of millions of people are still relatively poor in China. China is growing old before it grew rich, and there's no way out of that demographic trap that the Chinese Communist Party has set for the Chinese people. This is a baby bust, and that explains why China's economy will have a hard time recovering from its current problems, regardless of what mix of economic incentives the government puts in place. Regardless of how much they lower the interest rates or try to subsidize exports or engage in any of the other things that they would like to do, they can't make up for 400 million missing people. They can't make up for a hundred million empty cradles. That resource which is the ultimate resource, the human being, cannot be replaced. It is irreplaceable. Mr. Jekielek: In line with your description of this wanton destruction of human capital, according to the Chinese Communist Party, human beings can be used at will, as fodder for development or for whatever the purpose the CCP may deem necessary. What you're describing is a very scary situation. I wonder what extreme methods they might cook up to deal with this intractable problem. Mr. Mosher: Yes, you're absolutely right. The Chinese Communist Party has always treated the Chinese masses, and I've never liked the term masses, because that's dehumanizing in itself, but they've always treated the Chinese masses as a kind of inexhaustible resource that they could squander at will. They think, "We're going to build communism tomorrow, and it doesn't matter if we kill 10 or 20 percent of the population off. We're headed for paradise." Actually, it does matter over time. I'm sure that neither Deng Xiaoping nor Xi Jinping ever imagined the one-child policy would result in the death of the China dream, but it has. Let's talk more about the numbers and then let's talk about what the Chinese Communist Party might do in the extreme when it really gets pushed into a corner by the demographic trap that it set for itself. If you crunch the numbers as I have, and see that the population birth rate stabilizes at 1.1 child per woman, then the population of China declines to 440 million by 2100, less than the current population of the U.S. If the unwillingness of young Chinese women to get married and have children continues, which is happening in real time, and the birth rate falls to 0.8, which is where it is in Hong Kong, then there will only be 310 million people alive in China by the end of the century. You can see what I mean when I say China's demographic collapse is coming. What will the Chinese Communist Party do? It has already tried to start increasing the birth rate. Just a couple of weeks ago, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping, who is the chairman of everything in China, said that the members of the People's Liberation Army are now being encouraged to have three children. Now, they use the word encourage. But of course what that means in practice is that it is an order. Your commander-in-chief says, "Be fruitful and multiply.” If you have children, then your promotions are going to be pegged to whether or not you obey that command. With the group that is most immediately under his control, Xi has already ordered them to have three children to stave off the demographic collapse. In fact, several years ago, the Communist Party itself had announced that young Communist Party members should marry and have at least two children, and that has now been increased to three. Again, the people under their control, the party members, are being told they must have children. The other sign of the times is that the government is now setting up sperm banks throughout China and encouraging young men to donate their sperm. They haven't set up egg banks yet, and maybe that's coming. Young women could be told to donate their eggs for in vitro fertilization and raising test tube babies, experiments for which we know are going on in China today. But I'm afraid that what they will do is a simpler solution technologically. Young women will not be told to donate their eggs. They'll be told to donate their uterus and themselves. They will be told that for the good of the country, for the good of China's prosperity, and for the good of the future of China, they must consent to have children. There will be quotas announced and there will be penalties for not obeying. If all that sounds like something that no government would ever do to its people, you have to remember that's exactly what the Chinese Communist Party did to young women for 35 years. They told young women who got pregnant before the age of 21 that they must get an abortion. They told young women who got pregnant before they were married that they must get an abortion. They told young women who were married, but conceived a child outside of the quota system without the permission of the government, that they must get an abortion. They told young women who had one child that they must now be sterilized. In a top-down fashion, China has controlled the fertility of the country for decades, in order to drive down the fertility. What would stand in the way of the Chinese Communist Party from doing the opposite—using young women as a captive reproductive force to repopulate the country, now that they have effectively sent it in a downward spiral demographically? I can't see any moral reasons or any ethical reasons why the Communist Party would hesitate to do that for a minute. In 1958, Chairman Mao himself said, "We plan the production of steel, we plan the production of coal, but we don't plan the reproduction of people. We should set up a state agency to control reproduction in the same way that we control production." That little snippet of his speech was edited out of his collective works, but we now know it existed. Mao's idea back in the 1950s was that you need to control reproduction in the same way you control production. If you need fewer babies, you abort. If you need more babies, you forcibly impregnate. Before the end of the century, and maybe before the end of this decade, we will see forced pregnancy in one form or another in China. It's a logical outcome of the situation that they are in. Mr. Jekielek: This speaks to this hubris of total control, imagining you can control human beings in such draconian ways. It's a logical corollary to everything that's been done up to now. There is a recent piece by Ashley Rindsberg in Tablet Magazine about Western journalists and scientific minds believing statistics coming out of China. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Covid death toll, which was stuck at 5,000 for a long time. This helped to endorse some of these horrific zero-Covid lockdown policies, which have had such a terrible toll on society. Mr. Mosher: Absolutely. The Chinese Communist Party lies with their published statistics. With the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, as far back as September of 2019, they lied for months about its existence. They failed to reveal for months the existence of a new and deadly coronavirus that was out and about in the population. When they finally admitted they had a problem on or around January 1st, 2020, they told the visiting head of the World Health Organization,Tedros Ghebreyesus, that it was under control, and that they only had a few cases. They said that they were effectively treating them by putting those people who were ill with Covid on respirators and using Remdesivir and some other drugs, which have proved not to be as effective as originally claimed. They claimed great success in dealing with the coronavirus epidemic, at the same time that they were sending plane loads of people who were potentially infected with the coronavirus to places like Milan, Rome, Madrid, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, effectively spreading a highly infectious respiratory virus around the world. Because they claimed their own death rate was so low due to their effective quarantines, zero-Covid policy, and locking people in their apartments, the rest of the world, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, believed that China had the magic solution to containing Covid and tried to adopt the same policies in the United States. I actually wrote a book about this, Jan, called, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics, in which I showed that Fauci, the CDC, the FDA, and other agencies were modeling their response to the coronavirus epidemic on China's supposedly successful strategy. Of course, it wasn't successful at all. We knew in real time in March and April of 2020 about the smokestacks of the crematoria in Wuhan. There were 14 crematoria in and around the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, that were going day and night. Those ovens were going day and night to cremate the bodies of those who had died from coronavirus. The official death toll of a few hundred, then becoming a few thousand was nonsense. There were tens of thousands of deaths. In April 2020 I wrote a piece saying at least 50 to 60,000 people had died in Wuhan alone, and that it was spreading beyond Wuhan to the province of Hubei and other cities in China in real time. Their numbers were clearly fabricated. The incredible naivete of some of our scientists in looking to China for a solution to contain what was basically an uncontainable, highly transmissible, airborne respiratory virus makes absolutely no sense at all, unless they were trying to distract attention from their own failures in handing over the technology and the funding to allow China to develop this thing in the first place. That's the conclusion that I was forced to reach. A lot of people in the years since have come to that same conclusion. We should never look to China and the Chinese Communist Party for advice on anything, least of all for a model on how to treat an infectious disease which came from China. Mr. Jekielek: The death toll from Covid was much, much greater early on. Some people in the health freedom movement believed that it was purely propaganda coming out of China deliberately, that convinced the West to follow these draconian policies. But it's more similar to what you just said. Some leaders in the West have an admiration for the CCP’s ability to control. There is also an inability to see the incredible failures that have come out of a totalitarian structure like communist China. That seems to me to be the real lesson. We need to understand that they have this mentality that people aren't really human beings. What would you expect from this mentality? The West doesn’t truly understand this yet. Mr. Mosher: No, I don't think it is understood by the majority of people. However, the globalists and the elites have understood the lesson quite well. With China's zero-Covid policies, they see an ability to totally control a population, to indeed lock them in their apartment buildings while they starve to death or run out of vital medications and die from disease, or in despair throw themselves off their balconies as they're starving to death. The zero-Covid policies in China, which were again illustrated just last year when they locked down 20 some million people in Shanghai in their apartments, is really an expression of the total control that the Chinese Communist Party has been striving for since its founding back in 1921. It found its fullest expression in the zero-Covid policies, which I have written about. They are not just an expression of totalitarianism perfected, but they are also a preparation for war. Because in a wartime scenario, you would like the ability to lock everyone on their job sites to keep them producing weapons or vital foodstuffs, or to lock everyone in their apartments to prevent them from engaging in popular demonstrations, riots, or unrest. With the zero-Covid policies, which killed a lot more people than the weaker variant of the coronavirus did in Shanghai at that time last year, the head of the lockdown in Shanghai was actually promoted to be a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of Xi Jinping. Why? Because he followed orders and was willing to kill his own people in order to do the bidding of the supreme leader of the Chinese Communist Party. Every would-be dictator in the world; every Leftist, every Marxist, every communist, and everyone who hungered for more control and power looked at the Chinese model and found a perfect justification for imposing controls on their own people. We saw that in New Zealand, where the former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, locked down the entire country, forbade people from going out of their homes for months on end, and forbade people from going to funerals for loved ones who had died. She was encouraging neighbors to report on each other if they saw anyone leaving the perimeter of their house and their yard. This draconian lockdown really had no equal in a democratic country. We saw the same thing in Australia where many Australian states, especially Victoria in the south around the city of Melbourne, adopted Chinese-style lockdowns. All of the people who followed in lockstep with that were people who had socialist orientations, Marxist orientations, or Leftist orientations. In the United States, we saw the blue states engage in much harsher lockdowns than the red states, which still respected the freedom and liberty of their people to make health decisions for themselves and their families. Down here in Naples, Florida, from where I'm speaking right now, the city did not lock down. The county commissioners voted three to two not to lock down. The mayor came to me and said, "What about masking? Should we mandate masking?" I said, "No. People should be free to decide for themselves whether or not masks work or whether they're useless, whether or not they want to be exposed to a virus and get a cold, or whether they want to wear a mask and shelter in place in their homes." That's the policy they adopted. But in blue states, run by people with dictatorial tendencies who consciously or subconsciously hungered for total control, you saw exactly the opposite response. You saw overreach again and again and again. We see the same overreach now in the efforts of the World Health Organization to take control of the world by putting in place a pseudo-treaty that would allow it to take over a health response for any epidemic, pandemic, or global threat that it declared. That's the kind of ceding of our sovereignty that I hope we never consent to. Unfortunately, some American politicians, including the people in the White House, seem eager to sign on to this treaty. It should not be allowed to happen. Mr. Jekielek: We have covered the pandemic treaty and the international health regulations a number of times on this show. I'll direct some of our viewers to the recent interview with Dr. David Bell. I want to go back to fertility. As human beings, we are susceptible to being propagandized to indoctrination, especially when the same things are repeated in all sorts of ways from all sides. We form this perception of consensus, and I'm wondering what your view on this is. Not only are these birth rates low in communist China, but they're low everywhere in the West. Is this a consequence of accepting Paul Ehrlich's overpopulation view of the world? If we decide to start teaching ourselves that having children is really good and important, can we shift that view? Is there something else in the air that's keeping these birth rates down, not just in totalitarian regimes like China, but in every Western country? Mr. Mosher: This is a very personal question for me. I was an eyewitness to forced abortions on women in China who were seven months, eight months, nine months pregnant, or who in some cases were in the very process of giving birth, with the infant being killed on the delivery table. Those kinds of atrocities brought home to me the value of human life. In my own life, when I married and began to have children with my wife, we decided to be generous with having children, and we wound up with nine. I have joked for a long time that for many years the Chinese Communist Party had orders to sterilize me on sight, because I had long since violated the one-child policy. What I came to see in China with their utter disregard for human life led me to value human life in a way that I hadn't when I was at Stanford University. Paul Ehrlich was a colleague of mine at Stanford University. I was in the anthropology department, and he was in the biology department. His book, The Population Bomb, sold 4 million copies. It convinced millions upon millions of people in the United States, and probably tens of millions of people around the world, that the socially responsible thing to do was not to have children. The exact opposite happens to be the case. But that propaganda was very effective. A year later, the graduating valedictorian at Yale University gave a speech in which she broke down and cried. She talked about overpopulation and how she and her classmates would never be able to have children. Because if they did, they would be contributing to the problem of overpopulation, and that humanity was breeding itself off the planet. You could see that she was completely torn up about this. She had been propagandized to the point where her head overruled her heart. I don't know what she went on to do, but she certainly had been propagandized into believing that she could not be selfish and have children. Of course, we now know that children and people are the ultimate resource. We know that every brain comes with two hands attached. We know that people, given half a chance, will strive to improve their conditions of life and their living standard for themselves and their family. We know that as humanity's population has increased over the centuries from 100 million to 300 million to 500 million to the present day, that as our numbers have grown, our prosperity has grown even faster, and in fact, much, much faster. As our numbers have grown, we have become better fed, our lifespans have increased, and we're better educated than ever before. As our numbers start to shrink, we will start losing some of those gains that have been brought about, because you had all of these hundreds of millions of creative intelligences working together to make life better for themselves and their families. We see the decline in birth rates in the West occurring voluntarily, as opposed to a situation like we saw in China with the one-child policy. The government is not an innocent bystander in all of this. Governments that take a third to half of your income by way of taxes are themselves driving down the fertility rate. I've long argued that if we want to get the birth rate back up in the United States, France or Great Britain, and Hungary has done a lot on this already, we need to shelter young couples from taxes so that young couples who are willing to marry and have children should be sheltered from all taxes, including Social Security. Perhaps they should be a third sheltered with one child, and two thirds with two children. If they have three children, they should not be paying into Social Security, because they're providing for the future of the elderly in the United States by raising future taxpayers. If you tax them as well, they are in effect being double taxed, as compared to a single person with no children. If we could simply get the government out of the way in the United States, the birth rate would return to above the replacement rate, which is where we need it to be. Young women in the United States say that they hope to have two-and-a-half children on average. They wind up now with about 1.7 children. Why? Because life doesn't always work out the way you want it to, because taxes are getting higher, because inflation is eating away at your income, because you have student loan debt to pay back, and because the young man you would have married has become addicted to pornography on the internet or video games. There are all sorts of factors at work here. We simply need to get the government out of the way and encourage young couples to be generous and have two children to stave off a population disaster. It doesn't take everyone to marry, it only takes about a quarter of the population. If you could simply enable about 25 percent of young people in the United States to act on their fertility desires and have the three children that they would like to have and everyone else can have two or one or none, we would still be fine, demographically speaking. Right now, that's not the case. Mr. Jekielek: Steven, a final thought as we finish up? Mr. Mosher: As always, we have to keep in our hearts and minds the suffering of the Chinese people at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. They are the first and foremost victims of the Chinese Communist Party. We also have to realize that we should never, under any circumstances, however dangerous they may seem, learn any lessons or take any advice from the Chinese Communist Party, which has effectively been in a Cold War with the United States since the founding of the People's Republic of China. Mr. Jekielek: Steven Mosher, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Mosher: Thank you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Steven Mosher and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (54 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1026StevenMosher Epoch Original DVD collection:

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“People are looking for something to find hope in … because so much of music and movies and television spits in their face—for lack of a better term—insults them for having very simple, fundamental values, for having children, for caring about your family, for wanting to make decisions about your own body.” In this episode, I sit down with Matt Azrieli and Brad Skistimas, the latter of whom is also known as Five Times August. Mr. Azrieli co-founded The Post Millennial and is now CEO of Baste Records—a new music label for artists who refuse to conform to political and cultural orthodoxies. Baste just released Five Times August’s new single: “‘Ain't No Rock and Roll’ was sort-of my response to all of my musical heroes that didn't show up over the last three years. With COVID, and just worldwide tyranny, there was never a better time to speak up against 'the Man,' and very, very, very few of my heroes showed up to the fight,” says Mr. Skistimas. Watch the clip: “You look at what Rolling Stone did, and how they lionized the Boston bomber: People don't forget, and people understand now," says Mr. Azrieli. "Rolling Stone Magazine—it’s certainly not a countercultural magazine anymore, right? It's another tentacle of power,” says Mr. Azrieli. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (50 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1024MatAzrieliBradSkistima FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Brad Skistimas, Matt Azrieli, such a pleasure to have you both on American Thought Leaders. Matt Azrieli: Thanks for having us. Brad Skistimas: It's great to be here. Mr. Jekielek: Brad, you are better known as Five Times August. You’re now signed with Baste Records, which is incredible. You've got a really wonderful, thoughtful music video out. Let’s start with a quick clip of Ain't No Rock and Roll. Where did this come from? Mr. Skistimas: This song, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” was my response to all of my musical heroes that didn't show up over the last three years. With Covid and worldwide tyranny, there was never a better time to speak up against the man, and very few of my heroes showed up for the fight. This was my musical response to those guys. Mr. Jekielek: It is shocking that people that made their names by essentially speaking truth to power were suddenly absent. Mr. Skistimas: It is amazing because when you think about the counter-cultural movement of the '60s and the energy that was behind it, now it seems like so much of it was a sham. Mr. Jekielek: Was it really a sham or did people change their minds? I've heard both theories. Mr. Skistimas: In my opinion, a lot of it is demographic. There were many younger people around the time of the '60s, and as a result you had certain economic and social considerations, just the result of an old regime being replaced by a younger regime. Unfortunately, the children of the '60s are still an extremely significant demographic in the United States. They do not under any circumstances want to surrender power economically or politically, and this is symbolic of that. Mr. Jekielek: You've done a bunch of songs now. This new one that you've just launched is one of the tamer ones of your recent set. How did you end up doing these songs? Mr. Skistimas: I spent a lot of 2020 examining what was happening in the world and thinking about the future that was being made for my kids. I felt like I had a platform as a musical artist. I was looking around and wondering why my heroes weren't speaking up. I decided to step forward and start releasing these songs and say something musically, not just as an artist, but also for the sake of my kids' future. I didn't want them to look back on this time and wonder why dad didn't say anything about what was happening in the world. Mr. Jekielek: The song, “Fight For You,” makes me think of that. Mr. Skistimas: Yes, exactly. That one was for my kids, and it was for parents in this movement. Children are actually at the forefront of this fight. Mr. Jekielek: You have not been treated very well by the music industry, aside from a few outliers here, Brad. Mr. Skistimas: Yes. You really learn who your friends are the moment you dip your toe into this water and start speaking out about what's important to you. I lost a lot of friends in the music industry, but also gained a lot of new musical friends, and that's really exciting to see. It let me know that I wasn't alone. Mr. Jekielek: How did you come across Five Times August, Matt? Mr. Azrieli: Brad's a phenomenal talent. He's not only a phenomenal songwriter, he puts together the music videos for his songs. He's the artist behind the videos. My first exposure to Brad was through the music video for, “Sad Little Man,” and I thought it was phenomenal. The team loves Brad. With Baste Records, it's not a matter of partisan politics or Left or Right, it's a matter of creating a new culture. That's what a guy like Brad does, he's a creator. Rather than somebody who's just going out there being acrimonious, he's actually trying to say something. Mr. Jekielek: How did you guys meet? Mr. Azrieli: Brad, we first met in person in Austin, correct? Mr. Skistimas: Yes, that's true. I was introduced to Baste through Chad Prather who told me about you. Then you guys invited me down to Austin for the Minds Fest conference. We all hung out that night and I got to know the guys pretty well. Mr. Jekielek: Wait, you're saying that I was there too? Mr. Skistimas: You were there too with your producer Karys, a wonderful lady, not too far off camera. It was a great event. Brad was there, along with Winston Marshall of Mumford & Sons who played a couple of songs. We had Jeffrey Steele and Ira Dean, two very big songwriters out of Nashville who played their big hit song for Aaron Lewis, “Am I the Only One?” It was a lot of fun. Mr. Jekielek: Matt, tell me about the different artists that you've signed or that you are looking at. Have you reached out to Oliver Anthony? Mr. Azrieli: He wrote that great song, “North of Richmond,” a really incredible, amazing song, especially that first verse. That really hit a lot of people right between the eyes. We reached out to congratulate him. Obviously, if he ever approached us, we'd love to work with him too. In terms of the artists I'm trying to work with, it's about the aesthetic and the quality of the music, but it's also about finding people who are easy to work with and receptive. We're working with Brad at Five Times August. We're working with Chad Prather who also has a show on The Blaze. He has a real Will Rogers-type, humorous quality to him. We have Chris Wallin, a fantastic songwriter in Nashville who is working with songwriting talent all over town. We found one incredible song called, “I'd Be Jolly Too.” Chad has cut it and it's going to be a wonderful Christmas song. It's raunchy, fun, and full of energy. We're also working with Hi-Rez who recently put out his Trump the Don series. I'm sure that you heard, “First Day Out.” He did an AI Trump parody rap. We're going to put out his incredible song this November about our need to protect the Second Amendment and his personal experiences with it, which have been heart-wrenching. We're in talks with Afroman to do a parody of, “Because I Got High,” called, “Because Hunter Got High.” The point is you have to have fun. Mr. Skistimas: The new single, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” is a group of superstars from Nashville, as well as Pete Parada from The Offspring, who was unfortunately kicked out of his band for not getting his shot, but he plays drums on it. Ira Dean is on bass who's a mega star. Chris, who we mentioned a few times, produced the track, is a mega superstar. Tom Bukovac is on guitars, who is a great Nashville guitar player, along with Jim Moose Brown who played with Steve Miller's band. It is all like-minded, freedom-loving musicians who are on the track. Mr. Azrieli: That's the other important thing about Nashville, by the way. Nashville is the one place where you can find like-minded, talented people who are just incredible musicians. A lot of them aren't being given their due because of their opinions. Actually, that is we started the office in Nashville, specifically to find those people and work with them. Mr. Jekielek: In these times, it's hard to imagine how it could be profitable to do what you're doing. Mr. Azrieli: You make a great point. I ran a big conservative news website called The Post Millennial. Right around the time that Covid hit, and then during Summer of Love, we had a really fantastic journalist who still works there, Andy Ngo, who covered Antifa and what Antifa was doing in Portland. We had another wonderful guy, Harry Hoffman, in Seattle. We had the Pacific Northwest covered, and as a result, we had tons and tons of boycotts. The thing that I learned about conservative media is that people are looking for something to find hope in. They're looking for art and culture because so much of music and movies and television spits in their face, for lack of a better term. It insults them for having very simple, fundamental values, for having children, for caring about your family, and for wanting to make decisions about your own body. You're right, no business is guaranteed to be profitable. However, I believe, at least in terms of the mission, that we have to exist, and this kind of art has to exist. The success of this kind of art is inevitable. God willing, there will be proper stewardship and I won't do anything stupid. God willing, it will succeed. Mr. Jekielek: The Post Millennial has been a very important media property in the ecosystem, which of course we look at very often. People are absolutely looking for something approximating straight up news. Mr. Azrieli: Yes, absolutely. For example, Tim Pool is an extremely talented guy and he reads The Post Millennial. Other than Timcast, if he's reading something, it's often The Post Millennial. You mentioned that people at Epoch Times are reading us too. When I founded The Post Millennial, that was the entire idea. I looked at conservative media and I saw that everybody was reacting to the New York Times, or in my case to CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. But there was very little on-the-ground reporting, and very little simple relaying of the facts was being done. We can't always be on the back foot. We have to be creating art. By the same token, we have to be reporting the news and doing it well. You saw what happened during Covid and how the bias was reflected in terms of the stories they wouldn't share and wouldn't report on. Reporting the news is what Epoch Times does very well, by the way. Mr. Jekielek: Brad, I first heard you at the DC Defeat the Mandates march. It was one of those moments where a whole lot of people got together to talk about many of the things that you write about in your songs and construct into your videos, which are remarkably creative. How did you come to this from doing kids' music? Please share your journey as a musician. Mr. Skistimas: I started Five Times August right after high school. For a good decade, I was touring colleges singing pop love songs. I had a lot of songs licensed to MTV shows and different indie films and commercials. That's what I was doing for a really long time. Then I took a break from that and started a whole new kids project called The Juicebox Jukebox. I was making the most pure music I could put out there about kindness and being thankful, but doing it in a hip way. My entire intention behind it was to create music that was fun for parents and teachers, so they could enjoy it just as much as the kids. Throughout that time I was making videos to go along with those songs. Then 2020 hits and I stop everything I'm doing musically. I was examining the world around me. I took that new skillset of making videos and turned them into what I am doing now with protest music. It was an interesting arc to go from starting Five Times August to becoming a dad. My headspace was focused on my kids and putting out that music, and then I pivoted into being a protest artist, of all things. I never would have thought that up myself, but that's where the road led me. Mr. Jekielek: Did you think to yourself, "I need to make protest music now. No one else is doing it, so I have to do it." Was that your thought process? Mr. Skistimas: Not necessarily, because they were speaking out a little bit. Tom MacDonald is a great example of somebody who really practices freedom of speech in his music, and he's been around doing it for a while. That let me know it was okay to start saying things that might be considered taboo. As a songwriter, I felt like I just had to vent. I released a song called, “God Help Us All, which was the first song that I put out in this trajectory. I thought that would be the one song, my one say on what was happening in the world. I started getting all this new feedback on that song which thanked me for saying what needed to be said. That let me know I wasn't alone. It also let me know that I needed to write more songs like that to let others know they weren't alone. Mr. Jekielek: You imagine protest movements to be bottom up and very grassroots like the truckers convoy in Canada. People who tracked it from the inside found it to be very grassroots. On the other hand, you also have protest movements like BLM [Black Lives Matter] which are very top down with huge amounts of money being pumped in from the top. Are they both protest movements? What do you think about that, Matt? Mr. Azrieli: In the United States there's one part of the political system that is very much in favor of certain kinds of protests, even violent protests. For example, in the United States, everybody was told, "You have to be inside. We're under lockdown." In Canada, we had a curfew. Then the Summer of Love came and suddenly you are told that you can go out and protest for racial justice, that looting is peaceful, and that you don't even need to be contact-traced if you're at these events. But regular people weren't allowed to go to the park. We gave up so many of our freedoms; freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, all in the name of a medical emergency. The reality is that we have to cherish our freedoms. Regardless of the reason, we can't surrender these fundamental freedoms, whatever they are, because they are what make us American or Canadian or part of the Western world. Mr. Skistimas: There is a clear system in place. There is one side of the aisle that has controlled the narrative where it’s okay to speak up for this one group of things, but if you speak up for this other group of things, it's not okay. This one group of things happens to have the megaphone, so you see a lot more of it in mainstream media, and that is what is pushed through the mainstream mass narrative. Then on the other side of things, there are these simple, fundamental values that are being attacked, and that is not okay. Mr. Azrieli: When I was running The Post Millennial, if you tried to post anything at all about Covid, even just a completely milk toast news story, algorithmically, you were getting annihilated, almost immediately. It was a problem for a non-mainstream publication to even talk about Covid at all. That's why it's so critical that we have Twitter now and that Musk has democratized it. For example, we would have had no idea about Israel and Gaza and what's really going on. It's extremely important that we have some semblance of reality that isn't just the New York Times. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. Please tell me about your journey from Post Millennial to Baste Records. Mr. Azrieli: The Post Millennial started out as a small blog about Canadian politics. I met Ali Taghva, a Persian Canadian journalist and entrepreneur, and still a wonderful friend of mine. We went out for Korean barbecue and that was the start of it. Admittedly, we had a more partisan approach than other news sources do. We had a far more classically partisan approach than The Epoch Times, for example. Over time, we found that simply reporting the facts was so difficult to come across in Canada, and we became one of the largest news sources in the country. There was a point where we were hitting between 3 and 4 million unique Canadian readers every single month. In terms of equivalent numbers in the United States, that's roughly 30 to 40 million people in terms of the size of the population. That was because in Canada, predating COVID, we had a very out-of-touch mainstream media. It's gotten to the point where you can't share news on social media anymore or on Facebook, because the government honestly believes that people are on Facebook to read the CBC, which is absurd. I don't think any of the three of us have ever gone on Facebook just to find a CBC article. I could be wrong. But the point is that these people live in a very narrow bubble of opinion. When you actually try to democratize media and share things with people, whether it's news or whether it's music, you're going to reach an audience, because there are people who are desperate to be represented in the media that they see. I had some success with Post Millennial, and I was blessed to have a wonderful team. We have a fantastic team at Baste Records as well. We have Chris Wallin who worked with Brad on this single. Chris is a number one hit songwriter who had a number one hit with Toby Keith, “Love Me If You Can,” which got replaced by another number one hit by Kenny Chesney, “Don't Blink,” which is a phenomenal song if you haven't heard it. We also have incredible people in operations and marketing. What we can achieve with Baste is a platform to start a real cultural movement. In the '60s, there were some incredibly talented filmmakers, songwriters, and poets who changed society. God willing, that's what we're going to have here at Baste, too. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about your vision for your writing and your music. Mr. Skistimas: What I try to bring back with the music I'm writing now is something with meaning, something with substance, and something that sounds like you haven't heard it in a while that's a little familiar, but also unfamiliar, like, “Where has that been?” That's the goal. It's what I love about music. It's what I grew up listening to, that music from the '50s and '60s and those artists that I admire. That's what I hope to bring back to music, because a lot of music right now in the mainstream is fluff and doesn't mean very much. It's really just marketing. For a really long time in Hollywood, we admired these people because they made a movie or because they made a song that we connect to. Then they win an award and they use that moment to pretty much tell us how to live or what we need to support. The average person is tired of that. What's going to be important moving forward is who's making the entertainment that we are all absorbing. Mr. Jekielek: When you're getting involved in culture, that is also telling people how they should live, isn't it? Mr. Skistimas: Culture matters. The stories that we tell each other matter, and the music we listen to matters, but it's not a command. I don't want to tell anybody that they have to do anything, but just give the suggestion that maybe you could be a nice person, maybe you should give people the freedom to make their own decisions, and maybe you should allow people to assemble freely. Those are the things we value. Mr. Jekielek: Brad, I want to go back to talking about the music that you made for kids. Today, it has become morally acceptable to manipulate people, but I doubt any of your songs are like that. Mr. Skistimas: Right, especially with the kids' music. That was the most pure, honest music I could put out into the world that had absolutely no agenda to it. It was a gift to other families to say, "When you need a break from the agenda stuff or you don't want to question what it is that your kids are watching, just listen to this music." Mr. Jekielek: There's a really excellent book titled, Cynical Theories, that explains the birth of woke culture and how it works. Specifically, it says that people who believe in this woke ideology have a very cynical view of humanity. They view every interaction, like ours right now for instance, to be a power play. It's just my attempt to exert power over you, and your attempt to exert power over me. That's how things work. When you say that kindness is incredibly important, that's actually a subversive thing in this day and age. What do you think, Matt? Mr. Azrieli: Yes, to be earnestly kind is a little controversial. Is it worth the risk? Mr. Skistimas: As far as what's happening in culture right now, it's the fact that there are values that are being lost within the culture. What's happening in the mainstream is that there is a constant push to be more and more controversial. We're seeing rappers now doing lap dances with the devil. We're seeing music videos where it pretty much just looks like you're in a strip club for the entire three-and-a-half minutes. People are just getting tired of that. These simple messages are reminders that there is innocence out there to be celebrated as well. Mr. Azrieli: Absolutely. The thing to remember is that throughout this entire cultural revolution from the '60s onwards, the Satanic imagery has been used in abundance. We've always decried it. At the end of the day, we shouldn't be shocked, and we shouldn't even be horrified anymore. We should just laugh at it because it's so clearly absurd. At the end of the day, the best revenge is to live well. You just have to laugh about it, because if you don't laugh, you're going to cry. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think that imagery is so popular? Specifically I'm thinking about the Grammy awards that happened recently where it was a hyper-version of this. Mr. Skistimas: It's part of the demoralization of America. When you're pushing it further and further along as a way to sell records, make money, and drive an agenda home, it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse, until it eventually does come back around to those more simple values. You can only push it so far before people start saying, "We've seen that. What else is there out there?" Mr. Jekielek: One of your songs, if I recall correctly, got to number five on iTunes. Do I have that right? Mr. Azrieli: The most recent one got to number three on the singer/songwriter chart. God willing, we're going to get up there on the total chart. Mr. Skistimas: Absolutely. Yes, “Sad Little Man” got pretty far up there. Actually, the entire album that I put out last year was all protest music. That album, “Silent War,” got up to number five on the iTunes charts. Hopefully, we'll do even better with the new single. Mr. Jekielek: What was the general reaction from the music industry? Mr. Skistimas: When they see success, their idea is to either ignore you or take you out of certain things. Along the way, in my journey of releasing these songs, it's been a stair step to the realization that there is very much an agenda to silence you. I've had my Wikipedia page deleted. Mr. Jekielek: Completely deleted ? Mr. Skistimas: Completely. The Five Times August Wikipedia page was up for 10 years, and it wasn't bothering anybody. It wasn't taking up prime real estate. But after I released the song called, “Sad Little Man,” about Anthony Fauci, I pushed the wrong buttons with some of the overlords on the internet, and they just completely removed my page. Mr. Jekielek: What was the pretext? Mr. Skistimas: The pretext was that I wasn't relevant enough to be on Wikipedia. Mr. Azrieli: You were relevant for the past 10 years, but then suddenly ... Mr. Skistimas: Yes, all of a sudden. Mr. Jekielek: Comical isn't the right word. It got removed precisely because it became more relevant. Mr. Skistimas: Right. Those are the tactics. The idea is that they would rather try to erase you from the conversation altogether. It's the same thing with YouTube. They've attacked a lot of my videos and have pulled them without any warning whatsoever. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the megaphone, and I actually use that term as well. It’s the mechanism used to manufacture perceived consensus in society. Mr. Skistimas: In a Chomskian fashion, manufactured consent, that type of thing, Jan? Mr. Jekielek: We're very susceptible to the idea that the people around us think a certain way. If it's a lot of people, you will think, "That's just how things are." Even if you're very contrarian, you can be quite susceptible to that perception. As you were pointing out, only a very tiny sliver of society actually believes in the consensus view, but the megaphone has the ability to push it through the culture and society. Mr. Azrieli: It's like a civil religion. There are a set of secular precepts that we all seem to just take on faith alone. The Covid pandemic wasn't the only thing on the agenda. The climate crisis got paired right alongside it. There were protests in Brooklyn for Black trans individuals happening at the exact same time that Hasidic Jews were getting arrested for attending funerals. What we as a society have become less Christian, and as we've become less nomian we're trying to find new ways to express that very necessary religious aspect of our identity. Mr. Jekielek: Pardon me, less nomian? Mr. Azrieli: Nomian. Carl Schmitt defined the Greek word nomos as meaning the ethics of a polity when it begins to occupy a space. For example, our founding fathers wrote the Constitution. The American, nomian ethic is freedom of speech and the right to own a firearm. Mr. Skistimas: We're talking about core values and core assumptions about what is good in the world. Mr. Azrieli: Absolutely, and in America, it's the Constitution. In Christianity, it's the Judeo-Christian ethic. Both were effectively torn apart by our response to Covid and our response to each other, with Americans refusing to talk to each other and love each other. The message now has to be that we have to rekindle that love for each other. Because at the end of the day, we're part of the greatest country on earth, so there's no reason we should be at each other's throats. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think the whole music industry has gone in this direction? We'll call it the progressive direction or the antinomian direction. Mr. Skistimas: It's an organic unfolding of events. I used to make a joke where I would say, "This is all Elvis's fault for shaking his hips on TV." But really there's some truth to it, because that hadn't been seen before when he appeared on Ed Sullivan. That was controversial back then. Then the next thing you know, The Beatles come along and long hair is something. Then there was free love, make love not war, and that became a thing. Over the decades, it has naturally unfolded, and some of it was innocent and wasn't intentional. Eventually, there have been underlying satanic themes for just shock value. Eventually, those themes get taken hold of by a generation and brought into another generation and are taken more seriously. It's just organically unfolded in that direction to where it's a constant desire to push the boundaries. Mr. Jekielek: That's very interesting. Matt, do you think it's an organic thing to push the boundaries, or is it an agenda-driven thing? Mr. Azrieli: I don't think that it's an agenda. Everything is just as stupid and accidental as it appears. An instructive example of this is the Church of Satan, and the head is some guy in Austin, Texas. But when he talks, they're not sacrificing a goat in the Satanic temple of Austin. There's no child sacrifice. I mean, come on. Again, I'm not advocating for it. The point is that he just sounds like a moralizing Calvinist. He just sounds like a CNN news anchor. At the end of the day, people say things for status. They want to look cool and have prestige. In the name of that idol of prestige, we've just gone down a rabbit hole of stupidity in order to look cooler to each other. Mr. Jekielek: The Satanic Church is very much the inversion of all the Judeo-Christian values. That suggests a very deliberate attempt to foster a different kind of culture, a different kind of mentality as opposed to something accidental. That is an example. Back in the day, you had Herbert Marcuse with his concept of repressive tolerance which essentially says that if you have a progressive Left-wing view, all you do is morally right. If you have a traditional, conservative view, everything you do is morally wrong, and you have to struggle in the appropriate way to get rid of those things. To me, it's not just happenstance, whether it's the Satanic Church or whether it's accepting these progressive values as a creed. Earlier, you mentioned this secular religion. Mr. Azrieli: Ariel Pink made a very good point about this. It was just in some kind of offhand tweet, but his point was, if you were really anti-Christian, would you begin doing all of the terrible things that Christianity says that an anti-Christian person is going to do? The traditional argument behind abortion was, "It's not a wonderful thing, but unfortunately it has to happen sometimes." That's what it was. Now, it's a completely different thing. Right now you have people like Marina Abramović who was awarded some kind of a role with Ukraine for whatever reason. She's a sensationalist, shock artist, and so much of her art is simply about that subject of abortion and lionizing it. At the end of the day, it's easy to predict where our society is headed because it's just decaying. The things that we're doing now that are pretty bad. In Canada, if you didn't get a Covid vaccine, you couldn't ride a bus, you couldn't go to the grocery store, and you couldn't watch your wife give birth to your child. Often you couldn't receive medical treatment. In Canada most people die before they ever get an organ from the donor list, but we took people who were about to get an organ transplant off the donor list. We essentially said, "You're not taking the vaccine. You're going to die. It's not our problem." If you look at what's happening with medical assistance in dying [MAID] in Canada, as of March 17th, 2024, people just with mental illnesses are going to be able to have access to a MAID provision That means that a nurse is going to be able to kill them if a couple of doctors sign a waiver. It's very predictable, and it's very sad. But is it a conspiracy? Unfortunately, we're just as stupid as we seem. That's my opinion. Mr. Jekielek: Brad, you mentioned global tyranny. What do you mean when you say that? Mr. Skistimas: What I'm referring to are all of the mandates and restrictions that were put in place all around the world during Covid. People were being told, “Stay home. Stay away from your friends. Don't speak up. Cover your mouth.” There was a lot of that happening and it wasn't just in cities. It wasn't just in states. It was all over the entire world in every country. Mr. Jekielek: Are you seeing what you're doing respectively in your music and in the music industry as a renewal to counter that degradation that you're describing? Mr. Skistimas: Yes. It's interesting that to speak out against those things is now the counterculture. It's a weird inversion of what it used to be, because you're still speaking out against the man and you're still anti-establishment. But because you're not going along with the government and what they're telling you to do, you have become the bad guy. It's a weird inversion of what being anti-establishment used to be. Mr. Azrieli: That is 100 percent correct. But that's why we can bring this cultural revolution and do our best to impart it. But I don't mean like Mao's Cultural Revolution, God forbid. Mr. Jekielek: You are overcoming cancel culture, correct? Mr. Azrieli: That's the thing. Today, if you're an incredible poet, an incredible songwriter, or an incredible artist, who can you work with? There needs to be an underlying infrastructure for talented people. This is the thing that we're so bad at, creating this system or this oligarchic kind of bureaucracy. We're terrible at organizing with each other and supporting each other. I'm a singer/songwriter, a little bit of an amateur, but that's not my job. My job is to support people like Brad and artists like Chad Prather, so that their great music can come to the forefront of the American conversation. The song, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” is a piece of art that's a testament to what the Western world lived under during Covid. It's important that we don't let anybody ever forget it. We can't allow that memory to be erased. There are all sorts of people now claiming that they never told us to wear masks, for example, and that is completely absurd. But that song is going to last forever. That's the legacy that we're trying to leave for our children, which is the legacy of living in the truth. Mr. Jekielek: You also write about that in The American Beat. Mr. Azrieli: Absolutely. The American Beat is a side project that we're getting together. We want to talk more about culture, art, and aesthetics. Look at what Rolling Stone did and how they lionized the Boston Bomber. People understand that Rolling Stone magazine is certainly not a counter-cultural magazine anymore. It's another tentacle of power, and that's a depressing realization to have. Mr. Jekielek: What's in the future for Five Times August? Mr. Skistimas: This song, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” is out now and we’ll see where it goes with Baste Records. I'm really happy that something like Baste Records exists right now and that's really important. What's bubbling up right now in this counterculture arena is things that didn't exist three years ago. Baste Records didn't exist three years ago, but now it's here, and that's very exciting. Now there is an avenue for artists like me to collaborate with other artists, and we are finding each other. I've connected with so many different artists over the last three years where we all support one another, and that support system is now in place. We want to collaborate with one another. I look forward to doing that over the next year or so and seeing where those collaborations lead to. Mr. Jekielek: There's a whole parallel economy that has been developing. Vaclav Havel conceptualized it back in the day, and you're very much part of that ecosystem. Mr. Azrieli: Listen, if we're as successful as the Velvet Revolution and we have our own Charter 77, and if somehow I'm elected the president of a new regime of New America, I'll take it. But that probably won't happen. Mr. Jekielek: Apparently, you have some pretty high ambitions, Matt. Mr. Azrieli: Listen, I want to start a successful record label. That's actually a pretty monumental ambition, all things considered. Mr. Jekielek: Where can we find the song? Mr. Azrieli: You can find it wherever music is streamed. We're very excited to announce that we're going to have Five Times August on Vevo on YouTube, which is hopefully going to take our movement forward culturally and introduce us to a huge audience. Mr. Jekielek: We have to hear the song and we will finish up with that. Matt Azrieli, Brad Skistimas, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Azrieli: Thanks for having us. Mr. Skistimas: Thanks Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Matt Azrieli and Brad Skistimas and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (50 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1024MatAzrieliBradSkistima Epoch Original DVD collection:

President Joe Biden is fading in the polls for the 2024 elections, and Democrat voters are now showing who their top candidate could be: Hillary Clinton. If they get their way, we could see a repeat of the 2016 elections, with yet another face-off between former President Donald Trump and Ms. Clinton. In other news, New York City Mayor Eric Adams is facing sexual assault allegations, through a one-year legal exemption that allowed a former lawsuit against President Trump. 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/JoshLive1127CR_YT Federal Court Issues Major Ruling On Election Integrity The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a key ruling against the Voting Rights Act, which will make it more difficult for individuals or groups to sue in order to overturn election laws on issues such as voter ID. The case is now expected to head to the Supreme Court, but represents a major shift in election laws ahead of the 2024 presidential elections. In other news, Iowa will begin abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies at all its state universities. And meanwhile, major investment firms are now dropping environmental and social governance (ESG) investment policies, and are again leaning toward investments that place profits over ideology. 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/JoshLive1121CR_YT Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

New Scheme From IRS: 30 Million Americans Will Be Targeted | Facts Matter Starting this year, a new IRS rule goes into effect, requiring that “third-party payment networks like PayPal, Venmo, Amazon, and Square issue Form 1099-K when a user receives more than $600 in gross sales from goods and services transactions in a single year. Earlier, the threshold of gross sales was over $20,000.” This means that previously, if you sold a few things on Amazon or eBay, it wouldn’t really matter. It would be treated the same as if you were running a little garage sale to sell off a few items, and that would be it. You would have had to sell over $20,000 worth of goods before getting a 1099 tax form. However, starting this year, if you happen to be an American who made more than $600 by selling things online or even doing some freelance work, or by shoveling your neighbor's snow, the IRS will now be putting you under the scope, and forcing you to report this income as if it were an actual business venture. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Sale: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Federal Court Issues Major Ruling On Election Integrity | Crossroads The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a key ruling against the Voting Rights Act, which will make it more difficult for individuals or groups to sue in order to overturn election laws on issues such as voter ID. The case is now expected to head to the Supreme Court, but represents a major shift in election laws ahead of the 2024 presidential elections. In other news, Iowa will begin abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies at all its state universities. And meanwhile, major investment firms are now dropping environmental and social governance (ESG) investment policies, and are again leaning toward investments that place profits over ideology. Watch the clips: 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/JoshLive1121CR_YT 🔴 EpochTV Platform 25¢ Special Sale: https://ept.ms/45l73b3

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) employs almost three million people. It is the largest employer in the United States, and the second-largest in the world. Being such a huge organization, you would think the DoD should know a thing or two about numbers. Especially when it comes to factors relevant to the readiness of U.S. troops, like their health. But after a military whistleblower report on myocarditis last year, the DoD claimed that data on the issue had been corrupted. An official report soon followed, but another whistleblower then pointed out that the DoD report was incomplete. U.S. senators are now asking questions. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/dod-fixes-myocarditis-data-but-now-it-has-more-problems-5432846

Happy Thanksgiving!🦃️🎉 Thanks for the beautiful moments we shared and all the trust, love and support you’ve given to us. Judge Hands Trump Major Victory | Facts Matter One of the more unusual strategies that people across the country are using against former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election is to get him barred from appearing on the ballot. Without ballot access, people would essentially have to treat him as a dark-horse candidate—meaning they would have to actually write his name into the ballot as their choice. This approach would undoubtedly take several percentage points off of his tally. And the rationale that people are using to attempt to bar President Trump from appearing on the ballot lies in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment was enacted shortly after the Civil War in order to keep former members of the Confederacy out of the government. And as such, in the modern context, opponents of President Trump are making the argument that he was involved in an insurrection—and therefore, as per the 14th Amendment, he should be barred from serving in office. Looking across America, 31 different cases have been filed in 26 different states, all looking to get President Trump off the ballot in those individual municipalities. In each one of these states, there has been at least one lawsuit filed looking to get President Trump kicked off the ballot. However, what appears to be happening is that this effort is failing one state at a time—with many judges (some of whom actually even agree that President Trump was involved in an insurrection) still refusing to take him off the ballot. 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Trial Sale: https://ept.ms/RomanSale JFK Assassination Doctors Break Silence | Facts Matter On Nov. 22, 1963, exactly 60 years ago, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while driving through Texas in his motorcade. But in terms of how he was actually killed—meaning, the machinations behind the scenes—that has been a topic of widespread public debate ever since the Warren Commission came out with its report, and set the official narrative that there was a single, lone gunman responsible for the assassination. The Warren Commission, which was established shortly after the assassination to investigate what happened, released its report in 1964, and established that Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald, located on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, acted as a lone gunman. The official narrative was that two shots were fired by Oswald, with one of the bullets entering his upper back and exiting near his larynx, while the second bullet entered the right side of his head and exited through his forehead. And, allegedly, JFK was still breathing when his motorcade got to Parkland Hospital before subsequently being pronounced dead about half an hour later. However, recent interview footage has come to light, which has seven of the doctors who were on call at Parkland Hospital disputing the claims made in the Warren Commission's official report. ⭕️ Sign up for Facts Matter NEWSLETTER 👉 https://ept.ms/FactsMatterNewsletter