[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In the last few decades, a combination of drugs, crime, and violence have ravaged certain communities in America. At the same time, we’ve seen a shift of jobs overseas, an erosion of civil society, and an overall decline in economic mobility—with many now feeling the American Dream is just a pipe dream after all, according to Ja’Ron Smith and Chris Pilkerton. They’re the co-authors of the new book, “Underserved: Harnessing the Principles of Lincoln's Vision for Reconstruction for Today's Forgotten Communities.” During the Trump administration, Ja’Ron Smith served as deputy director of the Office of American Innovation, and Chris Pilkerton as acting head of the Small Business Administration. How do we revitalize these forgotten communities? How do we reverse the economic damage caused by pandemic-era policies? And how do we unite the 2 sides of the aisle? We discuss the matter in this episode of American Thought Leaders. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/ravaged-communities-jaron-smith-and-chris-pilkerton-on-globalization-drugs-and-the-erosion-of-civil-society-5505253 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Ja'Ron Smith, Chris Pilkerton, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Chris Pilkerton: Thank you for having us. Ja'Ron Smith: Thanks for having us. Mr. Jekielek: Welcome, and Ja'Ron, it's great to have you back. The last time we had an interview, you were actually heading up the Office of American Innovation in the Trump Administration, and there was some remarkable work done there. You two have written a fascinating book, Underserved: Harnessing the Principles of Lincoln's Vision for Reconstruction for Today's Forgotten Communities. You chart the vision that Lincoln had for the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, and you argue that it ended up being incomplete. Let’s jump in with that. Mr. Smith: Yes, it was incomplete, mostly because President Lincoln got assassinated. His vice president who took over and became president didn't actualize Lincoln’s vision and actually went in a different direction. Lincoln had a vision for bringing the country together, had a plan for poor blacks and poor whites, and had a plan for reimagining America. He was really thinking about using this opportunity to bring our country together, vs. Andrew Johnson who had his own issues growing up in the South. Johnson used it as a political opportunity to grant pardons to southern leaders, and set up the tentacles of what ended up being the Jim Crow era. After the Civil War a new America emerged and we never really dealt with some of the issues related to the Negro, except for when Grant took over. We're now talking about immediately after Lincoln passed away. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about some of those issues. Mr. Pilkerton: Lincoln and his personal vision all started in his youth. He grew up on the prairie and wasn't educated. Everyone's heard the stories about all the books that he read, but the reality was that he was fighting for folks like himself when he was running for Congress and running for elected positions. When he actually went through the Civil War, he saw this as an opportunity to reconstruct America in order to bring economic opportunity for all. In one of his early campaigns, he talks about this, and it's probably the equivalent of the shining city on the hill. It was an imaginary place he called Huron, a place where there was going to be bustling labor and market activity. That was his vision as he continued down the road. As Ja'Ron was saying, when President Johnson took over, there was a lot of baggage that he brought to that office. If it wasn't for people like Thaddeus Stevens and others who really held Johnson's feet to the fire and overturned vetoes, then the positive movement that happened during Reconstruction wouldn't have happened. Because essentially, Stevens was reverting back to the southern Democrat that he and many of his colleagues were. Mr. Smith: After we had this Reconstruction period, you had this whole period of Jim Crow in the South where you had African-Americans who never fully got their rights. They had things like poll taxes, and you still had a robust amount of lynchings in the south. There were a number of different things. Intentionally, they weren't set straight in the beginning right after Reconstruction. It took a civil rights movement to finally give those individuals their rights as citizens, and as a country, we had to participate in forced integration. To Chris's earlier point, there wasn't a huge focus on the economic piece related to American citizenship, the opportunity piece that we think is so vital. As we moved through the '70s and the '80s and started to be at the end of the industrial movement, labor had changed in a major way. The types of blue collar jobs that pushed people into the middle class in the '30s, '40s, '50s, started to go overseas. That brings us into where we are now. We've been in an area where economic mobility has continued to slow down for middle class and low income individuals. We haven’t figured out how to bring those individuals into the jobs of the 21st century that pay a living wage and let them pursue the American Dream. Mr. Jekielek: Certain policies have had an impact on the family, and you could call it the destruction of the family, especially in the black community. There's a huge number of households which are single parent households. Coming from a nuclear family household dramatically increases your likelihood of success. This is one of the very few things everybody agrees on. Then you had globalization and deindustrialization, and at the same time you had these policies that hurt the family unit dramatically. You end up with these underserved communities, both black and white. The wealth gap is larger, and the upward mobility is very restricted. We just had a series of pandemic policies that were economically devastating, and they affected those communities the most, on top of everything else. It feels like we're in a very dark place. Mr. Smith: It is, but I will also offer some hope, and hope cuts through our book. Chris and I both have Christian backgrounds, which has helped us be resilient and is the North Star for us to work towards. The future of our country depends on being able to harness our most important asset, which is people. We are now in a darker place, but we didn't get here overnight, and it's from a combination of things. There has been an erosion of civil society probably over the last hundred years. One important institution that has eroded in many communities has been the church or the faith community. At the same time, we also had a shift with certain government policies that may have encouraged lower income people to not get married. If you have the erosion of institutions that encourage marriage, and at the same time less incentives by the government to work or to be able to charge your own course, that creates a powder keg. Layer on top of that certain things like more drugs and more crime being in the community, then you really have a strong powder keg and a lot of explosive activity happening to the detriment of human beings. With regards to fixing these issues, over the last 40 years, we've kicked the can down the road. We say, “We're going to study this first, and we're going to study that second,” but then not really focusing on a solution. We demonized certain populations and sent them to prisons for drug abuse. We got rid of our mental health institutions, instead of trying to fix them in a way that can fix the issues that were wrong with them in the first place. Then we also had that economic mobility slowdown, where there were less jobs and less dynamism. Then in America you saw the tale of two cities; you saw a very vibrant New York, but you also saw an underclass New York. You saw a vibrant Detroit, but you also saw an underclass Detroit. We actually did just start to move away from that. We were being very intentional in the Trump Administration by making sure there was more access to opportunity. We started to see wage gaps lower and see more employment. Then we actually saw record unemployment, but it still wasn't enough. As soon as we had the lockdowns, it bankrupted everything that we had created. With the parts of society where that economic prosperity had not yet reached, it set them further behind. Kids that needed access to schools were shut out of their schools. But then you saw how much that school was failing when they were sent home and had to do it virtually. Parents said, "Oh, this is what you're teaching my kid. You're not really teaching them anything." If the kid was in a household where they didn't have both parents, or parents were at work, maybe that kid wasn't even going to school. In the wake of that you saw high truancy rates, and you saw the kids stop going to school. You saw an increase of crime, more addiction, and more domestic violence. This is what we're dealing with now. Based on some of the work Chris and I have done, and what we talk about in the book, there is still an opportunity for elected leaders, civil society leaders, and philanthropists to work together on a plan that can help revitalize underserved communities all across the country. Mr. Jekielek: In the book, you talk a lot about public-private partnership. For some of the viewers of this program, this has almost become a kind of bad word. We have a ton of evidence now of the government working with nonprofit organizations and Big Tech to censor Americans, to create narratives, to remove certain types of information, and to promote other types of information. It's an unbelievable thing we have discovered. This is a public-private partnership, and many people would argue that it shouldn't exist. On the other hand, you're talking about public-private partnership of a different sort. Please tell me how this will work. Mr. Pilkerton: For this brief moment during the beginning of the pandemic, there was this massive bipartisanship. When I say massive, we were speaking to folks on both sides of the aisle, civic organizations that may have typically been either Left-of-center or Right-of-center. We would talk to mayors, and we would talk to governors, both Democrat and Republican. Ultimately, we were putting together this massive public policy project and determining where the local government fits in. Where does the federal government fit in? How can this nonprofit help? Now granted, there is always the bureaucracy of government. But if these groups are working together in an efficient way, then you can actually advance the specific goals of that community. It ties back to Reconstruction and the black churches. The black churches were so critical for the African-American community during Reconstruction. Not only were they there to worship and pray, but they were there to get educated. Folks were discussing politics and how they could get involved in elected office. What we are proposing here are best practices. Those best practices can only come about if both sides sit down and say, “All right, we're going to simplify the system. We're going to have trust amongst ourselves, and we're going to collaborate.” These are all points that we make in the book. If you don't have that, then certainly the public-private partnership can become a bad word, because it can be corrupted and abused with all the kinds of things that you're talking about. But at the end of the day, it's really about taking these best practices and applying them across the board. That's where the data and the outcomes come from. Mr. Jekielek: Chris, this brief moment of bipartisanship that you described, happened around policy which ended up being catastrophic. Let’s talk about that. You were in the room, and it's very rare to hear what was really happening. We saw small businesses absolutely decimated. If people are going to recover, they are going to need more. There's more needed than would have been needed before 2020. Please tell me about what you remember. Mr. Pilkerton: As far as the policies, all of that legislation started on the hill. There was the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] [PPP] and the CARES Act [Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act]. Obviously, the White House had a hand in that. When you look at it from the small business perspective, PPP was the initial lifeline, and that rolled out to small businesses across the country. There were certainly criticisms of the program with respect to risk metrics and fraud. But at the end of the day, that program, according to recipients, helped save small businesses. Was it perfect? Absolutely not, but this was also an incredibly unique situation. There were policies that obviously could have been tightened and could have been better, but you have to remember the uniqueness of this situation. This was a pandemic, and this was once a multi-generation event. But we're going to continue to have economic crises. If small businesses are impacted in a negative way, that's going to affect the entrepreneurs, the workers, their families, and ultimately, their communities. We need a blueprint and a plan to address these situations, whether it's a pandemic or it's just an economic crisis. We really have to be able to focus on that. Once again, during these pieces of legislation, there are folks on the hill, Democrats and Republicans, that are trying to negotiate. You probably shouldn't negotiate out of thin air. If you have something to point to and that maybe you disagree with, at least that's a place to start. Mr. Smith: I can add to that, and I'll go back a bit further. When this pandemic first happened, you remember the Fauci curve. I remember seeing that in real time, because we had just done an Opportunity Now Summit in February. We were bringing in federal, state, local government and bringing in private-sector leaders and businesses for a summit to talk about how to create opportunity and what all the different pieces were. Was it public safety and economic development? Was it entrepreneurship, education and workforce? We were all in one building having a conversation, that's the movement we were pushing. This was in February, 2020. We had just gone to the treasury at the beginning of March, and we had a Freedman's Bank Forum to talk about capital access. That next week I went to a prison in Cleveland, Ohio, with the Cleveland Cavaliers. We were talking about how to help reform the prisons and help those individuals when they leave to become productive individuals. Then I had some meetings with some elected leaders. As soon as I came back I was told that some of the folks on the Cavaliers may have gotten Covid from someone from the Utah Jazz. Two or three days later we decided to shut down, but I was still called into work. Because they had shut down all the schools and places in New York where we could retrofit schools into emergency hospitals, we needed to look at that. The issue at the time was hospital capacity, and we wanted to stem the amount of people going to the hospital and stem the spread. I remember going to HHS [Dept. of Health & Human Services] and seeing a very empty building. HHS was supposed to lead on pandemic preparedness, but the infrastructure that they had in place just wasn't the emergency infrastructure needed for the pandemic. These were the challenges that we had as a country. We weren't really ready for a pandemic, even though you had people in that building that had supposedly prepared for it. We ended up doing a merger between FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and HHS, which put that emergency infrastructure there. We ended up learning that with some of the supply chain needs and some of the issues that states were having with hospital capacity, FEMA knew more about them than HHS did, so that changed our calculus. About a month in we had created this new engine, but we were still late, because by that time the damage had already been done with some of the shutdowns. I was called back to the White House to get back to my regular job, which was focusing on underserved communities. In the book, we talk about this agency that we put together called the White House Opportunity Revitalization Council. This was led by an executive order of President Trump, and that's how we did the Opportunity Now Summits where Chris and I originally started to work together. We had to take that whole infrastructure and focus it on Covid response, because we realized very swiftly that those communities were getting hit the hardest with the pandemic and specifically the shutdowns. I suggested that we look at this opportunity, much as Lincoln did, and take this opportunity to fix what we've done in our underserved communities and make a major investment here with the private sector. That's what Chris and I fought for for about four or five months, a real Marshall Plan for the underserved. We never convinced people on this critical piece of it. Another piece that I was really fighting for was that pandemic preparedness and that resiliency. Because when I was thinking about the war on Covid, I was thinking, “Let's see who are all the healthy individuals in each community and let's make sure they stay at work. All the folks who aren't as healthy or at risk, those are folks that should work from home. Now, we're really fighting against the pandemic with the power and the continuity of the community, but we never quite got there, and part of it was because of the political piece. While all of this stuff is going on, we're going into a major presidential election. More than anything, that is what really prevented us from playing in one tent together. At a certain point Chris and I were meeting with all these elected officials, and then at one point it became way too politically sensitive for them to work with us. As a result, it then became a game of politics. We started getting into arguments on masking and no masking, and all the other political issues around the pandemic like mandating vaccines and shutdowns. It then became more political, instead of looking at what's right. Mr. Jekielek: I saw a lot of really good policy coming out of the Trump Administration, not that a lot of people know about it, because it just simply wasn’t covered in the media. The work that you both did was incredibly important and valuable, especially with the Opportunity Zones. Then as this whole pandemic policy came in, it just wiped it all out, and that's terrible. Mr. Pilkerton: One thing I will add to that, Jan, is that one program that the President implemented was the Pledge to America's Workers, and this is the great thing about this plan. The President brought together all these top CEOs from around the country and said, “We want to create opportunities, we want to create apprenticeships, and we want to create jobs for folks.” They went back to their companies and figured out ways to do that at their companies or within the local ecosystem. Up to 16 million jobs had been identified for training. It didn't cost any money to do that, it was the ability of the government to convene and then scale these programs. Once again, the president was very involved, and cabinet agencies were very involved. The president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, led the effort. It demonstrates that public-private partnerships can work, but they have to be done efficiently, and the model shouldn't be broken. You should continue to do those kinds of things. Mr. Jekielek: You've written the book for a conservative audience, but a lot of conservatives imagine government programs to be bad. The types of programs that you envision in the book all involve empowering people in these underserved communities, giving them the little bit that they need to be successful and then to strike out on their own. This is in contrast to a lot of these other programs that we know about. You talk about what a terrible situation it is when welfare becomes the thing that you do, and becomes a generational thing. That's what a lot of conservatives think of as a government program. Mr. Smith: It's one of those perverse incentives. If you don't have to work and your housing and stuff is paid for, a person may not actualize themselves and use their gifts. What we're advocating for is re-imagining infrastructure for opportunity, but the key word is opportunity. You have to step into it, you have to take that opportunity, and then actualize it yourself. This is completely different than saying that you're just going to get taken care of. Across the Republican Party that's what you hear us talk more about, whether it's Tim Scott's Opportunity Agenda, or President Trump talking about the America First Agenda. In many cases we talk about it in terms of jobs, because a person's ability to get that first job puts them in a position to start charting their course. Once you are creating resources for yourself, then you can plan and make some decisions. That's what we're talking about—re-imagining. We realized that a child sometimes can't control the environment that they're bought into, or brought up in. Obviously a person could be born and not have both of their parents, or not have family. Then what's the infrastructure we have for that child to ensure that they can actualize themselves? That's the type of infrastructure that we're talking about. Things can happen; a person loses a father or has issues that come up in their community. We're trying to create more infrastructure around the things that we haven't traditionally planned for, like not having institutions like churches, or not having a safe community to live in. We're meeting people where they are now, and let's put on top of that three or four generations. If you have three or four generations of individuals who have lived in a poor environment, that haven’t been economically mobile, and that have lived with sexual abuse or drug abuse, those are a lot of layers to peel off. Sometimes the government doesn't have the answer to that. They don't have the heart to deal with that person as an individual, and the resiliency that would help grow a person out of that. We're suggesting that this infrastructure of opportunity needs to be led by civil society, a community of individuals that do have a heart. The government does have the ability to scale, though. We can learn from what worked in a certain community and see if that can scale to another. It may be different, but if you can account for those nuances, the government can articulate what works for the masses. We're suggesting that it is not just one thing or the other. It's not necessarily just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps alone, and it's certainly not all the government's responsibility to do this. What we're saying is to meet people where they are at. Let's take an all-of-the-above approach and create partnerships that will help collaborate around this new infrastructure for opportunity. Mr. Jekielek: Ja'Ron, this isn't academic for you. You come from an underserved community and figured out how to navigate your way through that. Mr. Smith: Yes, and it wasn't perfect. I was blessed to have a strong father and also have a strong mother, but they weren't always in the same household most of my life. I had to deal with the crack cocaine epidemic, just like a lot of families are dealing with the opioid epidemic. I empathize with things like that, that people make mistakes and those mistakes affect other people. Ultimately, you're responsible for how you want to see your life, and you have to figure out how you can pick yourself up and grow. It takes having people around you that can be encouraging. In cases where my parents weren't encouraging, I had a football coach, I had mentors, and I had my own village with an infrastructure around opportunity to help me become resilient. In many cases, that doesn't exist for some people, and they give up hope. That lack of resiliency can become very dark, where you don't care about your life and you don't care about others' lives. Then you have anger and violence comes out of that. We're trying to peel back those layers on the human level and help people actualize. Because ultimately, if we as a society do nothing and keep people out on the margins, that comes back on us, because we all live in this country together. You can neglect a kid, but that kid becomes an adult. That neglected adult could become a very dark individual that can do things that affect society. That's why we're all in this together. That dark age that you're talking about, it's going to be on us as a community of individuals to pull ourselves out of that. Mr. Pilkerton: Ja'Ron can speak to this really well. You can look at something like the First Step Act where you had very liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans working together. When I came over to the White House, and I give Ja'Ron a ton of credit for this, when President Trump signed an executive order back in June of 2020, during the height of the riots, we had groups from the Left, community groups, and most of the law enforcement unions at the table. At the end of that process they agreed on 90 percent of what ultimately went into that executive order. That came from the work that Ja'Ron and some of our other colleagues had done to really get that trust during the development of the First Step Act. Mr. Smith: That comes from the methodology that Chris and I talk about in the book; being intentional, building trust, collaboration, and partnerships, creating outcomes, and then studying what works. When the First Step Act came about, we knew that in states like Georgia and Texas, they had reformed their prison systems in a way that lowered recidivism, reduced crime, and ultimately reduced their budgets because they spent less on the prisons. That's the idea that we used to come up with the First Step Act. But then when we dealt with Congress, we had to deal with very tough on crime individuals from the past that just wanted to lock everyone up and throw away the key. Then you had other people that deemed the whole justice system to be racist and wanted to get rid of prisons and have no accountability for individuals. In between that are individuals who are deserving of a second chance, and individuals that probably need to be in prison a little bit longer for our public safety. But we had to navigate that practical reality. It took getting coalitions that represent the families and coalitions that represent law enforcement together to say, “What is the smart way to reform our system in a way that protects public safety, but allows for second chances and creates a more robust system?” We were ultimately able to get 80 percent of the Congress to support that. But it wasn't because the Congress wanted to do that, it's because the people that they represented supported that; the law enforcement groups, the families, and the community. That's how you really push our elected members and hold them accountable, because ultimately they're supposed to represent us, because we live in a representative government. That's the movement that we're on—a movement to empower people. We want to educate people, and that's why we wrote the book. These things can happen. You don't have to wait for reform or opportunity, but let's work on this together. Let's reimagine what this looks like and hold our elected officials accountable to make our country into the country that it can be. Mr. Jekielek: It's fully dawning on me how relatively short a time period this all was, from pandemic policy being implemented in March of 2020, to the BLM riots, and then the election. It's an incredibly short period of time, with what you might even call shock and awe. It's almost hard to fathom being in the government during this time. Mr. Smith: I'm only laughing because it just makes me more dependent on God. God is funny in that none of us ever saw this coming. Growing up as an African-American kid from Cleveland, Ohio, I certainly didn't see myself working for a Republican president. But all my life experience has prepared me to be in that position to be able to give a different perspective. That's the funny thing about life, you don't know when or where or why God created an avenue for you. Then it clicks and you realize, “This is why that happened, and this is what all of this meant.” When I left the administration and had children, it made me understand the work that I did in service even more. There's no time to waste, that's why we decided to write this book, because we think it's important to be intentional right now. We want to see our country passed on to our children and be even better than what we had. In order to create that environment we have to be intentional about being the change that we want to see in the world. Mr. Pilkerton: When Reconstruction ended, Grant had left office and Rutherford Hayes had won the presidency, and there was a dispute in the election. Ultimately, there was an agreement that troops would leave the South and then all of Congress would confirm that Hayes had won, and that was essentially the end of Reconstruction. The reason we're doing this now is that the time period that you're talking about was traumatic for so many communities. I remember walking into the White House campus at five in the morning. We were writing the executive order and seeing tanks. Obviously the riots had been going on, and you saw the destruction. The reality is we have to do it now. In other words, both sides need to come together and listen to the voices that Ja'Ron is talking about. The circumstances, as tragic as they have been to this point with the deaths from Covid, the destruction of certain communities and small businesses that have closed, and all of these things that have happened, the reality is we have the ability to reverse that, and we think this plan can really help with that. Mr. Jekielek: The First Step Act is a model of success in what we're discussing here. Do those coalitions still exist? Mr. Smith: Oh, yes. Mr. Jekielek: Are these people still working together, or was it a one-off miracle? Because when you look at the discourse, it would seem there is very little middle ground. Mr. Smith: That coalition is still working. Honestly, it's not the same environment. We had some other things that happened. I look at rogue DAs who aren't holding certain criminals accountable, and at the defund movement, it makes it harder for a coalition to articulate the promise of a smart on crime policies. The defund the police movement was a political movement. That has hurt underserved communities that need police officers. This whole movement to take a blanket approach with violent offenders on accountability is a political movement. It's not about keeping communities safe. All of that makes it harder for a coalition like ours, because when people are hurt by a reform of the criminal justice system, that impacts people. People could lose their lives. You have family members that are victims, and those are hard things that we went back to trust on. That has made it difficult in this environment. But yes, the coalition is still working. The coalition is also still working on opportunity zones that have a lot of promise. We did a lot of great work, with $50 billion worth of new investments in over 3000 different zones throughout the country. But there's still more work to do there. There are certain areas where they didn't leverage it the right way. There's other parts of legislation that weren't passed that would focus on jobs and small business growth or affordable housing. That wasn't in the original bill so we don't have that data to talk about the efficacy of the program, so there's still work to do there. Chris and I haven't stopped for one day leaning in with each of these issues. There has not been a week in the last three years where I haven't talked to Chris. We're constantly at work and constantly on watch on these issues. We're inviting more people to grow that coalition, because it's going to take more effort than ever before post-pandemic to pick up these pieces and rebuild our country into what it should be. Mr. Jekielek: Ja'Ron Smith, Chris Pilkerton, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Smith: Thanks so much. Mr. Pilkerton: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Ja'Ron Smith, Chris Pilkerton, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders, I'm your host Jan Jekielek. 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The pattern of excess deaths recorded in the South-East Asian country of Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic shocked a Canadian research team when they studied the overall death rates there. The number of deaths clearly increased, but upon closer examination, they noticed that the excess deaths did not coincide with the time when the pandemic was declared. Instead, it had a strong correlation with the timing of the COVID-19 vaccine program rollout. The same thing happened in nine other countries: Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Suriname, Thailand, and Uruguay. After studying over a dozen countries in the Southern Hemisphere, the scientists concluded that the 13.5 billion COVID vaccines that were given out worldwide caused 17 million people to lose their lives from the vaccines alone. But the death-rate data for elderly people aged 90 or older was the worst—one in 20 lost their lives after the vaccines were rolled out. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/no-lives-were-saved-by-covid-19-vaccines-canadian-scientists-estimate-5505337 Medical Disclaimer: Frontline Health (the “Show”), its guests, and contributors provide the latest news on health and medical discoveries, and it is meant for informational purposes only. The Show does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, cures, mitigation, or prevention for any type of disease or medical condition. Similarly, it is not intended for self-diagnosis or self-treatment of any health-related condition. The information on the Show is gathered from reputable sources; however, neither Frontline Health nor The Epoch Times Association Inc. are responsible for errors or omissions in reporting or explanation, and will not be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential, special, exemplary, or other damages arising therefrom. Patients should always consult with a doctor or other health care professional for medical advice or information about diagnosis and treatment. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] One year on, what is the legacy of the trucker convoy protests? Why have so many people bought into the idea that a society and its problems must be managed and controlled by so-called experts? And why are laws that pursue equity fundamentally at odds with a society based on the rule of law? “If the government has a license to treat people differently depending upon their identity, then they now have a license to punish and reward as they wish,” says Bruce Pardy, the executive director of Rights Probe and a professor of law at Queen's University in Canada, in this episode of American Thought Leaders. “In many ways, the most disappointing thing about this experience during COVID was the fact that a great many people supported the regime, and they didn't seem to have very much appreciation for the aberration that it represented,” says Mr. Pardy. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/bruce-pardy-the-triumph-of-the-administrative-state-5429979 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Bruce Pardy, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Bruce Pardy: It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: We first sat down to chat about a year ago, and we didn't end up publishing the interview. It was about the truckers' movement, of course. Just as we were about to publish it, the War Measures Act was pulled. Mr. Pardy: Right. Mr. Jekielek: I didn't get to have you on the show. It's a year-and-a-half now since we talked. I've come to believe that the truckers' movement was probably one of the most consequential protests in recent history. I want to get your thoughts on this. Mr. Pardy: I agree with you, not just in Canada, but probably internationally. Now, it wasn't the biggest protest we've ever seen, and it was quite modest in size. It wasn't the most eventful protest, in the sense that they drove up, they parked, and that's all they did, other than dance in the streets, sweep and clear snow, and feed the hungry. The truckers have done us all a huge service. They were protesting vaccine mandates, and that alone would've been enough. But what it really turned into was the first significant sign in Canada, a very polite, compliant country, the first sign from ordinary people that they didn't trust their government. Canada is the land of peace, order, and good government. We emerged out of the revolution in the U.S. The Canadians were the ones that didn't want to revolt, and wanted to remain loyal to His Majesty. Peace, order, and good government runs through the history of Canada. Here you have a bunch of truckers who took it upon themselves to drive all the way across a huge country to give a message to the government, "We don't trust you. We don't accept your authority. We don't accept your legitimacy." That is a significant thing to say. Mr. Jekielek: I've interviewed a couple of young men who had embedded themselves in the protest to document it. One of them had previously been a political organizer. He asked them, "What are your demands?" They replied, "We're going to Ottawa. We've got to stop the mandates." He was shocked to discover this was such a grassroots movement that these people didn't even really have demands, unlike some of the protests that we've seen. For example, many of George Floyd protesters had millions of dollars in backing. They were highly coordinated with very specific goals, perhaps diverging from the surface goals. Anyway, you get the idea. Here we had something that was very grassroots. Mr. Pardy: Yes. It was organic, spontaneous, and disorganized in a good way. You had to try and figure out what was going on. I was in Ottawa for a good period of time when the protest was going on, and it was even difficult to know who was calling the shots. If you talked to one trucker and then the next, it was basically no agreed upon structure or leadership, and that was part of its charm. It was really a spontaneous thing. Some of them just picked up, got in their trucks and said, "We're going to Ottawa." Then the thing built up across the country. Mr. Jekielek: What is the outcome here? Clearly, something changed, basically on those days when we filmed our interview. Suddenly, we thought, "Maybe this is going to be codified by the Canadian Senate, and what would that mean?" But then suddenly it was gone. There was a strong ripple effect across the world. Is that the reason you call it consequential, possibly internationally? Mr. Pardy: It's hard to know exactly why governments rescinded the mandates. You make a good point, that some of them happened to be rescinded not long after the end of the convoy. You could make the case that one thing had a lot to do with the other, and it could well be. On the dark side, let's take a step backwards. Covid seemed to come on us suddenly, and then we were in a different world. The rules were different, and the powers that the government had were different. They seized more powers than they've ever had before, and it seemed like a sudden overnight thing. I don't think that's really the case. It did come upon us suddenly, and it was an abrupt change, but in my view, these things had been building for a long period of time. In a way, the Covid experience was the triumph of the administrative state. People like to ask this question, "Why did the government fail so badly during Covid? Why did they allow civil liberties to be crushed? Why weren't they more effective at the measures that they put in? Why did it fail?" From the perspective of this machine that we call the administrative state or the nanny state, it doesn’t think it failed. The administrative state thinks that it succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, because it was finally able to do that which it exists for, which is to manage society. It was able to manage all of us in a more extreme way than it has ever done before. Of course, we've had an administrative state for many decades, but it had never been as extreme as it was during Covid. People were literally being told to close their businesses, to not go to work, to not walk through the park, and to not leave their homes. It was an extraordinary thing. Things were happening that a lot of people just would not have contemplated as possible in an earlier time. The truckers have at least questioned that consensus, and that questioning is why the government saw it as such a threat. It was no threat in literal terms. There was no violence, and there were no weapons. There was no storming of Parliament. There was nothing going on inside the convoy other than sitting in the trucks and playing in the snow. Mr. Jekielek: And honking. I remember there was a lot of honking. Mr. Pardy: And honking. Honking went on for a while. When I arrived in Ottawa, there was honking going on during the day, but it ended as evening fell. As the days went on, there was an application for an injunction brought to court, and the court granted the injunction. After that, there was basically no honking. Every once in a while you'd hear somebody breaking the rules, but there was basically no honking after the injunction, so they were compliant with the law. The one thing that the convoy did that was actually unlawful was parking. They were engaged in unlawful parking. The threat was that you have a whole bunch of ordinary Canadians coming to the government and saying, "We don't approve of what you're doing. We don't approve of the system that we're in. We don't believe in your legitimacy. We don't believe in your authority." I suspect that's why they ultimately decided to trigger the use of the Emergencies Act, which by the way, was not designed for that purpose. That's not the kind of emergency that qualifies for the use of the act. If you are in political trouble, that does not qualify as an emergency, and that's the kind of trouble that the truckers were causing the government. Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of this inquiry and its findings earlier this year? Mr. Pardy: I listened to a lot of the testimony, as many people did. The evidence given basically said that there was no violence to be found inside the convoy. In fact, one of the OPP [Ontario Provincial Police] witnesses said that he found the lack of violence in the convoy to be shocking. If you have this number of people doing this kind of protest, the implication was that you would expect some violence, but there wasn't any to be found. Yet, and I wrote this at the time, I had no expectation that the inquiry would throw the government under the truck. The purpose of these inquiries is as much performance as substance. I regard them as rituals. It provides the appearance of accountability, without actually providing accountability. The question being posed and answered at the inquiry was not the same question that's being posed and answered in the applications challenging the invocation of the Act. Those challenges have now been heard by the federal court, and we haven't received an answer yet. We'll see. Mr. Jekielek: This is the appropriate time to talk about what you do and how you've come to see this. You've been watching rights, basically, for decades. This has been part of what you do. Actually, I first came across you when Bill C-16 was going through the legislative system. It’s what I think of as the compelled speech bill. Mr. Pardy: It was an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act. It was incorporating gender identity on the grounds that were being protected from discrimination. Interestingly, the amendments did not include the word speech. It didn't say you're going to be required to say these preferred pronouns. The argument that Jordan Peterson and I and Jared Brown and others were making at the time was that if you include this based upon interpretations of similar provisions that have been given by human rights commissions elsewhere in the country, this is going to require you to use the preferred pronouns of people who are saying, "Please don't call me him. I want to be called her, or Z, or they, or whatever the case may be." That would amount to compelled speech, because the interpretation of using the wrong pronoun would be regarded as discrimination. On those grounds we said, "This is not a good idea." That objection did not rule the day, and it went through anyway. Now, in our human rights codes across the country, both the federal one and provincial ones, we have these grounds of prohibited discrimination, which more and more are now being used for exactly what we suggested they would be used for, which is saying, "I'm sorry, you can't choose the pronoun that comes out of your mouth. Someone else can tell you what that word should be." That is not a country in which free speech exists. Mr. Jekielek: It was fascinating to hear those arguments back then, and I didn't really grasp it at the time. Jordan and others were seeing something because of this work that all of you had been doing. Please tell me about that work, how you started, and how you ended up at Queens University. Mr. Pardy: I started my academic career focusing not entirely, but largely, on environmental law. Through the lens of environmental law, you can see a lot of the problems that we're having on a larger scale broadly across society. You can see the dilution of private rights. You can see the disappearance of certain kinds of due process. You can see the erosion of what we may have thought were our constitutional rights. The whole thing is veering off the track, in my view. It's a very interesting microcosm or case study of the larger legal picture, in which the ground really is moving beneath our feet in ways that we don't suspect. Let me give you one example. The Charter [The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms] came to Canada in 1982. It's the Canadian version of an American Bill of Rights. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, I remember we were celebrating it in grade school. Mr. Pardy: Right, and it has turned out to be less than one might have hoped for, partly because of the way it's worded, but also largely because of the way it's been interpreted. One of the sections in the charter is Section 15. It's the equality provision. It's a two-part section. Basically, the first part says that everybody is equal before the law without discrimination. Then the second part is an exception to the first part. The second part, and this exception does not appear in the American version, is an exception which essentially allows affirmative action in certain circumstances. The first idea is that everybody has the right to equal treatment under the law. That means that the same rules and standards apply to you as everybody else, without regard to who you are. The other version of equality is that people of different identities are entitled to equal outcomes. Now, here's the basic proposition. Everybody is different. Everybody is different in an infinite number of ways. If you apply the same rules and standards to everybody, by definition, they're going to end up with different outcomes because they're all different. If you insist that all the identity groups end up in the same place, that means, by definition, that you must apply different rules and standards to them. You have equal treatment or you have equal outcomes, and you can't have both. Over this period of time, the Supreme Court of Canada has said it's the second, and not the first. If you do have an actual equal rule that applies to everybody, but that actual equal rule produces disparate outcomes, that won't do. That means you have to change the rules, so there are different rules for the different groups. We've seen that from the Supreme Court of Canada. There is a case challenging our RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] program. They instituted a program whereby their members could essentially work if they wanted to. Along with that part-time option, they provided a pension plan that more or less resembled the full-time pension plan, in the sense that your pension reflected the hours that you worked. Now, this is a voluntary program. If you're a full-timer and you wanted to do this, you were able to do it. If you didn't want to do it, then you didn't do it. As it happened, more women than men chose part-time. As a result, more women than men had lower pensions than the people who were doing full-time. On that basis, a majority at the Supreme Court of Canada said, "This violates Section 15. Same rule, both sexes, different outcomes. We can't have it." Mr. Jekielek: Why is this a problem? Mr. Pardy: Whether it's a problem depends upon what you value. If you are a social justice warrior, that won't be a problem at all. This is the way it's supposed to be, because that's the whole idea of social justice. If you want protection from your meddling government, what you want is the right to be treated the same as everybody else. If the government has a license to treat people differently depending upon their identity, then they now have a license to punish and reward as they wish. Sometimes people confuse equality with freedom, and those two things are different. People sometimes look to equality to provide freedom, but the idea of equality of treatment is really the right to be subject to the same awful dictatorial laws as everybody else, whereas freedom is the right not to be subject to those laws. Sometimes people pursue freedom by looking to equality. But nevertheless, equal treatment is part of the rule of law. If you are going to adjust your rules for every particular case so as to provide the outcome that you want, that means you don't really have a rule at all. F. A. Hayek said that one of the elements of the rule of law was rules fixed and announced beforehand. That is, the government can rule us, but they have to tell us ahead of time what the rule is going to be, so we can understand it, and govern ourselves accordingly. Mr. Jekielek: Then they will be held accountable for those rules, correct? Mr. Pardy: Then they're accountable, exactly. But what's happened in the era of the administrative state, not just with this equality thing, but in a much broader way, is that we don't have that rule of law. Instead, we have decision makers in the executive branch, in all of these agencies, and even in the courts, making decisions as they go about things. A lot of the agencies and the bureaucrats and the professional experts see themselves as being there to solve social problems. In order to do that, you need flexibility. You need to be agile. You need to be able to respond to things. You need to be able to manage here and there, and to adjust as you go along. That is opposite to the kind of rule of law that Hayek was talking about. You can't do that if you're going to have a rule of law. The administrative state and all its people are inclined to see the rule of law as an obstacle and inconvenience to achieving the kind of society that they want. What they're missing is that the inconvenience that the rule of law provides, that so-called obstacle, is not an inconvenience. That's really the point. It's there to prevent you from managing things on a case by case, one-off basis, and making up things as you go along. That's what it's there for, but more and more, that idea is eroding. Then we have the alternative, which is you have a whole bunch of people in this enormous machine of the administrative state trying to solve, and not doing very well at it, but trying to solve problems one at a time, and making things up as they go. Mr. Jekielek: This is very profound what you're describing. I see the response to the pandemic, and people have different views on how it all happened. Are you saying the response was a crystallization of one particular philosophy of governance, which you could call a benevolent technocracy and rule by experts? Mr. Pardy: Yes, absolutely. It's the crowning achievement so far of that belief, the belief that in order for civilization to carry on and to be successful, we need experts in a bureaucracy managing things, so that things don't fall apart. That is a belief that is probably widely held, and even widely held across the political spectrum. Even political actors like Republicans in the United States, who don't approve of overregulation and too much bureaucracy and too many taxes and overspending, if you challenge them, a lot of them would still say, "We need an expert bureaucracy. We need an administration in order to make our way through life." The opposite view is, "Look, this is just a belief." It is just one of the ways of doing government. Our experience with it over the past while, and especially during Covid, shows it doesn't work.” If anything else, they have shown their incompetence during Covid. They've shown that they are captured by other interests, when they're supposed to be protecting the public. If the failure is so obvious during Covid, what makes you think that they would be any good at very many other things? We can go down a whole long list of things that we think they're good for and find out, actually, that in many of these situations, the biggest danger and the biggest risk to all of us is the meddling that the state is able to do. Mr. Jekielek: Just on this point of the significant and repeated failures of these policies that profoundly altered civilization, as you alluded to earlier, not everyone thinks it was a failure. Mr. Pardy: No. Mr. Jekielek: To this day, some people believe these things were successful, despite overwhelming and well-documented evidence to the contrary. That phenomenon is something I struggle with. Mr. Pardy: In many ways, the most disappointing thing about this experience during Covid was the fact that a great many people supported the regime, and they didn't seem to have very much appreciation for the aberration that it represented. If you remember the way people thought about their society before Covid, the idea that the government should take it upon itself to tell people whether or not they can open their business, go outdoors, or walk through the park would have just been unthinkable. Even the authorities themselves, I would expect, would have thought, "We'd like to do that, but we simply can't do that. People won't put up with it," but they did. They put up with it and they wanted more of it. It's an uncomfortable realization that there are other people in your country who don't think of their country in the same way that you do at all, and then you wonder where it is that you live. Mr. Jekielek: This wasn't just a Canadian phenomenon. The United States is almost like a collection of countries with quite different philosophies. Some states would be very similar to the Canadian model of approach. Some had a very different approach, especially at the very beginning. Mr. Pardy: That is one of its great strengths. The fact that you have different tribes in the U.S. is a strength. Because then you actually have real diversity, not the pretend diversity, equity, and inclusion. You actually have real diversity, in the sense that you have different places and different people with very different ideas about what the right thing to do is. That's great. We have that to some extent in Canada, and there are pockets here and there, as opposed to the real battles that are going on in the U.S. which are very healthy. One of the criticisms that Canadians lodge against the U.S. is, "They're full of conflict and they're so political about everything and they have fights in their Supreme Court about the philosophy of this and that. Their Congress is always fighting about things. In Canada, we don't have any of that politicization of our institutions." That's nonsense, of course. The fact of the matter is, the politicization of our institutions is even more extreme because there's no opposition. Mr. Jekielek: There is a lot more evidence coming out about the human costs of the policies that were implemented. There is still a significant portion of the population that doesn't want to know or isn't able to accept this. It's very difficult to have the discussion that you're talking about, and that's not just a phenomenon in Canada, of course. Mr. Pardy: Of course. Those discussions are needed. The evidence and the data that you're referring to needs to be discussed, and needs to get out into the public realm. They're out there, and they're available, but not a lot of people are accessing them. There's a more fundamental question, which is this. There's a danger when citing the bad results becomes the argument for why the measures were wrong, and that's not the case that I would make. I would make this case. If the lockdowns had worked better, if they had not caused such harm to people, if the vaccines had worked as advertised, if they hadn't had such adverse effects, and if the facts had been wholly different than they were, the measures were still wrong, because they took people's choice away. Even if the authorities happened to be right, you still can't tell people what to do. It's still a free country. It's still their medical decision. It's still their business. It's still their risk. It's still their children. Even if the situation were entirely different and we had competence in our public health authorities, the situation does not change. You simply cannot do this to people and call yourself a free country. Mr. Jekielek: We're going back to the two views that we discussed earlier. You're firmly on one side on the equality of opportunity. Mr. Pardy: No, I'm on the equal treatment side, but now we're talking about liberty as much as equality. You could make this case. You could say, "We're going to be equal about it. We're going to make everybody locked down and we're going to make everybody take a vaccine. That's equal." That's equal for sure. That's not free, though. It doesn't leave medical decisions to the individual, and it doesn't leave the assessment of your own risk to the individual. It has less to do with equality and more to do with whether or not you're serious about your civil liberties. The administrative state that we now have is more and more incompetent and captured over time. But even if that were not the case, you still shouldn't have one in the way that we do. Because they take it upon themselves to manage us, and being managed is, in a sense, the opposite of being free. Please note how they managed us. They managed us during Covid in a very clever way. We have a Charter, and we have a Constitution. We have rights in the Constitution. Those charter rights, most of the time, were basically useless during Covid for certain valid legal reasons, because the government didn't always infringe on them directly. Instead, they managed society by saying, "By the way, everybody, this is your choice. You can decide whether to get a vaccine or not. We're not going to make you. But if you decide not to, there are consequences for that choice. You might not be able to fly on a plane. You might not be able to have a job. You can't go to university. But by the way, it's not mandatory." They're doing indirectly, through their management of society, what they would probably not be able to do directly. It's just one of the examples of how you can squeeze through the gaps in the rights of the charter in a very effective way, as they did during Covid, which allowed civil liberties to be lost without infringing charter rights. Mr. Jekielek: Bruce, as you're talking here, you're putting the fear of God in me. I'll explain why. I'm reflecting on how there is this inherent feature of bureaucracies, where accountability is diluted to the point where it's unclear who is actually responsible.This type of management, which essentially means no accountability, presents a foundational threat to humanity. Does that sound too dire? Mr. Pardy: That's part of the design of the administrative state. Let's just back up a step in constitutional terms. Both we and the Americans have this concept in our constitutional order of the separation of powers. The Americans have a much more explicit one than we do. Again, separation of powers is there to protect us. If you want to conceive of the rule of law in terms of its opposite, which is rule by a person, none of us want to be subject to the rule of a person. We don't want to be subject to the rule of a king who has absolute power. We don't want to be subject to the rule of any other person who has the power to decide what's going to happen, so we divide up the powers between these three branches. The legislature can make rules, but it makes the rules without knowing the situations to which the rules will apply. The courts take those rules and they apply them to those particular disputes, but they didn't make the rules. They are supposed to be committed to the rules as drafted by the legislature, so they can't make them up. The executive branch is supposed to be able to do nothing. It's supposed to be powerless except for those powers that the legislature gives it in the statute. That protects all of us, because no one of those people or branches can decide on their own what's going to happen to you. This separation of powers, although it still exists as a principle and is lauded all the time, in practice is just heading out the door. These three branches, which are supposed to be checks and balances on each other, are all of one mind about the necessity for an administrative state, for the experts and the bureaucrats to be able to respond to social problems and make it up as they go. The legislature passes statutes that give broad rulemaking power to the executive branch. The courts defer to the decisions of the executive branch. The legislature even gives the executive branch the power to adjudicate things in tribunals and boards and commissions. Now, you have the executive branch making rules, deciding cases, and executing. They're doing the three jobs of the three different branches all in one branch. Of course, there's no accountability, because you don't know who's doing what now, and they're all in on it together. I'm not saying they don't quarrel amongst themselves, they surely do. But in the big picture, they're all of one mind about how civilization should be in order to carry on. I think that idea is wrong. Mr. Jekielek: What is the role of the media in all of this, which is very important? The media is supposed to share with everybody an approximation of reality or the truth of a situation, but that's also changed. The same management view is what many media subscribe to, as opposed to finding the truth, giving it as best they can to people, and letting them figure it out. Mr. Pardy: Let's just acknowledge this. If you are a person that professes a lack of belief in the idea of having an administrative state, then you are a heretic. Most people have grown up under an administrative state. That's what they think government is, by definition, but nevertheless, there are facts, and there are truths to be told. I take your point, and I agree with it. In many ways during Covid, the role of a great deal of the media appeared to promote the narrative. They said, “We're all in this together. You should do this because that's what the health authorities have said.” That's just being a propaganda arm for the government. How about asking some hard questions about what it is they're telling us to do? On the other hand, we should recognize this about the media. They're not a government institution. For that reason, they're basically like the rest of us, in the sense that they're allowed to say whatever they want. Free speech does not depend upon telling the truth. I would hesitate to pull any media outlet up for publishing something that happens not to be true, because that's really our job. Our job is to read and take in as much as we can and decide who's closest to the truth in our view. The real problem is not our opinion that certain media outlets are just talking off the top of their heads. It's that the government is now involved. It's funding, it's directing, and it's preparing to censor. Now, it's really going to town in terms of managing our online spaces and feeds, and that's the real problem. It's the government interference in the job of the media. Mr. Jekielek: This is the perfect moment to talk about bill C-18, and the suite of legislation that relates to managing information and content. Mr. Pardy: The C-18 bill is becoming a disaster for the government, because it’s an attempt to get the Big Tech companies to pay Canadian media outlets for the links that they feature on their platforms. It is totally backfiring because the big media players are saying, "No, we're not doing that, so we're just not going to feature any Canadian stories." That's having a bigger detrimental effect than not having been paid in the first place. One might make the argument that it's advantageous to a Canadian media outlet to have their links on these platforms, because they're directing a greater audience to your website. The strategy that the government decided to pursue with C-18 is so far falling flat on its face. But this bill is not even the biggest problem. The bigger problem is the one that was following it and has been referred to as the online harms bill. It is not in process yet, but the government has promised over and over again to bring in a bill to prevent the expression of harmful speech online. That's just a license to censor. Let's go further. Even the idea of hate speech that we have in our law is a problem. Let's distinguish these two different kinds of speech. In Section 2 of the Charter, we have the right to free speech. We immediately know that's not literally true. It's a very vague statement. If you go up to somebody on the sidewalk and say, "Give me your wallet or I'll stab you." Okay, that's free speech, but it's also an assault. No one is arguing that kind of free speech should exist, because you're basically attacking somebody. You're threatening imminent violence. That's not part of your free speech, so we know there are things like that. There is speech that falls outside the free speech guarantee. The question is, "Where are the boundaries?" If the boundary is, "You can't say something that hurts people," well, everything you say hurts somebody, because people don't agree about things. You need to be able to say things people disagree with. We have a hate speech provision in our criminal code, and that's problematic. In a free country you don't want to encourage this, and you don't want to say it's a good thing. But in a free country, the fact is that people are allowed to dislike each other, and they're allowed to say that they do, because they're free people. That's just part of the chaos of living in a free society. If you try to make sure that nobody says anything that's hurtful to somebody else, you now have a different ball of wax altogether. Mr. Jekielek: If you try to, and I'll use your word again, manage people. Mr. Pardy: Manage your speech, manage your relationships, and manage your respect. You become a managed people. Mr. Jekielek: Bruce, as we're talking about a managed society, I think back to a recent conversation I had with Matt Taibbi. We were talking about the death of the American spirit. He was saying that no legislation could actually help with that, even if you solve the issue of the encroachment of this managerial class. In a way, this is the death of the American spirit. The American spirit is that thing that is central to free societies, because it's the American idea that gave birth to all these democratic movements and democracies around the world. Has this idea just had its time now? Mr. Pardy: It's a very dark question, isn't it? During Covid, some people thought that the law would save them from all of this, because the law was written down. It's in black and white. The document is there, and you can read the Charter. But it didn't, and people don't know what happened. The law is a product of the culture, and your point is quite right. A document is not going to be able to resist the culture as it changes. It's just going to take the law and carry it away with it. People are the ones who are making the law and applying the law. If those people have an idea that's contrary to what other people think the founding idea of the country is, then the country's going to change. The really dark part is that although we perceive this Western liberal democratic existence as the way things are supposed to be and the natural order of things, and we do perceive an aberration from it, we just feel this is a pendulum and we'll swing back to normal soon enough. In the big historical perspective, it might be that this period of Western, liberal, democratic freedom is an aberration, because human societies throughout time haven't been like that. How do we know that this wasn't an aberration, and maybe now we're going back to normal. That's not a nice thought. I'm hoping it's not that way and that the period that we're in can be fixed and corrected. We can go back to that American ideal, not just in America, but more broadly, but it's going to be a challenge. Mr. Jekielek: It wasn't just America that's always been under assault from every dictatorship out there, especially the powerful ones like the Soviet Union and communist China. Mr. Pardy: Yes, and going full circle back to where we started, that's the reason that the trucker convoy was a threat, because it expressed an idea contrary to the prevailing order that has become dominant. Mr. Jekielek: Bruce, as we finish up, it always comes back to the fact that we're very influenced by the people around us. It might be a broader cultural trend as you describe, but what I'm also observing is that what we perceive others around us believe, that actually influences us. That makes us subject to manipulation when someone can manufacture that perceived consensus view, but also just organically, it makes us susceptible. With that view, we could go in a different direction if we believe that people around us actually do believe that freedom is the right way, and that liberty and individual individuality is important. Mr. Pardy: Yes, it's quite possible. One of the challenges is the idea of liberty and individual autonomy is actually quite an abstract idea compared to the alternatives. The alternatives are very concrete, and they say, “You should do this, this is right, this is wrong.” Concrete rules about right and wrong are much more easily grasped than the abstract idea about how liberty will be good for you, even though it means that you don't know what it's supposed to do. I agree with your point. If there is a critical mass of people who are of the mind that this is the right way to have a country, then great, but there's some slogging to do to get to that point. Mr. Jekielek: Any thoughts on how to get to that point? Mr. Pardy: Mountains are climbed one rock at a time, and there's a lot of little rocks and crevices to get over, so it takes a lot of time, with a lot of people making a lot of arguments. You have to just keep plugging away. I know that's probably not inspirational. I don't think there's any magic bullet. Again, this is maybe a dark encouragement, but the worse things get in terms of our managed lives, hopefully, the more likely it is that people will notice things aren't going well. Maybe eventually that will make more people open to the argument that this is not the right way to go, and that we need to change tracks. Mr. Jekielek: Bruce Pardy, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Pardy: The pleasure has been mine. Thank you very much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Bruce Pardy and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader

On Feb. 28, 2021, Israeli health officials warned the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about a "large number" of myocarditis cases in Israel following COVID-19 vaccination. By this point in the pandemic, the U.S. government bought 1.2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines. It cost $17 billion. And when myocarditis was flagged as a potential side effect, only 7 percent of these COVID-19 doses were given out. U.S. health officials could have paused the vaccination program. They could have tried to investigate myocarditis further. Instead, the CDC told Americans that vaccination was “our way out of this pandemic.” Mothers like Emily Ekanayake trusted the CDC. She saw the Israeli report about myocarditis too. But she believed the CDC—that the benefits outweighed the risks. So on June 10, 2021, Ms. Ekanayake's 14-year-old son Aiden got his second Pfizer COVID-19 dose. Two days later, Aiden woke up in the middle of the night with intense chest pain. Ms. Ekanayake recognized that it was myocarditis and rushed her son to the hospital. The Epoch Times uncovered how the CDC missed this safety signal and hid a warning that for young people the COVID-19 vaccines were doing more harm than good. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/will-anyone-trust-the-shots-again-how-the-cdc-hid-a-warning-5501436 Medical Disclaimer: Frontline Health (the “Show”), its guests, and contributors provide the latest news on health and medical discoveries, and it is meant for informational purposes only. The Show does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, cures, mitigation, or prevention for any type of disease or medical condition. Similarly, it is not intended for self-diagnosis or self-treatment of any health-related condition. The information on the Show is gathered from reputable sources; however, neither Frontline Health nor The Epoch Times Association Inc. are responsible for errors or omissions in reporting or explanation, and will not be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential, special, exemplary, or other damages arising therefrom. Patients should always consult with a doctor or other health care professional for medical advice or information about diagnosis and treatment. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “People are thinking COVID has gone away and we're getting back to normal. But in a sort-of international public health world, that's not the case at all. We're building new institutions, we're expanding institutions, and all the expansion is around pandemic preparedness and response.” In this episode, I sit down with public health physician and Brownstone Institute fellow Dr. David Bell. A former World Health Organization medical officer, he recently published “Pandemic Preparedness and the Road to International Fascism” in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. “The hope of writing the paper, and I think of us talking, is to try to get the public health world, who are very much on board with this and going forward with it, of stepping back and really thinking what they're doing, because they've repeatedly done huge harm to society over the last couple of hundred years. And it's clear that they're on that path again,” says Dr. Bell. He argues that public health played a large role in justifying the takeover of populations by colonial empires of Europe, and that given new International Health Regulations, which will have force under international law, it is likely that history may repeat itself. “Forerunners to the World Health Organization were the Paris Agreements and other agreements of the late 19th century around stopping pandemics coming from the colonies to Europe,” says Dr. Bell. Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/dr-david-bell-public-health-is-moving-toward-international-fascism-5500635 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. David Bell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. David Bell: Thanks. It's good to be here. Mr. Jekielek: You wrote a really interesting paper recently, “Pandemic preparedness and the road to international fascism.” Given the title, I'm shocked that it actually got published in a journal today. It paints an important picture that we should all know about, and I want to discuss that paper today with you. Dr. Bell: The way that public health has gone recently has become clear. As a public health physician, it's disturbing to see what has happened, but it's not surprising. It's about the path we're taking to international fascism. Public health is playing a lead role in that through Covid and the pandemic preparedness agenda that we're on now. I'm trying to point out that this is not new, and that this would be expected historically. Going back to the colonialist era, public health played a large role in justifying the takeover of populations in the colonial empires of Europe. The pandemics played a big part in that. The forerunners to the WHO, [World Health Organization] were the Paris agreements and other agreements in the late 19th century around stopping pandemics from the colonies from coming to Europe. We move on from there to the eugenics era of the 1920s and 1930s and the overt European fascism where doctors were overrepresented in the Nazi party and also in Mussolini's fascism. Now we are facing an era of emergency rule, rule by decree, and a very close symbiosis of large corporations and government, which can be called corporate authoritarianism, which really was Mussolini's definition of fascism. We are seeing public health policy pushing this. We're seeing very strong coercion, censorship, and vilification of people who don't comply. This is all being pushed based on a series of lies and fallacies, which are really obvious. It is the classic fascist approach, and in the same way it's concentrating wealth among the few that are orchestrating it. The hope in writing the paper and of us talking today, is to try to get the public health world who are very much on board and going forward with this to step back and really think about what they're doing. They've repeatedly done huge harm to society over the last couple of hundred years, and it's clear that they're on that path again. We can go into a number of reasons for why they comply with that, but first they have got to face the reality around them. Mr. Jekielek: Whenever you say the word fascism, that's one of those- Dr. Bell: It's a trigger. Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. You can throw out that word, you can use it, but no one ever wants to be called that. It's used liberally in inappropriate ways to basically demonize people. Dr. Bell: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: We have to put extra attention today on justifying your statement. Again, I'm surprised that it was published with that concept of fascism, but you're very serious in your treatment. You're not casually throwing this word out. All the steps that you've seen in the fascist model are being replicated today. What are those steps? Dr. Bell: First, we see this very tight cooperation between large corporations and government. That has been increasing over the last few years in public health. It started off with these public-private partnerships which seemed good at the start. Fascism is a trigger, but it's also a real thing. It's a trigger because of what happened in the second World War. Fascism also dominated the whole technocracy movement and the eugenics movement of the 1920s and '30s. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health started off around eugenics. This was mainstream public health. It's the thought that all people are not equal, but you have an elite that will manage the rest for the greater good. This was a corporate/government elite that worked together very closely. People have forgotten, but this was mainstream public health. It was the mainstream thinking in the ‘20s and ‘30s in North America. It then became discredited and pushed aside for several decades after WWII. We associate fascism with the idea of black and white pictures of people in jack boots. But in the ‘20s and ‘30s, this was the progressive way forward, pushed by large corporations, high levels of government, and by certain professions. It's a very attractive way, because the idea is that the experts decide what the masses do, but it also leads to the forced sterilization of people who are considered inferior. Again, this was mainstream public health in North America not that long ago. It can go to the excesses that the Nazis took, but it is not people in jack boots breaking windows. It's a progressive worldview pushed by wealthy people, which will eventually benefit them. But we have to look at it with colored glasses, and not through the black and white film of the 1930s. We need to recognize the progressive movement now is very much aligned with that way of thinking, and it's an easy place to fall into. It also arose very much from the Left, as we call it now. Mr. Jekielek: Typically people will juxtapose communism on the Left with fascism on the Right, but you're saying that fascism is actually a progressive movement. Dr. Bell: That's how it was seen, and that's how the New York Times saw it. It's how Time magazine saw it, and they had Hitler as a Man of the Year in the 1930s. Right-Left is a totalitarian way of viewing things. It differs from classic communism, where supposedly, all people are equal. In fascism they are not, and you've got an elite who are dictating. But in the end, they both have a totalitarian approach. Kudos to the journal that published the paper with that title. It shows that not all publishing is completely bought off, and some are willing to publish a diversity of views. But if we stop and observe, we can see where we are going with this pandemic preparedness agenda. We are really co-opting public money for the benefit of private interests for a fallacy—the idea that pandemics are an existential threat. They weren't in the 1990s, and we should be even better at it now. They haven't been since the 1920 Spanish flu when we didn't have antibiotics and people died of secondary infection. Health-wise, when people die, they die of many other diseases; heart disease, cancer, along with tuberculosis and malaria in other countries. These outbreaks, even of Ebola, are a tiny fraction of life-years lost and of mortality. The whole agenda now that pandemics are an existential threat are built on a fallacy. It's simply not historically true. The only way it can be true is if we have a whole series of lab leaks or the release of engineered viruses, because it's not going to happen naturally. If this agenda is built on a fallacy like that and strongly pushed and takes over public health policy and society, then we need to look at what is going on and why this is happening. This is not a normal way for humans to act and to massively overemphasize a threat like this. Then you have to look at who is gaining from this. During the Covid outbreak, when we had a virus that appeared to almost certainly be engineered and accidentally released, but we don't actually know, hundreds of billions of dollars accumulated in the hands of relatively few people. At the start of the Covid outbreak, these people in corporations said, “We should throw away all prior public health knowledge on how we handle an outbreak,” where it has already been published that we never lock down and we never do those things. A couple of thousand years of knowledge about natural immunity was thrown out. All of that was thrown out. We had a series of lies, one of which was. “Natural immunity doesn't work against respiratory viruses.” We had a virus that kills people at the average age of about 75 to 80, which we knew about from the very start of 2020 because of what happened in China. Certain people and entities pushed very strongly that we lock down everyone in society, that we close businesses, and that we pretend that we have no natural defense against viruses. They claimed that we have no medicinal defenses against this virus, even though things like vitamin D are scientifically proven to improve our immune function which we use to fight the virus ourselves. Inevitably, by doing that, we shifted wealth from all the people who used to work, to the people who were gaining from these lockdowns. Initially, this was very much the software companies. Then we shifted to mass vaccination with an injectable vaccine, which we already know is not going to work very well against respiratory viruses. Anthony Fauci published a paper in January 2023 pointing out that we always knew it wouldn't work. The net result was a shift of hundreds of billions of dollars to the vaccine companies and their investors. We have this situation where there's no public health basis for this unorthodox public health policy. There's no scientific basis for what happened. You have to look further, and then you find it's a push to change society to a very different fascist or feudalistic structure. Mr. Jekielek: Isn't it a technocratic structure? Dr. Bell: It is a technocratic structure which was tried in the '20s and '30s, and it is being tried again. Greed is a normal human trait and is very strong in all of us if we don't control it. Greed means you want to take stuff from other people for the betterment of yourself and your family. If you have individuals who start to get the wealth of whole countries, which we have seen over the last few decades, then this normal human trait will lead them to use their money to buy governments, media, and the software companies who control the public discourse. They will use that control during something like Covid to further increase their wealth. It's hard to find really wealthy people who don't want to get wealthier. Mr. Jekielek: Do you envision a constant state of health emergency to facilitate this transition? Dr. Bell: Yes. We now have this pandemic preparedness agenda. People are thinking Covid has gone away and that we're getting back to normal, but in the international public health world, that's not the case at all. We are expanding institutions, we’re building new institutions, and all the expansion is around pandemic preparedness and response. In a couple of weeks' time, the UN General Assembly will be releasing a report on this. It's about 30 pages of language around equity, children's rights, and the importance of education by these people who've just closed schools in Uganda for two years. They have put hundreds of millions of children out of school and increased poverty. But within that, it essentially says that we need to stop disinformation and censor people. It says that pandemics and health emergencies are an existential threat, and to manage this the world has to give more authority to the World Health Organization, in particular, and the UN, in general. Next May, the WHO is moving to change international health regulations, which most people still aren't aware of, but which have force under international law. Rather than just being recommendations from the director general of the WHO, the countries that sign them will be implementing these recommendations, essentially making his recommendations the rules that they will follow. They expand the idea of a health emergency from demonstrated harm to anything that the World Health Organization considers a threat. They even expand it beyond pandemics and viruses to things like climate change or this one health agenda where anything in the environment or society that could harm human wellbeing in any way can be seen as a public health emergency. It puts in place the ability to essentially have a permanent state of emergency, which we're seeing anyway if you look at the media over even the last few months. The state of emergency will allow, and this is within the International Health regulations and the treaty that's going with it, it will allow the mandating of border closures, quarantine, mass vaccination, and required medical examinations of the population. Essentially, the states will be doing this whenever the director of the World Health Organization says that they should do it. Mr. Jekielek: These new variants of Covid, Eris and Pirola, are out there right now. The fear narrative is coming back, but not nearly as strong. How do you view that in light of everything you're talking about right now? Dr. Bell: To bring in something as stupid as this you need fear, because it's not rational. It is not rational for us to be terrified of the next virus when we haven't really had a bad one since the 1920s. Even then, most people went through it pretty normally, so it's not rational. You need fear to work on people's minds. Mr. Jekielek: Please qualify what you said. Most people think the 1920 pandemic was extremely serious. They also think that the initial wave of Covid was actually extremely serious. Dr. Bell: In parts of California where they have looked and done audits, the actual mortality reported is 30 to 40 percent lower than the official figures. We know that early on the way that patients were managed had a significant impact on mortality. In New York, 85 to 90 percent of people who were intubated didn't get off the ventilator, and they died. That's not surprising. If you have frail old people who have respiratory disease, and then you intubate and paralyze them, there's a very high mortality rate. Part of the mortality is in the way that we manage things. Part of it is from people dying for other reasons. Part of it is people actually dying from Covid, which was a significant disease. But it was mainly for quite old people who had other comorbidities such as diabetes and severe obesity. In that high-risk group, there was significant disease. For the rest of the young college students who are now being locked down again in some colleges, less than one-in-a-million healthy college students would be expected to die. For the vast majority of the population, it isn't much different than the flu. If you look at it globally, it was around a 1.15 percent mortality rate. About one in 500 people probably died with the virus. Mr. Jekielek: That shouldn't qualify as a giant health emergency. Dr. Bell: In public health, a number of things went out the window in early 2021 in the way that we look at disease burden and at life-years lost. Almost everyone in society would agree with the following; if a five-year-old child dies of pneumonia or malaria, they lose 70 years of life. It's a tragedy. If an 85-year-old who is already sick dies, they probably lose six months to a year. It's also a tragedy. If you have a choice to put resources into malaria or childhood pneumonia, or an 85-year-old who is very sick, has six months to live, and then gets a respiratory virus, where are you going to put your resources? The bigger burden of disease is in the children, so you would put your resources there. It doesn't mean that one life is more important than the other, but we're talking about how we can use resources most effectively. Covid was a real disease which affected people, and some people died from it. But we put measures in place that we knew would increase poverty. We know that poverty shortens life expectancy. We know that closing clinics that screen for cancer will increase cancer deaths. That's why we screen for cancer to reduce it. We know that making people scared to go to the hospital when they have chest pain will increase heart mortality. We know that closing the clinics in other countries will increase tuberculosis and malaria, so we try to make these balances. We have a relatively minor disease, and then we have these major diseases that kill most people. Even during the height of Covid in the United States, cancer and heart disease were killing more people than Covid, and at a younger average age. Therefore, you don't make them worse to address this relatively minor issue. The World Health Organization essentially pretended that the one thing that mattered was this virus, and that this virus was doing far less harm than a whole range of other diseases that we normally cope with every day. In that, it was certainly a grossly exaggerated threat. Undoubtedly, we have done net harm to health by concentrating on the virus at the expense of everything else. The vaccine is an example of spending about $10 billion trying to vaccinate 70 percent of the whole world. We spend $3.5 billion dollars every year on malaria which kills over half-a-million children every year. In life-years lost and in disease burden, malaria is far worse than Covid globally. But in this pandemic preparedness agenda, we are putting three times more resources just in the Covid vaccine, and leaving everything else aside. Now, we are putting a system in place to try to stop the next pandemic, which historically we would expect in a couple hundred years time, but we are being told it could come at any moment. The World Health Organization and the World Bank and others are advocating that we put in $31.5 billion a year, and $10.5 billion of that will be new money. We're on the road to this right now. These treaties are using public money. It is taxpayer money from people who are getting poorer. It's going to fund a huge surveillance network which is now being put in place. Every country will be inspected every two years, and there will be a report on how well they are doing. There's a whole bureaucracy being funded for this. They will go out and find variants, because it's normal to find viral variants. This is how nature works. They will then have the power to say, “This is a potential threat. We will lock down this country and close the borders.” They will impoverish the people while they make their hundred-day vaccine. There will be billions of dollars going into a hundred-day vaccine program. It will be an mRNA vaccine. They will then mandate or coerce the population to take the vaccine in order to get out of the lockdowns, so that they can get back to their families and get back to their businesses. The population will take the vaccine. This will put a few hundred billion more in the pockets of these companies who are involved in running this whole network. It is a self-perpetuating way of concentrating wealth for this very, very small disease burden. It will be at the expense of all the other diseases which actually kill people. We are being sold this as if this is essential for the future of human society and the human race. If you tell a lie enough times, people will believe it. We have white papers from the WHO, the World Bank, the UN, the Wellcome Trust and elsewhere that state categorically in their introductions that pandemics are becoming more frequent and more severe. It's a fallacy, it's wrong, and it has no historical basis. Mr. Jekielek: It's like we're conveniently forgetting history, public health policy, and epidemiology, all in the name of a fascist impetus. Dr. Bell: How do you explain all this? Some people say it's a Marxist takeover, and we can fiddle around with words. There is a relatively small part of society that is benefiting, whereas most are being impoverished and losing their basic human rights in this process. A tie-in of corporations and government is running this. When we talk about national governments, Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum said he has penetrated the cabinets of a whole bunch of countries. A lot of our leaders now are from the World Economic Forum and the Young Global Leaders Program. When we talk about countries now, we're talking about a level of people who are working together in this corporate club. There is increasing censorship of the media. We are seeing a pushback now in America with the court cases around what's happened at Google and Facebook and Twitter. We're seeing this vilification of people in society with these labels, “Pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and “These people are killing your grandma.” These labels fit in the fascist mold. There is actually some benefit to putting these labels on people in order to wake them up and make them think about it. You don't take these labels lightly, but you also don't avoid them if they are in front of your face. You have to call a spade a spade, as we would say in Australia. If we start doing that, then we can start undoing what is happening. Mr. Jekielek: Seeing it for what it is and acting on it somehow. Dr. Bell: Yes, exactly, acting on it. Acting on it can mean a number of things. It can start by just not complying with stupidity. This system relies on people putting on a mask whenever they're told to, which shows their compliance. If you walk down a street where everyone is masked, it’s very different from walking down a street where you can see people smiling. If you put on a mask at the door of a restaurant and you take it off at the table, that's an idiotic thing to do. You are just showing that you are complying with the authority of these people who just made hundreds of billions of dollars out of your increasing poverty. You can do that, or you can say, “I'm not going to do that. I'm a sovereign individual. In the end, the government is there to serve me and not to tell me what to do.” Fascist and totalitarian regimes rely on compliance in order to work. From the public health point of view, people in my profession have to go back to looking objectively at disease burden and looking at the history of immunology. If you impoverish people, then you shorten life expectancy and increase mortality. This has been very well demonstrated. If you damage economies, you increase mortality, especially in low-income countries. But we have done this. We've pushed girls into child marriage, we've increased child labor, and we've done many things over the last few years that are all very harmful from a public health point of view. We're coping with it by putting out these memos that say equity and inclusion and make it look as if we're thinking about that. But at the same time, we are putting in these policies for a putative virus or a current variant, which we know will make this far worse, and which don't hold up from the point of view of disease burden. The reason this is happening is because this is where the money is in global health. It's in pandemic preparedness, and it's there because the people who are managing the whole system will gain from that in the long run. But almost everyone doing it knows that this doesn't make sense. They should know the history of public health and how this ended up in the past. Mr. Jekielek: Are you saying that the WHO is the hub of a global command and control system? Dr. Bell: The WHO is mainly a tool. It's not an organization trying to take over the world. It's being used by people who want to do that for their own benefit. If you look at how the organization should work, it should be there to convene meetings between countries and facilitate exchange of ideas and information. When countries ask for help, it should be there to help. China has 1.3 billion people, a large chunk of the world's population, so it should have a significant influence. If you are looking at the population size, so should India, and so should sub-Saharan Africa. But that's completely different from having an organization that can direct people in the country to be locked down and mandated to take a vaccine. That is a sovereignty issue. The WHO and the UN shouldn't even be there in the first place. The WHO is significantly funded by private interests. Its second-largest funder is a private organization that has significant pharma investments. Clearly, there's a conflict of interest. You wouldn't want that entity deciding on who should have what drug in the country. It's funded by certain countries, and the United States and Germany are the big ones who are very big in the drug industry. Nearly all of their funding and all the private funding is directed, which means they don't give it to the WHO so that the WHO can decide what's best for the world. They give it to the WHO to do a specific task that they request. They will even direct them to employ certain people, or to have meetings in certain places. It's very directed funding, and the WHO is just a tool they're using with their funding to get something they want. That can be good, and it can be bad. Again, in a democratic society you would not let that organization have any power over your people. It would be completely irrational to do that. A country like the U.S. has far more expertise on infectious disease within its borders than the bureaucracy at the WHO. You're not there just because you're an expert, and it's not a pool of expertise. It's a pool of bureaucrats who are there to manage coordination of certain aspects of health internationally. You can look at their track record around Covid. They do not understand immunity, how masks work, how the virus was almost all in old people and not in young people, and that if you close schools and massively damage the education of hundreds of millions of children you will push them further into poverty, having bad health effects on them and their country. If you don't understand that, you've proven that you're not competent to give public health instruction to countries. Again, it's completely illogical to go down the path we are going at the moment where we give more power to this organization to tell to and control over our own health policy. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. David Bell, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Bell: Thanks, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. David Bell and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “When 2020 unfolded, I could see where this was headed. I actually said to my husband in early January, ‘Okay, we're here. They’re finally going to really go for it. They're going to use this as an opportunity to coerce and force vaccinations.’” Over two decades ago, Leslie Manookian was in London working in finance, when she unintentionally caught a glimpse of the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry. “He sat down and, sitting across the table from me, he says ‘Listen, in very, very rare instances, people have died from the drug.’ And he said, ‘The bad news is, the FDA is going to make us put a black-box warning on our packaging. The good news is: We still think we can do $7 billion in peak sales,’” says Ms. Manookian. “And I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh. This is the reality of what I’m doing, and I'm playing for the wrong team.’” Today, she is founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund. She has filed numerous lawsuits against the government to ensure bodily autonomy for all Americans, including the landmark 2022 case in which a federal judge struck down a nationwide mask mandate for travel. “The administrative state is all of these federal agencies that are headed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. And the whole administrative state sits underneath the executive branch of government. It was never envisioned by our founders,” says Ms. Manookian.” Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/how-the-pharmaceutical-industry-captured-federal-health-agencies-leslie-manookian-5498040 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Leslie Manookian, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Leslie Manookian: So great to be here with you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: I've been thinking about your work ever since your organization helped end this first federal mandate, and a lot of people have been very inspired. There were images of airplanes and masks being tossed. You have an interesting path leading you into the Health Freedom Defense Fund. Please tell me about that. Ms. Manookian: I was just your average person working on Wall Street, and I had actually gotten transferred to London. I was working in finance there, and my job was at a company called Alliance Capital. It was one of my clients when I had been at Goldman Sachs. Essentially, my job was to interview the CEOs of multinational corporations to decide which European companies should be in our portfolios. I ran Alliance's European growth portfolio management and research businesses. I got to meet all of these incredible people in my role there. The CEO of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, a named brand company, came into our office. They were coming in to reassure investors. We owned a big chunk of their stock, probably a billion dollars. Their new blockbuster drug, which was in phase three trials, was having some stumbles. In fact, rumors were leaking out that some people were dying on the trial. The CFO, the head of R&D, and the head of investor relations came in. Sitting across the table from me he says, "Listen, in very rare instances, people have died from the drug." He said, "The bad news is that the FDA is going to make us put a black box warning on our packaging. The good news is, we still think we can do $7 billion in peak sales." I felt like somebody had kicked me in the stomach. I couldn't believe it. I thought, “Are you being serious?” I just sat there stunned at his cavalier attitude about the trade-off between his profits and human life, and I couldn't believe it. After that meeting ended, I went to my office and paced back and forth. Then I walked down the hallway to our pharmaceutical analyst's office, flung the door open, and said, "This is wrong." She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me like, "Yes, I know lady. What do you want me to do about it?" I thought, “This is the reality of what I'm doing. I'm playing for the wrong team.” I had a front row seat that most people don't ever get. I realized that there's much more going on in the world of business than most people understand. That was one impetus behind me actually leaving and dedicating my life to doing good on the planet and to playing on the team of the people, rather than for the corporate captains. So, I planned my exit. Mr. Jekielek: What year was that? Ms. Manookian: I don't remember the exact year. I could look it up because I could pinpoint it with the product, but it was around 2000, or 2001 at the latest. Mr. Jekielek: Along with the mandate decision that I referenced earlier, your 2011 film, “The Greater Good,” was an absolutely wonderful film. It was a very reasonable treatment of a very difficult issue. I watched it when we were making, “The Unseen Crisis,” our documentary about the vaccine injured not being treated well by the system. Indeed, your film was about previous recipients of vaccines who had been similarly injured and were not being treated well by the system. It was almost like ours was part two of your film, which I would recommend to anyone. You have some really interesting characters in that film, so please tell me about it. Ms. Manookian: Yes. Essentially, I was planning to retire. I was sick, struggling with my health, and I didn't know what was going on. I kept going to my very mainstream doctor in London and he said, "Listen, I can't help you. Conventional medicine can't help you. You should go and see a homeopath or an acupuncturist." I thought, "Okay, that's strange, but all right." I actually went and saw a homeopath because homeopathy is very popular in London. In fact, it's very popular in Europe and around the world. It's the fastest growing system of medicine on the planet today. I waited to get in to see this woman for three months. When I saw this homeopath, it resonated with me very deeply. It just made sense, so much so, that I actually enrolled in homeopathy college. I didn't tell anybody I was doing that, I just did it. I was still a director running this business, and this was all going on at the same time. I went to the college orientation on the very first day. The person leading orientation said, "Over the next three years, we're going to touch on many topics. We're going to talk about finding causes, the mind body connection, and nutrition. We're going to talk about vaccine damage." I raised my hand and said, "What are you talking about? Vaccines are the greatest invention of mankind." He said, "That's one perspective, and we're going to learn another." After the class, he handed me a book and said, "You've got to read this book." I went home and read that book. Being the analyst nerd that I am, I looked at the back of the book. There were over 960 footnotes documenting all these things that were in that book; rheumatoid arthritis after vaccines, seizures after vaccines, learning disabilities after vaccines, and death after vaccines. I thought, “If this is true, then somebody needs to do something about it.” At that moment, I literally felt that I was going to make a movie about it. That was literally the impetus behind making, “The Greater Good.” I didn't believe everything that was in that book. I wanted to go and find out for myself, so I started interviewing anybody and everybody that I could. I interviewed Dr. Paul Offit, the Chief of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He was a developer of vaccines and has a vaccine on the market for intestinal issues in children.I interviewed Dr. Stanley Plotkin of the Wistar Institute, a vaccine developer. We interviewed Dr. Neal Halsey of Johns Hopkins University. We interviewed Dr. Walter Orenstein, who was former head of the National Immunization Program at CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], and Dr. Melinda Wharton, who was the Deputy Director of the Immunization Program when we were there. We interviewed pediatricians, doctors, and scientists. We interviewed activists like Barbara Loe Fisher who founded the National Vaccine Information Center to get this whole spectrum of information to present to viewers. Along with all of that testimony, we wove in the stories of families whose children had been affected by vaccinations. We basically offered up all the information so that everybody could make their own decisions. We showed there's a National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act that actually recognizes that vaccines injure and kill some children. They set up a program to try and help resolve these issues or adjudicate them, and we showed how it has backfired. We touched on the fact that the vaccine makers have no liability for their products. It's not just the Covid shot, this all started in 1986. The film unpacks the issues that surround the whole vaccine conversation and debate, which actually predated the Covid vaccine conversation by 40 years. Mr. Jekielek: What you saw happen with Covid was not that surprising to you based on the laws and policies that have been implemented over the last few decades. Ms. Manookian: Once you really start digging into any subject, it then gives you a model to view the rest of the world by. That's very much the case with vaccinations. I started digging deep into this 20-plus years ago, and I found out our institutions have been corrupted. The medical journals have been corrupted. Our journalism has been corrupted. The media outlets have been corrupted. How did that all happen? You can go back to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. The Bayh-Dole Act was the act of Congress that allowed scientists working in NIH [National Institutes of Health] on the backs of taxpayer dollars to retain the patents to the products that they developed. It actually pays them money to keep them in government, but the problem is that it incentivizes them to then push products that they might profit from, like vaccines. This is why Fauci and his team at NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] own half the Moderna patent, because of that law passed in 1980. This really facilitated the corruption of all of our federal health agencies, the NIH in particular. In 1992, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act was passed, and that act allowed the pharmaceutical industry to capture the FDA [U. S. Food & Drug Administration]. Originally, this legislation was to enable the pharmaceutical industry to say, “We have this special drug. There's no way to treat this disease, but this special drug will treat it. We want to fast track this product and get it to market for people who are in dire straits and need this product right away.” Initially, that sounded like a really good idea. The program started out at about $100 million. Last year it was at $2.655 billion. That equates to 65 percent of the drug approvers’ salaries at the FDA and about 45 percent of the FDA's budget. The pharmaceutical industry is paying user fees directly to the FDA, essentially capturing the agency that it is supposed to regulate. These two pieces of legislation really changed the shape of our federal health agencies. Two weeks after the 9/11 event, the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act legislation was introduced. This legislation accorded extraordinary powers to state governors and state health departments in the event of a public health emergency. At this time, that has been passed in whole or in part by 43 states. Mr. Jekielek: In 1986, there was legislation where vaccine makers were indemnified from liability. Ms. Manookian: Yes, I did mention that. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of children were catastrophically injured or killed by their DPT [Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus] shots. It was a whole cell pertussis shot, meaning it was not attenuated or weakened like the shot that's on the market today. It still has issues, and it's not as dangerous as the original one was, but it actually also doesn't work. As a result of that, juries awarded millions and millions of dollars to families whose children had been injured or killed by the shot. The pharmaceutical industry went to Congress and said, “We're not going to make vaccines anymore unless you protect us.” Congress obliged and they passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which almost completely indemnifies the pharmaceutical industry from financial and legal liability. It's a little bit more complex than that, but basically that's it. Now, if your child is injured by a vaccine, you have to go to vaccine court. It’s a special court that's funded by the federal government and by a 75 cent tax on every vaccine administered in the United States. It is manned by judges called special masters, and there's no due process. There's no discovery and there's nothing independent. It's like a rigged court essentially. Either three-fourths or four-fifths of all cases are dismissed, so a very small minority actually ever make it through. It was supposed to be no fault and easy for these grieving families. Instead it has morphed into this horrendous process that can take 10 years. These people are not treated as though they have no fault. They're treated just horrifically by the federal government. It's one of these externalities. They've taken this damage that is happening and they've put it into this federal bureaucracy that's not actually serving the people at all. I know people whose children have died from shots. I knew people whose children had seizures and who have been paralyzed. I have friends whose children are still in diapers in their 20s who will never speak again because of the catastrophic injuries from vaccinations. This program essentially allows the pharmaceutical industry to continue producing vaccines without any liability. They have no incentive whatsoever to make a safer product. That's insane. Mr. Jekielek: There are a few more key pieces of legislation that I've heard about. Ms. Manookian: Then in 2005, you have the PREP Act [Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act]. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act provided immunity to the vaccine makers of childhood vaccinations. But now you've got all this infrastructure in place for a health emergency. The PREP Act in 2005 provided immunity to any company that makes a medical countermeasure in the event of a public health emergency. Anybody who made a mask, a test, or a vaccine under the Covid Emergency Declaration was shielded from any liability for their products. Of course, the government is actually paying for the shots using our tax dollars and printing money to do it. It's a license for these people to do whatever they want with no liability. In 2012, they rescinded the Smith-Mundt Act. This act prohibited the CIA and federal government from propagandizing American citizens. People have probably heard of Radio Free America and other programs like this. It's been legal for decades for the CIA and the federal government to disseminate propaganda to foreign citizens in order to influence their social fabric and their cultures in order to support democracy and to support uprisings against dictators. Rescinding the Smith-Mundt Act in 2012 legalized our CIA to disseminate knowingly false information to the U.S. public, and the critics were clearly very concerned when this happened. As a result of that, the people who passed it said, "Don't worry. We're not setting up a program and we don't have any funding for it." In 2013, they set up the program, and in 2016, they funded the program. What is the upshot of this yarn? Essentially, anything that you see in the news today could be propaganda. It could be coming straight from the government, and that is legal. Mr. Jekielek: The Health Freedom Defense Fund is a relatively new thing, correct? Ms. Manookian: First of all, in 2011, all this stuff was going on in the background. I was doing all this research and I was starting to realize that things weren't quite right here. While I'm making the movie, I'm thinking, “Why would they pass this model State Emergency Health Powers Act legislation? Then the Swine Flu came out in 2009, the federal government declared an emergency, and yet the data didn’t support that. Sharyl Attkinson did some amazing investigative journalism uncovering this, which you can find on our website. I pieced all of this together, and some of this made it into the movie. The movie came out in 2011, but I still kept on doing my research. In 2009, California started attacking parental rights and exemptions to vaccinations. They never had a religious-specific exemption, but they had a philosophical one that covered religious exemptions. They took that away. They allowed children 12-years-old to submit to vaccination without parental knowledge or consent, and the parents were barred from knowing about this. Somewhere around 2016, a New York state legislator introduced a quarantine law that would allow the state of New York to quarantine a person indefinitely for unspecified diseases and take them someplace without anybody's knowledge or any power to get them out of it. There was no proof that they were sick or that they were a threat to anybody. Do you understand what I'm saying? There's all this stuff going on where our individual rights and parental rights are being eroded. As a keen observer and researcher of the whole vaccine paradigm, when 2020 unfolded, I could see where this was headed. In early January, I actually said to my husband, "Okay, we're here. They're finally going to really go for it. They're going to use this as an opportunity to coerce and force vaccinations."He said, "Don't be silly. It's never going to get to that." I was like, "No, it's here. This is what I've been saying now for 20 years, and it's here." By the spring of 2020, I was contemplating what I was going to do about what was happening, and I tried bugging anybody who would listen to me. Most people weren't interested in listening, and I just decided I was going to start a nonprofit. I actually was prodded by someone who had supported the movie and said, "You should start a nonprofit." So, I founded the Health Freedom Defense Fund. We filed our first lawsuit in March of 2021, which was challenging the Los Angeles Unified School District's [LAUSD] emergency use authorization mandate. They have mandated the emergency use authorized shot, which is actually prohibited by federal law. But they did it anyway, and they didn't seem to care. Having all this knowledge for 20 years just really opened my eyes. The veil was ripped from my eyes, and I could see that there were certainly forces with an agenda that were eroding the integrity of our institutions and causing major problems for the average American. The other thing that it gave me, Jan, was this awareness that the CDC didn't have the power that it was claiming. When the CDC issued its federal travel mask mandate, I said to our attorneys, "This is not right, the CDC can't do this.” The CDC is mostly an advisory agency. For instance, the CDC can create a recommended vaccination schedule for children, but it cannot enforce it. They cannot implement it, because health laws are state laws. Health laws are part of what are called the police powers, and the police powers are reserved to the states. This is why every individual state has different laws surrounding health issues and vaccinations in particular. When they mandated that, I said, “We need to look into this.” Our attorneys said, "You're right." We filed suit in July of 2021 to challenge the federal travel mask mandate. But we didn't go for an injunction and we didn't try and stop it right away. We just said, "Let it work its way through the courts and let’s see what happens." About nine months later on April 18th, 2022, the federal judge in district court in Tampa, Florida issued her ruling, vacating the mask mandate. There were nationwide celebrations and videos and photos of people literally jubilant that the face rags were no longer mandated to go on a plane or a train or a bus. Number one, it was a blow to this behemoth, the administrative state, that in my view has plagued society. The administrative state is all of these federal agencies that are headed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, and the whole administrative state sits underneath the executive branch of government. It was never envisioned by our founders. That was one thing. It really struck a blow because the CDC was playing outside its sandbox in a big way. But it did something much more fundamental, Jan. It inspired people and gave Americans hope that they were not helpless. I just can't tell you how many people called us and emailed us and reached out. It was one of those moments that actually provided a tremendous amount of inspiration to people who felt like there was no one listening and no one fighting for them. That was probably its biggest success. Mr. Jekielek: What are you working on these days? Ms. Manookian: The Health Freedom Defense Fund has a mission to establish in the public consciousness the idea that each and every one of us owns our bodies. The idea that we need to ask the government for an exemption is upside down. We shouldn't have to ask anybody for an exemption, because we and we alone get to make choices about our bodies. That's our long-term mission. In order to achieve that, we try to educate people about their rights. We help teach them how to advocate. We provide all sorts of resources on our website, which is healthfreedomdefense.org. There's a tab called resources to help people fight for their rights. Then we also litigate when necessary. Even though we've only been around for a few years, we have filed over a dozen lawsuits, and we have better than a .500 batting average, which is pretty fantastic. We've sued the federal government three times, and the Los Angeles Unified School District twice. We are in two cases right now against Nike and Disney, one against LAUSD, and we're still in one against the federal government on behalf of federal employees. But the most unique and important one that we're working on right now is the Los Angeles Unified School District. This school district is still mandating the shot today, despite the fact that we've known since August of 2021 that the shots don't stop transmission or infection. We also know that they are dangerous. Why would any business, school district, or government body continue with this insanity where you're actually pushing people to potentially harm themselves by submitting to this shot? Mr. Jekielek: Especially children. Ms. Manookian: Yes, it's statistically zero risk from Covid for children. Yes, it really makes no sense. For young people and even for young adults it makes no sense. The biggest thing we deal with is a body of law in the United States. There's a case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which essentially said that a city could mandate a vaccination that was believed to be safe and effective in an extreme emergency, such as smallpox, with a 30 to 40 percent death rate. In an extreme emergency, they could mandate that or they could fine people who didn't want to take the shot. That lawsuit, that ruling from the Supreme Court has been used for a century to justify the erosion of our rights. The problem is that ever since the Nuremberg Trials and the Nuremberg Code, there's been a growing body of case law in the United States which says that you have a zone of privacy around you. You have the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, and you have the right to refuse life extending treatment. Those two bodies of law are at odds with each other. Our case against the Los Angeles Unified School District says that this drug is not a vaccine. It's a therapeutic with no public health benefit. As such, it's imperative that people have the right to make their own choices. You cannot use the Jacobson case to justify this, because Jacobson does not apply. What really needs to happen is this disparity between the recent case law and Jacobson must be reconciled. This case will be instrumental in doing that for the benefit of all Americans, so it's a really important case. The other two important cases are with Disney and Nike, which are in defense of employees who've either been bullied and discriminated against. In the case of Nike, they were fired for exercising their First Amendment-protected religious freedoms and their medical rights. One employee had a medical disability, and Nike fired them. These are senior employees that Nike fired, and the Supreme Court has recently ruled that you cannot fire someone. You can't refuse to accommodate their religious exemptions unless it's a substantial financial burden on the operation of the business. These are incredibly important lawsuits that we are fighting. They are all in the public interest because these people could be any person in America. You could be a school teacher, an employee in a business, or a worker at Nike or Disney or any one of these corporations that have trampled American rights. We are going to keep fighting and doing our work, and we're super grateful for anybody that wants to support us. Mr. Jekielek: Leslie Manookian, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Manookian: Thanks so much for having me on. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Leslie Manookian and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 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[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “They started with the DOJ issuing the threat tag. Then they moved to the FBI, who actually called some of our moms after they spoke at school board meetings with intimidating questions, trying to silence them.” For years, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich served as elected members of their respective local school boards. “This is a very important local office. The decisions that your school board is making oftentimes affect your life a lot more than the president, perhaps,” says Ms. Justice. But during the pandemic, they witnessed how teachers unions prioritized fear-based policies and activist messaging over the well-being of children. “School districts do two things well: they protect themselves and they celebrate themselves. And they often celebrate themselves to protect themselves. That's how you end up with a 90 percent graduation rate, but only 14 percent or 25 percent of kids reading on eighth-grade level,” says Ms. Justice. They’re the founders of Moms for Liberty, a grassroots organization empowering parents to defend their rights and advocate for their children’s education. In just over two years, they’ve grown to 300 chapters in 47 states. “What they were doing to parents 2020–2021 was so destructive to public education, so destructive to our government system,” says Ms. Descovich. “Elected officials abdicated their authority to bureaucrats. Our motto at Moms for Liberty is, ‘We do not co-parent with the government,’” says Ms. Justice. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/the-wrong-moms-tiffany-justice-and-tina-descovich-on-parental-power-educational-failures-and-alphabet-soup-excuses-5503330 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Tiffany Justice: It's an honor to be here with you. Tina Descovich: Thanks for having us. Mr. Jekielek: It's amazing that we were able to get everyone together in one spot. You two are traveling all over the place these days, most recently in Montgomery County, Maryland, doing these town halls. The focus of Moms for Liberty is parental rights. What are these town halls all about? Ms. Justice: The town halls are called Giving Parents a Voice, and that's truly what we're doing. We're putting the microphone into the hands of parents. Last night we had a parent panel and a policy panel, and we took questions from the audience. In Montgomery County, you're seeing a true violation of parental rights on so many different levels. Ms. Descovich: We love bringing the community together for these important discussions that need to happen on issues that are facing each community. We do them all over the country, because the issues are different everywhere. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned something very serious happening in Montgomery County. What are the issues there? Ms. Justice: Absolutely. They are the first county that tried to reissue the mask mandate on children, the 10-day mask mandate. I'm really proud to say that parents fought back and the district had to make the masks optional. That's a big win for parents. Their voices matter, and they're seeing that. There's another issue happening in Montgomery County. Secrets are being kept from parents about children's gender identity. Private conversations are happening between children and adults in schools without the consent or knowledge of parents, leading them down a very dangerous path as far as gender transition is concerned. Gender ideology and sexual orientation are being taught in the classroom. This isn't a book in the library that a child might just happen upon. This is a rainbow storybook collection where gender ideology is being introduced to children as young as five-years-old. In books like Pride Puppy, the children are asked to search for terms like leather, drag queen, and underwear. These are five-year-old children. I don't think a lot of moms are really looking for their children to learn about drag queens. Mr. Jekielek: What is that problematic? I probably don't need to ask this question, but why don't you lay it out for me? Ms. Descovich: It's not just problematic for a certain segment of society. We're finding that these issues cross religion and cross race. Last night at the town hall, we had the Jewish, Ethiopian, Muslim, and Christian population represented, all speaking out in one voice against what's happening there. Because once a parent loses the right to direct the upbringing of their children, once the government or the school is keeping secrets from parents and deceiving parents with some of these policies, you have lost your family. Mr. Jekielek: How does this sexualization or early exposure to sexual ideas contribute to that process? Ms. Justice: The least interesting thing about an elementary school student should be their sexual orientation. My child doesn't need a sexual, spirit guide at school. Parents send their children to school to learn; to read, to write, and to do math. There are amazing books that you can put in the hands of a child, and Pride Puppy isn't one of them. Mr. Jekielek: Back in the early days or before Moms for Liberty began, you started to notice each other's work on school boards through the masking issue. Since the masking issue is coming up again, let’s discuss what parents should know right now about masks for children. Then we'll jump into a little history. Ms. Descovich: Masking for children not only harms children, it's nonsense. Everybody knows that instinctively. Even in 2020 and 2021, when school districts were passing policies that forced masks on children, we had a parent coming to our school board meetings saying, "My child is deaf and is not going to be able to communicate. He's not going to be able to communicate if the teacher has a mask." At one of my school board meetings, I pulled out a plethora of complaints that had come to me about children that had MRSA [Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus] infection on their faces from having to wear masks. There were children that had dental problems or their gums were already starting to be infected from having the bacteria closed in on their mouths. There was issue after issue after issue, but school districts did not care. On top of that, they just didn't work. They were wearing cloth masks. There were no rules in place of what type of mask it had to be. It was just, “Put something over your mouth.” They didn't care about the quality, they didn't care about the grade, and they didn't care if it was causing harm. The whole issue was nonsense. Mr. Jekielek: In some cases, they were talking about putting N95 respirators on young children. Ms. Justice: One of the things that was most concerning was the fact that we were telling children who maybe have compromised immune systems or teachers that had compromised immune systems, that the masks would somehow protect them. In schools, it's really important to take steps to make accommodations for students who have special needs. We were forcing something that wasn't really effective, wasn't source control, and wasn't going to stop transmission. Yet, we were saying, “This is going to protect you.” It was a lie. The last thing that I ever wanted to do as a school board member was to lie to parents. I always want parents to have accurate information, so they can make the best choice for their own child. As a school board member, I felt that it was really unethical to provide masks as a solution, when it wasn't really helping the student in any way. Mr. Jekielek: We have Anthony Fauci on record talking about the utility of masks,and then the policy suddenly changed. Ms. Justice: This idea that people will feel safe if you wear a mask was a lie. It really wasn't what was best for kids. We saw that and we have evidence of that. There were the speech delays. My own son had a speech issue and he was getting speech therapy in school wearing a mask, while the teacher was wearing a mask. It was just absolutely preposterous. You have the American Academy of Pediatrics coming out telling moms and dads that babies don't need to see your face. Any mom who has had a baby knows that your baby needs to see you. When you smile, your baby smiles. This has created a lack of trust in American medical institutions and the school districts and the CDC and our government. It really has had a horrible effect. It has left a lot of parents wondering, “Who do I listen to?” Parents have now come to understand that they are the best expert for their own child. We really work to empower moms and dads in America to know that and to understand that. Ms. Descovich: We saw that these decisions and policies were being made from the federal government down to local school boards. We were in 12 and 14-hour school board meetings discussing and debating what policies to put in place around Covid that were all based on fear. It was never good to create a policy based on fear. Never. We shouldn't run this country on fear. We shouldn't make decisions based on fear. You shouldn't run your family based on fear. Ms. Justice: A spirit of fear took over in America, and we saw that very clearly when we were on the school board. Mr. Jekielek: We know now that there was a global campaign to foster that fear. Let's go back in history. Please tell me about your background and how you got into all this. You didn't start off in conservative circles. Ms. Descovich: I started as a mom, like all of our moms. I was a volunteer in my children's elementary school. I volunteered 10,000 hours in my children's elementary school, and was volunteer of the year and PTO president. I was just your average mom doing all I could to improve their education and be involved in their school. Mr. Jekielek: You were an average, highly motivated mom, but that’s a lot of hours. Ms. Justice: I was just going to say, that's a lot of hours. Ms. Descovich: Let's put it this way. I have worked since I was 15-years-old. After I gave birth to my now 15-year-old, I found that I wanted to be at home more. I started working part-time from home and doing some consulting. But it left me with this hole, and I still had this time and this energy. There are so many needs in the public school system. Of course, I'm going to give my time and energy to where my children are. Why wouldn’t you? That’s when you get to see what's happening in the public school system and you see all the problems. By nature, I'm someone that wants to solve and fix problems. As a problem came up, I would work through the school to fix it. As the problems became bigger, I would head to the district to try to fix it. When my now 22-year-old was in seventh grade, he brought home an assignment that he got a 100 percent grade on. His teacher said, "Great job." Of course, I was so proud of him. I opened it up and it was a wanted poster for Christopher Columbus that said, "Wanted, Christopher Columbus, for crimes against humanity." That brought me into a whole new phase of my life. I thought, “What is this? How could this be a 100 percent grade? I spent the next six months digging deep, researching, and reading everything I could on Christopher Columbus. Had I been deceived in my own education? What is the truth here? After Christopher Columbus, there was just one assignment after another coming home. My eyes were opened, and once your eyes are opened, you can't go back. Mr. Jekielek: What year was this, roughly? Ms. Justice: Maybe 2014 or 2015. Within a year or two I decided to run for school board. Mr. Jekielek: Let's bring us up to the pandemic time, because that's when things changed a lot. Ms. Descovich: Our school board got along really well. We had a Democrat on the board, an independent, and several Republicans. For most of my term, everybody really worked together for the betterment of our community. Everybody loved where we lived. When Covid happened, that just went away. Everybody in the school district always tried to serve or protect the most underserved children; the ones that have an IEP [Individualized Education Program], and the ones that have special needs. When Covid happened, nobody seemed to care anymore. It was so bizarre to watch colleagues I had a lot of respect for just ignoring parents that were in tears, such as the mom that came in talking about her deaf child and asking, “How is she going to communicate? I need to be able to do something else for my child, other than having her masked and having her teacher masked, if she's really going to have an education.” The board didn't want to allow any exceptions. They were too afraid of everything and said, “This is how it has to be.” It was very upsetting to watch that happen in my school district. I kept voting against the forced quarantine of healthy children and against the forced masking with no opt-out, but they kept bringing it. It was second-grade through 12th-grade for masks, and then they brought it down to kindergarten. I had to vote against it again. It was very unfortunate to watch. At the same time, Tiffany was in the school district just south of me. Mr. Jekielek: Doing the same thing. Ms. Descovich: Doing the exact same thing, and having the same experience. Ms. Justice: A four-one vote. Mr. Jekielek: Let's bring this up to date with you, Tiffany. How did you get involved in all this? Ms. Justice: I started as a volunteer at my kids' school too. I saw that the hallways were flooding and the school was really in a state of disrepair. I got involved in trying to renovate the school, and we were successful in making that happen. Along that journey, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about the way that the school district prioritizes the funds that they have. Your budget really dictates your priorities in a school district. I saw that the priorities of the district were really out of sync with what was best for the kids. Mr. Jekielek: What would be some examples of that? Ms. Justice: I saw the kids eating lunch at 10:30 am, and then realized that the union bargaining contract was dictating that. Early release days were happening once a month which weren't good for the kids, weren't good for the parents, and the teachers didn't like them. The union didn't want to let it go out of the bargaining contract. There was a lot of covering up of educational failure. There were a lot of excuses being made, “If only we did this, and if only the children had this, then they would learn better in school.” There was not a lot of focus on really ensuring that academic achievement was improving in the schools. I've said this before, and I will say it again: school districts do two things well. They protect themselves and they celebrate themselves. They often celebrate themselves in order to protect themselves. That's how you end up with a 90 percent graduation rate, but only 14 percent or 25 percent of kids are reading at an eighth-grade level. There isn't a lot of reading remediation happening between eighth and 12th grade, so something is amiss. We have graduation inflation, and I got to see that very clearly. Then Covid happened, and Tina is right. There was complete disregard for parents and their concerns about what was best for their kids. It was all about the school board’s liability and protecting themselves. No one was willing to take a stand. Elected officials abdicated their authority to bureaucrats. Our motto at Moms for Liberty is that we do not co-parent with the government. I was on a school board and I said that to the superintendent when he wanted to have a medical committee. He wanted to invite the hospital and the health department in. Then he said that he was going to choose some doctors in the community to come in and start helping them make decisions for the kids in school. I said, "Excuse me, sir, but you don't get to do that." When I take my child to their pediatrician, I get a recommendation. As a parent, I still get to choose whether or not I'm going to go through with that recommendation. They were going to pick a doctor to come in and make decisions for my child. Parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, which includes their education, their medical care, their morality, and their religion. I looked at them and said, "We do not co-parent with the government." That was that moment where I drew a line in the sand. I just said, “No more. This overreach has to stop.” Mr. Jekielek: I agree with you 100 percent. But we've been told in recent years that maybe there are some exceptions to that. Ms. Justice: There is somebody who knows better than you. Maybe there's some expert who just knows more, and you don't have to make the decisions. You can abdicate that authority to somebody else to make a decision. The bottom line is, when you're a parent, the buck stops with you. You have your rights, but you also have your responsibilities. You can delegate the education of your children to a local public school system, but that doesn't mean that you're delegating your responsibilities or your rights to them. Mr. Jekielek: When you were first on the school board, you seemed to be in agreement with most things, because you all were actually trying to help the schools do better. Then when Covid hit, somehow four out of five decided to take a different line. Do you have a sense of how that happened? Ms. Descovich: I do. Forced masking and these Covid policies were polling at 80 percent approval ratings, even in a red county where I lived. Politicians and school board members read the polls and they know what's happening. They caved to the loudest voice in the room. At that time, the loudest voice in the room was the teacher's union, pedaling fear with their red shirts, and making demands about not wanting to go back into the classroom and being too fearful to go back. Ms. Justice: They were suing to keep the schools closed. Ms. Descovich: They were doing a lot of things that were against what parents wanted. What led to the building and the launch of Moms for Liberty is that you had the teachers' union members in there, literally heckling parents who had no organization. They had just themselves. They didn't know other parents and they had never been at a school board meeting. They didn't even understand the structure of how things worked. I'll never forget a mom showing up and saying, "I'm going to call the county commissioners and tell them what you guys are doing over here." I thought to myself, "In Florida, the county commissioners have zero authority over a school board." She doesn't know that and she's frustrated. She wants someone to help solve these problems and she has no idea how to do it. In 2020, we saw that all across America with microphones getting shut off, doors getting locked, meetings being switched to Zoom, and links being lost and not sent to parents so that they couldn’t even join the meeting. Public comment went from three minutes to one minute. What they were doing to parents in 2020 and 2021 was so destructive to public education, and so destructive to our system of government. We saw an opportunity to help unify, organize, and educate these parents, and then empower them to stand up and defend their parental rights. Ms. Justice: We also had evidence to show. We had day-cares that were open in Florida, and the boys and girls' clubs were open. We got to see that kids really weren't getting sick like other people. There were some people in America who knew that something was really, really wrong when it came to the Covid lockdowns and mandates. We just started to rally those people. Ms. Descovich: Let’s go back to the school board members, the actions they were taking, and why that was happening, because I have some thoughts on that. In all the states across the country, school board members have been trained by the school board associations to believe they have no authority and they have no power. You are swept up as soon as you get elected, and you get a packet in the mail. In Florida, it's the Florida School Board Association. You get sent to their training and they literally teach you to depend on your superintendent, who is actually your employee, but this is part of the education culture. They teach you that you have no individual power, and that you can only work together as a board. You shouldn't use your own voice. It's very insidious in the way that it works. As school board members, we're sitting up on the dais. As these meetings were happening, the education establishment was saying, “This is how it's going to go, because the teacher's union is saying, ‘This is how it's going to go.’” The school board members were caving in left and right. They didn't understand their authority. They had never been trained in a way to understand what school board members were meant to do and what they were there for. On my own school board, there was a time when we were concerned that we wouldn't be able to meet in person any longer, or that some people might be too sick that we wouldn't be able to even convene a quorum to make the important decisions that only school boards are supposed to make. I'll never forget this meeting because we were going to pick one person that could make decisions on an $8 million purchase on whatever needed to be done for the entire school district. I'm from the 47th-largest school district in the country. It's a billion-dollar budget. Who would be this one person? We were having a debate about this. I'll never forget what my Republican conservative friend on the board said, because it brought me out of my seat. First, I said, "Our chair, who's been elected by our county, and then elected by us, should be the person making these major decisions for our district if a crisis happens." My friend said, "Our superintendent needs to do it. I would trust our superintendent over an elected politician anytime." The authority doesn't lie there. A superintendent should not be making those decisions. A person elected by the people, who has also been elected by representatives of the people is the way our government was set up. She had gone to all of those school board training sessions at the Florida School Board Association, and that was her mindset. The superintendent should be doing everything. That has been the demise of our education system. Mr. Jekielek: This fits into a broader theme discussed on this show. This theme keeps coming up again and again about this safety culture. The other theme is deference to experts on decision-making. What is associated with both of those is the abdication of the actual responsibility that you get when you're elected in the first place. Ms. Justice: Being a school board member is a big job, and I remember taking the oath of office. You swear an oath that you're going to uphold the Constitution, and that you're going to represent your constituents. I remember putting my hand up and taking the oath. At the end it says, "So help me God." I remember saying, “So help me God.” We'll see how this goes. It's a big responsibility and you have to make decisions that affect your local community. That's one of the things that we really impart to our moms, our dads, and our community members who are running for school board. This is a very important local office. The decisions that your school board makes oftentimes affect your life a lot more than the President or Congress. Your day-to-day life is affected by the decisions of the school board. It's very important that you run for office. You make sure you know who is serving in office, and you build relationships with those people. Mr. Jekielek: There's a lot of information circulating about Moms for Liberty. There are a bunch of slurs out there, and there are a lot of opinions. What is Moms for Liberty all about? Ms. Descovich: Our purpose is to fight for the survival of America. We unify, we educate, and we empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government. That is what we do. We organize in chapters around the country. We fight at the local level to defend parental rights and to improve public education. Mr. Jekielek: That seems pretty simple. Ms. Justice: We're disrupting the balance of power in American public education. There are a lot of people that rely on public education for money and for votes and for support. Kids are oftentimes left out of the equation when decision-making is happening. There's a lot of pandering to adult needs, but not the needs of children. We put the needs of children at the forefront of decision-making. There's some people that don't like that. Mr. Jekielek: The pandemic exposed an inordinate disregard for the actual needs of children. Ms. Justice: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Would you agree with that? Ms. Descovich: Yes. Ms. Justice: Yes. The burden of the world was placed on children's shoulders. At what point in American history have we ever relied on children to keep adults safe? Ms. Descovich: There was the shutting down of schools in places like Los Angeles where the teachers union said they would not allow the districts to reopen until they had defunded the police. What does that have to do with public education? Those children that were in first grade lost two years of school. If you can't read by third grade, and everybody agrees on this across the board, your future path is looking very bleak. Your chances of graduating from high school drop, and your chances of ending up in prison increase. Ms. Justice: That was condemning third-graders to a life of struggle. When you look at California and Gavin Newsom, schools closed in San Francisco for 18 months. They didn't get that time back. Kids didn't start kindergarten and work their way through. They just went right to second grade. For moms and dads, you know that there's a lot of development that happens in kindergarten and first grade. In America, we were treating adults like children and children like adults, and it was shocking. Mr. Jekielek: How effective is virtual learning? Ms. Descovich: Every child learns differently, and there are some children that can learn virtually. None of my kids could learn virtually. The quality of education through virtual learning has been a nightmare, especially when it was flipped on a dime. Those teachers had not been trained on how to teach virtually. Our poor school district and other school districts were struggling to make it work. I'll never forget, I was visiting a kindergarten classroom and a teacher was teaching to about 20 students. Then she kept ducking down the hall to talk to the kids at home through a laptop on a stool. They were looking at the side of her body. Sometimes they could hear a little bit and sometimes not. Kids could turn their screen black and play video games and pretend like they were in school. We know that virtual learning didn't work because we have the lowest reading scores in America right now since the 1980s. Ms. Justice: Then you have Randi Weingarten and others making excuses after excuses. Then there is the alphabet soup of CRT, DEI, and SEL. The bottom line is, children get a lot of confidence from mastery of skills. You've got 3 out of 10 children, only a third of children, who are grade-level proficient in reading in fourth grade across America. People wonder, “Why is there mental illness? Why are children suffering?” Can you imagine if you went into your job every day and you were being asked to do things that you had never been taught how to do or equipped to do. Imagine what shame you would feel, the embarrassment you would feel, and the frustration of failing constantly. That's what we've set our kids up for. We've set our kids up for failure and there's no reason for it. Between state and federal and local funding we will spend $850 billion on public education in America in 2023, and only a third of all kids are reading at grade level. If you had a business, and I'm not saying that schools are a business, but if you had a business with those outcomes, what would happen? Would more money be invested if only a third of the seat belts that you made were working? There would be an entire overhaul. We're trying to really shine a light on the failure in American public schools and say, “We need to reclaim these schools because they've been captured.” We need to do a lot of work reforming the schools and put the focus back on basics; reading and writing and math. Why are the teachers' unions so interested in forcing all this ideology into the schools instead of ensuring that the kids are learning to read? Mr. Jekielek: There are two things happening here. One is that there is a zeal around injecting this ideology. There are some very active, loud people that have been taught in the teachers colleges that the right way to educate is critical theory practice. Another viewpoint is that all these failures are for some other external reason like systemic racism. It's not actually that the teacher is doing a really bad job. Which of these is dominant? Are they both working at the same time? How do you view this? Ms. Justice: We've seen a lot of problems with teacher preparation. I don't want to put the blame on all of the teachers. A couple of things are happening. You have the unions who are bargaining for the people at the table. They're not bargaining for the teachers in the classroom. Even when I was on the school board and my kids were in public schools, their teachers were members of the union. I remember saying to one of the teachers, "Do you know what the union is bargaining for? I'm going to the bargaining meeting this afternoon." She had no idea. She said, "No, I just pay my dues. I try to stay out of it." A lot of times in America, teachers really don't know what is being bargained for and that the unions really aren't out for their best interest in the classrooms, but a lot of times are just for the leadership. Ms. Descovich: 100 percent. You can look at what the teachers' unions say in their summer conferences about what they value and what they put forward. Last summer and the year before when we looked at their agenda, there was nothing on there about education and nothing about reading. Ms. Justice: Nothing. Ms. Descovich: They take stands on abortion. They get involved in foreign policy. They were talking about Israel and the Ukraine conflict. Ms. Justice: Ukraine. Ms. Descovich: They were talking about all of these things, but nothing about education or education failure or how they're going to help their teachers become better teachers. They've completely lost their way and they have been captured. I remember our district sitting at the negotiating table with the union at one point. The union proposed that raises only went to the top 10 percent tier and that none of the other teachers got a raise. I thought, “What in the world is happening here?” We are careful not to blame everyday ordinary teachers for what's going on right now, but I will place clear blame on the head of the teachers' union. Ms. Justice: Randi Weingarten and the teachers' unions are the foot soldiers of the progressive far-Left, and 99 percent of the donations that teachers' unions make go to Democrats. Joe Biden and Jill Biden invited Randi Weingarten and other people in the first days of the White House. During Covid we saw the cozy relationship that they had with the teachers' unions. We've seen now in emails that have been discovered that you've got Weingarten talking to Rochelle Walensky at the CDC. Parents were saying, “My kids aren't doing well. They're suffering with this virtual learning.” As a school board member I was saying, “There's no real accountability for the quality of the learning. We graduated kids who had never even turned on a computer that year from March and April onward. It didn't even matter. Tina and I say all the time that we got to see behind the education curtain when we were on the school board, and then Covid happened. Then all of America got to see behind the education curtain, and it's really messy back there. Mr. Jekielek: Moms for Liberty is for parental rights, but also for educational reform. Ms. Justice: That is a huge issue. Mr. Jekielek: That's another key aspect of what you're doing. What kind of future can there be with a public school system that functions the way it does now? Do you think there's a way to reform it? Do you think that's what has to happen? There are other people that are saying, “Get your kids out of public school. There's no other way because it's unreformable.” Where do you stand on that? Ms. Descovich: I feel passionate about this. The conservative movement in general for the past few decades has been solely focused on school choice. We support school choice. Parents should have the right to direct the education of their children and to choose where they want them to go to school. Every kid is different, and we totally support that. We have completely neglected public education for decades. We've ceded that ground, and we've given it to the radicals. Then we want to know why there's riots in the streets. We want to know why Americans that are 18 to 30-years-old right now don't even know there are three branches of government. Why? Because we have neglected public education. We cannot cede that ground, and we cannot ignore those children. All of those children, which is 80 percent of American children, by the way, are going to graduate from public school with the indoctrination they've been taught, or the lack of what they've been taught for 12 years. They are going to be the future voters of America. Where have we left ourselves? Ms. Justice: We understand that it's going to take everyone, all of us, to move this country. I don't want any child in a classroom thinking that because of the color of their skin or their sexual orientation or their biological sex, that somehow they're up against an unfair advantage. We've had amazing examples of people across the United States who have risen to leadership and power and success from all different walks of life. That is America. America is a beacon of light for the world. We did an interview with some gentlemen from Hong Kong that had seen the change. He had been here, then had left, and then came back. He said to us, "America used to be a very bright light, but we feel like that light is dimming." American parents feel it. There is no future for America with generations of children who are illiterate. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about the book you're holding there. Ms. Justice: This is a very special book. It's called, Child Abuse in the Classroom. I came across this book early on in Moms for Liberty. In 1984, the United States Department of Education visited seven different cities around the country in the month of March. They heard testimony from parents about what was happening in the classrooms, and parents were very, very concerned. There was something called the Women's Equity Act. It was really the first time we saw thought formation coming from the federal government into the schools. Marlo Thomas and Carol Channing were commissioned to write a song. There was a lot of talk in classrooms about the role of men and women. In fact, there were cutouts of men and women with clothes, like paper-doll style clothes. There weren't any skirts or dresses for the women. All of a sudden, you were seeing this shift. There was a clarification of values happening, and education as therapy happening in the classrooms. There was a lot of magic circle time and questions. Even today, we're seeing them. There was a question, “You have people in a boat and who should survive? Who's the least worthy in the boat? Who should be thrown off if there's someone who's less worthy of being saved?” That started happening at that time, and parents were very, very alarmed. Fast-forward to Montgomery County where we had the town hall. You have a parent saying, "I feel like my child is being rebaptized into another religion." That truly has been happening for over 40 years. Parents were upset and concerned then, and it has only gotten worse. The federal government took steps to try to protect rights, the Protection of People Rights Amendment, FERPA, that was supposed to protect student safety and privacy. Now, we have secrets being kept in schools where parents can't get their children's educational records. This has just been a fascinating journey to read the stories of the parents from all over the country. Now, Tina and I are working really hard to give parents a voice, because Secretary Cardona and President Biden don't care what parents think. We have Joe Biden standing at the White House telling teachers, "When they are in your classroom, when the kids are in your classroom, they are your children." President Biden: They're all our children. The reason you're the Teachers of the Year is because you recognize that. They're not somebody else's children. They're like yours when they're in the classroom. Ms. Justice: No, sir. They are not your children. These are our children. Secretary Cardona was saying that parents were misbehaving at school board meetings. He doesn't have a lot of respect for these parents that think they know what's best for their kids. Secretary Cardona: I don't have too much respect for people that are misbehaving in public and then acting as if they know what's right for kids. Ms. Justice: That is the audacity of some of the statements that are happening now. Now is the time to create some accountability measures and to put the power back into the hands of parents across America. Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about some of the lawsuits that you're involved in. You've written some amicus briefs around the secrecy issue that you just mentioned. Please tell me about that. Ms. Descovich: For sure. Ms. Justice: There are shocking things that are happening. In Leon County, Florida, and up in Massachusetts, there are two court cases about children who were brought behind closed doors without the consent or knowledge of their parents. There were six pages of forms filled out where the child was being asked, “What name do you want to use at school? What name should we use when we're talking to your parents? Do your siblings know? Can we use your real name with them? Where do you want to sleep when you go on overnight field trips?” In both of these cases, parents found out about this betrayal. It's really a betrayal of the trust of the parents, and they were very upset. They filed court cases and they've both lost. This is now going through an appeal process, and we've been lucky enough to be able to file these amicus briefs, and to have help from Advancing American Freedom and the Institute for Free Speech, these amazing nonprofit conservative law firms that are coming and helping so that we can take a stand. Moms for Liberty has 130,000 members in 47 states. All of these parents coming together and saying, “Who does the government think they are to keep secrets about our children? In the original rulings, the court said that it did not shock the conscience of the court that this had happened in these schools. It certainly shocked the conscience of parents across America, and so now we're fighting back. Ms. Descovich: We also have some First Amendment cases that our parents are stepping forward on because their First Amendment rights have been violated. They go up to the microphone to speak and their mics get shut off. They get taken off the list to speak because somebody on the school board thinks that they know what they're going to say. We're moving forward in a lot of areas for that too. Mr. Jekielek: When these things were moved to Zoom, there were tons of examples where they just shut off the video feed. Ms. Descovich: I've got a better one for you. We had a dad that was a school board member from California, and he was the one lone conservative member on the school board. The school district and the other board members stopped sending him the link to participate in the meeting. He had no recourse. The last time I talked to him, he was filing a lawsuit. He couldn't even participate as an elected member of a school board because his fellow counterparts wouldn't send him the link. Ms. Justice: Let's talk about California if we could for a second, because this is really important. My personal opinion is we're seeing Gavin Newsom ramp up for a run for president. There is not a governor in the United States of America that has done more to violate parental rights. Mr. Jekielek: He did veto some legislation which was clearly against the parental rights assembly. Ms. Justice: There's a super majority in California, so his veto means nothing. That law will pass, he knows it, and that's him trying to steer to the middle. American parents are not stupid. We have been watching, and we have paid attention. What happens in California does not stay in California. I'm telling you right now, American parents are not going to let Gavin Newsom become President of the United States. They've become a refuge state. If your child runs away to California, they'll put them with a glitter family, and then your parental rights will be totally negated in that state. What kind of a governor, what kind of a man, and what kind of a father would allow that to happen? American parents are paying attention. People talk about the age of information a lot and ask, “Is social media really good?” What I've seen is that we have brought out the best of social media. Our moms connect on so many different platforms and share so much information. We are so aware of what is happening across the country. Now. we're working to make sure that those horrible laws that Gavin Newsom is passing in his state are not spreading across the country. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that you have 130,000 members. How old is Moms for Liberty? Ms. Descovich: Two-and-a-half-years-old. Mr. Jekielek: That's a sizable roster. What qualifies for membership here? Ms. Descovich: We started with two chapters in Florida in each of our counties. In two-and-a-half years, we've grown to 300 chapters in 47 states and 130,000 moms on the ground. Ms. Justice: Three states to go. Ms. Descovich: At this point, we haven't done a whole lot of recruiting and marketing yet. We're just moving into that phase. Everything has come to us organically. People go to our website, click the button, ask to start a chapter, and they go through the process. We have a vetting process, an interview process, a background check, and things of that nature. You have to have 10 people to start a chapter, and you need a secretary and a treasurer. After you're approved, you are off to the races. Ms. Justice: Yes, it's great. Mr. Jekielek: That is astonishing growth. Ms. Justice: The Biden administration and the governors have messed with the wrong moms. I don't care what letter you have after your name, Republican or Democrat. I've never been a political person. I wasn't registered as a Republican until 2016 when I wanted to vote in the Republican primary. But I've always been very issues-focused. That's the way our moms are. They don't care if you have an R or a D after your name. Are you going to defend parental rights? Are you going to respect me as a parent? Those are the questions that we're asking. Finally we're seeing that people are waking up. Elected officials are waking up to these threats to our liberty. Ms. Descovich: Let's talk about that for a minute. You mentioned the Biden administration coming after us. They have thrown everything at our organization, and yet we still grow and just get stronger. They started with the DOJ issuing the threat tag. Then they moved to the FBI, who actually called some of our moms after they spoke at school board meetings with intimidating questions and tried to silence them. When that didn't work, we kept moving forward and we exposed them through Congress. Tiffany went and spoke in a committee hearing exposing what they were doing. They moved on to the private sector and to nonprofits. We have proof that they met six times with the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center]. The Southern Poverty Law Center met six times with the Biden administration before they announced to all of America that Moms for Liberty is an anti-government extremist group. They now have labeled us as that, and are trying to take us down again. We took that news and raised several hundred thousand dollars off of that. They are unleashing everything they have on us. Just the other day, a liberal organization that is backed by one of Hillary's foundations announced they're going to dump $10 million into school board races against Moms for Liberty candidates. That is because we won 275 school board seats last year. Ms. Justice: With no money, by the way. Ms. Descovich: With no money. Ms. Justice: We just started a PAC, because we're done with the disregard that our government has shown for the American people. You could be speaking at a school board meeting and the next morning making peanut butter and jelly for your kids, and the FBI is calling you and asking you, "Do you have any guns in your home? Do you have any history of mental health illness?" These are the questions that the FBI was asking parents. It's just shocking to us. We say, “No more. We won't stand for it anymore. We, the people, we, the parents, are taking back this country.” We are working with the Heritage Foundation, who's been wonderful helping us to understand how the federal government works, and how to get information out. They have actually been helping us to FOIA the federal government; the DOJ, the DOE, the FBI, and the Biden administration. We have had absolutely no response. Actually, the Heritage Foundation is suing the Biden administration on our behalf now. That lawsuit is launching today. Because we want to know if they are talking about us. Are they talking about our moms and our organization? How are they using someone like the SPLC who gets millions and millions and millions of dollars that they keep in offshore accounts to target the American people? Mr. Jekielek: There is one criticism that you've gotten, which is just simply that you're into banning books. Ms. Descovich: The definition of banning books means you cannot get the book. We say this all the time, “Write the book, print the book, and sell the book. Put the book in the public library down the street, so that it's free and accessible, if you would like.” A public-school library is a very specific place that should have a curated library for education. We just talked about how public education is failing, and how children can't even read historical books and traditional books. They absolutely don't need to be exposed to pornography. Ms. Justice: I would like for someone to tell me at what age it is appropriate for a strap-on dildo to be in a book in a public-school library. How is that helping children to learn to read? The entire conversation around the books has been disingenuous. I know that because I watched Biden's campaign video when he talks about book banning. I just saw Gavin Newsom talk about the moms who are burning books. No one is burning books. Curating the content of a children's library is appropriate. You wouldn't have the same books that you would have in a seminary as you would in a medical college. We're talking about K-12 public education. Let's teach the kids how to read and let's put good quality books in their hands to help them to do that. Mr. Jekielek: What's next for Moms for Liberty? Ms. Descovich: We've launched our PAC. Last year, our chapters endorsed 500 candidates and 275 of them won without any money. That's just by word of mouth, by moms putting it out on their social media, and maybe getting involved in the local campaign. Ultimately, we want a Moms for Liberty chapter in all 3000 counties in the country. We want a mom and a mom celebrity shirt at every school board meeting, overseeing them, being the watchdogs, and making sure we get back public education. You talked about public education being infiltrated. We talked about the concerns in public education. Can it be fixed? Should we scrap the whole thing? It's our belief that it absolutely needs to be fixed, and it needs to be saved. The only people that can do that right now are parents. Mr. Jekielek: A final thought, Tiffany? Ms. Justice: Tina just said it very well. It's just a blessing to be a part of Moms for Liberty. It's an honor, honestly. Every day, we're just amazed by how strong American moms and dads are, and we’re amazed by the strength of the American people. I have a lot of faith that we're going to turn this country around. Mr. Jekielek: Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Descovich: Thank you so much. Ms. Justice: Thanks. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Bagram Air Base had prisons there that were filled with thousands of ISIS-K fighters, as well as dozens of members of al-Qaeda, and thousands of Taliban fighters as well. And the United States abandoned Bagram on July 21.” In April 2021, President Joe Biden announced that in five months, on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. troops would completely withdraw from Afghanistan. By the end of August, the Taliban was back in charge. “What happened in Afghanistan did not stay in Afghanistan, and the world became a more dangerous place,” says investigative journalist Jerry Dunleavy. He is co-author of the new book “Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End.” “You heard President Biden and many people around him continually saying throughout 2021 that the Afghan military was 300,000 strong, and that they could obviously therefore fight off a smaller Taliban force,” says Mr. Dunleavy. “This 300,000 figure was a complete fiction and was well known to be a fiction at the time. Mr. Dunleavy and I discuss President Biden’s decision-making process with regard to the Afghanistan withdrawal, the other players involved, and why the media has, for the most part, lost interest in the story. “The Biden administration is not going to hold themselves accountable, obviously. Most of the mainstream media has no interest in holding Biden accountable. And so, the book is an effort at doing that—at holding Biden accountable for this disaster,” says Mr. Dunleavy. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/jerry-dunleavy-the-truth-about-the-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-and-the-formation-of-a-ccp-taliban-partnership-5501015 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jerry Dunleavy, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jerry Dunleavy: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Mr. Jekielek: I'm familiar with you from years ago around 2017 when there were very few people reporting on what's now known as Russiagate. Some of us called it Spygate back in the day, and you were one of them. I just want to tip my hat to someone who saw some very strange things going on and wasn't believing the mainstream narrative at the time around the so-called Trump-Russia collusion. Mr. Dunleavy: I spent a few years as a reporter at The Washington Examiner where I was writing about this ridiculous, and now obviously completely discredited Steele dossier, the Clinton campaign's role in funding it, and the FBI's use of it. For a while, that was a lonely place to be. Mr. Jekielek: Everybody was very aware of the people that were counter-narrative back then, and you could count them on your hand. However, let's jump to the issue at hand. You've co-authored the book, Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden's Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End. This is the story of the Afghanistan withdrawal. We know terrible things happened and we know it wasn't handled well. But curiously, it's something that has completely fallen out of the public perception. You have really dug deep here. You've spoken to Congress as an investigator around this issue, even though today you're here in your personal capacity. Congratulations on that. Mr. Dunleavy: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Let's start here. Why are we not thinking about this Afghanistan withdrawal? Mr. Dunleavy: As the debacle was unfolding in August 2021, for a very brief moment the media was covering this as the Taliban took over Kabul and we saw those desperate scenes of crowds at the airport, and we saw Afghans falling from planes. Then we almost saw on live television an ISIS-K terrorist blow himself up and kill those 13 American heroes and wound dozens more. Some people were willing to give President Biden a chance, but this blew up two big things that Biden had been touting in the 2020 election—that he would be experienced and competent and that he would be an empathetic leader. The way that this withdrawal was handled with tons of Americans left behind, tens of thousands of Afghan allies left behind, and those 13 Americans killed in that suicide bombing blew up that narrative. It blew up the idea that President Biden was competent and it blew up the idea that he was empathetic, because this was the opposite of competence and the opposite of empathy. The media was happy to very quickly move on, because this event did permanent damage to President Biden's approval rating. You can see it in the numbers that this is something that he never fully recovered from with the American people. Rightly so, because this was a decision of his own making and based on his own lack of planning. Of course, there were 20 years of mistakes and 20 years of tragic American deaths, but ultimately, this was President Biden's decision and it's on him. He has played a small political price, but there has been no real accountability. Nobody has been fired, and no one has resigned. Some people have been promoted. Once Republicans took over starting in 2023, they've just been stonewalling Congress, because they want to turn the page. My co-author James Hasson and I wrote this book because the Biden administration is obviously not going to hold themselves accountable. Most of the mainstream media has no interest in holding Biden accountable. The book is an effort at holding Biden accountable for this disaster. Mr. Jekielek: You pay a lot of attention to a few key issues. You've done some forensic work around the Abbey Gate bombing. At the same time you looked at the people left behind, and also the 100,000 Afghans brought over to America. I want to find out who they are. You also talk about a shift in the global dynamic as a result of everything that has happened. You have a whole chapter on the Chinese Communist Party’s designs on Afghanistan, and its use as a propaganda tool. Let’s start with that. Mr. Dunleavy: Obviously this was a disaster for Afghanistan. Some members of the Taliban government are also considered to be essentially dual-headed members of Al-Qaeda, and you can see the terrorist threat growing in Afghanistan. It's a problem for Afghanistan, but what happened in Afghanistan did not stay in Afghanistan, and the world has become a more dangerous place. One chapter in our book relates to Russia's response to this disaster in Afghanistan. We make a very strong case that Vladimir Putin's decision to go into Ukraine was likely prompted, at least in part, by the way that NATO and the U.S. were in complete shambles. We also have an entire chapter devoted to China's response to this disaster in Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover. The name of that chapter is, “The CCP and the Kabul moment.” Mr. Jekielek: Which they keep touting. Mr. Dunleavy: Which they absolutely keep touting. The Kabul moment is what the Chinese Communist Party decided to label this whole event as part of their propaganda effort to undermine the United States and to undermine and threaten Taiwan. The Taliban was clearly on the verge of taking over Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, and prior to this, the CCP had been getting closer to the Taliban for a number of years. They got really close to them in 2021, because the Chinese saw the writing on the wall, and the United States government apparently didn't. This is what the Kabul moment means to the CCP. They looked at Taiwan and said, “Look, this is what happened after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and this is how it ends. The Taliban is now in charge. Look at how the United States treated its Afghan allies, with tens of thousands of them being left behind.” The CCP basically said to Taiwan, “This is the fate that awaits you, especially if you think that you can count on the United States, and especially if you try to fight back in the event of an invasion. Don't even try, because this is what the United States does to its allies.” This is the CCP’s propaganda. When we titled that chapter, “The CCP and the Kabul moment,” I was wondering if China was going to continue doing this, or if this chapter is somehow going to be stale by the time the book comes out. But sure enough, when the book came out right around the second anniversary of the Taliban takeover, the Chinese foreign ministry immediately returned to this, bringing up the Kabul moment again as an opportunity to undermine the United States and threaten Taiwan. Mr. Jekielek: This is propaganda warfare gold for the CCP, and the CCP will use this to elevate itself. There are numerous propaganda narratives that have been around since time immemorial, and this one will also be around for a long time. This is on top of decades of information warfare against Taiwan, with the goal being to take it over without firing a single shot. Mr. Dunleavy: Exactly. We just gave the CCP another tool to put in their propaganda toolkit when it comes to undermining Taiwan. Mr. Jekielek: What about the CCP’s actual designs on Bagram and Afghanistan, how is that playing out? The CCP has been showing itself as a supporter of the Taliban, and it has been fighting for the Taliban at the UN. The money of the previous government has been frozen. They're advocating to get that money unfrozen, which will then benefit them. Please tell me about this. Mr. Dunleavy: The CCP is probably the most powerful voice on the world stage right now that is advocating for the Taliban's interests. A big piece of that is there are currently billions of dollars of former Afghan government funds that have been frozen by the United States. The CCP has been pushing the United States relentlessly for two years to free that money and hand it over to the Taliban. This is what the CCP wants. This is obviously what the Taliban wants as well, so their interests are aligned there. Since the United States exited Afghanistan and the Taliban took over, the CCP has been working to increase its economic presence there, and also slowly but surely working to increase its military and intelligence interests there as well. On the economic front, China is very interested in Afghanistan's natural resources and its rare earth minerals. Afghanistan has a wealth of natural resources and rare earth minerals that they haven't been able to tap into for many years, largely because of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda attacks that have made day-to-day business very difficult. China is very interested in partnering with the Taliban to gain access to those natural resources, not just to enrich the Chinese economy, but also to help build up the Chinese military. This connection between the Chinese economy and the Chinese military buildup is very strong. So far, the Chinese have had some success with entering into some pretty lucrative deals with the Taliban, and that will likely continue. There are also indications that Huawei will be entering the Afghanistan space in a much more significant way. There is also evidence that Chinese intelligence has been helping the Taliban to track down certain people that would be of interest to both the CCP and the Taliban. It does not look like China has gained access to Bagram Air Base yet, which China is certainly very interested in. There were many reasons why it was a very foolish idea for the United States and the Biden administration to give up Bagram Air Base. Bagram was a very strategic air base for the U.S. for projecting our air power throughout Afghanistan, which was incredibly helpful and key for striking the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS-K and keeping the Taliban at bay. It was also strategic because it could monitor U.S. foes and U.S. frenemies. Pakistan is probably more of a foe than a frenemy, but certainly it is in that category. It was helpful for monitoring a foe like China because Bagram Air Base is fairly close to the Chinese border. Giving it up was bad for that strategic reason. If you're going to do an evacuation from Afghanistan from Kabul airport, a tiny airport in the middle of a dense urban environment in a city full of millions of people that ended up being controlled by the Taliban, it was not a smart place to do an evacuation from. On top of that, Bagram Air Base had prisons there that were filled with thousands of ISIS-K fighters, dozens of members of Al-Qaeda, and thousands of Taliban fighters as well. The United States abandoned Bagram on July 21st. That was giving up our final big strategic footprint in Afghanistan, and our final real base to project power in Afghanistan. It also meant that we were leaving behind these thousands of prisoners. The first thing that the Taliban did when they took over Bagram on August 15th was to open the doors to those prisons and free thousands of prisoners, including thousands of ISIS-K prisoners. One of those prisoners was the man who would go on to kill 13 Americans and nearly 200 Afghans at Abbey Gate just about a week-and-a-half later. Mr. Jekielek: Why would you abandon this base? It just doesn't make any sense. Mr. Dunleavy: President Biden was maniacal about a full U.S. troop withdrawal, except for 600 or fewer to protect the embassy in Kabul. To maintain Bagram you need a few more troops than that. You don't need 10,000 troops, but you do need more than 600 if you're going to maintain Bagram Air Base, maintain the U.S. embassy, and hold on to Kabul airport. But President Biden was obsessed with getting the troop levels vastly below that, so that he could say that the U.S. military was essentially gone from Afghanistan, outside of the presence that guards our embassy. This just shows how befuddling the entire episode was. He set the full U.S. troop withdrawal date for September 11th, 2021, which is the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. When most Americans looked at that, everybody was confused. Many of them probably felt like that was a punch in the gut, because it made no sense to pick the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks at 9/11 that killed 3000 people on American soil. It wasn't a strategic decision, it was a political one. Perhaps he wanted some sort of victory lap on the 20th anniversary, but it remains a confusing decision to this day. But the other problem was that the U.S. was leaving Afghanistan right in the middle of the Afghan fighting season. After 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan, everybody knows that spring is when fighting ramps up again as the snow melts and the weather gets better. The mountain passes clear, and then the Taliban can move a lot of people from Pakistan into Afghanistan across the AfPak border. The fighting ramps up in the spring, and then it's at its heaviest in the summer and on into the fall. Biden's announcement meant that we were pulling U.S. troops through the spring and the summer, right as the Taliban was ramping up its fighting. It was not just pulling our troops, but also pulling our logistics, our ISR, our advisors, and our contractors. Those were all things that had been supporting the Afghan military, already a very shaky military. We knew that if we pulled out all of those things in rapid fashion with no plan about how to continue to assist the Afghan military and Afghan Air Force in any significant way, we knew that the Afghan military would not be able to function. Biden's announcement about a spring to summer withdrawal means that the Taliban is taking over in spring to summer, and it means that on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban would be back in charge. Mr. Jekielek: If you talked to people on ground they would tell you these Afghani forces were not going to be able to hold anything. But there was other intelligence which told a different story than the one being used in the decision-making. Can you clarify that? You seem convinced that people knew that the Afghani forces would not be able to hold anything. Mr. Dunleavy: There were classified studies that were conducted by think tanks for the Pentagon ahead of 2021 that made it very clear that the Afghan military just would not be able to function without U.S. military assistance, unless the United States came up with a real plan about how to assist them in some other way, which the Biden administration never did. We just pulled out the U.S. troops and that was that. There were also warnings from the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan well ahead of this debacle in August, saying that the U.S. military pulling out meant that the Afghan military would not be able to function. As the Taliban advanced, there were some Afghan units that fought and fought bravely. There were hundreds and likely thousands of Afghan troops who died in 2021 fighting the Taliban, but a lot of them didn't. A lot of them dissolved and just fell apart. Some of them surrendered and some of them fled. Some of them were limited because they weren't getting food, they weren't getting ammunition, and they weren't getting the basic resources that they needed. Unfortunately, they weren't getting much in the way of U.S. air support anymore, which was something that had been critical in their fight against the Taliban. The Biden administration throughout all of this was continuously misleading the American people and the world about the size and strength of the Afghan military. You heard President Biden and many people around him continually saying throughout 2021 that the Afghan military was 300,000 strong and that they could therefore fight off a smaller Taliban force. This 300,000 figure was a complete fiction, and it was well known to be fiction at the time. On paper, the Biden administration was combining the size of the Afghan military and the Afghan police. On paper, those two combined got you to around 300,000. But no other military in the world measures its size by combining its military and its police. The United States doesn't do that, and nobody really does that, so it was misleading in that regard. Another known problem was that there were things called basically Afghan ghost soldiers or Afghan ghost units, which were soldiers or units that just existed on paper but weren't really there. It was likely someone in the Afghan military collecting a check in some way, but these units did not really exist. We knew that throughout 2021 the Afghan military was falling apart without our support. This 300,000 figure that the Biden administration continued to tout was a total fiction. But they continued to tout it, and it misled the American people. It also misled the Americans who were in Afghanistan, because it was painting a very misleading picture about what the Afghan military was going to be able to do. Obviously, it ended in disaster with the Taliban taking over and Americans and Afghan allies getting left behind. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think was the guiding principle behind this whole debacle? You have a theory. Mr. Dunleavy: Yes, I do. We try to get into President Biden's head a little bit in the book. The way that we do that is by looking at his history. One vignette that we tell is going back to the Vietnam War. President Biden was elected senator when he was 30-years-old, and he got into the Senate near the tail end of the Vietnam War. He was there too late to make his name as a big anti-Vietnam war advocate. He decided to make a name for himself by being the most vocal voice in the country fighting against the efforts by then President Gerald Ford, Republicans, and also many Democrats to bring out our South Vietnamese allies as the North Vietnamese marched south towards Saigon. President Ford wanted to bring out a lot of these South Vietnamese allies. President Biden tried to make his mark by standing against that. There's one quote that I dug up from the congressional archives where he essentially says, “We don't have a moral obligation to 100, 001, or even one South Vietnamese. That was his mentality during the war in Vietnam. That mentality and that feeling towards the current United States local allies carried over. You could see a little bit of that when he was President Obama's vice president. When he was Obama's vice president he got a big chip on his shoulder related to the U.S. military and the U.S. military generals in particular, because while he was Obama's vice president, pretty much nobody was listening to Vice President Biden. The military generals were quite annoyed with him. One thing to note was that President Biden, then vice president, was pretty much the only voice who opposed the U.S. raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden. This was a combination of things like not really caring very much about our allies and having a big chip on his shoulder related to military advice. It was also feeling like he wanted to make his mark on the war in Afghanistan, because no one had really listened to him while he was vice president. He had missed his chance to make his mark by opposing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As president he wanted to make his mark, and he wanted to get out. We lay out in the book how this was a singular focus of his early presidency. He just wasn't open to anyone who told him, “Look, this will be a disaster.” He really didn't care. Mr. Jekielek: At the same time though, the U.S. has brought over 100,000 Afghans. Maybe that stands in juxtaposition to what you just said. There seems to have been a big interest in getting people out. Mr. Dunleavy: By August 2021, the U.S. military is essentially gone from Afghanistan. We have given up Bagram. The Taliban is on the march, and the Taliban is taking over provincial capitals. The Taliban takes over Kabul, and the United States is in control of a small airport and nothing else. The Taliban at that point pretty much controlled all of Afghanistan. U.S. military leaders decided that the only option was to cooperate with the Taliban in order to get Americans and our Afghan allies out. This put the U.S. military in the position where we were relying on the Taliban to provide “security” outside the Kabul airport. Many of the people that we were trying to get out would have to make it through that Taliban gauntlet to get to the airport, because so many Americans and Afghan allies were now stranded behind Taliban lines. There was no real plan in place from the Biden administration about how to get all of those Americans out and about how to get all of those tens of thousands of Afghan allies out. Mr. Jekielek: That strains credulity. There must have been some type of plan. Mr. Dunleavy: There was no real plan to get Americans and Afghan allies out in a large number in a rapid fashion. Such a thing didn't really exist. The state department's planning for an evacuation was paltry, to say the least. In fact, the State Department didn't officially request a non-combatant evacuation [NEO] until after the Taliban had taken over Kabul. Essentially, there was no plan in place about how to get all these Americans and Afghan allies out, because there was no planning for a situation where we would have to do it with the Taliban controlling the entire country. Very early on from August 15th, it became very clear that the United States was not going to get all of the Americans out. The United States certainly was not going to get all of those tens of thousands of Afghan allies out, many of whom we had made promises to, and many of whom had worked and fought alongside the United States for years or even decades. Biden was pushing them very hard to get those numbers up, because there was no way that the U.S. was going to successfully complete what many Americans thought the mission should be, which was to get all Americans out and to get all of our Afghan allies out. There was no way that that was going to happen because of the situation that Biden had put us in. The Biden administration's measurement of success instead turned into getting a really big number of people out. That is still the level of success that the Biden administration points to today. When they called this a success, they pointed to that large figure of over 100,000 people evacuated from August 15th until we left at the end of August. But many Americans, well over a thousand, and tens of thousands of Afghan allies were left behind. You can look at that 100,000-plus figure and start to break it down. You will see that a relatively small number of those who got out were actually Afghan allies and Afghan special immigrant visa holders and applicants. Potentially, all of the Afghans that got out felt like if they stayed in Afghanistan it would be a terrible time for them, as it is for everyone in Afghanistan. Many of them felt that they would be at some risk from the Taliban. But many of them didn't have a specific connection to assisting the United States and NATO in fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda from 2001 to 2021. We can get into this a bit further. There was chaos at the airport as the Taliban turned Americans and Afghan allies away, sometimes beating Americans, and sometimes killing Afghans in full view of us. There was this general chaos with crowds storming into the airport and eventually sometimes making it onto the planes. Because of this chaos and because of the U.S. reliance on the Taliban, some of the people that were evacuated didn't really have any particular connection to the United States. Some of them were not vetted properly before they made it over here. Dozens were essentially considered to be national security risks, and they turned up because of biometrics with their fingerprints on IEDs that the United States had distributed. A small number of them seemed to have connections to the Taliban, whether being liberated by the Taliban or having other connections to the Taliban. Some of the unvetted Afghan refugees that made their way to the United States had committed various crimes. In terms of the whole number of people that we got out, it was a relatively small number of people. But when you're talking about dozens of people being deemed national security risks, and you're talking about serious, heinous crimes, this is a problem. It all went back to the fact that the Biden administration knew very early on that Americans and Afghan allies were going to get left behind. Their measurement of success had to be something different than getting all Americans and Afghan allies out. The measurement of success became trying to get a large number of people out instead. Mr. Jekielek: What happened with all these people that would be of concern at the moment? 100,000 people is a substantial number. Mr. Dunleavy: Some of the people that were identified to be national security risks were either imprisoned or deported. But according to the government records, some of them were not identified and were not located, and some of them likely still haven't been identified. Mr. Jekielek: What about everybody else? Are they living in cities or in small town America? Do you have any sense of that? Mr. Dunleavy: There are Afghan refugee populations that are somewhat scattered around the United States. A decent number of them actually live in the Washington DC, Virginia, and Maryland area. They were brought without a real plan from the Biden administration about what was going to happen next for them, because the Biden administration didn't plan on bringing tens of thousands of people over in a rapid fashion. You could see that with the Biden administration really scrambling and struggling to find third countries to bring people to as holding areas, basically called lily pads, because that hadn't been figured out by the time the Taliban took over. Then there was the question of what to do with these folks once they came to the United States. This is a struggle that is going to continue. For a lot of the Afghans that got brought over here, there is going to be a period of adjustment. Many of them didn't expect that the Taliban would take over, and didn't expect that they would be jumping on planes. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of blame was put on the Trump administration and its handling of things prior to the Biden administration taking over. How do you view that? Mr. Dunleavy: We have an entire chapter on the Doha agreement [The Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan], in the final year of the Trump presidency related to Afghanistan. We make it clear in the book that the Doha agreement that was struck between the United States and the Taliban during the Trump administration was a flawed agreement. However, there were conditions inside the agreement, and the Taliban was not meeting any of those conditions whatsoever. President Trump was inclined to lower the true U.S. presence in Afghanistan and eventually withdraw from Afghanistan, but he did not do this total, rapid, go-to-zero withdrawal that President Biden did very quickly in the first year of his presidency. When President Trump left office, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan was fluctuating somewhere between about 2,500 and 3,500, and that's what was left at the end. The Biden administration really likes to point to the Doha agreement to deflect blame from their own mistakes. It's essentially their only defense, because nothing that they actually did in 2021 was defensible. Their only defense was, “We had to do it because of the Doha agreement,” but that's just not true. One key example of how the Taliban wasn't following the Doha agreement was the continued alliance between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. That alliance remained unbroken from before 9/11, throughout the 20 years of war. It remains unbroken today, and you've even got some members of the Taliban government who are basically considered dual-head members of Al-Qaeda. By the way, in 2021 President Biden tried to say, “Al-Qaeda is gone from Afghanistan.” They were not. This Doha agreement excuse doesn't hold water, because the Taliban was not holding up any piece of the Doha agreement. Therefore, the United States was under no obligation to follow through, because if the Taliban is not holding up their end of the deal, there is no reason for us to do so. There was no reason to do a condition-less withdrawal in the middle of the Afghan fighting season. That was a choice. That was a choice President Biden made, and his hands were not tied by the Doha agreement. Mr. Jekielek: You've mentioned the Haqqani network which figures very importantly into what you believe happened in the Abbey Gate bombing. Mr. Dunleavy: A big premise of our book is that the Abbey Gate attack by ISIS-K while the Taliban was providing security at the airport that killed 13 Americans, wounded dozens more, and killed nearly 200 Afghans, that attack was likely preventable. I can go through some of the reasons why. The first, of course, we have touched on. The prisons at Bagram held thousands of ISIS-K terrorists, but the United States made the decision to abandon Bagram in July 2021. The first thing that the Taliban did when they took over Bagram around August 15th was to open those prison doors and free all those prisoners. Many of them very quickly went on to target and harm Americans at Kabul Airport. One of those ISIS-K terrorists who was freed, Abdul Rahman Al-Logari, successfully detonated himself at Abbey Gate and killed those 13 Americans. If the United States had simply held onto Bagram Air Base, a good idea for about 100 different reasons, the terrorist who killed those 13 Americans on August 26th would have been sitting behind bars rather than being freed by the Taliban on August 15th. Keep in mind that the Biden administration continued to talk about how the Taliban was businesslike and professional, which was not true. President Biden repeatedly kept talking about how the Taliban and ISIS-K were mortal enemies, the implication being that we can somehow count on the Taliban to make sure that ISIS-K doesn't attack Americans at Kabul airport. It is true that the Taliban and ISIS-K are enemies. They fought each other for years before August 2021. They're still fighting each other today, but this is Afghanistan. Things are always more complicated than in the simple ways that our leaders try to think of them. Even though the Taliban and ISIS-K would fight each other in Afghanistan, there was also coordination and collusion between the Haqqani network elements of the Taliban and ISIS-K in the years leading up to August 2021. There are many instances where the Haqqani network Taliban and ISIS-K would coordinate on carrying out high profile attacks against the United States and the Afghan government in Kabul specifically. Those attacks by ISIS-K would be carried out with facilitation and help from the Haqqani Taliban. Now you start to see a more complicated picture. You see the Taliban freeing these ISIS-K prisoners. Nominally, ISIS-K are their mortal enemies, but the Taliban are freeing them. Some of them are likely rejoining the fight quickly to target Americans, with one of them killing 13 U.S. service members. On top of that, it was very well documented and known to the Biden administration at the time that the Taliban fighters who had surrounded Kabul airport, many of them were Haqqani Taliban. One Haqqani leader later said that the first thing that he did when he arrived at Kabul airport was to surround it with a thousand suicide bombers. Those are his own words. Some of the Taliban units that were surrounding Kabul Airport were members of the Badri 313, which were essentially the Taliban Special forces linked to the Haqqani network. They had been trained up by Al-Qaeda and often carried out suicide attacks themselves. You could see many of these Badri 313 units as the ones that were in full U.S. Special Forces kit walking around and guarding the airport. The dynamic between the Haqqani Taliban and ISIS-K is much more complicated than the Biden administration was letting on. There were U.S. service members on the ground who raised the issue of collusion, and that this bombing was very possible. There was an Afghan Tajik American interpreter who had to deal with these Haqqani commanders. He also raised the issue of, “Look, some of these Taliban commanders, they're horrible, evil people, but they seem to be coordinating with us at least a little bit. But these Haqqanis, they hate us and they are not helping, and it's very possible that they helped that bombing happen.” In our book we raise this issue and bring it to light. When the Pentagon did its investigation into the Abbey Gate bombing, when you read the witness statements, you can see many of them raising the issue of the Haqqani network and the way the Haqqanis were behaving at Kabul Airport. But when you read the top lines and summaries and conclusions of the investigation, the Haqqanis don't even get mentioned. We thought that was something important to bring to light to add to the conversation. It's not talked about, and it should have been considered at the time when we were trusting the Taliban to protect us against ISIS-K. Mr. Jekielek: You've done some incredible work, and I'm not surprised you got the call to do some investigative work on this. Let's talk about these private airlifts, with private contractors coming in and helping. It's an amazing story. It's been told a bit, but it's something that's receded into memory. What did you discover about this? Mr. Dunleavy: These private and veteran-led groups that sprung up organically as the Taliban took over Kabul ended up getting many of the Americans and many of the Afghan allies out of there . The State Department was totally unprepared to do its job to get all of the Americans and Afghan allies out that we needed to get out. You could see the result of that with well over 1,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan allies getting left behind. Many of the successes in terms of getting Americans and our Afghan allies out happened because these private and veteran-led groups sprung up to make it happen. Many of them had relationships with the Afghans on the ground who they were trying to get out. Many of them had worked alongside these Afghan interpreters and others for years before. They were often trying to get their own interpreters out. Oftentimes, they were working from the United States, working from their kitchen tables, and working from ad hoc command centers set up in hotel ballrooms. Some of these private and vet-led groups actually ended up helping on the ground in Kabul as well to help get people out. Even after all of the U.S. troops had left Afghanistan at the end of August 2021, many of these private and vet-led groups continued their efforts to get Americans and Afghan allies out, whether by plane, through overland routes, or getting them out covertly, those efforts continued, and they continue today. Let me tell a story about how one interpreter was able to get out through private and vet-led efforts. Back when he was a senator, President Biden had visited Afghanistan many years before with a couple of other senators, and their helicopter was forced down in a snowstorm. U.S. Special Forces and an Afghan interpreter came to Biden's rescue. This interpreter was going to be left behind in Afghanistan. He ended up writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under a pseudonym, begging for help, because the Biden administration was leaving him behind. Just imagine, even a man who saved President Biden's life is being left behind by President Biden. That's what the situation was. One of these private and vet-led networks actually managed to get this interpreter out after the fall of Kabul and after the U.S. troop presence had ended. They were able to get him out and get him to a safe house in a third country, Pakistan. The Biden administration didn't play a role in saving this interpreter's life, but found out about it and would later go on to take a lot of the credit for it. But that just shows you what the reality was, that these private and vet led groups were essential in helping get people out, even getting an interpreter out that had saved Biden's life. Mr. Jekielek: All of this was happening during Covid. How did that play into all this? Mr. Dunleavy: Covid was playing into everything, and it played into this quite a bit as well. The Biden administration prioritized things like Covid case mitigation. They were prioritizing that over the functioning of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul or over the military readiness of the U.S. troops that would have to go into Kabul. When there were some Covid cases at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in 2021, the U.S. Embassy ended up shutting down many of its key functions for days or weeks. One of the functions that was shut down was the processing of Afghan special immigrant visas. There was a pause in this process of making sure that we would be able to get these Afghan allies out as the Taliban is on the march, and is just months away from taking Kabul. That's what the U.S. embassy in Kabul was thinking about. It’s not for me to completely downplay the coronavirus, but Covid mitigation was being prioritized over helping get our Afghan allies out at a time when the Taliban was about to take over the country. Mr. Jekielek: We're going to have to finish up fairly soon. Recently, there was a round table with the Gold Star families here. We've talked about the Abbey Gate bombing. What sort of accountability is happening now? Mr. Dunleavy: A good number of the Gold Star families came to Capitol Hill right around the second anniversary of the Abbey Gate bombing. This was a hearing put on by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the testimony from these families was powerful. They want answers about this attack, and there are demands for accountability. At this point, there has been no accountability. There has been no real accountability from Secretary Antony Blinken, Secretary Lloyd Austin, or national security advisor Jake Sullivan. But the families really want answers and they want accountability. While writing this book, I had the honor of talking to many of those families. We try to tell their stories and paint a picture of who these 13 heroes were. Also in the book we lay out how it's very possible that the Abbey Gate attack was preventable. We've already talked about the fact that if we had just held onto Bagram, the suicide bomber, Abdul Rahman Al-Logari would have been behind bars, rather than being freed by the Taliban and able to threaten Americans. On top of that, Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews testified in front of the House of Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year that in the early morning of the day of the bombing, August 26th, 2021, he was receiving very detailed information about an impending attack, and likely at Abbey Gate. He was receiving intelligence on the description of the likely suicide bomber as well. He and his sniper team ended up identifying someone that they believed matched the description of the likely suicide bomber in the crowd. According to Tyler's testimony, he asked his commanding officer for permission to take the shot and take this likely suicide bomber out. According to Tyler, Lieutenant Colonel Brad Whited told Tyler that he, as the commanding officer, didn't have authority to give Tyler permission to take the shot, and that he didn't know who did have that authority. Tyler and his sniper team never heard back about getting permission to take that shot. The likely suicide bomber disappeared into the crowd, and then that horrible attack happened later. We dug through thousands of pages of Pentagon documents line by line. In those documents, there is testimony that U.S. Intelligence knew that ISIS-K was staging at a hotel about two to three kilometers west of Kabul Airport, and that this was ahead of the Abbey Gate attack. Military commanders asked the Taliban to conduct an assault on that location, but the Taliban obviously never did. We uncovered testimony in these Pentagon documents that the U.S. officers were trying to identify ISIS-K locations in Afghanistan before the Abbey Gate bombing. It looked like they had identified an ISIS-K location in Afghanistan, asked for permission to conduct an airstrike against that ISIS-K location, but that permission to conduct that strike was denied. According to this officer, it was in part because U.S. military leaders deemed that there would be a negative response from the Taliban. This horrible attack killed 13 American heroes, grievously wounded dozens of them, including Tyler who tragically lost two of his limbs, and another female U.S. service member who is currently paralyzed. This attack also killed nearly 200 Afghans. If the U.S. had made better decisions, it's very possible that that attack could have been prevented. Mr. Jekielek: Jerry, this has been a fascinating conversation. A final thought as we finish? Mr. Dunleavy: My final thought is that my co-author James Hasson and I viewed this book as a first step—a springboard to getting to the answers, getting to the truth, and getting to accountability. There are a ton of details in here that people have never seen before and that have never heard before. We lay out an incredibly detailed timeline about how a cascade of bad decisions led to this disaster, and how this ultimately lies at the feet of President Biden. But we view this book as a start, and not the finish. Mr. Jekielek: Jerry Dunleavy, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Dunleavy: Thank you very much. I really had a good time. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jerry Dunleavy and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 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[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Last fall, investigations by the nongovernmental human rights organization Safeguard Defenders revealed there were over 100 secret overseas Chinese police stations in at least 53 countries around the world. Last April, the DOJ announced two arrests in connection with one such station in New York City. In this episode, Safeguard Defenders campaign director Laura Harth breaks down how these Chinese overseas outposts control the Chinese diaspora and illegally repatriate people by force. “You have a regime that is openly writing down that it is legitimate to engage in kidnapping to bring people back,” Harth says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/inside-chinas-secret-overseas-police-stations-safeguard-defenders-laura-harth-5499632 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Laura Harth, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Laura Harth: Thanks for having me, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: It's been a few years since you've been on the show and you have been doing some amazing work. Your organization broke the story about these Chinese police stations in many countries around the world. Most recently, in the fall of 2022, we learned of one such station in Manhattan’s Chinatown. I want to start there because that's what people will remember. Please give me the whole picture of what these things are, and why are they there? Ms. Harth: Safeguard Defenders came across the existence of these so-called overseas police service stations, which is a setup between public security authorities in China in cooperation with United Front linked groups around the world. We uncovered well over 100 such stations in at least 53 countries around the world, so this is a global endeavor. We came across them because we had been tracking the CCP's illegal repatriation methods—the illegal long-armed policing operations carried out by authorities in China and by CCP agents to bring people back to China against their will. Obviously, the stations played at least some role in this. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. For the benefit of our audience, the United Front is the Chinese Communist Party's overseas influence operation. It has various groups like student organizations that are operating here and working hand in hand with authorities from China. Why do these things exist? You have by far the most comprehensive reporting, so please break it down for me. Ms. Harth: Starting in 2016, basically since Xi Jinping came to power, we've really seen an explosion of these long-armed policing operations by the Chinese Communist Party around the world. We've been looking at the techniques, the regulations, and the policies they have back in China. In 2016 we see local, provincial, or city authorities in China looking at and mimicking those national guidelines and regulations and saying, “We can do this as well. Let's demonstrate how good we are.” They start actively connecting with these United Front-linked groups around the world. They had been connected, but they then started formalizing the bonds with those groups to use the existing networks of individuals and associations around the world to be better able to execute some of these operations. Part of what they were doing, and something that the Chinese authorities have not denied, is providing so-called consular services and administrative services like renewing your passport and renewing your driver's licenses. It's very important to point out, in and of itself, this is already illegal. It may not necessarily be a criminal offense, but under international law, this is illegal. This is a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. You can't just come in and set up your consular outposts wherever you want without the consent of the host government. China had already been doing this, and they have not denied that they've been doing this. They've even been vindicating the fact that they've been doing this. On top of that, what obviously concerned us at Safeguard Defenders was seeing that the central authority coordinating all those different services were the public security authorities of these four specific locations in China. On the basis of open source evidence, we were able to directly tie some of those stations to so-called persuasion to return operations. A persuasion to return operation is the preferred method of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] authorities. Again, this had been officially described in a written legal interpretation in 2018. It is their preferred method to go after targets abroad and coerce them to go back to China. Mr. Jekielek: It's like heavy persuasion, correct? Ms. Harth: Yes, it sounds very nice. It sounds like it is gentle talk and then an invitation. Obviously it is not. Usually, it starts with threats and harassment or even worse, punishment of family members back home. It is pushing those family members and convincing their relatives overseas to either be silent, stop their activism, or convince them to come back. The Uyghur communities overseas diasporas have been talking about this a lot. Many of them weren't able to talk to their family members for years. Then because they've spoken publicly, they suddenly get a phone call from a family member or from a public security agent using their family member's phone telling them to come back. We know this as a fact. But there are also the threats and harassment or worse delivered directly to the target overseas. We've seen these so-called police stations active in this on the basis of that open source evidence, which included a video of such an operation taking place in Spain. In Madrid, you had the target for repatriation in a direct video meeting with the public security authorities back home in China, and they also had a family member of that target with them. You saw it play out on video and such a station was involved. Then we've seen the indictment coming out here this spring in New York against two people linked to the so-called Chinese Overseas Police Station in New York, which alleges that these people were engaged in surveillance, harassment, threats against an individual on American soil at the behest of Chinese authorities. Those are the things that we've seen and that are obviously of grave concern, both for the human rights and freedoms of the people that are involved as targets, but also in terms of the brazen violation of territorial and judicial sovereignty in these cases. Mr. Jekielek: Do you think when they first came in, they would just establish themselves by offering these consular services, so that the U.S. authorities would just turn a blind eye to it? Then they would ramp up their level of activity. How do these things even get established in the first place? Ms. Harth: I wouldn't say that anyone turned a blind eye. In some countries like South Africa there was some kind of cooperation with local authorities, and some kind of consent to do this. In the vast majority of all these cases, mainly the democracies where these stations were set up, this was done without the consent of the host governments. Again, that's exactly where that violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations comes in. It's a difficult question. What comes first? We've seen them doing a series of things, often under the guise of offering services. Objectively, if it were not in violation of international law, one could understand that these services would be helpful to community members. What is of concern is the fact that you're running these kinds of services, not through the traditional channels, but through groups that are linked to the CCP's influence agencies and the United Front. We all know that the United Front work is not just about trying to influence people, and it is not just about trying to set up a narrative preferred by the Chinese Communist Party. It's also about cracking down on and silencing critics of that same narrative. When you are running your so-called consular services or court proceedings through these networks, obviously you're giving them an enormous amount of control over the communities in which they're performing these services. You give them access to a whole lot of data on who is there, because you are the ones that they have to come through. Mr. Jekielek: And legitimacy too. Ms. Harth: Exactly. That's the thing, legitimacy. You're effectively establishing these people as the leaders in the community who you'll have to go through if you need your passport renewed, so maybe you better behave. That's why we called the follow-up report last year which uncovered more stations, “Patrol and Persuade.” To really give a sense of what this is ultimately about, it is about establishing control over the community. Of course, you have those people that are actively cooperating with them, and even collaborating. There's also a very wide group of victims that are not necessarily only the people that are being actively threatened, harassed, and maybe returned to China, but also that middle group that just really doesn't have anywhere else to go. We need to find a way to engage them and ask, “You are now in the free world and you should be able to enjoy that. What are your concerns? How can we make sure that we can stop the hold that the CCP tries to have on you, even overseas? How can we stop that, knowing very well that the CCP's preferred weapon is using family members back home? It's a very difficult situation for a lot of those people. Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to that video from Spain that you mentioned earlier. This is a situation where the Chinese national in Spain is acutely aware that the people from state security in China have one of their family members. Ms. Harth: Basically, the target overseas is someone who was accused. Again, there's always a lot of accusations against people overseas that are being targeted. This is not to say that among those thousands of people that are being returned, there is not someone that may effectively be a criminal or may have committed criminal offenses. But it's important to remember that these operations are clandestine under international laws, and these are all just people that are accused. They haven't been tried in a court of law. As a bit of background, this one person was accused of environmental pollution. The people tied to one of these stations in Madrid were tasked by public security authorities back in China to find that person. They must have known he was in Spain, or maybe they had learned it from the family member back in China. They said, “Bring him in,” so, they're bringing him into a location. Just to be clear, these police stations are not classic police stations. They could be private residences or office buildings. Anyway, they bring this person in. We have the individuals linked to the station in Madrid sitting next to the suspect. They are in a video meeting with public security authorities back in China with this family member who has a nameplate without the name, but the relative or family member is in front of them. The setup was very clear to the target overseas. It couldn't have been clearer what was happening there, and it was actually a successful operation. That person voluntarily returned to China following this activity. This is a classic example of what has been happening. It's a classic example of what is described in tons of official documents from the Chinese authorities, on the basis of open source evidence exclusively from Chinese authorities and state party media. We managed to tie these stations to at least 84 such operations taking place around the world. With only three of them do we know exactly where they took place. There was one in Serbia, one in Spain, and one in France. There may have been many more, and maybe not all of these were as clear cut as the Spanish one. We don't know. But I would say there's enough evidence to demonstrate this. We can also take into account the indictment that has happened here in New York. There's enough evidence to say that these are not just innocent, administrative, consular services that are being performed. Mr. Jekielek: Right, they're multipurpose. Ms. Harth: Exactly, that's actually a good way to say it. That is perfect, because what they describe is this multipurpose platform that can field queries depending on what is needed. If you need a driver's license, you can go down to the station. It will be sent to the public security, which will then send it down to the local equivalent of the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles]. If it's a court issue, it will be sent to court. You can describe it as a nexus one has to go through. But again, it's always the public security authorities that have a very clear overview. That tells you a lot as well, because in what country would it be the police acting as the central agency for fielding requests on driver's licenses and passport renewals? It makes sense if you know the Communist Chinese system where things such as passports and driver's licenses can indeed be weaponized against you to make sure that you comply. Mr. Jekielek: You were testifying on Capitol Hill recently. China Daily decided to bring up this issue which is always very interesting. I actually enjoy reading the China Daily headlines from time to time, because I need to understand what their current obsession is or what the current view is supposed to be. But clearly, you've hit a nerve with this. Ms. Harth: We have definitely hit a nerve with this. Since January 2022 when we released our report, “Involuntary Returns,” which describes the methods being used to coerce people back to China, we've seen disinformation campaigns against Safeguard Defenders across many platforms. We believe they are trying to drown out our reporting by putting out fake reports with the same titles. There are obviously a lot of insults and the usual things that are said against Chinese human rights offenders or the human rights defenders working in China. There was a Global Times article during the weekend before the hearing on the Hill, and then China Daily came out on the day of the hearing on the Hill. Yes, it's fair to say they are still pretty upset about it. We clearly hit a nerve with that, which for us is a signal to keep pushing it. Clearly there's something here that annoys them. Clearly there is something that has been happening. The response that governments have given to what we reported on clearly does not sit well with them. So, we're on the right track. We need to keep pushing it, not necessarily the police stations, but the whole transnational repression and the long-armed policing angle. It is definitely something they're not happy to see being covered. Obviously, these attack pieces are not nice, and they're quite defamatory, frankly speaking. At this point they don’t even realize this, but within those pieces they actually keep admitting to a whole series of violations that they're continuously doing. They talk about our director, Peter Dahlin, being put through residential surveillance at a designated location in China back in 2015. I say, “Thanks for admitting it guys. The human rights procedures at the UN have been calling on you to abolish this system, because it's a grave human rights violation. It's a forced disappearance. It constitutes torture, and you're writing about it as if it were some beautiful thing. You bring up his forced confession.” I say, “Forced, televised confessions are not an okay thing to do. There's nothing to boast about here. Here you are attacking us and boasting about your grave human rights violations.” Then they go on and say, “All these people overseas, they're just volunteers. They're doing consular services. Once again, I reply, “Not okay guys, that's illegal.” It's almost funny in a way, the way they keep implicating themselves. But it also tells you how far removed from reality they are. The CCP is always going on about how they respect the sovereignty of other countries, how they do not interfere in other countries, and how they respect the international rule of law. The fact that they write about this as if it’s okay, and that this is somehow evidence against Safeguard Defenders rather than against themselves, really shows you how their minds work and how far removed from reality they are. Mr. Jekielek: The term brazen comes to my mind as you're describing this. Most of what we've talked about has been called voluntary return, which is basically through coercion. But there are some examples of forced return, and you've covered that as well. Ms. Harth: We do consider these persuasion to return operations as forced returns, and it is through coercion. A lot of people can empathize when people are going after your family members. It's one thing when they come for you, which obviously is very hard, but when they go after your family members, everybody can understand how that would be a very effective way of leveraging people. Therefore, we do consider it to be a forced return, not voluntary as they like to say. But there are other systems. Again, we base this on what the CCP itself has been saying, and what the PRC authorities themselves have been saying. In particular, there is a written legal interpretation from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection from 2018, which really outlines the methods that are being used. The first one is extradition. This obviously requires some cooperation from the country in which there is a target. This has become increasingly difficult for the PRC to do, especially within democracies, because of how the domestic system is gravely violating basic human rights. Repatriation is when they use immigration law. Rather than have someone go through a judicial proceeding fighting extradition, they'll try to have someone deported. This is something we see happening a lot in Southeast Asia in countries bordering China. But we're also very concerned about what's been happening in the Middle East region. It's one of the reasons why we are so concerned about the judicial and police cooperation agreements that they keep signing with countries, particularly in the global south, because it opens the doors to making all these procedures easier. But if those mechanisms are cut off, which luckily are being cut off in democracies more and more, they move to the clandestine means, which start with persuasion to return, which is their vastly preferred method. Again, it's easy to go after people when you're holding their family members hostage. But we also see luring and entrapment, when they try to get people to another place from where it may be easier to repatriate them, because that host country is willing to cooperate with China. Entrapment is when someone is traveling through another country and gets stuck. Idris Hasan, a Uyghur activist, is a good example. He's been stuck in Morocco now for two years. We were able to stop the extradition by appealing to the UN committee against torture, but now he's stuck in limbo. He was literally trapped in Morocco, and there have been other similar cases in the past. Then we get to the final method, which again is openly described by the supreme body in charge of these overseas operations—kidnapping. You have a regime that is openly writing down that it is engaging in kidnapping and that it's legitimate to engage in kidnapping in order to bring people back. They say this is a very irregular measure, so not to be used too often, and only when the other methods are not available. But again, there are examples of kidnappings taking place. We saw some taking place just last summer in Laos. I've read that legal interpretation so many times, and I've talked about it so many times, but then every time I talk about it, I am still stunned. Not only do I ask, “Why would you do this? How brazen are you to actually write it down, and publish it for all to see?” They say, “These are the methods we are using and that we think are legitimate. But at the same time, we do not interfere in the affairs of other countries. We do not violate international law.” I just don't know, and I'm still stunned. Mr. Jekielek: Part of the reason for publishing this is so that people will know. It's another fear tactic, correct? Ms. Harth: Yes, exactly. Like with the China Daily article, a lot of times when we've put out reports on these issues or other organizations have published reports on these issues, there's always a question that comes up during those regular press conferences that the foreign ministry does, where one of their friendly, controlled media will ask a question about these horrible human rights groups that are telling blatant lies. After denouncing these blatant lies, the answer is usually about how all these human rights organizations don't know anything or they are just anti-China forces. But it usually always ends with a message for those overseas communities, “By the way, we can get to you wherever you are. We will get to you wherever you are. We will chase you until the end of the earth.” I'm not just inventing these words. These are literally the words that you can find if you go back and scroll through some of these foreign affairs press conferences. These are the exact words that you will find. It's very clear that they want to put out that message to the overseas communities. It goes back to that, patrol and persuade, and that control element. They say, “Be aware that we can get to you. We will get to you until the end of the earth.” Mr. Jekielek: You're a person interested in freedom. I'm also a person interested in freedom. But not everybody is like that and has it in their bones. Most people will assimilate to these repressive structures to some extent. They accept them as just how things work. Just knowing that these repressive structures exist exerts a certain level of psychological control over the community. Ms. Harth: Yes, it's definitely a psychological pressure. I don't know if it's true that not all people care as much about freedom. Maybe it's about their priorities. Maybe they have to care about their kids or their family members. There's a lot of reasons why people would not necessarily want to stand up to it. During the hearing on the Hill, Rushan Abbas from the Campaign for Uyghurs was there. She has been a striking example of having these transnational repression techniques used against her to shut her up. It started with the forced disappearance of her sister Gulshan Abbas five years ago. But it continues every day, not just with keeping her sister disappeared, but also with harassment, threats, and online discrediting campaigns. She made a very good point during the hearing when she said, “A couple of years ago, the room behind us would have been filled with Uyghurs. They are not necessarily outspoken activists. They wanted to be there to show their support, and to stand up for what they believed in. They're not here now because they're scared.” When we don't see people standing up and demonstrating it is because they are scared, and because there is that psychological pressure. Rather than suggesting that those people are not freedom loving, it is potentially a sign of how increasingly effective the CCP’s operations are. From a European perspective, it's been very interesting and something to think about. When we look at the Anglo-Saxon countries, we know there's a lot that needs to be done and there are a lot of issues. But we see outspoken activists like the Hong Kongers, the Chinese, and the Uyghurs. We see them in Australia, Canada, the U.S., and the UK. They're very outspoken, they're not huge numbers, but they are there. But on the European continent, and I lived in Italy recently, basically there were no known dissidents in Italy, yet we have one of the biggest Chinese overseas communities in the world. Maybe these communities are really not producing any dissidents, and for some reasons, all the dissidents only go to the Anglo-Saxon countries, which would say something. Maybe the control they've been able to establish here, because of the fact that some of these community leaders have been cozying up to the local law enforcement and political establishment, maybe the control is even more effective in those places. It's a bit of a different way to look at this chicken and egg question, if you will. Mr. Jekielek: Sure. You raised a really good point that maybe not freedom loving, but maybe freedom obsessed. Ms. Harth: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: But in all seriousness, most people just want to live their lives. Ms. Harth: Which is okay. Mr. Jekielek: And preferably free. Ms. Harth: I'm fairly certain that most people would prefer leading lives free from the potential threats and harassment of an authoritarian power that is keeping their family members hostage. It's a fair assumption to make that probably 100 percent of people would prefer to live that way. Then within that space, if they want to talk about the other crimes that the CCP is committing, that's another question. But it’s not everyone's cup of tea. Mr. Jekielek: It's more a reflection on how powerful these types of coercive tools are on people, without the actual direct enforcement. The subtle stuff is the most insidious in some ways . Ms. Harth: Exactly, it's both. Again, it mimics a lot of what is happening inside China. When it comes to human rights defenders, they'll go after one to make an example out of that person. But you scare the wider community and you set a very clear example for all of them. Our sense is that you have the same thing happening overseas where you set up a system of control, and people know the system is in place if needed. The reason we learn about these cases is because Chinese propaganda is talking about them. They want to send that message out to the communities. Mr. Jekielek: Laura, this is such an important conversation and it’s giving me food for thought. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Ms. Harth: Thank you for having this conversation. The important thing is to keep having this conversation. If some people listening are going through this, and hearing things that sound familiar, I hope they know they're not alone, and that there are people that want to support them. In particular, we released a multilingual guide on how to recognize transnational repression and what to do in these cases. It's available in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Uyghur, Tibetan, and English. It describes what the acts might look like, but also lists some of the reporting channels where people can go to actually report such instances. Because if this is happening to you, it’s not okay, and you should not accept it. We understand that you may be scared, but there are, in particular in the U.S., channels available to report it anonymously. If you feel scared for your family members, and if you feel scared that this may lead to trouble for you, you can report anonymously. It's really important that people do report it, because it's the best way for people to start coming forward, and it's the best way to help the authorities in this country and other countries gain a better understanding of what exactly is going on. Who are the people doing it? Who are the actors? What are the methods? My final thought is an appeal to potential victims or people that may have seen or known of other victims. Please come forward anonymously, and help us to help everyone better address this issue in the future. Mr. Jekielek: Laura Harth, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Harth: Thank you, Jan. It was great to be here. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Laura Harth and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. 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[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Back in September 2018, just days after Rushan Abbas spoke at a Hudson Institute panel about the genocide of the Uyghurs, authorities in China arrested her sister and her aunt. “Two of my closest living relatives left back home, they both got picked up on the same day from 1,400 kilometers away from each other … as retaliation for my speaking out,” Ms. Abbas says. Her sister was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Many Uyghurs abroad are being blackmailed by the Chinese regime and their families held hostage, Ms. Abbas says. She is the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs. Evidence is also mounting that the CCP is killing large numbers of Uyghurs for their organs. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/my-sisters-abduction-rushan-abbas-on-the-ccps-tactics-to-control-and-manipulate-the-uyghur-diaspora-5496323 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Rushan Abbas, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Rushan Abbas: Thank you Jan, for giving me the chance to talk about this atrocity against my people. Mr. Jekielek: I've been following your work for quite a while and it's high time to have you on the show. It's a particularly difficult time for you because it's the fifth anniversary of your sister's abduction. This abduction is a case in point around what you were testifying about today in Congress, which is transnational repression courtesy of the CCP. The long arm of the Chinese Communist Party is coming into other countries and persecuting people there in various ways. Let’s start there. What happened with your sister and how does this all connect? Ms. Abbas: Again, thank you so much. Just five years ago I had a successful career. I was working as a business development director, enjoying my family, and also advocating for my people against the genocidal policies implemented harshly against the Uyghur people. In 2017, we heard that about one million Uyghurs were detained and put in concentration camps. On September 5th, 2018, I participated in a panel at the Hudson Institute, one of the think tanks here in Washington DC. I was talking about China's genocidal policies and outlining the fate of my in-laws. By that time my husband Abdulhakim Idris' entire family had gone missing; my parents-in-law, three of my sister-in-laws and their husbands, my brother-in-law and his wife, and 14 of their nieces and nephews. I talked about this and it was televised on YouTube. Six days after this, my own sister, Gulshan Abbas, a retired medical doctor, and my aunt, also a retired school teacher, two of my closest living relatives back home, both got picked up on the same day 1400 kilometers away from each other. That's over 900 miles apart in two different cities. They got picked up on exactly the same day as a retaliation for my speaking out against the CCP. I am an American citizen. I have been living in the United States since 1989, yet my exercised freedom of speech and my First Amendment right cost my own sister's freedom. Mr. Jekielek: In a way, this changed everything. Because on one hand, you had this incredible intimidation and backlash from the CCP for what you did. But at the same time it gave you a voice, and maybe a strength. Please tell me what happened. Ms. Abbas: I realized the Chinese government did this to intimidate me and try to silence my voice. I didn't want them to have that kind of power over me. I quit my full-time job and I became a full-time activist and advocated around the world as the voice for my people back home and my sister, and to expose China's crimes and the genocide. The one thing that the Chinese government did not realize when they took my sister is the power of love, because they never understand the power of love. I love my sister. The love I have for my sister, the love I have for my people, and the love I have for freedom and democracy, that's actually refueling me. I gain strength from that love and fight onward every day. Mr. Jekielek: How do you respond to people that say, “You're endangering your relatives by doing this?” I've certainly heard people say that in different contexts. Ms. Abbas: I do feel guilty when I think about my sister being in jail, but at the same time, I can’t only think about myself or my family. There's something that is extremely important for all of us, and that is freedom and democracy in the world. It is the freedom and democracy I left my family and my friends and my hometown for, and that I came to the United States for. All that is at stake right now. It's not just about my sister, my family, my in-laws, the Uyghurs, or the other people in East Turkestan. It's not just that their future is at stake. It’s the future of the entire free world that we know and most of us take for granted is being endangered. The Chinese government is the biggest threat to our freedom and democracy. The audience who is listening, their parents and their grandparents worked so hard to establish this over the last 70-some years. That's what we are losing by this transnational repression, and by the Chinese government's infiltration throughout the world. Now, we see many celebrities, CEOs, talk show hosts, Disney, Hollywood, and NBA stars being so vocal against any kind of social injustice, and rightfully they should. But where are they when the Chinese government is conducting an active genocide against the Uyghur people, when Uyghur women are facing forced sterilization and forced abortions, and when about 1 million children are taken away from their families? Uyghur women are forced to marry Han Chinese men, which is sponsored by the government. Where are the feminists? Where are the people who are supposed to defend children's rights? When the perpetrator of those crimes has the money and the power, then they all decide to be silent and look away. But one thing that they don't realize is they're not just giving away their freedom of speech. Those politicians, celebrities, VIPs, and world leaders are not just giving up their freedom of expression or freedom of speech. They are giving up the future of the free world. They're giving up the sovereignty of their countries if they are the leaders of the countries that are giving into totalitarian regimes like China. If we don't take action and hold China accountable or stop the Chinese government now, it will be their children and grandchildren who will pay the consequences of an illiberal world. Mr. Jekielek: I want to get you to qualify what you're saying, but first let's talk about how you have been working at this for a long time. Can you chart that course for me? We're talking about before China even got permanent trade relations and joined the WTO [World Trade Organization]. People have said to me that that was the single worst decision, and that we have in effect built the worst dictatorship in the world from that time in the early 2000s. What happened from then on with human rights related to the Uyghur people? Ms. Abbas: I was a reporter at Radio Free Asia in 1998 when Radio Free Asia added a Uyghur service. I was the first Uyghur reporter and I lived in Washington at that time. I had many opportunities to talk to lawmakers working with the Human Rights Commission. Now it's the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. I met with the late congressman Tom Lantos and our current champion for human rights, Representative Chris Smith. I was extremely frustrated when I saw the most favored nation status was granted for China. Because before that, that was the only piece of leverage the United States had over China to review their human rights records. But then, we brought them into the World Trade Organization, giving them all kinds of privileges. I remember that I kept repeating myself like a broken record, talking to the people in the different parts of the State Department and Pentagon. I had connections with some of the military generals, lieutenants, and colonels. I approached them and always tried to tell them, “Don't trust the Chinese government. The CCP is not an ally. They are the enemy of humanity. They're doing this kind of oppression.” I used to list what they were doing to the Uyghurs, all the people of East Turkestan, the Tibetans, and the Falun Gong practitioners. I tried to warn them. I wish they would remember what I said back then, and I hate to say I told you so a long time ago. But unfortunately, many people believe that if we keep investing in China, keep giving them the technology, keep giving them the money, and keep giving them all the privileges, they are going to open up and become a more democratic, free society. No. We knew this back then. We tried to warn the people here in America they were not going to become like a free country with freedom of speech or any kind of respect for human dignity. Because a country like China feels threatened by any kind of freedom, and even by any kind of religious belief. They want people to completely submit themselves to only the Chinese Communist Party. Any kind of religious, ethnic, or linguistic differences are a threat to them. When this mass detention started in 2017 and 2018, Cui Tiankai, the former Chinese Ambassador to the United States was interviewed about those camps. He bluntly and openly said, "We are taking those Uyghurs to the camps. We are trying to make them normal people." The Uyghur people, because of their religion, their ethnic background, their history, and the language they speak, the Chinese government doesn't even consider them to be normal people. This is the mentality of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Jekielek: In the early 2000s the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners was already well known. In 2006 we started getting evidence of the organ harvesting industry that had been created in China. There were a few heroic people like Congressman Smith talking about these things very early on, but it was rare. In 2017, we became aware of this large-scale imprisonment of the Uyghurs. I thought to myself, “People should try to hold the Chinese regime to account for these mass internments.” There were millions of people in these labor camps, but there was very little reaction. Do you think that led in some way to what happened to the Uyghur people in 2017? Ms. Abbas: Absolutely. The appeasement, continuously taking everything as it is, not speaking out, not holding China accountable, and rewarding China with all the privileges brought to this point today. The 2008 Beijing Olympics was actually China's turning point on human rights. They acted like they respected a little bit of freedom here and there, when actually they were really oppressing the Falun Gong practitioners and the Tibetans and the Uyghurs. Forced labor had already started. They were taking the Uyghur youth to China proper, and forcing them to work in factories for almost nothing. All that was happening and the United States government knew about everything that China was doing at that time, but we did absolutely nothing about it. And not just that—the international community also rewarded China with the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Mr. Jekielek: Then also a second time, I might add. Ms. Abbas: During the middle of an active genocide, we rewarded them the Winter Olympics. Mr. Jekielek: The whole premise of the 2008 Olympics was an opportunity for the CCP to become a more responsible leadership, but the opposite happened. That was predictable for people like yourself. Ms. Abbas: Yes. The Chinese government learned very quickly that they could get away with almost anything. Right after the Beijing Olympics, they cracked down on the demonstrators in Tibet, and then there was the 2009 Urumqi massacre. There was absolutely no voice coming out from the United States government during the Obama administration. That was the testing of the waters for the Chinese government, and then immediately they started to crack down more and more on people. After the Urumqi massacre, 40,000 Uyghur youth disappeared. Human Rights Watch did the report, and no questions were asked. The United States is continuously investing in China, even today with this much information. There is leaked document after leaked document from the Chinese government confirming the genocidal policies. There are testimonies from former camp victims about what's happening inside of those camps. Crematoriums are being built next to the concentration camps for a culture that doesn't practice cremation. Organ harvesting started with the Falun Gong practitioners, but now it's very common for the Uyghurs. There were video clips advertising halal organs in the Muslim majority countries and in Arabic speaking countries. All this is happening, yet we still continue to appease the genocidal CCP regime. I often think about what happened to the vow, “Never again?” After World War II, many people had regrets and said they should never allow something like this to happen again to humanity. They knew back then what Nazi Germany was doing to Jewish people, but they continued to do business as usual with Nazi Germany, empowering Nazi Germany's economy to murder more people. Then later they all claimed ignorance. They knew what was happening, but they said information flow was too slow and they didn't know all these details. Nobody can claim ignorance anymore. This is the information era, and there is overwhelming evidence. Even the United Nations Human Rights Council released their report. Mr. Jekielek: Grudgingly, and under a lot of pressure, I might add. I had the impression they didn't really want to publish that report. Ms. Abbas: No. Michelle Bachelet was in her seat to warn the Human Rights Council to not criticize the Chinese government and not to release the report. She sat there the entire time during her term and then last within the 15 minutes of her term, she released the report. Although it was watered down because of the pressure by the Chinese government, it still confirmed everything that we have been saying for years; mass detention, forced labor, forced sterilization, child abduction and torture. All these are the elements of the United Nation's own description of the crimes of genocide. Out of those five elements, if one is happening, you can call it genocide. In their own report, they listed quite a few of them, but they didn't call it genocide. They said it might constitute crimes against humanity, but they actually have all the crimes listed. With that much information, these people are continuously engaging with China in business as usual. All these people are still saying that we need to work with the Chinese government. We need to have a friendly dialogue and continue to benefit from the Uyghur people's forced labor. When all these crimes are listed in the history books, they cannot claim ignorance anymore. Mr. Jekielek: For those that might not be aware, genocide doesn't just mean the mass killing of people. Genocide means policies enacted that are designed to eliminate or eradicate a group of people by whatever means, including cultural assimilation and sterilization. You mentioned many of these elements. There is a question if it’s genocide or if it’s crimes against humanity. That's a false dichotomy. They are simply terrible things that should never happen. How can you expect a regime to treat you reasonably if they do those things to their own people? Ms. Abbas: Exactly. Not only that, what the Chinese government is doing to Uyghurs, Tibetans, Southern Mongolians, Falun Gong practitioners and the Hong Kongers is not just staying within their borders. They are expanding it all over the world. They are running police stations in Canada, the United States, and all over Europe, and they are harassing American citizens and Canadian citizens. They are exporting the complete surveillance police state implemented in East Turkestan to other parts of the world. This is not just staying in East Turkestan or in Tibet or in Hong Kong. How do you trust a country like China, as you said, if they are doing something like this to their own citizens? What kind of future will they bring to the international community? We all saw what happened when we continued to appease a dictator with Putin's invasion of Ukraine. But Putin's invasion came in broad daylight with tanks and armed soldiers. China's invasion of the world is coming in with smiley faces, suitcases full of money, infiltration, and manipulation. You can look at the threat diplomacy that they are conducting all over the world. They have the power of the Belt and Road Initiative, the trade threats, and the manipulation of the United Nations as the second largest donor. China is becoming the strong arm of the world. While the Chinese government is conducting sterilization against Uyghur women and forcing Uyghur girls to marry Han Chinese men, who represents women's rights in the United Nations as a special envoy for women rights? It is Peng Liyuan, Xi Jinping's wife. Can you believe this? The United Nations was established because of atrocities during World War II to protect people from such crimes. Yet, everything they do is swaying into what Xi Jinping and the Chinese government want. Mr. Jekielek: It definitely seems that many institutions in the United Nations are very tightly aligned with Chinese interests. Let's talk about how this transnational repression of your community manifests. How is the CCP targeting Uyghur Americans here? Ms. Abbas: Every Uyghur in the diaspora, including all the Uyghurs in the United States, the Uyghur Americans who are American citizens, the people who are here legally, and students all have their family members back home. The Chinese government basically has their hands on every Uyghur's neck by holding their family members hostage. In some cases, the Chinese government makes the family members call their kids and ask them to stay away from political activities like the hearing this morning, a protest, or speaking out for some of their missing family members. Their parents will call them and say, "Do not get involved with anything. Think about us. If you want to see us alive, and if you want to see us outside instead of being in detention, please listen to us and don't do anything." In some cases, the officials from the Chinese embassy and consulates call the Uyghur people in America. Even from back home, some police in different regions and cities call Uyghur people in the U.S. and warn them, "If you want to see your parents safe, don't speak out." People are scared, and people are worried. That's why a few years ago when we had a hearing like this morning, we used to have a room full of Uyghur people with pictures of their missing family members. But as you saw today we only had one or two sitting in the room. They are afraid of coming because their family members are being held in detention. They are missing or they are dying. Some community members here say that their family members are dying just a couple weeks after being released, or they are dying in detention. Nobody is speaking out about this. This is actually like my husband's case. About 20 days ago, in this 21st century information era, we heard from some distant relatives that his father passed away in January. My father-in-law passed away in January, but we just found this out seven months later. That was the only piece of information that my husband got since April 2017. The last time he communicated with his family was April 25th, 2017. This is just one example of how the Uyghur families living in the United States are being persecuted. Mr. Jekielek: Internationally, there are also examples of people being forcibly repatriated. There have been people from various countries that have been forcibly repatriated back to China because they were inconvenient to the regime. Ms. Abbas: Yes, absolutely. Almost every few months we hear that there are Uyghur people in detention somewhere. There are some in India right now and the Chinese government is trying to take them back. There's a gentleman from Turkey in Morocco right now, Idris Hasan. His case is being highlighted and the Chinese government is asking the Moroccan government to send him back. There were actually more than a 100 Uyghurs sent back from Thailand. There were many young students sent back from Egypt in 2017. The Chinese police, along with the Egyptian police, actually went out into the streets together. They made an apartment to apartment manhunt and arrested those Uyghur students and sent them back to China. They all disappeared. In Saudi Arabia, we also heard of a few Uyghurs facing deportation there. We don't know how many more there are in other parts of the world. The Chinese government's policy is not to just eradicate Uyghur people within East Turkestan or within China, but also they are trying to bring all the other Uyghurs back from other parts of the world, and then basically oppress them or persecute them. A young girl from Japan, Mihray, was studying in Japan for her master's degree. She kept getting phone calls from her family members asking her to come back. She was told to think about her family and think about her parents. If she continued to study in Japan, they would face repercussions. So, she went back. When she went back, she was taken directly to the camps. A few months later we heard this young girl had died in the camp in detention. This is just one example of many. We know a few actually went back while studying in the United States. A famous scholar, Dr. Rahile Dawut, studied at Indiana University, and she's now missing. There was also a graduate student from Northwestern University who went back with his wife and two kids. He was detained in the concentration camp and faced all kinds of torture and hardship. He was released half dead basically, and died a few days later. Waris Ababekri, one of our colleagues from University Times and one of the leaders of the protests during 1985 through 1988 was in detention. Then he died two weeks after being released. There are many stories like that. As you mentioned earlier, genocide is not an event or one incident. Genocide is a progression, and there are 10 stages of genocide. If you look at what's happening to Uyghur people and the Falun Gong practitioners, they label them as the “other group.” Then they start to demonize and stigmatize their culture and their ethnicity. Step by step, they give out disinformation and false propaganda and they create hatred among the populace. The Uyghurs are being labeled as uncivilized people, backward, and criminal, because all the normal aspects of religion are being criminalized. The government is using disinformation and propaganda against the Uyghur people, but not just that. As part of the transnational repression here in the United States, I am being attacked day and night on social media and on their traditional media. The Global Times Network actually did an article after I doubled down on my efforts. I carried my sister's photo, protesting in front of the Chinese embassy, at the United Nations, and at the European Parliament. The CCP said that I stole another person's photo and falsely claimed this was my missing relative. They said I was spreading lies about China. A few months later, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson spelled out my sister's name and said that they had charged her. Which one is it? Am I a liar or is my sister a criminal? Basically it's the same playbook against all the marginalized groups. They did it to Falun Gong practitioners, the Tibetans, the Uyghur people and the Hong Kongers in front of the entire world. What happened to Hong Kong? That entire region lost its freedom and democracy. All of a sudden, Hong Kong became a part of this dictatorship. Their people who were born and raised in freedom, and now they are under the totalitarian system like everyone else in China. This is what happens if you don't take action against genocide and crimes against humanity. There is no neutrality when it comes to genocide and crimes against humanity. If you don't take a side today, and if you don't take an action to stop China or hold China accountable, then just look at the Uyghur people today. Then you can imagine how the future of the world is going to be. Everything the Uyghur people are facing today will be the reality of the entire world. If we don't speak out now, then the only voice left to speak will be one of regret. Mr. Jekielek: Giving the technology, giving the goodwill, and turning a blind eye to the problems was because if we offered the tools of prosperity to China, then they would become more like us. They would become more of a free and open society. Increasingly, people have been saying that it went the other way. We actually became more like them. Ms. Abbas: Yes, and I have experienced that. Sometimes I wonder where I am living. Am I in China or in the United States? I arrived at Columbia University to participate in one of the panels with Tibetan and Hong Kong activists, as well as one of the Chinese dissidents from the Tiananmen Square protests. After I got there, the university canceled our panel because apparently the Chinese student association at the university protested. They canceled our event. I felt like I was in Beijing at Tsinghua University or Beijing University. Also I see certain tons of humans here being exported from Xinjiang, we call East Turkestan, coming to the United States. The customs and border patrol sees those certain tons of humans here. Imagine Jan, how many people does that represent? When something like this happens, it should be breaking news all over the major media. Every reporter should cover this. Every evening news should have this as breaking news. No, we don't see it anywhere. Again, little by little, inch by inch, we are giving in. We are becoming like this authoritarian regime. The Chinese government makes their five year plan to reach their 100-year plan and they stick to it. They're on target. They stick to their plans and they keep working towards that. What about us? We don't even have a clear China policy. We have all these dreams of engaging with China and appeasing the Chinese government. We say that we don't want to have a cold war with China. Actually, China is already at war with us, and it's not our choice. They are deciding it. They are having a war against us. They are having a war against freedom and democracy. We don't realize what the Chinese government is planning on doing. They say the last century was a century of humiliation for the Chinese people and this century is China's century of retaliation. What does that mean? It's not retaliation against the Uyghurs or Tibetans or Hong Kongers or Falun Gong practitioners or southern Mongolians. It's retaliation against the West, and retaliation against democracy. When are we going to wake up and see this reality? Mr. Jekielek: Over the last few years there has been a significant shift in how people understand the Chinese regime. I don't have a very deep respect for our mainstream media and how they cover many issues. Strangely, on the China issue, the reporting is unusually honest compared to what we've seen over the last 20 years. You can tell me if you agree or not, but I see that as positive. I also agree with you that it's also far from ideal. What are your thoughts about that? Ms. Abbas: They covered a lot, but not enough. Radio Free Asia is continuously doing an amazing job breaking many of the cases that I mentioned earlier, with the crematoriums and the organ harvesting and many of the deaths. But the mainstream media is not paying attention. Even if they cover a big event or big breaking news, they always add the CCP's talking points as a footnote. Mr. Jekielek: Right, that's true. Ms. Abbas: Why? Why are you repeating what the CCP is saying? It's so frustrating. I will read the article, then toward the end I get frustrated and I just yell and scream. It's so frustrating to see how some of the journalists work. But I don't want to discredit many of the amazing journalists. They are actually covering a lot of the incidents happening to the Uyghur people, so thanks to many of the great journalists. But with the mainstream media and especially the evening news covering the CCP's crimes, it's always up and down. It's extremely difficult to have consistency on covering the ongoing genocide or what's happening to different marginalized groups. The Chinese government's actions should be the biggest story, not just the Uyghurs or people within their borders, but what they are doing to the United States, like the balloon incident for example. Mr. Jekielek: The balloon did get some headlines. Ms. Abbas: It did, and then it disappeared again. There are some follow ups and some investigations, but then why are we not hearing about it anymore? Why are the American people not hearing about it? There was a warehouse in Fresno, California with about a thousand infected mice being kept with all kinds of viruses. They were biological weapons basically, and it was run by a Chinese company. Clearly, they were doing something there with all kinds of coronavirus and other viruses. Mr. Jekielek: It was totally off the books. Ms. Abbas: What's interesting is that it got reported a little bit here and there. At first they mentioned Chinese ownership. Then later they dropped that and said, "The Fresno police discovered this warehouse that kept these infected mice." But then you don't see who the owner was and who was behind it. The Chinese government is using this very effectively to bring everything back to the Asian hate, or this is hurting the Chinese people's feelings. No. We are talking about the Chinese regime. We are talking about the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people. We all have great Chinese friends. That's the playbook of the Chinese government, turning everything to their benefit by saying that it's criticizing the Chinese people and making things bad for the Chinese people. No. The Chinese people did not elect Xi Jinping. The Chinese people have no voice in what kind of regime they want to have. The Chinese people are also the victims of the Chinese communist regime's brutality. The ordinary Chinese people are with us, and we saw that in the November Urumqi fires. They protested standing in Urumqi Street in Shanghai. The Chinese people in China actually showed their solidarity with the Uyghur people. It is actually the Chinese people who are also the victims of China's propaganda. Mr. Jekielek: The level of propaganda within China is so huge, and many people are brainwashed this way to some extent. Despite that, there are still people that will see through it and do it publicly, even knowing that they will invoke the wrath of the state. I see hope in that. Ms. Abbas: Yes, absolutely. Sometimes we receive messages through our social media on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. People are reaching out to us. Chinese people are using their VPN to reach out to us. I received a letter from an underground Christian Church in China. They sent me a note and said that they were so sorry for what their government was doing to our people and what they did to my sister. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think is the path forward for the U.S., especially given the reality of transnational repression? Ms. Abbas: The U.S. needs to have legislation to protect Uyghur American rights. We need to have legislation from the lawmakers to address the social media that's being used by the CCP's trolls. Social media is not open to the ordinary Chinese people, but their trolls and their officials use it to harass us and they spread libel and attacks against the activists. When we report that to law enforcement, they cannot do much because of freedom of speech. When the CCP is threatening, harassing, blackmailing, intimidating, spreading libel, and saying if you don't stop speaking out against the CCP, we will destroy you, that is not freedom of speech. We need to have some sort of instrument to protect the Uyghur people living within the U.S. Mr. Jekielek: Rushan, let me jump in here. Just a few days ago, based on the Fifth Circuit Court decision, we know for a fact that there are structures in the U.S. government that have been censoring Americans in violation of the First Amendment, under the pretext of countering foreign disinformation. This is unimaginable. But at the same time, I'm aware that what you just described is happening. These foreign disinformation operations, courtesy of China, are the real thing. That is being almost used as an excuse to curtail the First Amendment rights of Americans. It's very hard to figure out how to deal with this. I agree with you that some sort of instrument is needed, but when the ability to censor gets pulled in, it can be abused in the wrong direction. Ms. Abbas: True, there is a fine line. But we need to differentiate why this certain person is coming out of the blue. This person doesn't know me personally, and has nothing to do with what I'm doing. Why is he out there constantly attacking, demonizing me, and trying to discredit my work? He says, “Stop what you are doing.” People like that should get the attention of the FBI, and they should investigate him. Why is this person doing this, and what's in it for him? Maybe the Chinese government has his family members held hostage and they are making him do that. But how do you prove that? Yes, it is important to have First Amendment rights and that is our freedom. At the same time, the Chinese government is using democracy to destroy democracy, using it to infiltrate, and using it to suppress American citizens. Somebody needs to do their jobs and protect us. Mr. Jekielek: This is one of the foundational issues of our time. The CCP excels at these mass operations. They can push out the same message across a billion accounts. But that can be detected and that can be stopped. What if someone just believes their propaganda and they share it? Maybe they've been brainwashed into that. Ms. Abbas: That's true too. To finish on a positive note, I take all these attacks as proof that I'm getting under the CCP's skin. Whenever I speak out on some platforms or whenever I do something impactful, I see these massive attacks. That’s when I feel like I'm doing the right thing. I believe in that famous saying, the arc bends toward justice. Maybe we are taking baby steps, but we are making huge differences here. Five years ago, when China was continuously implementing an active genocide against Uyghurs, the world community did not know who Xi Jinping was, and how the Chinese government operated. But today, everybody out there understands Xi Jinping is a dictator, and China is a genocidal regime. They can believe it or not, and they can agree with it or not, but at least they now know something about it. We are making a difference. From the Uyghurs activists, the former camp victims, the great politicians, and the journalists like yourself, we are making a difference, and we will continue to fight. I left my homeland in 1989, and left my parents and my friends. I came to the United States because I was looking for freedom and democracy. Today, that is at stake, and I will not stop fighting. I will protect that freedom and democracy and fight against the CCP. Mr. Jekielek: Rushan, the accomplishments that you just mentioned are because of your hard work, and I need to mention that before we finish. It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Abbas: Thank you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Rushan Abbas and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW]“The nations that had staged successful Marxist revolutions didn't do it on purely economic grounds, but first had attacked the civil institutions, which is just another word for the cultural institutions of the working class.” In this episode, I sit down with Liz Wheeler, host of The Liz Wheeler Show and author of the new book “Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids.” “We've forgotten to protect children's innocence, and that's a key part of the Marxist strategy to destroy our country, is to subvert the innocence of our sons and daughters,” says Ms. Wheeler. “Social Emotional Learning is one of the most interesting parts of how the Marxist ideology is reaching everyone's children.” What are the key ways in which the far-left takes power, and how have they been successful in re-engineering society? Why might the concept of “neutrality” actually be a trap? “We’ve fallen for this idea that we shouldn't insert any kind of values or moral order into our society, that we shouldn't use government—[the] just authority of government—to help create this moral order. And because of that, we've withdrawn our values from a lot of these institutions that have been captured,” says Ms. Wheeler. “The Republican Party has embraced libertarianism as conservatism, but it’s not.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/liz-wheeler-the-grip-of-technocracy-and-how-self-avowed-marxists-enforce-social-coercion-5494522 FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Liz Wheeler, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Liz Wheeler: Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. Mr. Jekielek: I've really enjoyed reading your book, again, very provocatively titled. You're talking about Marxists coming after kids. What is the reality of this situation? What is the meaning of this title? Ms. Wheeler: The title of the book is, Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids. People usually say," Liz, really, Marxists? Isn't that just an empty ad hominem that's hurled on cable news? Isn't that just the insult that people use and no one really understands what it means? " Like many other parents during Covid, whether Democrat, Republican, conservative, or liberal, we caught a glimpse of what our children were learning in school just by peeking over their shoulders during Zoom classes. We saw that they were being brainwashed with critical race theory and transgender ideology, in addition to the good old-fashioned moral relativism theory that says your truth or my truth is more important than the actual truth. I thought to myself at the time, "It seems like this is a concerted series of attacks on our children." Why is this happening all at once? It turns out the question is less why and more, “Who is behind this?” I realized that this is not particularly new. This is not something that just started happening during Covid. For nearly a century, the Left has been attempting to re-engineer our society. Unfortunately, they have been pretty successful at it. They've captured four out of the five major foundational, cultural institutions. They've captured the media. They've captured the education system. They've largely captured religious institutions. They've just about captured the judicial system. They've set their sights on the nuclear family, and they have almost destroyed that as well. You could argue that there's one element of the nuclear family left standing; children. That explains why the Left is going after these children. In my book I name the people and the organizations behind the capture of these institutions and behind the attacks on our children. The people behind these attacks are self-avowed Marxists or have embraced an obvious Marxist ideology. In the first half of the book, I unpack the reality of what we are facing. I often say that we as conservatives and Republicans refuse to acknowledge the reality of the political enemy that we face. Even if it sounds hyperbolic when you say Marxist, if we refuse to acknowledge who these people are and what ideology they espouse, then we won't fight effectively against them. Therefore, we won't win. In the second half of the book I offer a solution, and I will admit to you it's different from what the Republican Party offers. I offer a solution for how we can reclaim both our institutions and protect our children for the sake of their individual souls. If we surrender our children to the Left, our nation is done. Mr. Jekielek: Our viewing audience has grown to be many different people under one umbrella, and there are a lot of Republicans. We know that. Then, there's a lot of people that call themselves politically homeless, and a lot of independents. Why the focus on Republicans? Ms. Wheeler: That's a great question. I can best describe this by saying that I first identify not as Republican, but as conservative. As conservatives, or as politically homeless, you can just call us common sense people. You can call us independent thinkers. You can call us freedom-loving Americans. There's many ways to describe what we are apart from any party affiliation. But the way that our political system works is that you join one party or the other, whichever party you share the most values with, so that you can work towards a concerted goal. Even if you only agree with seven out of ten principles of the Republican Party, it's better than agreeing with zero out of ten of the Democrats. The reason I'm critiquing the Republican Party is because of these attacks by Marxists, the capture of our institutions, and the fact that there are now targets on the backs of our children coming from the Left. It's coming from far-Leftists. It's being embraced by the Democratic Party. Democratic politicians espouse this. We would expect that the Republican Party would push back on this. You would hope that they would be fighting effectively to advance conservatism in our nation vs. allowing this Marxism to seep into our culture and into our law. But they haven't. They most certainly haven't fought back with any effectiveness against it. One of the main goals of my book is to challenge Americans, regardless of your political affiliation. If you're sick of your children being attacked and if you recognize the chaotic reality that we are living in right now where reality itself is under attack, then we have to ask ourselves, "Who is our most effective fighting partner?” If that effective fighting partner is the Republican Party, since the Democrats have embraced what I would describe as evil, we have to be part of holding the Republican Party accountable for how they are fighting this battle. Mr. Jekielek: Please give me an overview of what you see happening. Ms. Wheeler: One of the debates that we've seen in this country over the course of the past six months, not even going back as far as two or three years, but in the past six months, there's been this debate over what does the word woke mean? Can you define the word woke? This has been asked of a lot of thought leaders in the conservative movement in the Republican Party, since we've embraced being the anti-woke party. A lot of people can't define what the word woke means. They recognize it when they see it. They know that white children are being told that they're racist just because they're white. That's wokeness. If a little girl says, "If you identify as a boy, then you can be a boy.” They identify that as wokeness, but they can't truly define what it is. In my book I trace wokeness back to its origin. Where did it come from? What is it? How can we fight back against it if we don't understand what it is? I found out that it's the brainchild of a Brazilian Marxist named Paulo Freire. Paulo Freire had banana views. He was a self-avowed Marxist. He did not believe in objective reality or objective truth. Therefore, when he looked at schools and the education system, he didn't believe that children were being taught knowledge, because he didn't believe that knowledge was a thing. He said, "Every bit of knowledge is just the prevailing political narrative. It is not because it's right. It's not because it's true. It's just because it has emerged victorious in this competition of political narratives.” He argued that children shouldn't be taught the prevailing political narrative, and that instead, children should be taught to view the world through critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is essentially viewing the world through the lens of Marxism where everything and everybody is either oppressed or an oppressor. It's the classic Marxist dialectic. This critical consciousness that views the world through a Marxist lens is exactly what wokeness is. It is simply a rebranding or a redefinition of a word, a favorite Marxist tactic. It is a euphemism for this Marxist lens that is now being indoctrinated into our children in school. When we understand that, and when we see that, it's hard to unsee it. Put that in a box for a second and think about, "What is Marxism?" A lot of people understand Marxism as economic Marxism. You think of Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto. The simplest explanation is class warfare with the goal of communism, with the working class revolting against the ruling class in order to have collective ownership of everything, with no private ownership of anything. Honestly, that didn't work out well. It didn't spark a global revolution the way that Marx and Engels thought it would, and therefore it died out. It was relegated to the crazies and the kooks and the universities. It wasn't put into practice until Antonio Gramsci revived it and brought it back to life in the 20th century. He recognized that the nations that had staged successful Marxist revolutions didn't do it on purely economic grounds, but had first attacked the civil institutions, which is just another word for the cultural institutions of the working class. Gramsci proposed that in order for a nation to be transformed from a free democratic nation into a Marxist or communist nation, before that revolution could happen, you would have to destroy the cultural institutions on which the working class rely. Those cultural institutions that he named are the very same ones that we see modern American Marxists attacking in our society right now. The end goal of communism is the complete deprivation of basic human rights. It results in oppression, tyranny, and death. It de-persons individuals in the countries in which communist dictators prevail. That is evil. Mr. Jekielek: It emphasizes group identity. That's one commonality of all of these Marxist derivatives, which you describe as wokeness. I've had numerous guests on the show that are looking at this through different viewpoints as we try to understand it. Let’s talk about the nuclear family for a moment. You said the children are one part of the nuclear family that might not be compromised. What do you mean by that exactly? Ms. Wheeler: If you look at the traditional nuclear family, it has five elements; man, woman, marriage, sex, and children. Throughout human history, that's been the understanding of a nuclear family. In our country for the past 150 years, there has been a concerted effort to destroy the family. Feminism and radical feminism has told women that they're worthless and that they should copy men. That has really destroyed parts of the nuclear family. It is the same with the attacks on men. That might be one of the most prevalent parts of our culture right now, this cultural attack on masculinity. It is telling men that testosterone is a toxin and that they're essentially rapists if they're not feminized out of it. They are told that their desire to protect and provide for their families and their wives is somehow wrong and marginalizes their wives. This has culminated in the MeToo movement where there has been a legal and social effort to deprive men of due process, and of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. It's the same with marriage. We have legalized gay marriage in our country right now, and this is a topic a lot of Republicans and conservatives are uncomfortable talking about. You can even set aside homosexuality for a moment, or the idea that two people can do whatever they want in their own homes. Just set that aside for a minute. The danger of allowing gay marriage to be legal lies in the ability of government officials to redefine words, because whoever has the power to redefine words becomes the arbiter of truth. Being the arbiter of truth is really just a nice way of describing authoritarianism. We surrendered marriage to justices on the Supreme Court, who redefined a word that simply cannot be redefined. The institution of marriage existed long before we did, long before our country did, and we surrendered a key part of our freedom. We also have the sexual revolution that tries to twist and pervert sex which has all these different elements. It's a heavy thing to go through all of these assaults. All of these aspects of the nuclear family have at one point or another been the target of Marxists, not just Leftists and Democrats, but of Marxists. The last remaining element is children. The Left needs to compromise children because they understand that in a simple debate, Marxism is not going to win over capitalism. If there was an honest one-to-one stating what communism has to offer and what capitalism has to offer, communism is never going to win. They have to separate children from their parents. They have to distort children's minds. They have to pervert reality by redefining words in order to compromise these children, so that these children, before they are fully intellectually, psychologically and spiritually formed, can be indoctrinated into being permanent neo-Marxist revolutionaries for the Marxist cause. Mr. Jekielek: One of your chapters focuses on social emotional learning, and I have heard it described as a Trojan horse. Please tell me about that. Ms. Wheeler: Social emotional learning is one of the most interesting ways Marxist ideology is reaching everyone's children. I had an interesting conversation with my husband right after our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was born. I asked, “How are we going to educate her? Are we going to send her to private school, public school, or homeschool?” Every new parent thinks about this. I am a proponent of homeschooling. I was homeschooled myself, and I think it's great. My husband went to public school. He said, "That woke stuff isn't in the public school in our neighborhood. She'll be fine there. You can just walk down and talk to the teacher." This conversation stuck with me because it has been a very common thing for parents to think, “Yes, the wokeness is out there." It might be in California or New York, but it's not in our neighborhood. It's not in my child's classroom.” Slowly, the eyes of parents across the country have been opened to realize that this is touching their children. Even in the public school that you went to when you were a kid, in that classroom with the same teacher that's been there for 10 years, it's in there. The reason this wokeness is so pervasive is through things like social emotional learning. What is social emotional learning? It sounds fine. The words are innocuous. They don't have any negative connotations, and it's not subject matter. It's not like history and science. It's disguised as values education, which again, sounds fine. We want our children to be taught values. We want them to be taught right from wrong. But the question that parents should ask is what are these values? If this is education about values, what are the values? Each aspect of this Marxist worldview is being packaged with every other subject. You no longer have math, you have math with social emotional learning. You no longer have science, you have science with social emotional learning. You no longer even have gym class. You have gym class with social emotional learning. This type of values education is about critical consciousness. It's Paulo Freire's critical consciousness, this lens through which they are trying to teach children a Marxist worldview on everything from math problems, to family interactions, to how you behave towards other people. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about Paulo Freire, because only recently have I realized how influential he was. He's the most cited academic on education in the American system by quite a margin. This has been baked into the education of every teacher in every teacher's college in the country. How did that happen? Ms. Wheeler: Once Paulo Freire said something that I laughingly confessed that I agreed with. He said, "There's no such thing as a neutral education." When you first hear that, you think, "Indoctrination, that's bad." The more that I thought about that, I realized that he was right. There is no such thing as neutrality. Neutrality is an idea that Republicans have fallen for. We've fallen for this idea that we shouldn't insert any kind of values or moral order into our society. We shouldn't use the authority of government to help create this moral order. Because of that, we've withdrawn our values from a lot of these institutions that have been captured. Since there's really no such thing as neutrality, the Democrats have simply stepped into that void that we left for them and have hijacked that institution for their own purpose. Public education in our country was not mandatory until it became mandatory in 1852 in the state of Massachusetts. A lot of people think, “That's not that long ago." The reason that public education became mandatory in Massachusetts was because at the time, there were a lot of immigrants coming to America. There were a lot of immigrants who were Catholics coming to America. The Protestant politicians at the time wanted to make sure that the children who had been born in other countries knew that America was their homeland. They were given an American civics education, because they would be the next generation of Americans. The politicians at the time wanted children to be loyal to America. They were going to be American first, as opposed to being loyal to their homeland. They made public education mandatory so that they could indoctrinate children in American values and also in Protestant values. The politicians at the time were Protestants, and they were anti-Catholic. As a Catholic, I laugh about this now, but this reminds us that the idea of indoctrination is actually morally neutral. Concerning indoctrination we think, "The Left is indoctrinating our children." That is wrong, not because they are indoctrinating our children, but because of what they're indoctrinating our children with. The morality of indoctrination is completely determined by what is being taught. Public education was created to be an indoctrination system. People on the Right understood that at the time. But then, we surrendered that institution that we had built for indoctrination to someone else. We surrendered it to the Left in this false name of neutrality and in this false idea of the separation of church and state, a misunderstood topic. Mr. Jekielek: I've heard people say, “Yes, there is indoctrination. On the other hand, there is teaching of critical thinking.” Indoctrination is when you teach someone the specific correct way to view certain things, as opposed to teaching the tools to be able to figure things out. Are you saying indoctrination is the passing on of a particular moral position? Ms. Wheeler: I've used the term critical thinking my entire life because when I was homeschooled, I always felt that one of the things that set my education apart from my public school counterparts was that I was able to critically think about things, whereas some of them were not. In the course of writing this book, I realized that I should not have been using that phrase, because critical thinking is a Paulo Freirean phrase. It is describing thinking only through critical theory. It is not the way that you and I would ask, "Are we analyzing this correctly?" When we say critical thinking, we're talking about independent thinking. We're talking about the ability to decipher a problem and not be affected by groupthink. Critical thinking is a misleading term that seeped into our culture that's actually quite wrong. I challenge my fellow Americans, especially parents and conservatives and Republicans to understand the idea that I'm discussing right now is not new. Let me tell you this anecdote, and it caused me to change my mind. Back in 2016, I spoke at CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference]. After I spoke, I was in the lobby and an independent journalist came up to me and asked, "What do you believe the role of government is in America? How would you define liberty?" This was a very philosophical question, and I gave a very libertarian response. I said, "The role is to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Otherwise, it’s to stay out of our business unless someone's inalienable rights are violated. Government should really stay out of our business." Then this independent journalist says, "Do you believe in the legalization of drugs?" I was caught off guard. I said, "What kind of drugs are you talking about? Like hard drugs?" It turns out that, yes, he was. He was talking about meth. He was talking about heroin. He was talking about fentanyl. He was talking about cocaine. I said, "No. I don't think we should legalize those drugs. That would be self-destructive, and that would lead to a chaotic society." He responds by saying, "Isn't that a contradiction of your definition of liberty?" I realized that it was a contradiction. It turns out he wasn't a journalist. He was a cannabis legalization activist, which is neither here nor there for the purpose of this story. But that stuck with me, because in a sense, he was right. This idea that freedom is the ultimate end, or that the definition of liberty is as close to absolute liberty as we can possibly achieve is the wrong definition of liberty. I challenge people to grapple with this. It's a mind-bending question, but to grapple with this question of whether freedom is the ultimate end or whether it is the means to something greater. Grown men dressed as sexualized versions of female strippers and gyrating in front of children, we all know in our guts that is grotesque. It's immoral. It's awful. It's evil. If freedom is the ultimate end in and of itself, then there would have to be some inherent morality to that. But there's not, which led me to this evolution of how I think about liberty. It must then mean that freedom, if it's not the ultimate end, is the means to something greater. What is that something that is greater? It turns out that the framers of our constitution actually grappled with the same question. This is not something that I invented. This is not a unique problem that I've thought about. James Madison, author of our Constitution, in the Federalist No. 51, defines the word liberty. He defines freedom as the means to something greater, which is justice. I have read this Federalist No. 51 dozens of times. Suddenly, as I'm writing this book and researching, I'm understanding it in a completely different way, because I recognized what James Madison was saying. When he said justice, I thought, "This is the debate between the John Lockean view of liberty, and the Edmund Burkean view of liberty. Edmund Burke was hugely influential on James Madison. Edmund Burke proposed the definition of justice. We would then say, "Great. The definition of liberty is justice." Then what is justice? The definition of justice mirrors Original Justice; capital O, capital J. He's talking about natural law. I realized that freedom as the tool to achieve moral order in our nation cannot be fully understood until we as a society know that objective truth exists. The definition of words like man, woman, marriage, moral, immoral, right and wrong, truth, liberty, and justice, all of these definitions are up for grabs in our country. But the definition of these words exist in the Judeo-Christian morals on which our Constitution was founded. The response that I often get to this point is, "Are you talking about forcing a Christian nation on Americans? Are you talking about a theocracy? Are you talking about religion?" My answer to that is, "No, I'm not talking about a theocracy. But yes, I am talking about religion." But you don't have to be a practicing Christian. You don't have to worship Jesus Christ in order to acknowledge that when our Founders created the structure of government that was to guide and form our society, they did so by acknowledging the definitions of these words, and the definitions of those words were rooted in those biblical principles and Judeo-Christian values. My challenge to conservatives is that we must re-embrace the idea of natural law and these objective truths if we are to reclaim our society from this chaos. Mr. Jekielek: In San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are open air drug markets. That's one way to describe the scene. There is a radical libertarianism that is promoted where they say, "This person is addicted to this drug, but we can't impose ourselves on them and prevent them from taking it." For some reason, that would be imposing on their rights, but it's perfectly fine for them to kill themselves with the drug. It's very strange. Our priorities have become inverted, or we have lost that guiding principle that you're outlining here. Ms. Wheeler: Yes. This problem that I am discussing isn't just relegated to legislatures and statutes and the boring stuff. This is evident in our culture. It's evident in the back and forth that I've been having with Andrew Tate for the past few weeks. Andrew Tate obviously is this masculine bro-influencer. He was the most Googled man in the world a year ago. He tells young men that they are under attack by our society. He accurately diagnoses this cultural ill where our society vilifies men. Then he prescribes an antidote for materialism and pornography and exploitation of women and worship of self. He gives this very self-destructive prescription for a problem that he accurately diagnoses. This is perfectly emblematic of what has happened in our political cultural environment. It's fairly easy to look at something that's wrong and identify it as wrong, but it's not so easy to define what is right. It's easy to point out what's wrong, but it's not easy to define what's right. What has happened culturally and politically is exactly what has happened with Andrew Tate. To his credit, he is courageous enough to point out a bad thing that is happening in culture, even when that is unpopular to point out. It resonates with a lot of people who are being victimized by this assault on their masculinity. Because we as a culture, a political body, and a nation have surrendered the idea that objective truth exists and that natural law must reign if we want society to be well-ordered, we fall prey to a false diagnosis. We actually fall prey to a self-destructive diagnosis as a solution to the problem, even if the problem was correctly identified. This has happened in politics too. It's actually libertarianism because libertarianism doesn't want to define what's right. They want it to be a morally relativistic individual truth. They want everyone to have the license to make those decisions about morality themselves, even when it impacts the larger society. That is not conservatism. The Republican Party has embraced libertarianism as conservatism, but it's not. In fact, the framers of our constitution rejected libertarianism because that's essentially what the Articles of Confederation were. The articles of Confederation were a libertarian document, and it didn't work. It created chaos for the first years of our country. The constitutional convention was convened, and they came up with a document that was not libertarian. It was a document that understood the necessity of a moral order in society and gave the government the just authority to recognize objective reality and to recognize natural law. When I say it's not a new idea, it's not even a new practice. We have laws in our nation right now where children are not allowed to even walk across the floor of a casino. Why is that? It's not because they're going to be physically harmed walking across the floor of a casino and walking by slot machines. It's because we as a society acknowledge that it is immoral. It's morally harmful for a child, not physically harmful. That's just one example of many. We have laws that govern morality, even if it doesn't dictate religious practice. The Left would like us to believe that those two things are the same thing, but those two things are not the same thing. The people at home put their trust in our elected officials who willingly surrendered the definition of words. It's incredibly unpopular among Republicans to talk about gay marriage, but gay marriage was the beginning of the redefinition of words that Republicans allowed. There was no limiting principle on it at the time, and we're seeing the repercussions of that today. It's an incredibly important battle that Republicans simply surrendered. They said, "I don't care what you do in your own home. I don't want to define for someone what happiness might mean. Who am I to boss someone around separation of church and state." They willingly surrendered this definition, not realizing the power that it would give to the other side, and we're suffering from it today. Mr. Jekielek: Weren’t they thinking about any of these implications at the time? Ms. Wheeler: The people at the time who spoke out against the efforts to legalize gay marriage warning about the repercussions were accused of engaging in slippery slope fallacies. They were called Bible thumpers. They were castigated as the religious Right, a label that a lot of conservatives didn't want to be associated with. And so, they backed off. But we're such a prosperous society. We have enjoyed such immense freedom and wealth and opportunity. It’s such an amazing life that we have in the United States of America. We forget that there are people who want to take it away from us and who have the ability to take it away from us. If we don't constantly fight back against it, not just defensively holding it at bay, but if we don't hold down the fort, then someone else is going to occupy it. Mr. Jekielek: You're bringing up politics. People call it the politics of personal destruction. Another way to talk about it is the heckler's veto. Ms. Wheeler: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: This has been such an incredibly powerful tool of the authoritarian Left. Ms. Wheeler: It is, yes. The heckler's veto is, "I'm going to intimidate you into silence. Even if the law doesn't require it, I'm going to socially coerce you into compliance." We've seen this everywhere on college campuses. When I went to speak at James Madison University this past April, there were a thousand radical trans activists. My speech was literally titled, “The Ideology of Transgenderism.” I was asking, “Where did this idea of the gender spectrum come from? Where did the idea that if you identify as a woman, you can be a woman come from?” The answer to that is queer theory. It's a critical theory that began in the Frankfurt School, and I was talking about its intellectual roots. The debate team so objected to hearing a discussion on this that they condemned my appearance at this school. I'm pretty used to being protested, because I've been in this work for a long time. I understand it, and I understand how to respond. But they were hoping to intimidate me away from being able to speak. They were hoping that threats of violence against me and my family and against the facility and the students that were hosting would cause my viewpoints not to be discussed. I'm saying this because I care so much about our children and our families and our country and these cultural institutions. But we've become so worried about uncomfortable conversations, even on the personal level, let alone the governmental level or the cultural level, that we bow to the heckler's veto quite often, and it empowers them. Mr. Jekielek: Concerning the people that are very loud, you have this impression that a much larger group is agreeing with their position, so then you back down. Ms. Wheeler: Yes. I talk about technocracy in one of the chapters of my book. Technocracy is ruled by experts. We became more familiar with this during Covid when it was, "All hail, King Fauci. Listen to what he says. He is the predominant expert. Therefore, we are not allowed to question or dissent or have opinions that differ from his." He's a perfect example of technocracy, although he's far from the only example. It's not an isolated individual here or there that makes up the technocratic class. This is a whole system. As I was researching for my book, I found out that the idea of technocracy goes all the way back to the French socialists. There was also a Russian Bolshevik physician who accurately described technocracy as ruled by the experts, which is actually the heckler's veto. If we make enough noise, you're not allowed to dissent. He described technocracy as a stepping stone from capitalism to communism, because once individuals who aren't in positions of elected power are unable to dissent and to question, then they have sacrificed their ability to identify objective truth. They have surrendered that power to redefine words to someone arbitrary who's claiming to be an expert. I find the heckler's veto to be much more than just a nuisance, and much more than just an individual threat to a speaking engagement that I have on a college campus. I find it to be an outgrowth of the idea of technocracy, that if someone has designated themselves to be an expert, then no one else is allowed to question it. Otherwise, you will be branded as anti-science or transphobic or whatever the insult of the day is. Technocracy is prevalent in so many aspects of our lives today. The entire administrative state and the federal executive agencies are technocracy codified. They are the living embodiment of technocracy. We see it in educational institutions. We especially see it in the medical field. Young parents will recognize it because we experience technocracy in the pediatrician's office. The pediatrician tells you, "Don't co-sleep, and breastfeed only a certain amount, and do the schedule of vaccines." A parent with any questions is shut down immediately as if it's not their child. They are told to just defer to the experts, to just defer to what the American Academy of Pediatrics or the CDC says. It's not always based on empirical evidence. It's based on ideology. Mr. Jekielek: Traditionally, the idea of the heckler's veto was just some random people coming along, screaming a lot, and then you can't be heard. Effectively, they get to veto the direction things are going in. But here, this becomes more like an expert's veto, the system's veto, or the technocrat's veto. Ms. Wheeler: The way you describe it as shouting someone down is a tool of the technocrats. It's how technocracy enforces the experts as being the only ones allowed to have an opinion. It's not that Dr. Fauci is going to be out there actively censoring everyone who dissents. But his minions, the heckler's veto, the social pressure, and the coercion, that's what shuts down people, not from legally being allowed to have an opinion, but from feeling that they can have an opinion socially. We overlook the power of this tool. We saw examples of this during Covid when the vaccines were rolled out. We saw so many people who didn't want the vaccine, but got it anyway. They didn't think that they were at risk from Covid. They thought maybe the vaccine had been rolled out too fast. They weren't sure about the mRNA technology. Maybe they were young men. They saw the risk profile for the heart problems, and yet they got it anyway. It was sad, but also fascinating to watch this aspect of human nature. You have to ask, "Why?" Everything about what you thought and your analysis of the situation was accurate, and yet you got the vaccine anyway. Why did you do it? The reason for that was this social pressure, and it was overwhelming. People don't trust themselves. People are made to be part of a community. We are not made to be hyper-individualistic. We're made to be part of a community that shares our values in order to help hold us accountable, but also in order for there to be cohesion among people. There has to be a set of shared values. But you had people who abused this and made it into social coercion. You had people who didn't want to do something who were socially pressured to do something on behalf of the technocrats. For a lot of us, it was disillusioning to watch this unfold or to see the grip that technocracy has on our country. I spent the last year writing this book, and I will tell you that unpacking exactly how all of this happened, how it came to be, and why it has such a strong grip on our nation now, has actually encouraged me. Once we understand this reality and acknowledge it, we will be able to fight back against it. It’s not just through platitudes and trite cliches, but through a difficult and challenging reorientation of how the Republican Party operates and how we define what we want for our society. Mr. Jekielek: I'm going to go back to the title of your book, Hide Your Children. It doesn't seem proactive, or is it? Ms. Wheeler: It's twofold. First of all, I got this idea from that YouTube video from Antoine Dodson that went viral a couple of years ago. It was a local news report that practically everyone in the country saw. It was this hilarious YouTube video where this guy said, "You got to hide your kids and hide your wife," because they had been an attack. Antoine Dodson: Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He's climbing in your windows. He's snatching your people up, trying to rape them. So y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, because they raping everybody out here. Ms. Wheeler: I thought it was apropos, not funny, but a way to bring levity to a very serious topic. In my book I say that parents must give shelter to our children, but the idea of sheltering your children has been castigated in our nation. They say, “You don't want your kids to be sheltered. They won't have an idea of how to operate in the world, and they'll be unsocialized.” But we need to give shelter to our children from the evil of the world until they are equipped to handle it, and until they understand the definition of right and wrong for themselves. Then when they encounter evil, they can identify it as such, and not just identify it, but understand what right is as compared to evil. As parents, we must give our children shelter from this evil so that they don't grow up confused at best, or at worst, indoctrinated. Once they are capable of this discernment, we will have formed them into self-sufficient members of our society. Hopefully, they will be spiritual individuals with an active faith as capable adults who are equipped to handle not only families of their own, but capable of guiding our country into the next generation. It is proactive. Yes, that video was a little tongue in cheek because it was attempting to bring levity to a tough topic, but we've gotten away from protecting the innocence of children. Maybe it's because of cell phones. Maybe it's because our culture has been inundated with overtly sexual advertisements for so long. Now, children are exposed to critical race theory and trans theory and drag queen story hours and new pronouns and all of the rest of it. We have forgotten about protecting children's innocence. A key part of the Marxist strategy to destroy our country is to subvert the innocence of our sons and daughters. We should hide our children from the Marxists as we eradicate Marxism from the institutional structures of our country. Mr. Jekielek: Liz, as we finish up this fascinating conversation, there's still a whole significant group of people in society who are on board with radical Marxist changes, but maybe they're just on autopilot. Maybe they really don't see what's happening. Maybe they say, "I've heard about this," and they feel that something's wrong, but they can't put their finger on it. It's those people that are the most important people in this equation. Do you agree with that? Ms. Wheeler: Yes. We're at a very unique moment in our nation. A lot of the people you described are just average moms and dads who are not super politically engaged because they're busy raising families. Unintentionally, they have become more politically aware as their children and their families have come under attack by this wokeness. They don't like it, and they recognize this in their gut, the way that I did when that journalist at CPAC asked me if I thought that we should legalize meth. They recognize that inherently it's wrong, that critical race theory is wrong, that trans ideology is wrong, and that wokeness is wrong. They recognize that it's wrong, and they're looking for the leadership, the solution, the antidote, and the prescription to fix this so that they can just go back to their regular lives, and just go back to being moms and dads. They're looking for that. If we don't offer a clear vision, then what are they going to do? Look what happened to Andrew Tate. We're going to have situations like that where people get an accurate diagnosis, but then fall prey to a dangerous prescription for the problem. Parents' eyes have been opened to an extent that they're willing, in a way that they never have been before, to engage in political discussions and hear the reality of where this chaos, this insanity, and this evil is coming from. Of course, my hope is that they choose to pick up this book, even if they're not particularly politically engaged. If you care about your children, if you care about our country, and if you care about your family's ability to thrive and flourish in our society, then be part of this fight with us. Let us build the country that we want together. Mr. Jekielek: Liz Wheeler, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Wheeler: Thank you so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Liz Wheeler and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a 33-year-old man found himself grappling with unusual symptoms. His legs began to tingle and itch after standing for 10 minutes—a sensation he had never experienced before. He found his legs were turning a shade of blue. This started happening after he suffered a COVID-19 infection, and became a condition that would persist for a year and a half, ultimately leading to the publication of his case in The Lancet, one of the world's oldest and most prestigious medical journals. His symptoms were eventually tied to POTS, or Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. POTS is a circulatory disorder characterized by an abnormal surge in heart rate when transitioning from sitting or lying down to a standing position. Alongside the rapid heartbeat, individuals with POTS frequently experience lightheadedness, fainting spells, and persistent fatigue. While POTS remains a relatively uncommon condition, it still affects an estimated five hundred thousand to one million people in the United States. It is predominantly experienced by women between the ages of 15 and 50, but can affect individuals of any age or gender. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/a-strange-covid-19-symptom-how-to-diagnose-and-treat-it-5496222 Medical Disclaimer: Frontline Health (the “Show”), its guests, and contributors provide the latest news on health and medical discoveries, and it is meant for informational purposes only. The Show does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, cures, mitigation, or prevention for any type of disease or medical condition. Similarly, it is not intended for self-diagnosis or self-treatment of any health-related condition. The information on the Show is gathered from reputable sources; however, neither Frontline Health nor The Epoch Times Association Inc. are responsible for errors or omissions in reporting or explanation, and will not be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential, special, exemplary, or other damages arising therefrom. Patients should always consult with a doctor or other health care professional for medical advice or information about diagnosis and treatment. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader