In this episode, we sit down with Lee Benson, the author of “Value Creation Kid: The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed.” Growing up in a low-income family, Benson went from pulling weeds for 25 cents an hour as a child to founding and selling multiple successful companies. What is the downside to protecting children from adversity? How do we create opportunities for our children to grow and eventually prosper on their own? And what role should the government play in all this? Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-protecting-your-children-from-adversity-is-actually-maiming-them-lee-benson_5343156.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Lee Benson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Lee Benson: It’s great to be here with you, Jan. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: A mutual friend of ours made me aware of a book you’ve recently written, Value Creation Kid. When I first heard the title, I thought, “What is this about? Why are you recommending this book to me?” Then, I read the subtitle and I’ll read it right now, The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed. Then, I thought, “Oh, okay.” In our society today, there’s a lot of focus on victimhood that’s being taught in many schools. I find it incredibly concerning. People that are taught to think this way won’t be able to empower themselves, because they’ve been taught that way. You’ve come up with a whole methodology which you’ve applied to help deal with this. This is something I want to start covering more on American Thought Leaders—how do we deal with some of the madness of our time? Please tell me about this. Mr. Benson: What you’re talking about is that it becomes an excuse for not achieving anything. “I’m a victim, and it’s not my fault that I’m here. I come from a low income family. I’ll never go to college, therefore I don’t have to really apply myself.” I meet people all the time that would say, “I’ve gone out of my way to take all the struggle away from my kids. I don’t want them to have to experience what I experienced.” I ask, “How’s that going?” They reply, “I have two sons and they both live in the basement. One is 23, one is 27, and I don’t see any way they’re ever going to be able to move out.” This father took all the struggle away from the kids and with the best of intentions, and thought he was doing amazing things. What we need to do is to embrace this concept of struggle as actually something really good and trust it. If I go all the way back, this isn’t something I just came up with. When I was seven-years-old, I was approached by a neighbor unsolicited and she asked, “Would you be willing to pull weeds in my garden for 25 cents an hour?” Back then with 25 cents I could buy two candy bars and have change. It was worth a lot back then. So, I started doing that, and it was hard work. Every couple of weeks I’d go over and do this, and I was thinking, “There’s got to be a better way,” even though I really appreciated this. I grew up in Spokane, Washington, and we had a lot of snow back then during the winter time. I started asking folks, “Hey, can I shovel your driveway and sidewalk?” I would get 50 cents to do that, and it would take me only about a half hour to do each one. I just four-folded my money. Next, I got a paper route. Then, I had a couple of paper routes and that just kept going. I started on what I’m calling this value creation cycle. I would struggle to get a capability which would build my confidence and I wouldn’t stop there. I’d use that to actually create value, eventually becoming a dishwasher, a busboy and a cook. I came from a low income family. I was actually kicked out of the house at the beginning of my senior year in high school. It was a non-event because I was already financially competent, and financially independent. It was a non-event for me to get my own apartment two days later. I spent one night in my truck. It was no big deal. Going through that was one of the best things that ever happened to me. But again, starting as a seven-years-old I embraced this value creation, struggle cycle. There was nothing I thought I couldn’t have accomplished, and I didn’t feel like a victim when that happened to me. It was kind of a toxic and dangerous environment, the family environment that I grew up in. I had a younger brother in and out of prison four times before I intentionally lost touch with him. I had a lot of other family members that really weren’t good people. Even with all of that going on, this outside world of creating value and taking bigger and bigger steps each time saved me in the biggest possible way. Some of my siblings didn’t fare so well because they stayed in that environment. They didn’t have this external value creation way of looking at the world. It saved me, and it can save a lot of kids. Mr. Jekielek: There are some ways I don’t like that word because I think of struggle sessions from communist China. Mr. Benson: Sure. Mr. Jekielek: But that’s very different. You make the distinction between healthy struggle and trauma, which you’ve experienced, and a lot of people have experienced and have had to deal with. Please explain that distinction, because it’s very important. Mr. Benson: Healthy struggle would be “I want a capability. It’s going to be a lot of work to get it.” I’m on my seventh business that I’ve started from scratch. One of them was an FAA repair station, and I had never written an FAA repair manual before. I had never interfaced with a government, but I went through the struggle of figuring out how to get that capability. I built my confidence and I created even more value from that. That’s an example of an adult going through a healthy struggle. For a child, a healthy struggle could be just learning how to make and manage money. “How do I earn it, how do I save it, how do I give it, and how do I share it?” This is a capability that they would want to go after. Those are simple examples of healthy struggles. Trauma is something that is not good. As an example, a lot of kids are abused, and that’s not good. Adults can run into terrible situations. They could get mugged, and they struggle through the aftermath of all of that. That’s not a healthy struggle. But I also believe that every single struggle, whether it’s healthy or unhealthy, can be used to create more value in the world. It can be leveraged to create more value. Healthy struggle is the ideal. On the unhealthy side, it allows you to understand when other people are going through the same thing, and then, help them through it, which is wildly valuable. Mr. Jekielek: You keep talking about creating value, and I associate that with money, but that’s not what you’re talking about. It’s actually a much bigger concept. It’s creating something that will be good for others, good for your community, good for the world, and focusing your life around that. That’s what value creation means. Have I got that right? Mr. Benson: Yes, that’s correct. When I think about value creation, there’s three main buckets, and we talk a lot about this in the book. There’s material value creation, there’s emotional energy value creation, and there’s spiritual value creation. You need to figure out which bucket or combination of buckets that you want to create value in. A lot of folks would say that time is the scarcest commodity. You never get it back. For decades now, the scarcest commodity on the planet is positive emotional energy. When it’s running at nine or 10, all kinds of bad things can happen, obstacles come up, and it’s really no big deal. You say, “I’m going to blow through it and it’s going to be amazing.” When it’s running on one, if you get a flat tire, it ruins your week. That is probably the most powerful bucket of value creation. It supercharges everything, if you can maintain high positive emotional energy. To take it a bit further, when you interact with groups, are you the person that takes the energy out of the room or do you give it? My co-author, Scott Donnell, he’s the kind of guy with this amazing positive energy. He wants everybody to win. I just watch everybody gravitate towards him, which is fantastic. He’s generating positive emotional energy. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll share a moment that I’m remembering from a couple of years ago when I saw a coworker walking down the street with the weight of the world on his shoulders, obviously having a very difficult time. And I was feeling exactly like that. I saw him coming down the road. I said, “Okay, there’s no way I can look like this when I pass this guy. I just gave everything I could to give him a positive moment, saying, “Hey, how are you doing?” But that actually elevated me. There’s something to what you’re saying here. Mr. Benson: Yes, there really is. Look at the emotional energy piece of it. Material value could be money and things that you accumulate. Some people are really good at that. The spiritual side is going to be different for everyone. It could be very, very strongly based in the religion that you’re part of, or it could just be a connection to something greater. But that’s different for everyone. Every single child out there has a value creation superpower that they’ve yet to fully discover, because most families don’t really talk about that. In the book, we outline something called the Gravy Stack Method. The reason we wanted to make it a method, and the biggest thing that I would love to do with this book is to operationalize value creation within the family. There are four parts to it, and we want to make it super easy. I’ve got a number of friends that are in the low income family category, and a lot in the middle income family category. How can a low income family with both parents working two jobs, even have time to read the book, let alone do anything? This is the challenge. How do we make it really simple where anybody can do it themselves? Of the four parts, the first is value creation. How do you talk about it with the kids? It’s what I went through. You should start talking about these things immediately, really at any age, even before kindergarten. The second part is house rules. What’s your job for the family? What are the expectations of you as a child? As you get older, they advance. You’ve got how you would earn extra money in there. As you’re looking at this and the child is advancing, you’ve got the expectations. We also look at expenses. As they get older, they pick up more of their own expenses. This is the house rules piece of it. We have financial competency. It’s not just financial literacy. Learning about this stuff without applying it doesn’t really matter at all. The last part is healthy struggle. How do we design healthy struggles for our children so they can build these skills over time? If the foundation to leading the lifestyle that you want is to be financially competent so you can support it, not everybody needs to be a millionaire or a billionaire or any of that, but you want to lead the lifestyle you want, it’s important to have it. How do we build them into that? If we’re teaching them over time, you have a job for the family and these are the things we’re expecting you to do. You make your bed, you brush your teeth, and you do your homework. Then, you’ve got these expenses that you’re going to be picking up. You can’t pick up expenses if you haven’t learned how to earn money. Let’s give them jobs that can be action gigs and brain gigs. An action gig is paying you extra money to wash the car, but we’re not paying you any more than the carwash down the street . It’s got to be fair market value to teach those lessons. As the money comes in, they can pick up their expenses. Now, they’re learning this. This isn’t something we can explain just once, but if you create this way in which the family operates, they’ll start discovering their superpower. They’ll learn how to make and manage money. By the time they’re launched into adulthood, they’re going to be financially competent, and financially independent like I was. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve actually been doing this, and this isn’t just theoretical. Mr. Benson: Correct. Mr. Jekielek: This is an important part. How has this been operationalized among people? Mr. Benson: From my background and starting young, I went through that when I was kicked out of the house in high school. I started playing in a rock and roll band. I don’t even count it as one of the seven, but my first real business was playing in a band. In the 1980s, there were a couple of years where we played over 300 nights a year, with covers and our own original stuff. That’s how I made most of my money back then. When I think about struggling to get a capability to build confidence, and use that to create value, I took that from the band. Then, I started an aerospace business, and then two more aerospace-related businesses and then a few others along the way. I was just thinking about, “How can I create more and more and more value over time?” I’m not sure whether I’ve created more material value or emotional energy value, but I do know I keep thinking about taking bigger steps going forward. That’s how the journey is supposed to work. Interestingly, when I talk to adults about the concepts in the book around healthy struggle, all that makes so much sense. Every family should do this. Yet, I’ll watch these adults that are running businesses and something doesn’t go perfectly. It’s almost always because they didn’t have the capability to do this thing well. They act like a victim rather than embracing this healthy struggle. It’s a chance to get this capability to navigate this challenging time better next time it comes up in their business to build their confidence so they can use that to create even more value. People get the concept, Jan, but they don’t understand how to really apply it. Talking about something is one thing. Like I say in my first book, you’ve developed a strategy or you know what you want to do, congratulations. You’re 3 percent of the way there, but 97 percent is actually doing it. Mr. Jekielek: It’s like a muscle, and you have to try it. You have to remind yourself, “I’m feeling like I’m a victim, but actually this is a great opportunity. Let’s dive into this. Let’s see how we can solve this.” After a while, it just becomes the way you do it, as opposed to falling back. I was thinking about healthy struggle. Sports are the obvious way, becoming better at sports or music as an example of healthy struggle, correct? Mr. Benson: Yes. Music is a great piece. You want to convey emotion through what you’re doing by writing or even playing other people’s songs. When you convey the emotion, you have to be in really good shape so you’re not thinking about what you’re doing. I’m a guitar player and I have 50-plus guitars around. I purchased all of them to play, I’m not really a collector. I just like the way they sound and the better shape I’m in, the more emotion I can convey. Thinking about emotional energy, I was at an event last summer that Steve Vai put on called guitar camp. For five days, 150 guitar players were there. He invites Tommy Emanuel and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is literally one of the best, if not the best guitar player on the planet.” He does a rendition of a Beatles song on the acoustic guitar, and this guy will talk about how intentionally he’s pushing the envelope of how to convey emotion through the instrument. He plays the song and I’m fighting back, trying not to tear up and cry. I’m looking around and everybody’s crying. Our host, Steve, comes up on stage probably five minutes late and says, “Sorry, I was looking for boxes of Kleenex. I couldn’t stop crying while listening to that.” It’s amazing to think about the healthy struggle to get to that point where you can convey that emotion. In talking to Tommy Emanuel afterwards, he said, “I’m not even close to where I know I can be.” You get on this track to create value, whether it’s material, emotional or spiritual, and you want to create more and more value each time. I theorize and fully believe that once you get on that road, you will never get off. Mr. Jekielek: What is the role of humility, since we’re talking about that now in all of this? Mr. Benson: What is the role of humility around this? Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Mr. Benson: That’s sort of interesting. I’ve never been asked that question before. Wildly important, I would think. The more value you create, the more humility we need to exhibit going forward. I am never being put on a pedestal at all, and I diffuse that pretty quickly because you’ll always let somebody down going through. But if you’re trying to connect and help other people create value, I think humility is a giant part of being able to fully connect and be there for them so they can do it. Mr. Jekielek: I bet some of the reason that he was so effective is that he also realized that he wasn’t near his pinnacle, that he was just on this part of the journey. That’s just my hypothesis. Mr. Benson: That’s right. What I observed is that he came into the room, treated everybody the same, walked into the crowd, and shook everybody’s hand that was around him. He was just incredible. I’ve seen a lot of folks that are very accomplished that don’t treat other people very nicely. Mr. Jekielek: What are the practical obligations? You’ve actually shared this methodology with any number of families who have actually been applying it. How has that gone? You have a whole methodology that you’re applying in the whole system. Mr. Benson: Yes. This is fairly new in the last year, rolling out and testing this and doing research for the book and what will work in the real world with real people, especially low and middle income families. Actually my favorite example is when I texted a friend of mine from a low income family with three kids. I asked, “How’s it going? Are you trying this stuff?” She texted me back a picture of a stack of books that she had bought online to give to all of her friends. It was working really well. Just having these conversations with the kids and these families, it’s changing everything. I’ll have friends come over and I’ll spend time with their children and I’ll start talking about, “Hey, what’s your job? Here’s what my job is in the family here and this household. What kind of value do you want to create in the world? I bet you have a value creation superpower. What is that?” The feedback I’ll get from the parents is, “Our kids never talk to us that way. How did you get them to do that?” I just changed the language a little bit and you can absolutely do it too. So far, so good. One of the things that Scott Donnell and I have done here is we’ve created an app called the Gravy Stack App. It’s just to make it easy to manage all this stuff. Although you don’t need it, you can totally DIY this within families. This whole concept for me and why it’s so important, started back working with so many different businesses, my own companies. How do we create an environment where adults discover their value creation superpower, where you know you got it right when every single team member is acting like the CEO in their own role? It’s amazing. I used to get comments back in the day before I went out working with a lot of additional businesses where people would say, “What are you guys doing here?” Because I walked around every employee in one of my businesses, over 500 employees. They all know the numbers. They look you dead in the eye. They talk about the value that they’re creating. It’s like you never see this anywhere. When you walk through, you’re the CEO, you know all their names, all their numbers, you know what they’re doing. They approach you. They’re excited to be talking about what they’re doing. Isn’t this how it’s supposed to be everywhere? Learning about that, now how do we start all the way at the front end with the kids K-12? Wouldn’t it be really nice if right out of the gate the purpose of an education was creating value in the world—not getting a good grade, getting a diploma, getting a degree, or getting a job. People would not be doing what they think they’re supposed to do. Instead, they would be doing what they really want to do, because they discovered their value creation superpowers. If we could start that early on, and they’re playing with value creation in two or three of the buckets, why they are learning becomes really obvious— what to learn, over time, and they can start to guide that even more. Now, how to learn makes a lot more sense because they want to go faster in that direction. That’s my dream working backwards from what would a graduating high school senior look like as they’re being launched into adulthood? What would be ideal? They can think critically. They understand the power and value of a healthy community, and they want to build those things. They’re financially competent, and as financially independent as they want to be. I can go down a short list there, but that would be incredible. That would make a giant difference in the world if we could launch more kids that way. Mr. Jekielek: It’s particularly relevant in our current socio-political cultural moment. What do you make of our times right now? You were talking about some amazing hopeful things, getting families to empower themselves, and focusing on value creation in these different buckets. There’s a lot of families and a lot of kids that are in a completely different world right now. Mr. Benson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of this? Mr. Benson: For me, it’s about perspective. I’ve spoken to thousands of high school seniors about the virtues of entrepreneurship. I believe anybody that creates a job is a hero, because that’s one more person that can contribute to supporting their families, which is fantastic. Speaking about perspective, I went to meet a small group of seniors at one of the charter schools in Arizona. A lot of the kids were talking about at the beginning of the 90-minute discussion that I have with them, that they’ll probably never be able to start a business and never go to college. They’re being the victim and there’s all this stuff going on. I notice this one young woman shaking her head. I asked, “What’s going on with you?” She looks around at the rest of the classmates and says, “I’m from Tanzania and you have 99 times more opportunity here than I had in my home country. I feel like I can do anything here.” By the end of these discussions, the kids are typically saying they’ve gone from, “I’m a victim and I’ll probably never amount to much” to “I can start anywhere and go everywhere.” Because in these sessions, the context is starting and running a business and building it over time. I share with them how I think about it. If you’re going to run a business, the environment within which you’re running this business is largely going to be created by the policies of our elected officials. You want tailwinds to give you help. You don’t want headwinds to constantly hold you back. I tell them, “I think voting is really important. I have a process for voting, and I encourage you to have a process for voting as well.” They ask me, “What’s your process?” I will go through it. I say, “Anything or person that I vote for, I want them to move these pillars in the right direction. and there’s six of them. It’s free people, free markets, personal responsibility, protection from uninitiated force, and only voluntary relationships. The last one is elevating self-esteem.” The ones the kids ask me about the most is, “What do you mean by only voluntary relationships?” I say, “Would you like to be forced to do anything against your will?” Of course, they reply, “No way.” I said, “One example of an involuntary relationship would be income taxes. When I go through this at tax time for the past 20 years, I’ve probably paid a million dollars or more in federal income tax alone every year. If I don’t pay it, somebody will eventually get me and throw me in jail. That’s not a voluntary relationship.” They ask, “What would be better?” I said, “A consumption tax would be a lot better, and our government should be doing things to continually improve citizen experience and return on taxpayer investment. The experience gets better and the relative cost goes down, just like in the real world. More value and best value wins, all of it.” We go through all of that. A lot of the teachers would say, “Nobody’s ever explained it this way, and this really makes a lot of sense.” I said, “This is my process and I encourage you to have your own process.” I said, “Typically, my only option is voting for people or things that will move it in the wrong direction, the slowest. But ideally, I want it to go in the right direction.” Quite a number of kids would say, “Our process is our teachers tell us to vote Democrat no matter what.” I say, “Congratulations. You have a process. Most people don’t actually have one. But I would encourage you to develop a voting process that creates better conditions to work, live, learn, and play for your family and the communities you engage with and groups that you’re part of.” I’m always clear, and this is completely right, I’m not affiliated with any party. I’m for better conditions to work, live, learn, and play. Both of our main parties today could do a much better job of making those things happen. Mr. Jekielek: Over the last few years, many small businesses were lost and power was centralized and involuntary behavior was coerced. Let me go back to the question, what do you make of this? Mr. Benson: The biggest challenge is the incentive structures that we have in our local, state, and federal government. Somehow, we need to take those things away. What’s really the goal? When I watch the news coverage, mainstream media during these election years, it’s all about who’s going to win, instead of who’s going to create better conditions to work, live, learn, and play for all the people that live in this country. Mr. Jekielek: And how are they going to do it? Mr. Benson: Yes. But all the media seem to care about is “They need to do this if they want to win, they need to do that if they want to win.” I think, “Oh my gosh, you’re completely missing the whole point here.” I look at it, and I’m super thankful for the founding documents that made this country so amazing. Because when you have the separation of powers, the rule of law, the Constitution, and the rules of engagement that are operating, and as long as they’re solid, it doesn’t allow it to go too far. What really concerns me the most today is that if those things get blown up, then we’ve completely lost this country. I think about larger companies where they’re just knocking it out of the park, creating all kinds of shareholder value. It’s absolutely amazing. Change the leader and everything just dives, because the leader changed the rules of engagement. My biggest fear for this country is that somehow our rules of engagement and the founding documents and all of that get completely blown up. Mr. Jekielek: The very large corporations get a lot of advantage versus this wellspring of innovation, which is really the small businesses of America. I don’t know if you agree, I’m just guessing from everything you said up until now. Mr. Benson: I do agree. To a large degree, these larger corporations are in collusion with the government, and this is crony capitalism. A worse form of capitalism is woke capitalism. I wish we called it value creationism, where the best value wins. It’s an equitable playing field, and that’s not what we have. We should write legislation that would go in and scour every agency at the federal, state, county, and local level for any unhealthy incentives and wipe them out, and make it illegal to create them again. That’s the most important thing we could do. But it’s kind of hard to get the folks that are playing the game to actually do that. Mr. Jekielek: Break this down for me—unhealthy incentives. What exactly would they be? Mr. Benson: Any conflict of interest. If there’s a public union, they shouldn’t be able to give a bunch of money to folks that are creating the conditions for the members of the union. That’s a perfect example. It’s everywhere, look at our health agencies, like the NIH [National Institutes for Health]. But I haven’t thought and looked into this nearly as deeply as you have. They should not be able to invest in organizations like big pharma or anything else that’s going to give them any kind of a kickback directly or through their investments. Our congressmen and women should not be allowed to invest in corporations that they regulate. I could really go on and on. It’s fascinating to me because even in the elite Republican or Democrat environments here in the state, a lot of these folks are talked about and held in the highest regard and integrity. I sit back and watch them. If offered the right incentives, they’ll fully embrace crony capitalism, which makes conditions worse to work, live, learn, and play for the rest of the citizens here. It almost seems like it’s almost always about the money. Money’s not a bad thing, and I think of money as just accumulated best efforts. For any money I have in the bank, I put in all these efforts, and I was able to save some. That’s great. I can trade my best efforts for somebody else’s accumulated best efforts. That’s all it is to me. But it should be an equitable playing field. If we really want to get the most value out of this country, and for that matter, every other country on the planet, wouldn’t it be amazing if every country thought this way? Mr. Jekielek: I think it would. There’s a question of morality. That’s what it comes down to. If you’re talking about folks that have it good and they decide, “I’m going to make it better for myself, even if it’s at the expense of these others.” That’s the thinking of the day. Mr. Benson: Here’s what I think they don’t get. I’ve had a lot of folks over time say, “What I’ve done in my business for my employees, I put in a 10,000 square foot gym, and I had full-time trainers six days a week. I gave them more money if they trained two days a week. If they brought their family members, I put even more money in their paycheck. It cost a fair amount of money to do it.” Most other business leaders would say, “We can’t afford that. We would never do it.” This is just one example. They will say, “You don’t understand, we’ve grown faster than you. We make a lot more money than you do because we do these things.” When you think about win-win value creation, you can make a whole lot more over time and you can sustain that and you can scale it, you can accelerate it when you’re thinking win-win exchange of value as opposed to win-lose, and feeling good about that because the losers won’t hang out very long. I’ve always thought if they really understood this concept and they got on that track for a little bit, they would never get off, because that’s really where they would make the best returns if financial returns are important to them over the long run. Mr. Jekielek: I wonder if we as a society have embraced this win-lose dichotomy, as if win-win isn’t really a thing. It’s not a win unless the other person loses. I see that in communist China. That is how the leadership views its success and failure. The other side has to lose. It’s baked in. I wonder if as a society we have bought into that to some extent. Mr. Benson: There’s a fair amount of that, when people feel good that somebody else lost. I don’t feel good when somebody else loses, even if I’m not really particularly fond of those folks. That’s not making the world a better place. It’s really not helpful. I get to work with a lot of organizations and every month I usually pick up a couple more companies that I work with. When I talk about value creation, it’s not uncommon for the senior team to say, “It can’t just be about the money.” Because I go in and say, “What’s the one number that tells your organization if you’re winning or losing the game, and that will drive the majority of the right behaviors?” In the for-profit world, it’s typically cashflow or some version of profit. But if the people aren’t happy and winning, with the team members and advancing, then you’re not going to optimize the profit piece of it. If our clients aren’t happy that that’s not going to happen. This is about holistic value creation for the organization. It’s a lot like the book for holistic value creation for a family of any type or size and how you run after it. It doesn’t take very long to get their heads around, “This makes so much sense.” But we’ve just been taught that money’s bad. I believe that’s a form of virtue signaling, because they really want the money too, in every case that I’ve seen. Mr. Jekielek: That’s a very interesting observation. It does come down to this idea that the value of positive creation for the community is at the root of this. It’s really a kind of morality, am I getting this right? Mr. Benson: It is. It’s a win for everybody going that direction. When people use terms like altruistic, selfless, I ask, “Don’t you do things that are in your own best self-interest, whether for this life or the next, depending on your beliefs?” The reply is “Well, yes.” I say, “By definition, you’re selfish. Selfishness isn’t a bad thing, but you can be win-win selfish, or you can be win-lose selfish.” The more win-win we are, the more things will accrete to you and more opportunities expose themselves. I do things to create value for as many people and organizations as I can, and that exposes me to opportunities I otherwise wouldn’t have available. I feel really good when I help, even if there’s no financial reward or anything else. Selfishly, I want to feel good. That’s really a good thing, and more people are bringing opportunities to me, and I love that. I just absolutely love it. It’s a way to create value faster in the world. But people have to understand it, and get on that road for a while to understand, “Oh my gosh, this actually really works.” Mr. Jekielek: One of the things I’ve noticed while talking to people in all sorts of different communities, there’s a lot of people that have been very demoralized. They don’t appreciate what they have. We talked about this a little bit in this interview. They don’t see a lot of hope for the future, and they don’t see the promise of their country. It might be hard for them to see promise in an educational method, like the one you’re proposing here. Do you have any thoughts on how to get through to those people? Mr. Benson: That is such a big question. When I talk to the kids, I ask, “What would it be like if your purpose in life, your primary motivation was the value you created, not external things, like TikTok likes or being part of this special club? Now all of a sudden when you’re going down this road of creating value, you can develop this intrinsic motivation and you’re not really subjected or influenced so much by external forces trying to bring you down. But if you’re not on the path of creating value and really going down that road, it’s easy to be too influenced by what’s going on out there.” Once they start on this road, anyone, a child or an adult, everything will get better. The bad that’s going on in the world, it’s a pretty small part of the population. Let’s not let the 3 to 5 percent at most take down the 95 percent, that doesn’t make sense. Mr. Jekielek: What you say makes perfect sense to me. Do you have any thoughts on how we might reach those people who have been so-called black-pilled and it’s hard for them to think about things this way, such as, “How can I empower myself? How can I create this positive change?” They have a very different, almost nihilistic way of thinking. I keep encountering this, and you probably do as well. How do we get through to those people? It’s not an easy answer, I realize that. Mr. Benson: It’s not an easy answer, and I talk to lots of groups. I’ll even host regular think tanks in my studio around certain topics like K-12 education and other things. I want to talk about what is possible, and productive ways to get there. Unfortunately, the majority of folks out there, because of the culture in this country right now, want to know more about why something won’t work or what’s wrong with people. All they want to talk about is how to go after the problem. I usually say, “Okay, that’s fine. We can admire the problem as much as you want to, but what would the ideal state look like, and how could we actually get there?” I’m able to change the discussion to go in that direction. If somebody just wants to complain, and again, admire the problem, that’s okay. Every minute you spend doing that is one minute that you’re not creating value in the world, and you’re not helping somebody else. It’s all in perspective. I don’t think I’m going to have three or four sentences here that are going to change everybody, but I do think about how to create value in the world. What is my value creation superpower when I come into a room? Start with emotional energy. Don’t be the person that takes the room down. Be the person that lifts the room up. Start there. As you start elevating your own, it will supercharge anything else you want to do when it comes to creating value in your life and the communities that you’re part of. Mr. Jekielek: Lee, this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion. You make this distinction between happiness and joy. A lot of people today will say, “What is the meaning of life? What do you want in life?” The answer is, “I want to be happy, with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But you make this distinction that is interesting and poignant. Please tell me about this. Mr. Benson: I have listened to a lot of speakers and experts in different areas say that if you’re not happy 100 percent of the time, then something’s wrong. You need to go through all these processes and figure it out and enjoy personal fulfillment. If I had a most important number for myself, it would be a fulfillment quotient. How is that elevating and growing over time? I can go through healthy struggle, unhealthy struggle, and difficult times in any way, shape or form, but I can still elevate my fulfillment going forward. That’s how I think about the difference. How could you ever really be happy if you didn’t understand the opposite of it? You’re going to ebb and flow, but you can raise your underlying fulfillment and joy continually throughout your life. That’s my view. Mr. Jekielek: It’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in that order. The liberty part is ahead of the pursuit of happiness. The liberty part seems like you would need to have some healthy struggle to maintain, as we’re learning today. Mr. Benson: We’re going through that a lot right now. I agree. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish up? Mr. Benson: I look at the United States, and I also think about this globally. In the United States, we are only generating 10 to 15 percent of the value that we could. Imagine if we could start with a million families embracing value creation in their household as part of their operating methodology. What would be different and how infectious would that be? Imagine if we were creating 30 percent of the value that we could, or 50 or 80 percent. We’re not even close to what’s possible here. I’m really hoping that we can get a lot of families embracing value creation and operationalizing it this way. I want to live in a world that’s amazing. I tell kids when I speak to these groups, “You’re going to be running the world that I retire in, and I want it to be incredible.” Even though I’ll never retire, at some point, I’ll age out. But I want it to be incredible. Even though I personally love dystopian future movies, I don’t want to live in one of those things, that wouldn’t be very good. That is where I want to leave this. This is really the whole purpose behind this book and a big part of my mission in life. Mr. Jekielek: Lee Benson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Benson: It has been great to be here. Thank you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Lee Benson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 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

What happens now after the arraignment of former President Donald Trump in the classified-documents case? Will there be pre-trial motions? What will the government do? Is the defense team fully formed, and who should be on it? Why should the defense wait before filing a motion to dismiss? And what do we know about the audio recordings of conversations between the Bidens and the owner of Burisma that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has been talking about? We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of Kash’s Corner. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kash-patel-why-trump-defense-should-wait-to-file-motion-to-dismiss_5337852.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Kash Patel: Hey everybody, welcome back to Kash’s Corner. We hope everyone tuned in last week for our live show from Arizona. It was a heater of an episode. If you didn’t see it, please tune in to Epoch TV and you can catch it anytime. Jan, what are we going to do on the heels of that great episode? Jan Jekielek: I want to highlight why it’s really valuable to watch it, because you and I went through all sorts of nuances around the Trump indictment. Just a few days later on Tuesday, Trump was arraigned. And now, we’re filming this show Wednesday. He gave a speech explaining what his plan is now, and we want to dive into that. What does that actually mean? What does this mean logistically? What can happen here? Let’s dive into all of that. Mr. Patel: Just so our audience knows, I was in attendance last night, Tuesday night, at Bedminster. I heard the former president and current candidate give his equivalent of a rebuttal to the indictment, informally, of course, since he gave the formal one in court. You’re talking more about what happens now procedurally. Lots of things. President Trump was arraigned in the southern district of Florida, my former home shop where I was a federal public defender for a long time. An arraignment is where you simply enter a plea, either not guilty, or guilty. I’ve almost never seen someone just walk in and say they’re guilty on the first day, because you want due process. Even the prosecutors want that. The defense attorneys want that, with all the evidence. President Trump entered his not guilty plea to all 37 counts. There’s a couple of things that start to happen. One; discovery is supposed to start coming in from the government, discovery being evidence. In this case, it seems from the indictment that we covered, the evidence is quite voluminous, with a lot of documents, and a lot of paperwork. Are they going to get the documents in true, unredacted form? Is the government going to claim state secrets or say it’s classified, “We can’t show the defense attorneys X, Y, or Z.” Do the defense attorneys have clearance? That’s a whole other issue. The president maintains his security clearance for life. But counsel, while they have an unlimited right to counsel per the Constitution in terms of your criminal defense, they have to be given a security clearance, because most people don’t have them. Most lawyers don’t have them. 98 percent of lawyers don’t have a security clearance. That process has to be worked out between the defense attorneys and DOJ. If the court has to get involved it’s an awkward situation, because the executive branch controls security clearances, not the judicial branch. The judge couldn’t even order one, if for some reason the DOJ says to one of the lawyers in the case, “We’re not going to give you one. This is a problem. You get to pick who your attorneys are in this case.” Let’s see how that shakes out. But we’ve seen how security clearances have been handled for people in the past, and we’ve seen some of them revoked for political reasons. We’ve seen a lot of people denied flat out for political reasons. In this case, that would be a way that the government takes a stab at due process. Mr. Jekielek: What are examples of clearances being denied for political reasons? Mr. Patel: I know a number of people that applied to the FBI. To be a special agent, you have to have a security clearance. You have to go through the process. They were supporters of one political movement versus the other. They had a perfect background, no criminal history, no credit problems, and no issues of residency or anything like that. They were basically told, “At this time, you don’t meet the mark for a security clearance. Please try back.” When you see it over and over and over and over again, you think, “These are really good people. These are great candidates.” Then, you see the people who are supposed to have their security clearances revoked if they do commit a crime or lie to the American public, like Clapper, Brennan and Comey, who’ve gone into Congress and lied under oath, not to mention leaked sensitive information during and after their tenures. Again, you’re seeing the two-tier system of justice in the administrative state of security clearances. Those are just a few examples, but it’s going to be interesting to see. We don’t yet fully know the final composition of Donald Trump’s entire defense team. I imagine it’s going to be more than one person, and it probably should be. We’re going to have to see how that one shakes out. It could require some litigation. I’ve had to go through it when I was a federal public defender, when we had no national security cases. There’s only very few people in my office who would receive either a temporary or partial security clearance, instead of top secret, to handle the discovery and the evidence in the case. But this is a very extensive matter, and as the government has portrayed, involves some very sensitive, highly classified materials. I don’t know how they’re going to meet the due process burdens in this case. It’s going to be pretty tricky. Mr. Jekielek: Another nuance may be that the classification of those documents is in question. Mr. Patel: Yes, that’s a great point. Mr. Jekielek: So what does that mean? Mr. Patel: That’s the thing. President Trump’s attorneys can go in there and say, “Wait a second. They didn’t charge my client with anything about unlawfully possessing classified documents.” We covered that extensively last week. If they’re not charging him with classified documents being possessed unlawfully, then why don’t you just turn them over? It would seem logical. I don’t know what the government’s going to claim. They might claim, “No, they’re still classified.” Then, you have to go before the court and say, “We have to litigate this.” It’s going to be one of the many pretrial motions that are going to come up. You could have a pretrial motion over every single document, with thousands and thousands of documents. Should we do this one? Should we do that one? Did the government overly redact on this one or not? Is this one classified or not? What about the next step? This can take time. I don’t know what the government’s approach will be. When I was a national security prosecutor, in order to bring a prosecution involving classified information, you as the prosecutor first had to do the intergovernmental process to have that declassified beforehand, before you went to the grand jury. This is a good reminder, grand jurors can’t ever be shown classified information. None of them have a clearance. You would think the documentation they showed to the grand jury was declassified, at least in part. What I mean by that is, and not to really geek out, but CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act, governs the dissemination and adjudication of classified information in criminal proceedings. The government can go ahead and get substitutes. They can get summaries of the document, of the classified information. Say there was something on North Korea launching an arsenal of attacks in an in-depth intelligence report, and the collection was so sensitive and so limited that we didn’t want it out in any way, shape or form. The government could petition the judge and say, “We think this summary substitutes sufficiently for this information. Please go ahead and issue that.” I understand the mechanisms and the reasoning behind the CIPA statutes. A lot of times it works, and it does protect sensitive information. But in a case as overly political as this one, being examined by literally the world, people are going to say, “Wait a second. The DOJ and FBI have a track record and these prosecutors have a track record of withholding evidence of innocence, Brady information, and overly redacting information. How are they, the prosecutors, supposed to know what the defense needs to prepare defense in this case? That’s supposed to be on the defense attorney, not dictated by the prosecutor. There’s a whole lot that’s going on, and the CIPA stuff usually happens during the pre-trial litigation. Then, the defense attorneys have their turn. If they are given all the documents and the government still says they’re classified or classified in part when they want to use the document in the defense of their client, they have to petition for that document to be declassified either in whole, or in part, or by substitute. You can see how just having one criminal prosecution with national security implications with one document could take months to litigate and months to get the inter-agency governmental approval necessary for the declass or the summary substitution. Because they just can’t say, “Let’s call the CIA and just see if this is declassified and we can use it.” It’s every agency that has an equity in that document. Usually it’s a multitude of agencies; the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, or the DOD. Everybody’s got to sign off on it. It’s not like the lower levels. This has to go to the director or the cabinet secretary level of each agency and department to sign off on, because the DOJ is requesting that use, or the defense attorneys are requesting that use. That’s how the CIPA statute works for production of information for both the prosecution and the defense in this case. Mr. Jekielek: It could be a very long time. How you think this works out strategically for both the defense and the prosecution. Do they want a speedy trial? Do they want a protracted trial? It feels like people could make it go in one direction or the other. Mr. Patel: Yes, it goes either way, for either side. I’m sure politics will weigh into it, even though they say it won’t. Do they want President Trump off the campaign trail for a 45-day trial next year? Do they want that to happen this year? Do they want to try and convict him earlier rather than later? That’s from the prosecutorial standpoint. From the defense standpoint, do they want the exoneration earlier? Do they want the exoneration later? Do they want the pretrial motions to go out extensively, so they can inform the media as they come up with their findings and rulings from the judge to say, “This is fair. That is not fair. Look at what’s being kept from our client. We don’t have access to these documents.” These are the decisions that you have to make as the individual case proceeds. We faced the same issues when I was a federal public defender. Sometimes it was very advantageous to go right to trial just knowing the position of the government, the pieces of evidence, and if they had witness problems. We would say, “Yes, we’re ready pretty much right now, judge. Give us a week and we’ll go.” Other times I was in there for two years before I said, “Judge, I’m ready for trial,” because I had to do a whole host of stuff to figure out how to best defend my client. Sometimes it was in the middle. Actually, a lot of times, in federal court especially, a judge will say, “You get one continuance per side, 30 days and 30 days. After that, we’re going to trial.” This other district of Florida is known for being what we call a rocket docket. They don’t slow roll criminal cases, they move them. Now, everyone will say this is a different case, and it is. It’s a former president who’s running to be president again. I don’t know if those seasonal rules will apply in this case. But it will be interesting to see what positions the defense and the prosecution take as to who wants a fast one, who wants a slow one, who wants to do a lot of pretrial motions, and who doesn’t want to do a lot of pretrial motions. The clock actually hasn’t even really started yet, and let me tell you why. People might forget that President Trump has a co-defendant in this case. We’ve all heard of this thing called speedy trial. State law says speedy trial must occur within, and I’m making up the number, 180 days of arraignment. If it does not, and there’s no good cause for a delay, the case is thrown out. In the federal system, pursuant the Constitution, there is no number assigned to speedy trial. There is a constitutional right for the defendant to have a speedy trial, but that delay is not defined by the courts. It’s more on a case by case basis. Is there undue delay by the prosecution? Did they say they were ready, then they had a witness problem? Did they lie about evidence? Did they withhold evidence? Did they not produce everything? That speedy trial clock doesn’t start in any co-defendant case until all co-defendants are arraigned. As far as I know, yesterday in Miami, only President Trump was arraigned. I don’t believe the co-defendant was arraigned at the same time. Who knows when that’s set for? It could be a month, it could be two weeks. In essence, maybe the prosecution will use that to say that the clock hasn’t really started for our discovery obligations. Now, you get into all this stuff where you ask, “Where’s our information?” They say, “Oh, we’ll start when everybody’s arraigned.” Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned some of the possible pretrial motions, so walk us through those. Mr. Patel: As a former public defender, what I would personally recommend is an extensive pretrial motion order from the defense. In order to vigorously defend your client, in this instance, the former President of the United States who is up for reelection, there’s just too much at stake to rush it. There’s so much information in a 37-count indictment. They’re talking about however many documents. We don’t know if it’s hundreds or thousands of photos of different places. Different states are involved in terms of geographic location of information and witnesses that you have to locate and use this court process to get them in there if you want them as a defense. That process in and of itself takes time. You have to put together the appropriate defense team in this case. Everybody knows there are civil cases and criminal cases. What most people don’t know is that a national security case is different. Yes, it’s a criminal case, but it has to do with a whole different set of laws and classified information that we’ve been talking about. It’s almost this third animal. You do need a brilliant criminal defense lawyer, but you also need a national security expert who has litigated CIPA and these pretrial motions. You need someone who’s very good at the Classified Information Procedures Act, because they’re going to need to be involved and litigate this stuff along the way. I don’t really know too many singular people that can perform all those duties at the A+ level. There’s a couple, and maybe they can find that one person, and maybe they become President Trump’s attorney. But it’s a massive lift. Then, you have to review all the documents. You can’t even start filing pretrial motions. I heard people say, “There should be a motion to dismiss right away.” Okay, if you’ve got good cause to dismiss, sure. But you want to make that motion after you’ve done all your homework, in my opinion. You want to go in there and see what they got. Because you also want to look at the substantiated allegations of prosecutor misconduct by some members on this team. You want to look at if they did it before, did they do it again? That’s not at all improper if you are the defense attorneys in this case. That’s a different line of effort to follow than just the straight pretrial motions based on discovery and due process. This is a whole other branch that shoots out to say, “Judge, not only did they fail to produce the proper discovery and overly redact and withhold a witness, but the prosecutor is unethical. That’s a whole—wow. Unfortunately, it happens. It’s happened to some of the prosecutors on this special counsel team. Those questions should be raised, in my opinion, not just the evidentiary ones. Then, you present motions to suppress evidence, “Judge, Mar-a-Lago was unlawfully raided. He replies, “Okay, tell me why.” You say, “Fourth Amendment, search and seizure.” Everybody knows the basics. You have the right to privacy in your home against your effects and person, unless there is a measure met by the government to say you no longer have that right, because you are committing a crime or have evidence of a crime, and that’s a probable cause standard. The agents or lawyers may have lied on the application, or they may have omitted relevant evidence, it happens not too infrequently on those motions to suppress evidence. I’ve litigated hundreds of them. I would say probably 15 percent of mine were granted in some form or in full. That means the evidence that the government got from that unlawful search and seizure is out. I’m not saying this is going to happen, but just let’s say for instance, the judge rules that the raid at Mar-a-Lago was unlawful. Then, everything found at Mar-a-Lago is now out. It’s excluded from the trial. It’s as if it never existed and cannot be used against Donald Trump and the co-defendant in the prosecution. That’s one instance. Then, you have all the other locations. They went to Bedminster, they being the government and the feds. I thought there was a third location somewhere, but I can’t really remember. There’s a whole NARA [The National Archives and Records Administration] component to it. We haven’t got any lucid details from NARA as to what they have and what they gave back in terms of all these documents. I would litigate, in a pretrial motion fashion, to get a definitive answer from NARA, because part of the defense is going to involve the Presidential Records Act. It should involve the Presidential Records Act coupled with legal precedent from NARA involving the Clinton sock drawer case, which we’ve discussed before, and involving Sandy Berger from the DOJ, which we’ve discussed before. You want definitive positions from the other components of government involved in this case. The good thing about being in federal court is you could put it all before federal judges and they have to decide. That’s when the rubber meets the road. In some instances, this pretrial motion calendar could be very extensive, and it should be. But that’s a trial tactic that the defense attorneys must decide with their clients. Mr. Jekielek: With respect to the Mar-a-Lago raid, there were all sorts of documents taken which were not relevant. There’s a question about whether it was okay to take those. Mr. Patel: What the government will usually say is, “We take everything. We’ll give you the stuff back that we don’t use.” Yes, most of the stuff they took, it’s safe to say, won’t be used in this prosecution. Right now we know they’re using 32 pieces of evidence. I don’t know how long those pieces of evidence are, to substantiate the first 32 counts. It doesn’t match up with what we’ve been told publicly about the boxes and boxes and boxes of evidence. But they took it all. Mr. Jekielek: There was a discussion among a number of commentators at Epoch Times, that the indictment has to do with material which was thought to be under attorney-client privilege. Mr. Patel: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: How do you understand this? How does that become an issue or not? Mr. Patel: We touched upon that last week, and you raised a great point. In my opinion, that should be one of the first motions, because you don’t have to go to law school to know there is an attorney-client privilege; civil, criminal, or national security. Even if you just consult with an attorney, and you’re saying, “I want to open a business,” or “I think the government might come after me for my money,” or “They might actually charge me with a crime,” that’s all attorney-client privilege. Those conversations are sacrosanct. They can’t be found out by the prosecutor except for one exception, if the attorney and the client get together to commit a crime like, “Hey, let’s go rob a bank. Okay, you’re my attorney, here’s 10 bucks, so the government can never know what we’re doing.” Obviously, that’s the whole purpose of the one exception to the attorney-client privilege. In this instance, if the stakes couldn’t be any higher already, you now have the former chief judge here in DC, Howell, who was responsible for all the grand jury issues. They litigated this before her when she was chief judge. Basically, one of President Trump’s former attorneys was brought before her. The judge, upon motion by the government, said, “Yes, I’m going to allow you to break attorney-client privilege and look at conversations.” I don’t know what types, if there were notes or conversations or recordings, we don’t really fully yet know all the substance of that. But she allowed the government to go get them. That is shocking. It almost never happens. I would challenge that very motion immediately out of the gate. How can you break attorney client privilege when people are going to say he was working in consultation with his lawyer to discuss his options? I haven’t seen the indictment. What they presented in the indictment doesn’t look sufficient to break attorney-client privilege. They could have more. They probably do, but I don’t know. But it would have a drastically chilling effect on the American legal system entirely if this is the precedent the DOJ is setting when they just want to get a target and have a judge that goes their way. This judge can review that pursuant to a defense motion and say, “No, that was improper.” Because remember, this is the trial judge. On a side note, the trial judge makes the trial record. The trial judge does not have to accept any rulings that came before them. They can be reviewed, with very minor exceptions. One of these motions involving attorney-client privilege is of such great consequence to the trial, the trial judge’s job is to protect the trial record. With a case like this which will almost definitely go up on appeal, the job of the trial judge is to produce a record that cannot be overturned, because they issued all the rulings properly based on law, they reviewed all the facts and evidence, got both lawyers from both sides to produce all their motions in a timely fashion, and didn’t forget to do something. Remember, federal judges don’t like one thing, and that is being overruled by the appellate court. It’s pretty simple. It doesn’t matter if you’re appointed by a Democrat or Republican, none of them like being overruled. When I overturned federal judges on appeal and I reappeared before them for resentencing or retrial or remotion, none of them were happy with me. It wasn’t personal, they made a mistake. The appellate courts said, “You made a mistake, fix it.” In this instance, just think about all the motions that could come in. Every one of those could be an appellate issue for the defense. With rare exception, the government doesn’t really have the opportunity to appeal, because then it basically goes in direct contrast with double jeopardy. You can’t keep trying someone over and over and over and over again. You get one shot at it. With very, very rare exceptions, can they appeal certain rulings during the trial process. Most likely it will come from the defense if there’s a conviction. If there’s no conviction, there’s no appeal, and then that’s it. Mr. Jekielek: There’s material now that has been taken out of attorney-client privilege. It’s not clear to me that the lawyer in question has been charged with anything or have they been? Mr. Patel: Not that I know of. We don’t know. Mr. Jekielek: Right. This is something the defense would presumably get some eyes on to understand. Mr. Patel: Yes. In this instance, since it’s already a co-defendant case, you would think that they would have charged that attorney in this case, because it’s a continuation or an aggravating factor to the conspiracy. But they could have charged him separately and earlier. He could have pleaded out and said, “I promise to cooperate.” I have no idea. I don’t know how they did that. We don’t know yet. One of these pretrial motions will help shed light on that. Mr. Jekielek: There is also this question. There are calls for Judge Aileen Cannon to recuse herself. But let’s say that Cannon does rule that it was wrong to waive this attorney-client privilege. That’s a massive thing. Just imagine what will happen in the legacy media with that scenario. Mr. Patel: I haven’t seen calls from the government for recusal. I haven’t seen calls from the defense. Those are the only two people. Mr. Jekielek: No. These are calls from the peanut gallery, let’s say. Mr. Patel: The rule is pretty simple. If, for some reason, a federal judge is in a position where they cannot be a neutral arbiter of the law and the facts in a case, because they have a personal relationship with the defendant or the prosecutor, as friends and neighbors, and they go away on vacation together every year with all their kids, or they have a financial stake in the bank that’s in front of them on a fraud charge, those are righteous recusals. I don’t know of a situation where federal judges appointed by presidents recused themself because a matter appeared before them that involved the president that appointed them. Of course, there really hasn’t been a case like this before. But that is not an appropriate precedent to set, because then you’re allowing other judges to be subjected to the same ruling. “You were appointed by Obama? Well, that guy is best friends with Obama, and he was his business partner, so you can no longer be the judge.” That would never amount to a recusal, ever. In this instance, you are right. It’s a peanut gallery, and a legacy media talking point. I don’t think that will get very far. If the government makes that motion in this case, I don’t know what the basis would be. It can’t just be that President Trump appointed you, and then, you have to recuse. Let’s remember, Judge Cannon was the federal judge in President Trump’s case involving the Mar-a-Lago raid and the special master. She didn’t recuse then, so why would she recuse now? Mr. Jekielek: That’s a very good point. We’re in it for a long haul, is that what you’re telling me? Mr. Patel: Yes. I think so. But we’ll see. Mr. Jekielek: Senator Grassley is saying, and he’s pretty good on the things that he says publicly, that there are 17 recordings that a Russian oligarch took of discussions with President Biden as, “insurance policies.” Mr. Patel: Yes, we’ve talked about the FBI, FD-1023 before. Congress, as an investigator said, “Chris Wray, director of the FBI, we’re doing an investigation and we found out about this document, please give it to us.” Chris Wray initially said, “No, it doesn’t exist.” Then, a whistleblower comes forward and says, “Actually, this document does exist.” It’s proven to exist, Congress issues a subpoena, and then, there’s a whole back and forth. There’s a possibility of holding Director Wray in contempt, which literally got to the 11th hour. What was interesting to me as the guy that did the Russiagate investigation, the first in congressional history to subpoena the FBI for 1023s, the ones related to Christopher Steele and other source reporting from back then, was the fashion in which the FBI mounts their defense to this constitutional oversight. First, they say, “No.” Then, they say, “We can’t give it to you.” Then, they provide a heavily redacted copy. Then, they lift some redactions. Then, they say, “Okay, we’ll meet the chairman in ranking and they can have some of it. Not all of it, but we’ll give them a briefing.” There’s all sorts of variations they layer in there. It’s one of the problems I have with this institutional response to congressional oversight. It’s now been publicly reported, not just that these 17 possible recordings exist, but who they involve. They involve people from overseas ventures and possibly President Biden and his family. Whatever your position is on that, what’s important is that it’s now been revealed that the FBI redacted the portion of the 1023. I know where it is, because I know where to look. But none of these folks really have that kind of federal prosecutor or national security experience. They redacted the portion that revealed that these recordings existed to the committees when they finally turned over this document at the end. It was later revealed that they finally lifted that redaction, just for Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley. Then, Senator Grassley comes forward and says, “This is in the document.” It will be interesting to see what Congress does. I imagine they will go get those recordings, or try to. I imagine that will be a pretty big fight, just like we saw with the production of the document itself. There’s got to be a way those recordings get out to the public. I am a guy wanting to know what’s on them, like pretty much everybody else. To meet constitutional oversight responsibility from committees of jurisdiction, concerning the FBI and the DOJ, and all other agencies for that matter, they either submit to that constitutional oversight or they don’t. They, the agencies, can’t be the ones to pick and choose which oversight they submit to. That’s not how it works over there. It will be interesting to see where this goes. I imagine it will probably be covered in the media as the week goes along here. Probably by the time this show airs on Friday, there will probably be more information on it. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, so how do you know that there’s some sort of recording attached to a 1023? Mr. Patel: That’s a great point. From their perspective, they were looking at a partially redacted document. You can sort of see it sometimes, just from the out build, A is talking to B and they’re in this room and it sounds like they were setting up a recording or it sounds like it was like a confidential human source. If you run sources like I have, you can read into the materials. There are specific parts in the paperwork that are called sections A, B, or C. You have to think of it like this and rewind the clock a little bit. Do you remember when you used to go to the library and they had those big wheels on the bookcases, and when you turned them, the big wheels would move back and forth because they wanted to make space for all the extra books? When the FBI first started doing 1023s, you can’t staple a cassette tape to a piece of paper or a VHS tape to a piece of paper. You can’t pin the computer drive to the sheet. There’s different classifications of the different types of evidence. You go into the FBI repository and you get the file and then it tells you on the file, “Go to the corresponding location to get the piece of evidence; videotape, cassette, or computer hard drive.” It sounds a bit antiquated. But now, pretty much everything is digitized. Similarly, they’re usually not sticking drives onto the sheets of paper. They will reference them and they’ll say they have a portion A, B, or C. At least that’s how we used to do it, unless they have updated the system. That’s the best way that you’re able to glean if this information exists. Mr. Jekielek: All right. Kash, it’s time for our shout-out. Mr. Patel: This week’s shout-out goes to Richard Laro. Thanks so much for watching our live presentation of Kash’s Corner last week from Prescott, Arizona. We appreciate the audience there that was in person, but as always, we appreciate our audience that viewed online, live, and later on the replay. If you missed it, please tune in for last week’s special episode. Thanks Richard, for your comments. We thank everybody for their comments on the board of Kash’s Corner. Don’t forget, the weekly live chat keeps growing and growing and growing. Please join us if you haven’t tried that yet, and bring a friend. Next week, we’ll see you on Kash’s Corner. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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The U.S. electricity grid is critically dependent on extra-high-voltage transformers made in China, says Tommy Waller, President of the Center for Security Policy. An expert on the U.S. grid, Waller also stars in the documentary “Grid Down, Power Up.” What are the greatest problems facing America’s electrical grid? Why is the industry allowing these vulnerabilities to exist? And what happens if the electric grid goes down? Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-communist-china-could-imminently-cripple-americas-electric-grid-tommy-waller_5335229.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Tommy Waller, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Tommy Waller: It’s an honor to be here. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Tommy, about three years ago, in May of 2020, President Trump signed an executive order declaring an emergency around the national grid. This happened after one of these large high voltage transformers in the grid by a Chinese manufacturer was inspected by authorities. The results of that inspection are classified, but this grid emergency ensued. Tell me what happened and how this whole realization that we’ve had since then has progressed. Mr. Waller: Absolutely. Yes, it was on May 1st, 2020, that an executive order declared a grid security emergency. It was a recognition that our bulk power system has really now become dependent on certain countries that are adversaries hostile to the United States, including Communist China. In this case, there was this transformer seized by the federal government the year before 2019. You can read about it in the Wall Street Journal. That transformer was brought to Sandia National Laboratory where it was inspected. The result of it was a recognition that this is a really critical part of our grid, these extra high voltage transformers, and many experts consider it to be the backbone of our modern grid. I can explain why. If this device that we depend on for the lifeblood of our modern civilization was able to be manipulated, if it was able to be turned off, then that could be extremely problematic for us. China understands our dependence on electricity. It’s a very worrisome vector of attack that the Trump administration recognized, that they tried to address through executive order. Unfortunately, on the first day of the current Biden administration, that executive order was suspended. Our nation has imported about another 100 transformers from China in the ensuing period. We’re now somewhere around 400 in the US grid. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me the scale of these things. I watched the documentary, “Grid Down, Power Up,” recently, which featured you as an expert. They talk about how to move these things around and get them installed. This is an issue in itself, and just try to imagine what that would look like without power? Mr. Waller: That’s right. We talk about the grid. When we say the grid, we’re talking about the whole system that generates electricity, transmits it, and distributes it. In order to transmit that electricity, it’s normally over long distances. You think about the power plants that produce our power. They’re not right next to the population centers. These extra high voltage transformers are needed to step up the voltage and then to bring it back down. It’s that high voltage that allows it to travel those long distances. These assets are absolutely critical. If that transformer stopped working for any reason, then you’re not moving that electricity from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. The assets themselves, the large ones, may take years to produce. It used to be a lead time of about a year. Most of these are made overseas, unfortunately. Now, even the current Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm mentioned that with the war in Ukraine, and with the electrification of so many things in the world and in our country, the lead time for these assets has gone from about a year to more like four years. Mr. Jekielek: To build one, if you’re going to commission it? Mr. Waller: That’s right, to build and to import it, and there’s only so many rail cars and so many trailers that can transport these things across the country. When you look at that Wall Street Journal article by Rebecca Smith about this particular Chinese transformer, you can look at the cover picture in the article and see the size of the trailer needed to transport this thing. There’s only so many of those assets. We can’t afford to lose these for any reason, whether it’s because they were manufactured with malicious intent to manipulate them, or if they’re attacked by different forms of attack, we can’t afford to lose them. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start there. What does a situation look like where power goes down in a significant portion of the country? Mr. Waller: All we have to do is look at history. Let’s take New York City. In 1977, there was a 24-hour blackout in New York City. It was a natural form of an electromagnetic pulse [EMP], a lightning strike. A lightning strike hit a substation in New Jersey. It caused a blackout in New York City. In a 24 hour period, there were more than 4,500 or arrests of people who were looting, more than 550 police officers injured in the line of duty, and over $300 million worth of damage in that city in 24 hours. Think about society and our dependence on electricity. Within hours the water stops flowing. In an urban environment it takes electricity to pump that water. If you’re in an urban environment, you lose water right away. Over time, you lose the ability to process wastewater. Refrigeration is so critical to our food system. There is a very significant nexus between food security and national security, and food security depends on electricity. Every single way that you look at it, modern society is not prepared to live without electricity. In short order, you have suffering and you have chaos. You have societal collapse when we lose portions of our grid and our enemies know that. Mr. Jekielek: “Grid Down, Power Up,” asserts that as few as just nine of these power stations or substations around the entire U.S. were taken down, that could result in a complete systemic failure of the grid. When I heard that, I thought how could that even be possible? Can you explain this? Mr. Waller: The film, “Grid Down, Power Up,” does cover that, but it wasn’t the documentary that discovered it. It was actually the federal government, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [FERC], which oversees our bulk power system. This came in the wake of a physical attack and physical sabotage. Your viewers may remember that in April 2013, a substation right outside of San Jose was attacked by a gunman. It was a very highly professional attack covered in the Wall Street Journal by Rebecca Smith. FERC did a classified study in the wake of that attack. They discovered that if an adversary knew which nine substations to attack, that could cause cascading failures that could black out the whole country for an extended period of time. We experienced this before on August 14th, 2003. Some may remember the great Northeast blackout that was a cascading failure from a tree branch in Ohio striking a transmission line. A single point of failure caused a cascading blackout that resulted in 55 million customers losing power, some for up to two weeks. Whether it’s mother nature or whether it’s an adversary, it is a system that can be taken down if it’s not properly protected. Mr. Jekielek: It’s shocking how quickly and easily society can start breaking down. We’ve seen that in our society to some extent with the lack of application of certain laws in certain situations. Portland, Oregon, comes to mind as an example, but this has been replicated in other places. Things which were unthinkable a few years ago are happening on these streets. I’m resistant to the idea that when the power goes out, suddenly you have a full anarchy going on. How does that happen? But actually, this seems a lot more credible to me today than it did even a few years ago. Mr. Waller: For a society to be resilient, it needs to be prepared. It needs to recognize these threats, and for it to bounce back, there needs to be virtue. Think about how so much of our society today lacks virtue. I should say that in many cases, as you see in the wake of hurricanes, like Hurricane Harvey in Texas where the Cajun Navy comes from Louisiana to Texas, you absolutely have circumstances where good-hearted people, whether it’s in America or anywhere else in the world, good-hearted people will come to aid others. But to your point, over time, our society in America has become far less resilient, far more dependent, and really lacking in virtue with the type of compassion and willingness to help a neighbor. Where years ago, those qualities were far more present in society. Mr. Jekielek: I’m not going to belabor this, but the Covid-19 pandemic exposed this reality that you’re just discussing. Let’s jump into the nuts and bolts of it. There are multiple serious possible points of failure and some of them natural, and some of them terrorism and state actors. I want to start off with that and this obvious example. How did we start importing these absolutely critical pieces of infrastructure? I’m just imagining here we imported 100. I don’t know if they’ve all been deployed by now. If just nine of those could be compromised, potentially it could shut the whole grid down. That is a wild point of failure, but a possible point of failure. Mr. Waller: How did we get here? Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Mr. Waller: In a lot of similar ways to where we are as a nation and our dependence on China for lots of different things. We know that the CCP has been executing unrestricted warfare against the rest of the free world, predominantly the United States. One method of unrestricted warfare is looking for these critical vulnerabilities of a society and figuring out how to exploit those. In this case, what the Chinese did was genius. They identified that these transformers need a certain type of steel to be manufactured, grain oriented steel. What do the Chinese do? They dumped into the market massive amounts of grain oriented steel. They cornered the market for even the precursors that are needed to create the transformers. I’m sure you and your viewers are very familiar with the inexpensive aspect of purchasing products from China, which is made possible by slave labor, if you want to call it that. Mr. Jekielek: And also currency control. Mr. Waller: Yes, currency control, Mr. Jekielek: Multiple factors, but yes. Mr. Waller: Exactly. The CCP uses these different factors to corner the market on an asset that any modern civilization needs to survive. That led to a lot of other manufacturers being put out of business. The utility industry looks and they say, “I’ve got to make an investment on a transformer. What’s the price of these things?” Any investment is going to result in the utility spending money and the rate payers, all of us who pay our electricity bills, having to potentially pay more the more they spend. It’s understandable for them to look to save money. That’s exactly one avenue that the Chinese used in order to get into that market of providing these transformers. Number one, our country needs to identify where these transformers are and get them inspected. Then, we need to produce these domestically, ideally onshoring production, and if not friend-shoring, having allies produce them and ensuring that those allies are not using components that come from communist China. Mr. Jekielek: How many more of these have been inspected to date? Mr. Waller: We know that one has been inspected at Sandia National Laboratory. That’s all we know. We know that a President of the United States declared an emergency on May 1st, 2020 after that. We know this is a big deal. The good thing is that even if the federal government isn’t moving as fast as they should on this, which they need to move much faster, the states are waking up. Look at Texas, for example. Texas has its own grid. The last legislative session they passed the Lone Star Protection Act or Infrastructure Protection Act. It was designed to be at least moving forward in a state like Texas, to identify whether critical infrastructure components were going to be coming from adversaries to make sure problems like this don’t happen in that state. This is something that if the federal government’s dragging its feet, it can be taken on at the state and local level, because at the federal government level, there is regulatory capture. Mr. Jekielek: It’s so important to think about how to address this, and I want to cover that extensively in the interview. Before we go there, I want to highlight to our viewers that the Chinese regime has civil-military fusion as one of its top seven national priorities. The cornering of the market for these high voltage transformers is as much a military decision as it is a state business decision. An interview that came out later by an expert said that they found something in this transformer that would allow it to be turned off remotely. Mr. Waller: We imported this massive 500,000 pound electric transformer from China. They decided to send it to one of our national labs when it came into the country. They found hardware in it that had the ability for somebody in China to switch it off. Mr. Jekielek: It’s possible these things are in the system. This is just one shocking way that the system can be compromised. But we also have six potential routes, both in nature and also human-induced. Please give me a picture of these. Mr. Waller: To reinforce your point about the civil-military fusion. We know the Chinese have executed unrestricted warfare, which includes economic warfare. But let’s back up even further. Let’s go a couple thousand years back to Sun Tzu who wrote, The Art of War. He said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.” This is the way they do it. To answer the question about the different vectors, we should go to Mother Nature afterwards. But let’s just talk for a second about human-induced threats to the grid. We talked about physical sabotage like what happened in California. We just saw this in North Carolina at the end of last year with rifle fire. There’s lots of different ways that you can harm the grid physically. Cyber attack, or an electromagnetic attack, which could be localized, a directed energy weapon, or a nuclear electromagnetic pulse. There is the one we just talked about with respect to this grid security emergency declared by President Trump, and then suspended by President Biden, which was supply chain. Finally, if you look at policy, there will be blackouts if we continue some of the policies that our government has applied upon the nation just due to physics. You can’t shut down large baseload powered generators like nuclear, coal, fossil fuel plants and replace them with renewables, when the sun only shines and the wind only blows intermittently, and also at the same time electrify everything. Think about the demand that electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging stations have on the grid—that’s going to require a lot more electricity. Yet, because of lots of different government policies, we’re shutting down the largest producers of electricity. Physics will not allow us to continue to have the lights on with the path that we’re heading down. It’s policies that are human-induced, and malicious action by humans that can take the grid down. Jan, the reality is that right now the grid is so vulnerable to some forms of threat from Mother Nature that even if we deterred all of our human adversaries from taking it down, it’s 100 percent certain at some point the grid will go down because of solar weather. That’s a warning that I’ve personally issued at least twice to the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm. So far, it doesn’t look like we’re doing nearly what we need to do about it, even though it’s a completely fixable problem. Mr. Jekielek: The system is vulnerable to these electromagnetic pulses, whether from a solar flare or from an EMP or or a nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude. Mr. Waller: Yes, that’s right. We should spend a minute or two talking about the EMP phenomenon, because some viewers might think that sounds like science fiction. Unfortunately in the past there was some ridicule, “You’re worried about EMP, where’s your tin foil hat?” This is a real threat. Our military hypothesized that there would be an effect when they detonated a nuclear weapon in the exo-atmosphere. Because they discovered something in our ground tests about any conductor that was in the source region of a nuclear detonation. Decades ago when they did these ground burst nuclear tests, they would build mock towns and mock cities around it, and they would conduct a nuclear test. They discovered that the electric grid wires that were in that vicinity of the blast would be highly charged with a current, and it would travel down those wires and catastrophically ruin assets that were hundreds of miles away from the source region. Electromagnetic pulses are what they called them. They thought, “This may actually also happen if we detonated a nuclear weapon in space in the exo-atmosphere 30 kilometers up into space.” That’s exactly what we did. The United States and the Soviets detonated nuclear weapons with high altitude nuclear bursts, atmospheric nuclear tests. The result was a pulse, electromagnetic pulse that was far worse than they ever expected. A lot of the test equipment was actually ruined. Our test took place about 900 miles from Hawaii. It turned the lights off in Hawaii. Both sides, the Soviets and the Americans, discovered they had this incredible, really super weapon. They signed an atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty, stopped testing these in the atmosphere, and it became a highly classified knowledge that this was a method of attack. Our country then spent billions of dollars hardening our nuclear weapon systems, our command and control systems against this. When people ridicule this and say, “Where’s your tinfoil hat? You’re worried about EMP?” No, the U.S. Defense Department has been worried about EMP for a long time. The problem is that we didn’t protect the life sustaining infrastructures like the electric grid against this really catastrophic threat. Mr. Jekielek: You don’t need a nuclear weapon either. Mr. Waller: That’s right. Mr. Jekielek: There are these EMP devices, where there are even suitcase size ones that have a kind of more localized effect, and there’s also larger ones. So none of this is actually theoretical. Mr. Waller: Not at all. There are systems that our military has where they can use a directed energy weapon to shut down electric infrastructure. We have the CHAMP, a cruise missile system, that can produce localized EMP effects. It can pick out a building among other buildings and put a directed energy pulse into that building. This technology does exist. A high altitude nuclear EMP would be devastating because of the widespread impact it would have. But regardless, even if it were a localized effect, if someone found out which of those nine substations to attack with a radio frequency weapon and did it, and those substations were unprotected, it would result in the same kind of blackout. Mr. Jekielek: The solar flare can actually have that exact same effect. That’s why you’re saying there’s a 100 percent chance that if this system is not hardened, it’s going to go down at some point, because there’s a 100 percent chance that one of these flares will happen. Mr. Waller: Solar weather is a natural form of EMP, and I’ll briefly explain this. When we talk about nuclear EMP, there are three types of pulse, but I won’t go into all the details. Your viewers can read all about this. The E1 and E2 are the fast pulse. The E3 component of a nuclear weapon is very similar to what happens when the sun produces a coronal mass ejection, these highly charged particles that leave the sun and travel into space. It happens all the time. In fact, just last month in March there was a massive solar storm, and it happened to be on the opposite side of the sun. Had it traveled towards Earth, we might not be having this interview right now. The reason is that these highly charged particles react with the Earth’s magnetosphere. In fact, in the northern latitudes, people can see the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, which is the visual depiction of the electromagnetic energy generated when these particles slam into our magnetosphere. Just for the sake of our viewers, here’s an explanation. If we were to start our lawnmower engine, there’s a magnetosphere in there. There’s copper wire and a magnet. When you pull the movement between the copper wire and the magnet creates electromagnetic energy that travels down to your spark plug and starts that engine. When that magnetosphere on the earth moves, and it heaves and it wobbles either due to a nuclear blast or highly charged particles from the sun, a coronal mass ejection, that movement induces current into the earth’s crust. What do we know about electricity? It takes the path of least resistance. As the Earth’s crust has these currents induced and it sees a transmission line, if the conductivity of that transmission line is less than the earth, it moves up through the grid. Mr. Jekielek: Which of course it will be, because that’s what its purpose is. Mr. Waller: In many areas, but it depends. One of the good things is we have the USGS Geomagnetism program that is literally surveying the conductivity of North America, the crust of the Earth to figure out in different areas how conductive it is. What we know is that in the past, that conductivity has resulted in electric infrastructure being ruined. In 1921, there was a solar storm. They call it the railroad storm. Why? Because there were railroad stations in Connecticut and through the Northeast that caught fire and burned to the ground. Why did they catch fire? Because the telegraph operators that had telegraph lines that were 100-plus kilometers long had these ground induced currents from a solar storm that caused sparks and fires. I’ve twice briefed the secretary of energy, and I have shown her, and I could show you the tables that demonstrate the industry-led and government approved standards to protect our infrastructure against these harmful ground induced currents. Those currents go into our transformers. The transformers are nearly irreplaceable. The level of protection we have from the current standards are so low that the grid will go down if we have a significant storm like the 1921 storm, or like the 1859 Carrington Event solar storm that some of your viewers may have heard about. When I say that it’s 100 percent certain, all I’m saying is with the level of protection we have now and the standards that have been set by the industry and approved by the government guarantee that the grid goes down if we suffer a solar storm of a significant magnitude. Mr. Jekielek: Nevermind these other routes. We haven’t even discussed cyberattacks yet. I can’t help but think of solar winds since we’re talking about solar phenomena. Mr. Waller: That’s right. Look, the same regulatory capture that resulted in a completely dangerously erroneous solar storm standard, that same regulatory capture between the industry and the federal government, has resulted in cybersecurity standards that we believe are not nearly what they should be. There is no standard approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, that would require the detection, mitigation, or removal of malware in the grid. Yet, we know that the Russians used what they call black energy malware to take down the Ukrainian grid. We know that some of that malware is in our own grid, yet there’s no standard that requires the industry to find it, mitigate it, and remove it, despite the fact that our coalition has on multiple occasions petitioned the federal government to create such standards. Mr. Jekielek: You would think that they would care about this. Mr. Waller: Some do. Look, when people find out that I served in the Marines they say, “Hey, thank you for your service,” which I appreciate. The reality is there was nothing that I ever did in uniform or ever would do that actually would impact the day-to-day survival of the American people. That’s the truth. But the people who keep the lights on in this country, they do. They do provide for our survival every day. The first thing is I should thank those that work in the electric power industry. They’re actually trying to keep the lights on, these engineers that are out there. There’s some phenomenal people working really hard every single day. Unfortunately, when it comes to the regulatory environment, when it comes to the rules that govern that industry, there are a lot of people who’ve been obstructing and lobbying against really reasonable, prudent and affordable methods to protect this infrastructure. Mr. Jekielek: Before we start talking about those, tell me about yourself. You’ve served in the Marines and the Reserves. You’ve been briefing the Secretary of Energy on some of these vulnerabilities. Where did you come from? Mr. Waller: I felt a calling to serve in uniform since I can remember. It goes all the way back to being about four-years-old having Christmastime at my grandparents, and getting GI Joe pajamas for Christmas. To me, those weren’t pajamas, it was a uniform. I had this calling to serve, and I identified the Marines as the branch that I wanted to serve in. I swore into the Marine Corps on my 18th birthday. I told myself I’d stay in until they kicked me out, and we reached that point. I took a stand on the COVID vaccine mandate, and unfortunately, along with many others, my religious accommodations were denied. I waited a year, I appealed and did everything I could, and I was not allowed to continue serving. So, that service ended. But I was very blessed that during the last half of my career in the reserves I had this civilian job with the Center for Security Policy, a nonprofit founded by Frank Gaffney, who worked for President Reagan. Frank knew all about nuclear EMP years before it was ever declassified. He’s been worried about the grid for decades. When I got this job, which is more than a job, it’s a calling in life. He sat me down and taught me about electromagnetic pulse, and taught me about these threats. Then, he assigned me the duty of managing this nationwide Secure the Grid Coalition. I’m not a physicist, and I’m not an engineer. I’m an infantry guy. But I was so blessed to be the apprentice to some of the world’s foremost experts in all of these different threats to this critical infrastructure. I was able to translate to the American people and to our policymakers the reality of those threats, and what needs to be done to defend against them. That includes our current Secretary of Energy, and includes President Trump. Before he was president, the first time he was briefed on electromagnetic pulse, our organization made that possible. Not just him, but anybody who would listen, regardless of political party, and anybody who would listen to learn about this incredible vulnerability that we need to remedy. Mr. Jekielek: You were a forced reconnaissance marine. Please tell me briefly what that means, because it actually fits well with your current role. Mr. Waller: The reconnaissance community in the Marines is supposed to be the eyes and ears for the commander. We’re supposed to identify our adversaries and what they’re doing on the battlefield and report back to headquarters. It’s been a blessing and a privilege to be part of that community. The marines I served with are among the best in the nation. In fact, 17 years ago last night, we lost incredible patriots to combat operations in Iraq, and these were recon Marines who gave it their all. Being the eyes and ears for the battlefield commander is essentially what I’ve been focused on in the military as a reconnaissance officer. But yes, it blended very well with my civilian job to be the eyes and ears for our policymakers when it came to profound threats to our security. I was blessed with a civilian job that actually made it possible for a short period of time, for a couple years, for me to work on this in uniform. I was recruited by the U.S. Air Force’s Electromagnetic Defense Task Force [EDTF], to be a staff member of that organization and to help them form a task force to address electromagnetic spectrum threats, and to produce two reports on this issue that lay out the challenges. It’s been a privilege to serve in that capacity, both in the reconnaissance community and when asked by the Air Force’s EDTF. Mr. Jekielek: Please give me the overview of the specific grid-related threats that are coming from China. I know you see that as the biggest threat among the many you’ve just described. Mr. Waller: Sure. When it comes to China and their ability to affect our grid, we talked a little bit about policy. If we adopt policies here that rely on China to produce, whether it’s transformers or the tens of thousands of inverters that we need for our renewables, the wind and solar technology itself, the markets are cornered by China in many of those areas, if not all. When we embrace policies that create and enhance a dependency on China, while at the same time creating vulnerabilities because we are not producing enough electricity, that’s one. The second one you mentioned before is cyber. We know that China has a significant cyber capability, and that can mean cyber espionage where they’re stealing secrets in our own power production, whether it’s nuclear power or otherwise. It is a cyberattack, planting malware in different forms of malicious cyber intrusions into our infrastructure. The supply chain we mentioned already. They could be producing different things with say a hardware backdoor that would allow them to remotely control or turn off or turn on certain things. There is electromagnetic attack. We know that the Chinese are obviously nuclear capable, it’s part of their war fighting doctrine to focus on both that and cyber. Part of their cyber doctrine is the use of electromagnetic pulse. That’s for both the Russians and the Chinese. Nuclear EMP is in the cards if they wanted to use that. We just watched a balloon transit the entire continental United States, and that balloon could be a platform for an EMP attack. It doesn’t take an intercontinental ballistic missile. It can be one of their proxies, North Korea had a vessel, Chong Chon Gang, that went to Cuba, picking up SA2 surface-to-air missiles on their launchers. They weren’t nuclear tipped at the time, but it turned off its transponder and transited the entire Gulf of Mexico and turned it back on right outside the Panama Canal. U.S. intelligence said “We need to look at this.” What did they find? They detained the vessel in the Panama Canal. They found these two missiles buried underneath tons of sugar. That could have been a trial run by a proxy of Communist China. A surface-to-air missile is another method, and then, just physical sabotage. Look at our open borders, and look at our immigration policy with respect to the People’s Republic of China. If they put the right people here with the right know-how they can conduct physical attacks on this grid. Mr. Jekielek: To your point, I’m getting reports of very significant numbers of military-age Chinese nationals coming through the southern border and through the Darien Gap. Michael Yon is down there tracking some of this. It is shocking because you don’t think of that. You think of it as generally people from the region and economic migrants. But it’s actually quite a number of people from all over the place, including Communist China. Mr. Waller: That’s exactly right. The reality is that China has identified this vector of attack as one that could be effective in doing exactly what Sun-Tzu said, “subduing an enemy without fighting.” We have to recognize that they have identified that as a vector of attack, and we need to defend it with as much intensity as they are attacking it. That’s what we’ve failed to do so far. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about the Secure the Grid Coalition. This is something that American citizens can get involved in. Even from our relatively short conversation, this is an incredibly important issue, and it’s a completely bipartisan one as well. Mr. Waller: Exactly. The good thing is that there’s hope. As we talk about this and get into the issues of regulatory capture, your viewers are sitting here thinking, “Why?” They probably are getting a little bit angry, and they should. I go back to a quote from St. Augustine who said, “Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, courage to make sure they don’t remain that way.” Our Secure The Grid Coalition is a venue for people who get righteously angry about this inaction and who have the courage to work on it, and to collaborate on it. It’s a bipartisan group co-chaired by Ambassador Woolsey, who was President Clinton’s director of Central Intelligence and Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House. We’ve got hundreds of members around the country who volunteer. We’re talking about a volunteer effort in their states and at the federal level to continue trying to shape policies to protect this most critical infrastructure. Probably the single most valuable product of that effort just lately has been the film you mentioned earlier. One of the members of that Secure the Grid Coalition, David Tice, sank an immense amount of money, time, and effort into the film. He was able to talk to Dennis Quaid, who’s the narrator. Now you’ve got David Tice and Dennis Quaid going all around the country because they care about this. But the film they produced, “Grid Down, Power Up,” is the culmination of nearly a decade of interviews of the experts in our coalition, in a film that can teach Americans everything. I’ve been trying to brief policymakers for nine years, and this film can teach them in less than an hour. The producer, on his website, griddownpowerup.com, created a tab called “Participate.” You click on that tab and see all the policy recommendations that we’ve been promoting for years, you click on that and you can actually get involved. We now have a platform where the efforts of our coalition can be massively expanded. People who are watching and who are concerned can actually get involved by viewing the film, sharing the film, and then clicking on that participate tab, which will give them the ability to send messages to the people who could actually fix this problem. Because again, like you said, it is a fixable problem. Mr. Jekielek: Apparently there’s relatively easy ways to harden some of this infrastructure that aren’t that expensive. It’s not a complete replacement of these transformers, for example, which of course is very difficult. Mr. Waller: Yes. Let’s take one example. We’ll take the threat that we can’t deter: the sun. Looking at the sun, we know it makes those harmful ground-induced currents that can travel into those transformers. There are technologies out there like neutral ground blockers which can be applied to those transformers that are vulnerable. Not every transformer is vulnerable to solar weather. It depends on the length of the lines, and it depends on a lot of factors. But with the analysis that’s been done so far on the transformers that are vulnerable to that threat, if they were to install these neutral ground blockers on the transformers themselves, they could solve that problem for the entire United States for just over $4 billion. Here again, this is what I explained to the Secretary of Energy after she made comments about the bipartisan infrastructure bill, $1.2 trillion, and she talked about the Inflation Reduction Act. I only use the infrastructure bill. Theoretically, it should be about infrastructure. One third of 1 percent of that infrastructure bill could solve the problem of solar weather completely. 4 billion is one third of 1 percent of 1.2 trillion. Yet there’s no indication, despite multiple, multiple attempts to get them to spend that infrastructure money that our elected officials have already set aside thus far, there’s not any indication they’re spending it on that. Which means if we don’t protect those transformers, they go down at some point in the future. That’s just one example. Your viewers can just drive down the road. They can drive down the highway and see walls erected to protect neighborhoods from the sound generated on that street. Keep driving and look at the substation that provides the life blood to that neighborhood with maybe a chain link fence and a padlock. It should be ballistic protection to make sure these transformers can’t be shot up, and they can’t be viewed. It’s a fixable problem. Mr. Jekielek: You would think that the industry would be very interested in maintaining the integrity of these structures because their business depends on it. A lot of people might find it confusing why they’re not more interested in it. Mr. Waller: Yes. Again, there are some companies in the industry that are absolutely doing the right thing. They just are doing it quietly and they’re not stepping out and boldly talking about it. But writ large, for the industry as a whole, there is what we call regulatory capture. It is difficult to understand because you would think for the sake of business continuity, a lot of it has to do with your quarterly profit reports, and really a love of money over doing the right thing. Jan, the entire industry on an annual basis spends about $145 to $150 million in political influence in lobbying at just the federal level in this city and in the offices where our U.S. elected officials serve. It’s about $145 to $150 million a year, and that does not count the state and local level and all of the political influence and lobbying there. That entire industry pays about $4 million a year in fines. When you look at the last 10 years of the fines that they’ve paid for violating the rules that they created, the industry actually creates those rules. The federal government has to approve them. When they violate their own rules the federal fines are only about 4 million a year. When you look at the balance of where they put their money and effort, it goes into maintaining control as opposed to actually protecting the infrastructure. The process is designed by the industry to be that way. Jan, we talked about the 2003 blackout, and we should take a minute to look at two factors. The result of that 2003 blackout in August, the great Northeast blackout, was that you had the creation of NERC, the North American Electric Liability Corporation, which is the industry nonprofit that makes the rules, and FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission either approves or disapproves. After the tree branch in Ohio created a blackout that cost 55 million customers their electricity, you know how long it took for them to create a standard for vegetation management? Vegetation management means cutting trees. It took nine-and-a-half years to create a tree cutting standard. When you look at the solar standard that I just mentioned, and what I showed the Secretary of Energy, and I can show your viewers, that process was similar in the sense that the industry controlled that process and used junk science. They used bad data to produce bad data that would not require them to have to take action. The Air Force Electromagnetic Defense task force, when it comes to the threat of nuclear electromagnetic pulse, discovered one of the most egregious things. The Electric Power Research Institute, a government- industry funded research organization, worked with the U.S. government on a three year study on the effects of nuclear EMP on the bulk power system. It just so happened by divine providence on the day that they produced and published that report, it happened to be the second summit of the U.S. Air Force Electromagnetic Defense Task Force. I took the world’s foremost experts and put them all in a room and handed them copies of that report, and they started to go through it. The report that they produced, which your viewers can find online at Over The Horizons Magazine, pointed out just how dangerously erroneous this study was. I’ll give you one data point because we just talked about the 2003 blackout. That 2003 blackout was caused by a single point of failure—a tree branch in Ohio. When you look at the industry-funded, government approved study by the Electric Power Research Institute on the effects of high altitude EMP on the bulk power system, the table showed the projections of the amount of electricity that we would lose in this eastern interconnection. The eastern grid where we are here in Washington DC, they projected we would lose only about 40 percent of the electrical load that we lost in August, 2003 with the great northeast blackout caused by a single tree branch, one single point of failure. Where a high altitude nuclear blast would create thousands of simultaneous points of failure. That one data point will give you an idea of the industry funded studies that inform the government approved regulations that are supposed to protect our grid. Mr. Jekielek: The viewers of this program are no strangers to the concept of regulatory capture and this type of reporting that you’re just describing. They might think to themselves, “So, where is the hope? How can we change these large bodies that are determined to be doing things in this highly problematic way?” Mr. Waller: The hope really comes from the bottom up, honestly. We’ve seen, again in Texas, some steps have been taken. Right now, there’s actually legislation in Texas authored by a state Senator Bob Hall that would create a commission at the state level that would analyze all these threats and decide for the state how it would address those threats, as opposed to just depending on the federal government. There’s no reason why states can’t do that around the country. Obviously there’s an interconnected nature, but it doesn’t prohibit them from doing it bottom up. We see a pilot project in San Antonio, Texas. One of the most valuable things that came out of that Air Force Electromagnetic Defense task force was a pilot project in San Antonio. In fact at the first summit, it was a classified briefing at the time, and all the results have now been unclassified. They had to have one individual cover the final briefing of all these generals and admirals and the former CIA director. They said, “We think it should be the Marine.” I was the only marine there. It just so happened from this civilian job that I have, that I had an expertise in this area. I knew for years that all the experts said, “If we could just get one pilot project started somewhere in the country that can write the playbook for this and inspire the action, that’s what we need to do.” I put that in the briefing and all these people shook their heads and said, “Yes, we need to do that.” Right now in the town of San Antonio, you have the military base in San Antonio, and you have the surrounding civilian community who are working together to apply the knowhow to protect against electromagnetic spectrum threats like EMP, not just the infrastructure for the base, but the surrounding critical infrastructure. That is a hopeful story that needs to be translated to the rest of the country. It can be, if we have enough people who get behind this. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish? Mr. Waller: No, just that we’re running out of time. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry was the chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, and he passed away late last year. That’s what he said, “We know how to fix this.” He was worried about whether we had enough time. One of the things that he shared with me is that once we grasp the gravity of this vulnerability, we need to be better prepared. Think about the citizens of Moore County, North Carolina, that was a no-notice outage. That physical attack, the rifle fire on those substations turned the lights off immediately. There was no weather report saying a hurricane was coming. We need to be better prepared to be able to live without electricity for as long as we can. As you learn about this, it makes you think differently about how to be prepared. Some think, “Oh my gosh.” Dr. Pry said, “It makes you want to run to the frontier,” so to speak. What Peter Pry said was that we need to follow the example of the founders of this country. They had an infinite frontier to run to. Instead, they turned and they fought tyranny and they won. Yes, we should be prepared, but we need to fight the tyranny of inaction by getting involved, the same way that our founders fought the tyranny of their day. That’s what’s such a blessing now about having the film, “Grid Down, Power Up,” and a website, griddownpowerup.com, with the Participate tab that gives every American the opportunity to do just that. Mr. Jekielek: Tommy Waller, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Waller: It’s been an honor. Thank you, sir. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Tommy Waller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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“What we found is [that] the whole representation of what is happening is a lie … The U.S. government is representing to the public that this is a health event and the response to a health event. But in fact, … this is a military operation.” In this episode, I sit down with former pharmaceutical executive Sasha Latypova. She emerged from retirement during the COVID-19 pandemic to become a whistleblower after she observed the government and vaccine manufacturers veering away from established clinical research and public health protocols. “The total volume of adverse events and deaths was tens of times higher than [for] all the previous vaccine products combined,” says Latypova, referring to public data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. “We have all kinds of levels of protections—consumer protections—that should be triggered with this picture long before this extent of injury has occurred. Yet none of them were triggered,” says Latypova. We discuss variability in different vaccine lots, and how the U.S. federal government militarized public health and weaponized gene therapy in its deployment of the COVID-19 genetic vaccine. “The government was able to commandeer pharmaceutical companies to produce these non-compliant injectable products and distribute them,” says Latypova. “If you catch an official—a professional—lying about something straight to the public, what else are they lying about?” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/exposing-the-vaccine-military-machinery-behind-the-global-covid-19-response-sasha-latypova_5335644.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Sasha Latypova, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Sasha Latypova: Hi, Jan. Thank you very much for inviting me. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve been watching you talk about some very troubling things over the past months. You’ve become a whistleblower in the realm of Covid genetic vaccine manufacturing. What did you see that made you start wondering about a problem happening? Ms. Latypova: I became aware of this strangeness with the whole Covid pandemic response very early on, because I worked in the pharmaceutical industry and I had retired before Covid started. I sold my companies and I was enjoying a great life and spending time with my family and doing hobbies and traveling. But when Covid started, I was initially concerned like everyone was. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know about the illness. But I became suspicious when the health authorities started an overt campaign against hydroxychloroquine, which I knew was a safe drug because I’m from the industry, and I had familiarity with it. I looked specifically into the issue that they were falsely assigning to it, which is QT prolongation and arrhythmias associated with drug-induced QT prolongation. It happened to be the area of focus of the last company that I had and worked with in pharma. I knew what they were saying about this drug was absolutely not true. More importantly, the regulators knew perfectly well that they were saying things that were not true. That immediately gave me pause. I started thinking, “They’re professionals, they know this issue, they know this data, yet they’re saying things that are not true.” That led me to start questioning the whole thing. If you catch an official or a professional lying about something straight to the public, what else are they lying about? That started my whole investigation into it. Also, I was a little bit familiar, not very deeply, but I did come across this mRNA class in the past, in my professional work when these products were in development for other different things, very severe conditions such as cancer. I knew that these products were inherently dangerous, which is not unusual in pharmaceutical research and development. We frequently work on things that are risky and can be toxic, such as chemoagents. But there is application for all sorts of things and the risk-benefit profile is always a consideration. I knew that these products were inherently dangerous and inherently toxic. They were developed as a cancer product in the past. Yet, all of a sudden, our regulators were all gung-ho saying, “These are going to be prophylactic vaccines. They’re going to be given to children, pregnant women, and everyone, regardless of their health status, age, or risk profile with regard to Covid.” That gave me yet another pause. I became extremely suspicious about this whole situation, and that’s how I started looking into it. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me a little bit about your background. You said you sold your company. What exactly were you doing and how did you get into it? Ms. Latypova: I’m originally from Ukraine. I grew up in the Soviet Union. While I was still in Ukraine, I worked in industries that contracted for health and IT. I also did a bunch of international translations of documentation and negotiations of companies that are coming into the market right after the Soviet Union collapsed. I had some familiarity with the topic. I came to study in the United States for my business degree, and for my graduate degree. I went to work for the pharmaceutical industry right from the start. I worked in various capacities and eventually started several businesses that I co-founded, and they were all successful. The last one, as I said, was actually focused on cardiovascular safety testing in pharmaceutical research and development, looking at electrocardiograms, and looking at QT prolongation, the issue that they were falsely assigning to hydroxychloroquine. That work is called contract research organization, which is a very broad term. There are a variety of contractors. Just think of if you want to build a very large and very complicated house, how many contractors you’re going to hire. It’s kind of like that. We are involved in a variety of different specialty tasks. A variety of companies are working toward fulfilling these projects and clinical trials. That was my work. Ultimately, the companies were successful. I sold the last one, and I didn’t need to work anymore, so I was just having a good time. Mr. Jekielek: You were involved deeply in clinical trials, that’s what I want to establish. Ms. Latypova: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: From many different angles? Ms. Latypova: The last one was cardiovascular safety testing in humans. Previous ones dealt with oncology, imaging, studies, and arthritis. I actually worked in all therapeutic areas. My clients were a variety of pharma companies, large ones and small ones, Pfizer included. Pfizer was also our research and development partner. We were developing technologies that they were interested in, applying it to their clinical trial space to make it more precise data collection, more accurate, and more reliable. We partnered with Pfizer several times. We worked with large companies; GSK, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and a variety of small biotechs. I was very familiar with the space. Mr. Jekielek: What about the manufacturing side of things? For most of us, this is a black box. You just assume it’s done and it’s done right. Ms. Latypova: Exactly. That’s a very big issue that people often don’t appreciate. The whole FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] regulation actually hinges on good manufacturing practice regulations. All they’re regulating is the compliance of the manufacturers with what the manufacturer claims about their product, and that what they claim on the label needs to be true, and needs to be reproducible in every pill, every bottle, every vial, and everything that the manufacturer ships. In the United States and worldwide, and especially in developed countries, we have laws that are similar. In the United States, it’s called good manufacturing practices. It’s an extensive set of laws. It governs everything; the raw materials, the impurities, the potency, and the contaminants. It’s an extremely complicated structure that every participant of this industry has to comply with parts of or entirely. If you are selling a drug in the United States, then you’re responsible for your own compliance with all of it, including the compliance of all your vendors with all of it. I had to comply with parts of this as a contractor that was performing work for Pfizer. We knew how difficult, how extensive, and how tight everything is regulated. That’s what people don’t really understand. The majority of the entire industry is engaged in some ways in compliance with these rules. That’s extremely important to know, and it’s extremely important to follow. You have to prove that the product has certain ingredients and certain quantities. Again, they’re present in every single dose of the product. That’s why I was always focused on this, because I knew how important it was. Mr. Jekielek: You started digging around, and you noticed that things weren’t quite what they seemed to be. Where did you start looking? Where did you start finding problems? Ms. Latypova: In addition to looking at what was happening with hydroxychloroquine, I became suspicious once the mRNA products started coming on the market. Obviously, there were a lot of reports of adverse events and deaths, which I was expecting. As I said, I knew this product was inherently dangerous. I knew there were going to be a lot of problems. There is the VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] database. The CDC maintains the VAERS database, and there are some others. There’s Yellow Card in the UK, and EudraVigilance in Europe and all kinds of other databases. They all started showing huge numbers of adverse events and deaths right away. The government was denying that those were associated, denying that they were happening, and they continue denying to this day. Mr. Jekielek: I want to discuss VAERS briefly because I had never heard of it until the pandemic. The way the general public was taught about Vaers early on was that it was a poor system that shouldn’t really be trusted, because it’s just self-reporting. I was shocked to learn that’s not how it was considered in the past. Ms. Latypova: No. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about that. Ms. Latypova: This is very interesting because depending on when you ask CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] officials about VAERS, it’s either an amazing bulletproof system that is so reliable, that always maintains this wonderful data set for them to monitor safety, or it’s completely poor and unreliable and usually the reports are made up. It just depends on how they want to answer the question. Historically, before Covid and before it got so contentious, it was considered a fairly reliable database. It’s actually a very important database. They’re saying, “It’s not definitive if a report shows up for something that was caused by this product.” But even on their website it says it’s an important early warning system to identify unusual data patterns. That’s how I was using it. I was using it exactly for that purpose. I wanted to look at the data pattern that was coming across. The first immediate finding was that the total volume of adverse events and deaths was 10 times and more higher than all the previous vaccine products combined. The database is very old, and I think it started in the nineties. It has reports for about 100 different vaccine products from hundreds of manufacturers. You have a very rich data set, and you see that historically, the level is here. Then, 2021 comes along and it’s like this. Of course, it’s a signal, and it’s undeniable. There’s a signal, it’s a pattern, and it needs to be investigated. But no investigation ever happened. Mr. Jekielek: We heard that they couldn’t find a signal. I’ve interviewed a number of people who have spoken directly with the FDA and HHS [U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services] and they said, “We’re just not seeing any signal here.” Ms. Latypova: And that was a signal for me, them not seeing the signal. Because if you have government officials staring at a very loud signal and telling you there is no signal, that’s a signal in itself. That was a big question for a long time, I could not understand how they were able to do this, how they were able to deny reality with a straight face, and nothing would happen. Nobody would be in trouble or investigated or prosecuted while we have the very loud and clear signal of huge injury and deaths occurring to Americans, including children and pregnant women. That was a big, big problem, and a big question for me. I couldn’t answer it then, but I can now. Mr. Jekielek: What did you decide to do? Ms. Latypova: I wanted to investigate data for myself first. I wanted to look specifically because I have experience in pharma manufacturing and good manufacturing practice compliance. I looked at the data, not just at the total number of adverse events and deaths, but also the patterns of the data across manufacturing lots or in batches. All pharmaceutical products are manufactured in lots or batches. The lots are numbered, and you can look at them. If you go to the pharmacy and buy Advil, you can look at the box, and it has a lot number. Those are the lot numbers that can be recorded in VAERS reports, when people submit the reports. They’re not always there because people who are submitting the reports; patients, their relatives, pharmacists, doctors, healthcare professionals, or nurses, they don’t always have that information. You may not remember what the batch number was that you were injected with. You don’t have your card with you or the physician doesn’t know. In about 50 percent of the reports, those numbers are there. I was able to match those lot numbers with the CDC lot numbers. I have a list of them. I was able to see that not only were the adverse events high, but the variability of them by batch was absolutely extreme. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain variability. Ms. Latypova: The variability, meaning how many total reports are submitted for a particular batch number. Some batch numbers had two or three reports and some had 5,000 to 6,000. That should never happen, and you should never see that. Think about it, if you’re buying Advil today and you’re buying it a month from now, your experience a month from now shouldn’t be 1,000 percent different, because that’s really dangerous. Even if you think Advil is safe medication or aspirin is a safe medication, or even if you buy an orange juice and your experience today and a week from now is 1,000 percent different, that’s going to be very dangerous. Just one of those instances is very dangerous. When you see a variability like this between batches of what is supposed to be consistently produced, and good manufacturing practice compliant, it means that the product is not good manufacturing practice compliant. As a comparator, I didn’t have a baseline for this and I didn’t have information on the batch sizes at the time. I do now, and this story doesn’t change, but at the time I didn’t. I thought I should compare it to something known, and something known was flu vaccines. I extracted all the data for flu vaccines from VAERS. I looked at how flu vaccine data looks from batch to batch over a long period of time. By the way, there are a variety of producers making different size batches. Historically, there are dozens of manufacturers of flu vaccines, and different sizes of batches. For flu vaccines, it looks as expected for a good manufacturing practice compliant product, which is straight line, very close to zero, all the batches line up, and there is very, very little variability, just a tiny bit. When you compare them to these Covid shots, you can’t even put them on the same graph. The flu vaccine data disappears because the Covid shots’ variability is absolutely huge. At that time, which was toward the fall of 2021, I knew for sure they were not good manufacturing practice compliant. So, we have a not good manufacturing practice compliant product being produced, shipped in millions of doses, and injected in millions of people, including pregnant women and children. We have the CDC and FDA lying and saying, “There is no signal at all,” and this continues for a long time. Eventually, I ran across research by my current collaborator, Catherine Watt. She’s done an incredible legal analysis of what set of laws the government and the healthcare agencies are utilizing to enable this subversion of the good manufacturing practice compliance laws, and being able to deny that there is any injury, any deaths, or any problem occurring with these products for a long time. This continues to date. What we found is the whole representation of what is happening is a lie. Basically, the U.S. government is representing to the public that this is a health event and the response to a health event. But in fact, what they are doing is a military operation. These so-called vaccines, they’re not really vaccines, but these injections have been manufactured under defense contracts, utilizing the Defense Production Act, other transaction authority, and emergency use authorization under a public health emergency. When these things are used together, then good manufacturing practices do not apply to these products at all. Mr. Jekielek: Even legally? Ms. Latypova: Even legally, yes. There’s a law on the books, 21-USC-360bbb, that says, “Emergency use authorized countermeasures under public health emergency cannot constitute clinical investigation.” Clinical investigation is actually not possible for these countermeasures. If clinical investigation is not possible, then you cannot have clinical trials, you cannot have informed consent, you cannot have clinical trial subjects, or clinical trial investigators. Utilizing the structure of emergency use authorization, public health emergency, other transaction authority, and the Defense Production Act, the government was able to commandeer pharmaceutical companies to produce these non-compliant injectable products and distribute them, calling them a medicine, when in fact, it’s not a medicine. It’s an act of war. They’re using the Defense Production Act, its machinery, and the United States military. Even internationally, this is being distributed from this military to overseas militaries, not through the pharmaceutical distribution chain. They’re using the military machinery to distribute these non-compliant products, including biologicals, chemicals, and all kinds of ingredients we don’t really understand very well, and then, call it public health and medicine. Mr. Jekielek: First of all, this sounds so fantastic, what you just said. One thing I know for sure that is not crazy, which is the fact that it is the military that did the distribution. That’s official. That’s public knowledge, and that was announced. I know people who were responsible for the distribution and they’re very proud of doing the distribution, because they felt it was the only structure in society able to deploy this fast enough. I have that on record now. But what about these other parts? This is actually the U.S. government contracting these pharma companies to develop a countermeasure against what? Ms. Latypova: Countermeasure is a very important legal term, and I advise people to look it up. Countermeasure Is a very fuzzy term, first of all. Anything can be a countermeasure. A lock on the door is a countermeasure against the break-in. Calling something a countermeasure, you have already removed the precision of the legal definitions of a pharmaceutical, for example. But we already know it’s not a pharmaceutical. What I am saying is not a conspiracy theory, definitely not, because the law that I just described is 21-USC-360bbb. It’s cited by everyone, including the FDA in their documents, the manufacturers in their documents, and by GAO [U.S. Government Accountability Office] reports that discussed this. Recently, as you may know, Brook Jackson’s False Claims Act case was dismissed. You can read the dismissal of this case. The judge agrees with what I just said. He agreed with the fact that Pfizer wasn’t supposed to be compliant with good manufacturing practices per contract with the Department of Defense [DOD], that they were producing countermeasures, and that they were producing a large-scale manufacturing demonstration, which is how these things were ordered from the government. He essentially describes this in a more sophisticated hundred page document. Mr. Jekielek: Based on the contract. Ms. Latypova: Based on the contract that Pfizer produced. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Ms. Latypova: Pfizer produced their DOD contract, and since then, hundreds of Department of Defense contracts for Covid countermeasures were released through FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], although they’re partially redacted. I read a lot of them and they’re all online. I read the Pfizer/Moderna ones and some other vaccines, and they’re all essentially similar. They’re utilizing the structure of ordering countermeasures, ordering prototypes, with the Department of Defense ordering them from the pharmaceutical manufacturers under Defense Production Act, and under other transaction authority. Good manufacturing practices are not part of it at all. This product, by statute, and by contract with the Department of Defense, does not need to be compliant with good manufacturing practices. Another additional part of this whole scheme is the public health emergency announcement. When a public health emergency happens, essentially the executive branch of the government absorbs the power from legislative and judicial. A public health emergency, by various legal amendments and acts over a long period of time, triggers this whole system where the HHS secretary becomes a de facto dictator. The HHS secretary is the sole person who can deploy these products in the United States. The FDA need not be part of it. In the law, it says that HHS secretary, whoever that happens to be, it used to be Alex Azer under Trump, and now it’s Xavier Becerra. They can determine whether these countermeasures can be deployed in the United States based on available data, if available, it does not have to be available, and based on his own determination about the current risk-benefit profile and future risk-benefit profile. Again, he can take advice from whoever he wants to take advice, but the decision is up to him. Mr. Jekielek: That’s very interesting because it’s also counterintuitive. If it’s a DOD operation, why is the HHS secretary responsible for the deployment? Ms. Latypova: In the structure of a public health emergency, it’s a militarized structure, and they merge and it’s all the executive branch. HHS and DOD become one organization, and they also wrap FDA into it. Mr. Jekielek: In terms of this operation? Ms. Latypova: In terms of this operation, yes. The public health emergency becomes that trigger for invoking all these military-type of laws saying that now they’re one organization. There are also inter-agency agreements that go into this, where they determine confidentiality, and determine how they’re going to make these countermeasures. The HHS secretary deploys them, and the DOD orders them. They get funding through the DOD, and through BARDA, which is an HHS agency. They’re all intertwined. Then, FDA rubber stamps everything and pretends that they’re regulating these things, but they’re not. They’re impersonating regulators basically, because there’s nothing in the law that says that FDA regulates countermeasures. They don’t. Mr. Jekielek: But you would think someone would want to know. I’ve had a number of people on this show who have had pretty serious vaccine injuries. The fallout from this scheme is that the idea that these people could be harmed is denied by society and certainly denied by the authorities. There are admissions in the NIH [National Institutes of Health], but it’s rare. Mostly they say there’s no signal. Most people are diagnosed with anxiety and things like that. This seems to be linked to this idea that this is not a health response. I don’t know what your thoughts are on this. Ms. Latypova: I understand why the government denies it, clearly. I still can’t wrap my head around denial of this happening by regular physicians. I know that there is a monetary structure that incentivizes this behavior. There’s definitely payments from Medicare and Medicaid to the doctors to vaccinate, and bonuses for numbers of vaccination they administered. There are especially high bonuses to vaccinate somebody who hasn’t been vaccinated. There’s a high price on the heads of people who haven’t been vaccinated to get the injections in and to get boosters. There’s a huge monetary incentive there. Essentially, the government extended its sovereign liability protection to everyone who complies with this system. Throughout this whole structure of producing these injections, distributing them, injecting them, then denying the injury, there’s not only a huge monetary compensation and incentive, but also liability protection through the PREP Act [Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act]. That’s also explicit in the DOD contracts with vaccine manufacturers. Not just vaccines, it actually goes with the entire Covid countermeasures production, which includes vaccines, therapeutics, monoclonal antibodies, blood products, diagnostics, masks, swabs, and even staffing and things of that nature. All of them have the PREP Act Liability Exemption Clause, which describes that if you are in compliance with all of this, then you are treated as a covered person under this act, and you are exempt from liability if you follow the orders. The last sentence of that clause says, “This is both civil and military application. This product is both civil and military application.” By the way, the contracts are redacted with most common redactions. There are two redactions, B6 and B4. B6 has to do with if we reveal this information, it will hurt U.S. foreign policy or U.S. foreign relations. And B4, if we reveal this information, we are revealing information about state of the art technology in the U.S. weapons system. I’d like somebody to answer this. I’m just listing a set of facts. You can make your own conclusions, but I’d like somebody to answer this question, “Why and what is being put in these injections? What are people being injected with?” Because we know there’s huge amounts of deaths and injuries, but we can’t address those injuries until we know what they were injected with. We still don’t know that. Mr. Jekielek: Ostensibly it’s synthetic mRNA, and a lipid nanoparticle envelope that activates production of synthetic spike in the body to create an immune response. It definitely does that, but there’s more to it. That’s what you’re saying, there’s more to it than that. Ms. Latypova: That’s what is claimed. What you just said is claimed on the label of the product. But as I’ve described before, we know for sure they’re not good manufacturing practice compliant, which means they can’t verify to themselves that is what they’re making. They’re probably making that in some instances, but there’s also a whole bunch of other effects and varieties. By the way, if the product is not good manufacturing practice compliant, it’s open to adulteration and falsification, whether on purpose or by accident. We have now this whole bunch of unknowns happening. Mr. Jekielek: I remember the hearing where Dr. Renata Moon opened up the mRNA vaccine insert, which Bobby Kennedy Jr. says is, “The one place where the vaccine companies tell the truth.” She opens it up and it reads, “Intentionally blank.” Dr. Renata Moon: I unsealed the box that the entire thing came in, and then I pulled this out and this is what it looks like. I’d like to show this to you. Sorry about that. It’s blank on both sides. Dr. David Gortler: Boom, there. Dr. Renata Moon: It says intentionally blank on it. Dr. David Gortler: That’s the data that pharmacists and physicians are basing on giving the injections outside of mainstream media recommendations. There it is right there. Here’s a good question. Why didn’t they just print that on a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp? Why all the theater of folding it up into a great big piece of paper like that? Why? Senator Ron Johnson: That’s what is passing for informed consent. Dr. Renata Moon: So how am I to get informed consent to parents when this is what I have. I have a government that’s telling me that I have to stay safe and effective, and if I don’t my license is a threat. How am I to give informed consent to patients? We’re seeing an uptick in myocarditis. We’re seeing an uptick in adverse reactions. We have trusted these regulatory agencies, I have, for my entire career up until now. Something is extremely wrong. Mr. Jekielek: To your point, you also have talked about the variation between the batches, which by some interpretations might almost look deliberate. I found that to be very strange. Ms. Latypova: Yes. This was one of the findings pretty early on when I was looking at the various data and looking at the variability of adverse events and deaths per batch number. In addition to seeing huge adverse events and death rates overall, we saw huge variability batch to batch. But that variability was also not random, meaning that it’s not just they don’t control their process and they’re producing random outputs. There’s some sort of a design going on as far as what’s in those vials in different batches. For example, we saw clusterings by alphanumeric codes, both in Pfizer, and Moderna. Depending on the letters used in the alphanumeric numbering, which should be just random, it should be just some sort of a manufacturing scheme to keep track of things. But depending on the letters, we knew that this set of letters would produce higher toxicity and this set of letters would produce lower toxicity. That should never happen. We also had clusterings by dates of manufacture, and this should also not happen. You should not have a difference between the product produced on the first of the month, or on the 30th of the month. Another colleague of mine from Denmark was recently published in the peer reviewed journal, the European Journal of Clinical Investigations. He published this data he had obtained from the Danish government. Denmark was Pfizer exclusive. They got all the batch numbers for Pfizer and the adverse event data, and he was able to find three different patterns of toxicity, and they’re cleanly separated from each other. Again, we have variability of toxicity. It also aligns in three patterns and there’s nothing in between, meaning that this is not actually random by design. By design, they have three different levels, high, medium, and low. The fourth one means something as apparent as placebo, because those people who were injected and don’t submit any reports, they don’t have any adverse events. We have at least four different levels of toxicity detected in the data from adverse events. Again, this should not happen. This should be explained. There should be an investigation. Once you see some variability of data like this, this huge variability of the clusterings of data by various parameters, there are numerous different safety protocols that should be triggered at the manufacturer. Manufacturers themselves should detect it. Manufacturers should recall these products, should stop the production lines, and start investigations. That’s what they normally do. If the manufacturer is not doing anything about it, then the FDA has all sorts of enforcement powers. They can also force recall, and force investigations. We have all kinds of levels of consumer protections that should be triggered with this picture long before this extent of injury has occurred, yet none of them were triggered. None of them worked. All of them fell apart simultaneously and that kills me. I feel like I’ve been screaming for the last two years in an empty space and nobody’s paying attention to this. Mr. Jekielek: Have you experienced any blow back? Ms. Latypova: I tried to post this on a more mainstream social media sites, and it was immediately banned and canceled everywhere. I still can’t get my Twitter account back. I can use it on my laptop, but I cannot have it on my phone. Instagram deleted my art website. It was 100 percent dedicated to art, and it had nothing to do with this. Yet they banned it, and I can never get Instagram back. But other than social media censorship, no, not really. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been in the middle of the biopharmaceutical industrial complex, as some people call it. You’re aware of its size and power. Did you think twice about disclosing these things as you started? Ms. Latypova: I don’t worry about it. Yes, I know they’re powerful. If they wanted to kill me, they would kill me, but that doesn’t concern me. Because the evil that has unfolded in the last two-and-a-half to three years is unfathomable to most people. Most people prefer to deny it, rather than to deal with it. I don’t want to deny it. I want people to have the knowledge that I do from my professional background and I want them to understand what’s going on so that people can stop. In fact, we have been successful so far, because the uptake of these shots now is practically zero. There’s a huge distrust of the pharmaceutical industry, and of the health authorities. People are questioning it. By spillover they’re questioning the childhood vaccination schedule, which is a great development. They should question it, because the people who are able to do this with these shots, where else are they lying? What else is going on? You have to question all of this. Appropriately, people are becoming very skeptical, very concerned, and very protective of their children. It’s a great development. As far as justice and investigations and the reform that should come, I hope it will, but that’s going to take a long time. At this moment, everyone should understand what happened, understand the truth, and stop taking these injections. Mr. Jekielek: Do you have a theory about what happened? Ms. Latypova: It’s pretty speculative to answer this question to the many people who are asking me why. I can’t get in the heads of the criminals. I can just tell you that this is what they’re doing. I have the backup to everything that I just said in terms of facts, in terms of the laws that are being utilized, in terms of the noncompliance that’s evident, the injury, the deaths, it all ties together. I can show you how they pre-planned this. Why are they doing it? We have to ask them. We have to put them on the stand and have them explain it. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve been hearing about this accelerated research in applying mRNA vaccine technology to livestock. People are concerned that this will be something that will enter the food supply. What are the ramifications? We don’t know. Hearing everything you just said, it adds an extra serious twist. If all this was created without the proper regulatory oversight, going far beyond the basic concept of EUA [Emergency Use Authorization], how has this triggered accelerated research into the deployment of such products for livestock? Ms. Latypova: That’s a great question. It’s not research, it’s just deployment. Have you seen the speed with which they just said, “Now, we’re going to put it into the food supply.” Recently, the bivalent boosters were approved based on eight mice. You don’t need any other conspiracy theories to come through to just understand this. If I told you five years ago that there’s going to be an injected product forced on every man, woman, and child in the United States, which was approved based on eight mice data, would you think that I’m nuts? Yes, and I would think that I’m nuts at that time. But this is the reality, and this is what happened. Then, just by diktat, they decide, “We’re going to inject old cattle with this stuff.” There were no studies, and nothing was tested. They tested it on mice, but they’re going to put it in cows? Mr. Jekielek: I don’t actually know the state of deployment, but maybe you can explain that to me. Ms. Latypova: They’re basically putting a bunch of money in front of cattlemen associations and agricultural associations, and they’re saying, “Now, we are going to either convert the previous cattle vaccines or just use new mRNA shots for cattle.” For what reason? What is the emergency with cattle? Is there a pandemic of cows of some sort that we haven’t heard of? Why all of a sudden they need to be injected with mRNA? Somebody needs to answer that. I don’t know the answer to this. Mr. Jekielek: This has begun, or it’s planned? Ms. Latypova: Yes. There have been news reports that at least some of the cattlemen associations are going to be forcing this on the participants. Mr. Jekielek: On their membership. Ms. Latypova: Membership, yes. This is going to be regulated that the cattle vaccines are now supposed to be mRNA for some reason. And also they’re going to convert traditional vaccines for humans, traditional childhood vaccines, and vaccines like flu, and RSV, and some other indications, and also convert them into mRNA. That’s published in peer review journals, ‘We’re working on these Covid vaccines, and next, we’re converting all these vaccines into mRNA platforms.’ Mr. Jekielek: Is it just a mania? Is it a mania because everyone thinks they were so safe and effective? There was this huge information blitz about safe and effective. They said, “You’re going to kill grandma if you don’t take it.” There are many, many pieces of messaging, with billions of dollars spent on it. People have just become obsessed with this technology because we’ve been told it was so great and the panacea. Ms. Latypova: Yes, it’s a great money maker for certain people, obviously. A lot of money has been thrown at it by the government. With the government also come the private investors, because they frequently co-invest. There are various types of investors, including private and public funds. They see this spigot of money that opened in this direction and of course, they all follow because it was such a great bonanza. That creates a lot of financial momentum behind this. Technically, they’re claiming it’s much easier to make these vaccines because it’s by chemical reaction. You don’t have to grow any cultures and so forth, so they’re claiming it’s also technically easier to manufacture. I have not seen any benefit from them, I only see injury. Mr. Jekielek: By all accounts, these are actually failed products. It’s surprising that this technology would be deployed broadly in many areas or even the interest for it to be deployed broadly. Ms. Latypova: Yes. They’re not only failed, they’re also dual-use. This technology has always been designated dual-use, meaning civil and military, just as they’re stating in the PREP Act clause. It’s been designated dual-use technology since at least the nineties. Its current use is indistinguishable from its weaponized use, because as a consumer or even as a manufacturer, it’s very hard to ensure that that code that you’re coding is actually the correct code, the mRNA code in the vial. Mr. Jekielek: I see, right. Ms. Latypova: It’s very easy to subvert it, to change it, to introduce other codes, and to introduce other nefarious pieces of code into it. If you don’t know what was introduced, you don’t have an assay to test for it. It’s completely open to adulteration and falsification. Correct, the technology has been in development since the nineties, but no products have come to the market out of it. There have been no successful medical products because of all these problems I’ve described. With the manufacturability of it, you can’t really make it consistently in good manufacturing practice compliant. It’s wide open to these falsifications and the weaponization type of approach. It’s also documented in a lot of literature, including NIH textbooks and military reports on bioweapons technology. This phenomenon is very well documented. The use of it is indistinguishable between the supposedly medicinal use that has never been demonstrated, and the weaponized use that has been demonstrated. That whole obsession with this technology seems extremely problematic and very questionable. Somebody has to explain how you distinguish between weaponization use of this technology and what you claim is beneficial medicinal use. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, that’s a great question. I just want to clarify. When you’re talking about the code, you’re basically saying that the mRNA that goes into that technology that is then delivered the way that the mRNA vaccines were delivered, that code is subject to change. You can introduce some other mRNA, and you wouldn’t even know to test for it if you didn’t know what was put in there. Ms. Latypova: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Since the whole system is a black box, it’s very hard to actually track and assay for it. Ms. Latypova: Yes, assay for it, and verify it. In fact, it’s been allowed by the regulators. Another thing I haven’t discussed yet, I think you’ve covered in your publication. At the end of 2020, there was a leak from the European Medicines Agency, and a bunch of Pfizer manufacturing documents were released at the time of the approval, and a bunch of emails between EMA staffers that were discussing this. In these documents, it was clear that at the end of 2020, the European Medicines agency deemed Pfizer as not good manufacturing practice compliant. It was the number one objection from the regulators for their approval. And two, they found this issue of mRNA breaking down and creating broken pieces of mRNA code. At the time, Pfizer told them that the standard for approval should be 50 percent of mRNA should be consistent with the declared code, and the regulators went along with it. The product was approved in Europe within weeks of this discussion. So, 50% of a mRNA should be consistent with the code that they declare for BNT162b2, and then the other 50% is unknown. Mr. Jekielek: Right, they lowered the standard. Ms. Latypova: They arbitrarily lowered the standard for themselves. Somehow, regulators miraculously agreed with that nonsense. That means that 50 percent is undeclared, and 50 percent can be practically any sequence. It could be any designer sequence you can make. If you made a designer sequence and didn’t tell anybody what it is, how are you going to make an assay to test for it? You can’t. Mr. Jekielek: Right. It just looks like another band. Ms. Latypova: It just looks like another band. It just looks like a piece of mRNA. We don’t know what it codes for, but you can introduce all sorts of different things into it, and that’s how you weaponize it. Actually, that’s described as a weaponization technique for gene therapies in an NIH book that was published. There’s a whole chapter on this. There’s a textbook online that was published in 2018, and that’s exactly how it is described. That’s exactly what they put into the approval, and that’s what went on the market. Please, let’s discuss this openly. Somebody has to explain to us how they are determining that these vials are not the weaponized use, but the medicinal use. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish? Ms. Latypova: Thank you for inviting me and for the great conversation. My wish is for this information to be discussed and shared. Challenge it please, and prove me wrong. Look at these documents, and prove me wrong. But more importantly, I would like some open, public investigations to start. How can we answer these questions? Because this information will help people who are vaccine injured. Because if we answer these questions, we will know what they were injured by. Mr. Jekielek: Sasha Latypova, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Latypova: Thank you very much. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Sasha Latypova and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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Birth rates have fallen all over the world “ominously,” said Dr. James Thorp, a practicing obstetrician gynecologist who specializes in high-risk pregnancies. This trend has been observed in the European Union using government data portals. Countries like the UK have seen a deficit of nearly 5,000 births per month in the first two quarters of 2022 compared to previous years. This downward trend started after COVID-19 vaccination. So how have things fared in the United States? There are mixed signals. According to newly released CDC data, last year the United States was about a total of 3,000 babies short compared to 2021. The lead author of the report said this is a very small change, so officials are treating it as a normal indicator of the overall declining birth rate trend. Since 2014, birth rates have been declining by 2 percent every year. Despite that, there is something concerning happening on the ground that is affecting a portion of pregnant women. At the end of last year, a nurse whistleblower released a letter from a hospital in Fresno, California. The letter described how the hospital was seeing an unprecedented rise in monthly stillbirths. Their rate was around 22 stillbirths and creeping higher. Thorp says that in the years prior to COVID-19 vaccination, the stillbirth rate was around 5.8. “This is a 40-fold standard deviation surge in stillbirths that occurred only after the rollout of the vaccine,” said Thorp. So what could be driving this? Thorp said that the greatest risk to a pregnant woman is inflammation. “To my understanding and my clinical experience, the most inflammatory agent ever introduced in medicine is the COVID-19 vaccines,” said Thorp. Meanwhile, Dr. John Littell, a family physician from Florida who specializes in managing pregnancies, suspects that COVID-19 vaccines may be causing micro-clotting in the placenta. “You just have to do whatever you can to prevent these small blood clots and to optimize the flow to the developing baby,” said Littell. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is still strongly recommending bivalent boosters “as soon as possible to maximize maternal and fetal health.” Join Dr. Thorp and Dr. Littell on Frontline Health as they talk about concrete strategies pregnant women can take to protect themselves and their babies from the risks of COVID-19 vaccines. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/birth-rates-are-dropping-worldwide-post-covid-19-vaccination-heres-what-women-can-do_5318271.html 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-treating 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

On June 8, former President Donald Trump said he’d been informed by his attorneys that he had been indicted by special counsel Jack Smith as part of the investigation into his handling of classified documents. It’s the two-tier system of justice playing out yet again, argues Kash Patel, from Russiagate to impeachment No. 1 to impeachment No. 2 to the weaponization of the Jan. 6 committee to the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. What does all this mean for America? Kash Patel and Jan Jekielek sit down for a live show of Kash’s Corner in Prescott, Arizona. Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kashs-corner-live-trump-indictment-two-tier-system-of-justice-and-what-this-means-for-america_5322644.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Kash Patel: Hey everybody and welcome to a very special episode of Kash’s Corner live from Prescott, Arizona, at our dear friends home, the Borlands. Thank you so much for having us. We have a live audience here, and we’re streaming live right now. We’re going to replay at the regular time, 8:00 PM EST. Right now, we’re going to take questions from our audience. Jan, we need some mega-sized news for this mega-sized episode of Kash’s Corner. Do you have any? Jan Jekielek: Not two hours ago the Trump indictment was unsealed, throwing a wrench into our plans for this episode to some extent. But at the same time, it’s an amazing opportunity to get some Kash thoughts, hot off the presses. Looking at this indictment, Kash, we’ve got 37 counts in this federal indictment. We’ve got 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information. We seem to have a recording of President Trump talking about some documents or secrets that he knows and trying to hide them. It looks pretty scary to a lot of people. What’s your reaction to this? Mr. Patel: Jan, I spent time as a Federal prosecutor, a national security prosecutor, and also as a Federal public defender in the district of Miami down south. An indictment that every judge will read out at the beginning of every single criminal case is not evidence of anything. It is a charging document, and it is a one-way street. The prosecutors are allowed to go into a grand jury, produce evidence, and then ask a grand jury, is it 51 percent to 49 percent, maybe a little more than not, that a crime may have occurred. That’s the standard. Since it’s just prosecutors in the room, there’s no cross-examination, no defenses, there’s nothing like that put forth. Indictments are meant to be scary, especially Federal indictments. I know, because I used to write them. I used to write terrorism indictments. They are meant to serve as a messaging tool and also that we’re serious and will prosecute you with what we can actually prove. In my opinion, this is where this indictment goes wrong. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the specifics right at the beginning of the indictment. It’s mentioned that President Trump is recorded talking about documents where he’s telling people that they’re writing a book, that these are secret, and don’t tell anybody something of this nature. It looks like it should put the fear of God into people. Mr. Patel: It is done, and that’s what happens. They say, “Oh my God, secret recordings. How did this happen? It’s the former President of the United States, the guy running for president right now, and staffers.” There are probably a legion of agents and prosecutors who’ve been on the job for 10-plus years each who have combined to write this one piece of paper. It’s not like somebody wrote it last night. This thing has been perfected word by word, period and comma by period and comma, the identifiers, the titles, and passages like the one you just cited, because they want it to have gravitas. On today’s episode, we were actually going to talk about the sealed indictment process, but that’s gone now. Now that the Federal judge has unsealed it, we can actually see the public’s reaction to the indictment. That’s what prosecutors look for because they want to know if they hit the wickets or did they miss? Looking at the things that have been coming out on social media and other lesser media platforms that aren’t Epoch Times, you see the media’s response to this. It’s probably not what the prosecutors wanted, and I’m sure we’re going to get into it. Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. It seems kind of muted, doesn’t it? Mr. Patel: Yes, it’s muted to tepid. Now, as prosecutors, the DOJ probably will not comment. I’m surprised Merrick Garland hasn’t scheduled a press conference as the Attorney General. Maybe they’ll do that Monday. I’m not really sure. When you have a case where you charge a former President of the United States and he is also running to be President of the United States, and we’ve exposed the corruption at the FBI and DOJ, and outlined it on our show over the past seven-plus seasons, you would think the number one law enforcement officer in our country would want to tell the public about the indictment. Now, the DOJ, in my opinion, was caught off guard when the Trump camp was notified and was publicly reported. They went out front and center and said, “We’ve been notified that President Trump is going to be indicted, but we don’t know exactly with what,” because the indictment wasn’t unsealed yet. They beat the DOJ to it, in my opinion. That’s just another example of how President Trump is able to have his professionalism displayed in the media about how to basically out-maneuver it. From his perspective, this same FBI and DOJ have been unlawfully leaking during the entire special counsel presentation of Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump when it favors their narrative. Donald Trump didn’t do anything wrong by putting out that statement. He was notified like anyone else that he had to be at an arraignment on Tuesday in Miami, Florida, at 3:00 PM EST. So, they went out with it. Mr. Jekielek: Do you think they did this early unsealing with this in mind? Mr. Patel: We were talking about this on the car ride up to Prescott. That’s exactly what happened, because a sealed indictment is just that. Only a judge, after a request by the prosecution, can unseal the indictment in court. Then, you can produce it, usually done at arraignment, especially in a case that’s involving such sensitivities as with President Donald Trump. President Trump put them on defense right out of the gate. They were expecting to have their production, their presentation, their attorney general come out next week and say, “Here we are. Here’s our indictment,” a 1, 2, 3 punch. But now their hand has been forced, and we got to see it early. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things I didn’t see mentioned a lot in there is the National Records Act, which one would expect to see prominently. Mr. Patel: Yes. Let me walk through the indictment. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this because there’s so much other stuff we have to cover. We’ve spent the last two years as this guy’s been subpoenaed by the DOJ on this matter about classified documents. They say that President Trump has unlawfully mishandled classified documents. When they have their time to step up to the plate and charge President Trump with the unlawful handling of classified documents, do they? No, they don’t. That charge is on the books, Jan. It’s part of an extension of the Espionage Act. Do you know what they use? They reach back to an act that has been on the books for a hundred-plus years. It’s called the National Defense Information Rule of Law under the Espionage Act, literally talking about charts and sailing utensils. It’s so old. In that part of the law, and here’s a kicker that most people will not cover, The National Defense information process that they charged Donald Trump with right now was written 55 years before the Classified Acts ever were written into Congress. That means there was no classified information for 50 years after the NDI. Then you have the classified unlawful handling of classified information come under The Espionage Act. Why do they go back a hundred-plus years? Because now they’re not saying that Donald Trump mishandled unlawfully classified information. We’ve talked about that extensively, why we believe that’s not the case before. They’re saying he took stuff that maybe was classified, but maybe not, and we’re going to charge him with 30 some counts. They took each document that they felt they wanted to charge him with and they issued a single count. That’s wildly, overly zealous. It’s going to backfire, and we can talk about that. But one of the big points I wanted to make was that if you’re going to shoot your shot, shoot your shot. If you’re going to kill the king, kill the king. If you’ve been saying for two years Donald Trump is stealing or unlawfully possessing classified information, then charge him with that. But we now know the rule of law, because we on Epoch have so extensively put it out there. A president has universal declassification authority, and he’s a sole arbiter—period. We’ll get to the Presidential Records Act and how that applies to everything else. I just found it astounding. The irony in the indictment itself, not only do they go to the NDI to charge him with individual documents, but then they flip to the very end when you look at the obstruction and conspiracy charges and they itemize that he was using classified documents to do that. It’s one or the other. Both legalities can’t be true in the same charging document. Either he took National Defense information unlawfully or he took classified information unlawfully. They didn’t charge the latter. They settled for the former. We’re going to get into the former and why it is a wildly overzealous prosecution when we talk about how Hillary Clinton was handled, how Sandy Berger was handled, and how General Petraeus was handled. We’ll even talk about Bill Clinton’s sock drawer case. Mr. Jekielek: This is the time to talk about those things. When you read this document, it seems like they’ve really covered their bases. But then, when you dig in a little bit, it doesn’t seem quite so airtight anymore, does it? Mr. Patel: It’s meant to put you on your heels. Even as a former Federal prosecutor and public defender, every time I read any indictment, I’m like, wow, look at that. Then, I take a breath and I do what I always do, which is to look behind the words and at the totality of the circumstances. If you recall, and I’m sure you do as does everyone else, Hillary Clinton exchanged at least 36 different threads of classified information on an unclassified homecooked email server that the world had access to and exchanged it with Jake Sullivan and Burns. Jake Sullivan is the current National Security Advisor of President Biden, and Director Burns is the current Director of the CIA. Those three individuals exchanged, without argument, classified information over three dozen times on an unclassified server. What did James Comey do when he was director of the FBI? He comes in and he says, “We just don’t think she was grossly negligent.” What are you talking about? Either you mishandled classified information unlawfully or you didn’t. He shifted the paradigm. They didn’t charge her with the unlawful handling of classified information. They should have because she wasn’t a president. The Presidential Records Act doesn’t apply to her, and a whole host of other things. But they went to the NDI portion, the National Defense information and he said, “Oh, she wasn’t grossly negligent and she doesn’t meet the intense standard for it.” Because there is an intense standard for NDI and we’ll get to how that ties into Trump’s innocence. They exonerated her. They literally said, “We’re not going to charge you.” Not having a legal out like the Presidential Records Act, how do you not charge her for disseminating unlawfully classified information, which she did not have the right to possess on servers that could be hacked by China or other adversaries. The two-tier system of justice is now front and center for the American people to see. When we criticize Hillary Clinton’s adjudication of that matter, people thought it was a conspiracy. Now we’re stitching it together. Mr. Jekielek: I couldn’t help but notice that she’s got hats out on Twitter today about her emails. I was actually saying that’s a pretty heavy troll there. Mr. Patel: The U.S. government couldn’t look at the 30,000 emails she deleted. What about the destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice there? What about how she was treated? Her lawyers got the red carpet treatment to come into FBI headquarters ahead of time and sit down with preordained questions and answers, so that they could adjudicate their answers based on a wink and a nod. They didn’t do that for President Trump. It’s a two tier system of justice. We’ll quickly go through Sandy Berger and General Petraeus. Sandy Berger was a National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton, if I have it correct. This guy was literally in the National Archives building stuffing his pants with classified information. No, I’m not making this up. They caught him. He was never charged with the unlawful possession of classified information at a felony level. Petraeus, and this is not a knock on his storied career as an army general, was caught with reams of classified information while he was the Director of the CIA in the Obama administration, that he had handed over to his mistress, so she could write a book. He also was not president and guided by the Presidential Records Act. He literally disseminated classified information, stole it and gave it to a private citizen, so she could write a book. He gets caught, lies about it, and the FBI interviews him at CIA headquarters. This is all in the court pleadings. They asked him flat out “General, did you take this material?” He said, “No.” No obstruction of justice count, no lying to federal officers, and no felonies for prosecution for possessing unlawfully classified information and stealing it. Do you know what he got? He pled guilty to a misdemeanor. It’s a two tier system of justice. Finally, I want to close with more of a legality approach. For the Presidential Records Act, let’s set the sequential stage. National Defense Information goes back a hundred-plus years. Then 50 years after that, you have the Classification Acts that came in that actually classifies information. You can’t retroactively prosecute people before 1951.That’s why this DOJ went 120 years back because they fumbled on the classification issue and they can’t legally prosecute him. What comes next? NDI, classification statutes, Presidential Records Act, if I have my math right, was passed right around the Carter administration and really went into effect during the Reagan administration. What Congress said was simple, “When you’re President and you leave, you can take whatever you want. When you take it, whether it’s classified or not, it’s your personal property.” Bush has done it. Bush One, Clinton, Obama and President Trump did it. The case that I want to highlight is a Federal court case involving Bill Clinton’s sock drawer. He literally had secret tapes that he lawfully took out of the White House when he was leaving after he was President and hid them in a sock drawer. The National Archives and the DOJ tried to get them back. They went to Federal court. Do you know what the ruling was in that case? The Presidential Records Act protects Bill Clinton from ever divulging what was on those tapes and why he took them. He still has them and the world doesn’t know what’s on those tapes and why he hid them in his sock drawer. The Presidential Records Act is the law that was adjudicated in court. That law must now apply to Donald Trump across the board, otherwise there will be another split and another creation of a two-tier system of justice. President Trump, we’ve seen it resoundingly, whether you like him or dislike him, has said publicly over and over again through counsel and others, “The Presidential Records Act applies to me and also the Declassification Authority applies to me.” Let’s see if the judge down in Miami will apply the Presidential Records Act to nullify a bogus prosecution coupled with the President’s authority to declassify things. We can talk about the obstruction and conspiracy charges as they flow. But generally speaking, Jan, if you’re going to be charged with obstructing justice, you have to be charged with obstructing an illegality. If President Trump did not commit these crimes, there is no obstruction, there is no conspiracy, and there is no lying to Federal prosecutors or Federal agents. It all flows from that one instance and that’s why the indictment is written in this sequential order. Mr. Jekielek: Please spell out how the President’s Presidential Records Act would actually be used to nullify this prosecution? Mr. Patel: Simple. Let’s take the indictment at face value. President Trump brought things with him from the White House when he was leaving the presidency. I believe it was either to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, I can’t remember which one he went to first. It doesn’t matter if he took a sticky note or 10,000 boxes of information. At last count, President Obama was still going through 3 million pages of documents he took. It doesn’t matter what’s in them, either, the same law would apply to him. The Presidential Records Act is simple. The President can take whatever he wants when he leaves office, that’s it. Here’s the kicker, part of that act says it becomes his or her personal property. That means it transitions from being U.S. government property to the personal private property of the past President. That’s the Presidential Records Act in a nutshell. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying there would have to be a dramatically different interpretation of law here for this to make any sense. Mr. Patel: For this to be vitiated. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Mr. Patel: Talk about a vitiation or cancellation of legal rights and statutes. The reason I set it up sequentially is if Congress wanted the Classification Acts and Espionage Acts written in the 1950s to supersede the Presidential act written after it, they would’ve written the Presidential Records Act differently. The law that comes after supersedes the prior unless Congress says otherwise, and they didn’t say otherwise, in the Presidential Records Act creation. One of the parts that really offends me as a public defender is how easily the DOJ got the past Chief Judge of the District of Columbia, the Federal circuit there, to rescind the attorney-client privilege that President Trump shared with his lawyer. In the indictment, you see a paragraph or two about how President Trump is speaking to his lawyer about options. If you know President Trump, and of course I’m still a senior advisor, and I talk to him frequently, he jokes all the time.That’s his mannerism a lot. You can’t capture that in a black and white typecast. But let’s put that aside for a second. They took that and they said, “We went to a Federal judge and ruled that attorney client privilege doesn’t apply because there’s a crime fraud exception.” Wow. You just literally told the world, DOJ, that any criminal charged with any offense, or potential to be charged, or anyone who’s not even charged with an offense and has an attorney-client relationship can’t talk about possible options with their attorney. This is one of the things that his legal team must challenge out of the gate right away. This is not a position that can stand in the United States of America. Our fundamental rights in the Bill of Rights and Amendments 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 10 specifically say you have the right to counsel and an unlimited right to counsel. What the DOJ is trying to masquerade this as is, “Oh no, they were in on it together as a criminal conspiracy.” How? It’s a devastating blow just to justice. Forget whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. You’ve just literally thrown arctic water on the Constitution and chilled the effect of people having conversations with their attorneys about what their options are. If he had actually instructed them to do something actually illegal, that would be in the indictment, not this other verbiage we’re seeing. Because you don’t lead with your worst evidence, you lead with your best. The way they’ve set it up, especially when it vis-a-vis attorney client privilege is just a shocking abdication of justice. Yet again, you have a two-tier system of justice, because I’ve never seen that happen. I’ve seen attorney client privilege vitiated when an attorney was actually committing a crime with the individual that he was representing. In that instance, it’s righteous. But in this one, the facts just don’t support it. They’re going back to intent, right? They’re saying to President Trump, “Hillary Clinton wasn’t grossly negligent under the NDI.” But they’re saying President Trump was when he was talking to his attorney about options and joking about it as he does so often. Now they’re saying, “Well, it’s a different standard. We’re going to shift it around. We’re going to charge him.” I think people are seeing it. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s finish up with the actual indictment now. Any final thoughts on that? Mr. Patel: No. They talk about an obstruction, a conspiracy, and they talk about a couple other things that multiple lawyers for President Trump did or didn’t do. The sticking point for me is how involved they were with the conversations President Trump was having with his lawyer or communications, whether it’s a phone call or a conversation in person. That has a drastic chilling effect going forward on due process. This DOJ is going to have to answer for that. That’s one of the biggest legalities. If I was his counsel on these cases, I would reach out and say, “This is the first pretrial motion judge. How could they possibly have ruled this? I believe the district court judge who ruled on this matter got it wrong. That evidence should be thrown out.” Mr. Jekielek: There is this issue of jurisdiction. You would expect this to be charged in West Palm Beach or DC, but instead it’s being charged in Miami. Mr. Patel: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: First of all, how can that be, and why do you think it is? Mr. Patel: This is getting into the legal nerd weeds, but basically you can find jurisdiction anywhere you want. But as we’ve known, this grand jury has been sitting and investigating Trump from Washington. They’ve had a coordinate grand jury in Miami. The way you get jurisdiction is just what the law says. President Trump doesn’t live in Miami and the events apparently took place in West Palm Beach where Mar-a-Lago is or where Bedminster is as it was cited in the indictment, in northern New Jersey, neither of which are in Washington, DC. In my opinion, this is a masqueraded attempt at what we call forum shopping, trying to get the case somewhere where they have the appearance of neutrality. But here’s the kicker. When you charge a document, the very last sheet that you submit on the indictment, there for the public to see is, is there a related case? Meaning, was there a search warrant or something that preceded this indictment that a Federal judge already handled? Because if there was, it automatically goes there. That’s the law. These prosecutors actually checked no, there’s no related case. Then, what was the case about the appointment of a special master from a Federal judge in Miami all about talking about President Trump’s possession unlawfully of classified documents? They’ve got to come up with an answer for that. The answer is it’s bogus. Here’s the kicker, and maybe it’s poetic justice depending on your viewpoint of the world. The DOJ drew the same judge, Judge Aileen Cannon, who is a President Trump appointee, down in Miami, Florida, who handled the special master case. Mr. Jekielek: Which is an almost impossible situation, because there’s like 20 to 25 possible judges out there. Mr. Patel: Yes, I’m not saying one way or the other how Judge Cannon or any other judge would rule. I’ve appeared before almost every single judge in that district, dozens of those judges, and I live in Las Vegas and those are pretty slim odds, one in 30. You might see some moves by the government to recuse this judge just because she was appointed by Trump. But I don’t think that passes legal muster. That’s like saying anybody who has an affiliation with any president goes before a Federal district judge and says, “Oh, you’re out because you’re recused by president X, Y or Z.” They don’t get to do that. I don’t know if that’s the goal that they wanted to set out. But now they’re going to say, “No, we just let the case go where it went.” But there’s another reason why I think it’s down in Miami. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a familiar face over in Miami that you’ve worked on the other side of, Karen Gilbert. Mr. Patel: Yes. I was told this just like everybody else, I’m allowed to have sources. The Deputy Special Counsel in the Jack Smith prosecution is an individual by the name of Karen Gilbert, a federal prosecutor from the Southern District of Florida, Miami. I’ve tried cases against her. I used to be an assistant Federal public defender against Karen Gilbert in the Southern district of Miami. What is the Deputy Special Counsel? Just think Weissmann and Mueller. Yes, everybody has a number too. In my opinion, if this is the case and Karen Gilbert is the Deputy Special Counsel, which I believe she is, she is the female version of Weissmann for Jack Smith. What do I mean by that? You can’t just say something like that, Jan, and not back it up. Wind the tape back to 2009, Karen Gilbert is the Chief of Narcotics in the Southern District of Florida. The biggest narcotics’ importation hub in the U.S. is Miami, and she’s running the entire operation. A physician in Miami in 2009, Dr. Ali Shaygan, is charged in that case with prescription drug violations, with 141 separate counts. Karen Gilbert is the supervising chief and her two line prosecutors are below her. If you can believe the following, this is what she authorized. She said, “Go wiretap the defense attorney’s offices and phones, so we can hear what the defense attorney is speaking about to the investigator for the defense attorney during the prosecution.” Don’t believe me. Go look at Judge Gold’s opinion on the Ali Shaygan case in the Southern District of Florida. That was outed before or during the trial process. Quick side note, the judge let the case go to the jury anyway, and didn’t throw it out. The jury acquitted Dr. Ali Shaygan of all 141 accounts without knowing that. But going back to what I believe is the quintessential illegality of an overzealous prosecutor spying on a defense attorney unlawfully, she was about to be throttled by Federal District Court Judge Gold for allowing that type of unethical and what I believe is unlawful behavior. Do you know what she did? She did what typical cowards in government do, she resigned from that position so she wouldn’t get punished by the District Court of the Appellate Courts. Then, she meandered around. Of course, like anything else in government, if you want a promotion, the bigger you screw up, the bigger your promotion. Years later, she would come back to be the Chief of the National Security Section for the Southern District of New York. Now, she’s the Deputy of Special Counsel who might be the prosecutor who actually presents the case in trial before Judge Aileen Cannon. If that’s the case, and I believe it is, the public ought to know. If Karen has anything to do with this case, there are questions that Trump’s defense counsels need to ask the court about the propriety of her conduct in the past, and whether or not it applies to this instance. In a case like this, you have to find out with all of the prosecutors in that office, what are their political leanings? Who do they donate to and why is there a gag order from Special Counsel Smith’s office preventing the release of his staff? Prosecutors by definition are public officials. You put your name on the indictment, you put your name on the search warrant, you present the case in court announcing your name to the judge and jury. In this case we know zero members of that staff publicly. Our friend Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch just sued to release the names of the staff. I’m not saying some of the agents who work for the FBI and others should be outed. A lot of them do other types of covert surveillance work. We’re not asking for that, but we are asking for the prosecutors. We demanded them for the Mueller investigation and we found out it was Weissmann, an individual who was reversed 9 to 0 by the United States Supreme Court in the Enron prosecutions. By the way, what do he and Jack Smith have in common? Jack Smith was the Head of Public Integrity at the Department of Justice when they charged Governor Bob McDonnell in the state of Virginia. Governor McDonnell was found guilty at the trial level. Do you know what the United States Supreme Court did to Governor McDonnell’s case? They threw it out, 8 to 0, for prosecutorial misconduct and unlawful application of the law. That’s who Jack Smith is. Then, you have Karen Gilbert. Who else do we have? We are asking fair questions. They would be asking us if it was the other way around. But again, the two-tier system of justice allows them to participate with their conspirators in the media to leak information that’s helpful to them. That’s the other thing, Jan, it’s been out for long enough. We live in the 24/7 news cycle. If there was some bombshell explosion on this indictment, there’s a large number in the media that would be writing it that way, and I haven’t seen one. Mr. Jekielek: We’re talking about the composition of these different teams. I’ve been thinking about President Trump’s defense, and it’s a complicated defense. What kinds of lawyers do you need to do this properly? Mr. Patel: Yes, it’s a National Security case. However you look at it, it’s a criminal case, but it’s also a National Security case. This is what I would say to people who handle these types of cases. One, you need a National Security lawyer. You need someone who’s an expert in classified and unclassified documents and procedures. They have to have a clearance. You need someone who knows how to attack what’s called CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act, which is how the defense can go in and get documents that are helpful to us and declassify them so we can use them at trial. Because in order for the government to have brought this case in the fashion that it has, everything that they want to use has already been declassified. Here’s a funny side bit. Let’s see if they actually had to declassify anything that they’re going to present in this case, or they’re going to take it as the law that President Trump had the right to declassify them in the first place. Then, you need a criminal defense attorney to couple with your CIPA adjudication process attorney. It’s a big team. You need people who are experts in witnesses. You’re going to need people who are experts in these specific types of crimes, obstruction, and lying. Speaking of which, they did charge President Trump with a couple of counts that we call 1001, that is lying to Federal officials or agents. If it wasn’t so offensive, it would be extremely laughable. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute James Comey for lying under oath to Congress. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute Clapper or Brennan for lying to Congress under oath multiple times. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute Merrick Garland for lying under oath. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute Director Chris Wray for lying under oath to Congress. But this DOJ has no problem charging President Trump with, if you read the material in the indictment, what amounts to basically jokes. On top of that, if the superseding level of law that he’s charged with is not an illegal crime, then he’s not lying about anything. They’ve spliced the atom pretty thin on this one, but they’ve dressed it up really well in an indictment that sounds like it’s a boomstick. If they have the right set of defense attorneys around them, they’re going to pop it real quick. I don’t know that this case ever gets to a jury because in my opinion, as a former public defender and Federal prosecutor, there’s just too many legal questions that have to be answered by the judge before it ever gets there. There’s an appellate process, which we call an interlocutory appeal process, which means there is the opportunity before you actually get to a jury that you can appeal the judge’s ruling in between. It’s not done often, but it can happen. There’s a lot of steps to go through. I did see a lot of commentary out there about the length of the trial, 21 to 60 days. But yes, the DOJ always says, “We don’t participate in politics or elections.” So, you charged a former president who’s the front-runner to be the Republican nominee to sit in a Federal criminal trial for 60 days during an election season, but you’re not interfering with the electoral process. These types of opposing positions are starting to come to light. We’ve been covering them for a long time here at Epoch and many other organizations. But most of America has been lied to for so long that they said that was conspiratorial Right-wing nonsense, and now they’re stitching it together. These same actors, Lisa Monaco and John Carlin, the number two and three at the Justice Department under Garland who are running DOJ, were the heads of the National Security Division and a senior post at DOJ, and launched Russiagate against Donald Trump. I know that because I was a Federal prosecutor at the National Security Division working for John Carlin. The cast of characters doesn’t change. Chris Wray covered up the entire Russiagate scandal. Chris Wray lied to Senator Grassley about the existence of source documentation, and then had to be held in contempt of Congress just to produce it, because I believe he wants to cover more FBI corruption. It is right that America is asking the questions of the participants. The government is demanding the credibility of Donald Trump and all of the other individuals cited in that indictment be questioned. Well, it’s a two-way street. We have a right to know what prosecutors are working on it, have worked on it, and will work on it. We have a right to know how many of those people worked on past instances of unlawful prosecutorial misconduct, and why they are on the most important, most consequential case that the DOJ has probably ever brought. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, normally we’d finish up here, but today we’re going to pick a few audience questions since we can do the live Q&A. I’ve got Raz3060 here. The question is “Kash, what happens with your DOD lawsuit now that you’ve got an okay for the book go ahead?” Mr. Patel: I appreciate that. That is actually also breaking news, but not Trump-level breaking news. With my book Government Gangsters, the government sat on it for eight plus months failing to release my manuscript, which I’m required to submit as a former government employee, because they don’t want it out there. I sued them in Federal court this week. We won, they bent the knee, and after eight long months, we are going to get this book to print this summer. Do you know how many redactions after eight months and nine different agencies reviewed it? Nine. They were so meaningless that my attorneys literally laughed out loud and almost wanted to thank the DOD and the rest of the government for redacting those ridiculous redactions. It’s coming out, and you can get it on pre-order. But we’re still having fun. A crux of that book is the two-tier system of justice. It’s not just in the DOJ, it’s in the halls of Congress, it’s in the administrative state, and we’ve seen how it’s hijacked some of the people in the judiciary as well. Mr. Jekielek: Another question, here we go. We’ve got William Spielberger. He asks, “Can RICO statutes be charged, even if the statutes of limitations have expired on the original crime?” Mr. Patel: That’s a complicated legal question that breaks down like this. If a mob boss committed a fraud in ’80 and you got new evidence in ’90 that that conspiracy has been continuing, then the statute of limitations starts over. You can bring that RICO case again. Mr. Jekielek: All right, from Steve Florkey, “How do we get rid of dishonest judges who support or just wink at this kind of corruption?” Mr. Patel: There’s only one way to remove any Federal official; impeachment. Judges are subjected to the same scrutiny and standard as cabinet secretaries and other Federal officials are. You’d have to call Congress and start getting a lot of people together and have a solid legal justification to impeach a Federal judge and remove them from office. Mr. Jekielek: We have another one from Raz3060, which is an interesting question, “Why was NARA negotiating return of the documents if the President could have them?” Mr. Patel: Your question begets the answer. If the president is allowed to have them, this whole NARA thing, in my opinion, was a farce. Remember, I was designated by the president as his Presidential Records Act nominee. That’s not exactly the right word, it’s not coming to me at this time. Mr. Jekielek: Representative. Mr. Patel: Representative. Thank you, Jan. This is why we don’t do live on the air too much. But you don’t even really hear about that. What happened to all the NARA stuff? What about the NARA representatives? Why did NARA refer this to the DOJ? Why didn’t NARA refer Hillary Clinton to the DOJ? We learned the truth and what the law is when it comes to NARA and the documents. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, it’s time for our shout-out. Mr. Patel: This week’s shout-out on this very special episode of Kash’s Corner, has to go to the Borlands. Thank you so much for inviting us into your home. This place is awesome. I’m moving in, but we’ll talk about that later. You guys are extremely beneficial supporters of Epoch Times and my foundation, The Kash Foundation. You do enormous work that people never hear about. Thank you for letting us come to Prescott. I can’t come to Prescott, Jan, without acknowledging and thanking my good friend, Mr. Miller. I know Marsha couldn’t be here today, but it’s always humbling to see you, sir, and everybody else that is in the audience. This has been a really great experience. For those of you that missed it or want to watch it again, it airs at 8:00 PM EST. There’s also going to be the live chat then, and there’s an airing of this on NTDTV. We are blasting this out there. Let us know what you think. Let us know about our analysis and more importantly, let us know your questions, because Jan and I read the commentary board every week in preparation for next week. With that Jan, it’s time to say goodbye from Prescott, Arizona, with this live edition of Kash’s Corner. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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“Federal prisons have been tasked with making sure that they are not transphobic by allowing men who identify as women … into women’s federal prisons.” Libby Emmons was a playwright and producer in the New York theater community until she faced the ire of both her peers and her audience. Her crime? The views she held on gender ideology. “The ‘ask’ by these trans activists, which I do not believe includes all trans people, or all gay people, or anything like that—this is an activist ‘ask’, and the ‘ask’ is to erase women. The ‘ask’ is to completely change the language, change our understanding of reality, and to tell us not to believe our eyes, not to believe our senses, but to believe what we are told to believe. This is indoctrination on a mass scale,” says Emmons. Today, Emmons is the editor-in-chief of The Post Millennial and Human Events, where she writes frequently about cultural trends related to race and gender in America. “By conflating gender identity and biological sex and then—essentially because you have changed the definitions—rewriting all the laws today that have protections for women, you are changing the entire structure of society, and you’re doing it by not even having to pass any laws. You don’t have to do anything but completely corrupt the language,” Emmons says. We discuss many of the gender-related changes in society today, including biological males in women’s prisons and on women’s sports teams, “gender-affirming care” for minors, rewriting the definition of “woman,” and how transhumanism and transgender ideology embrace a similar mission. “The Department of Agriculture took this directive and said, ‘Okay, so we give out a bunch of funding for free student lunches across the country so that kids can eat lunch … If your school has a policy of not allowing gender self-ID for washroom access—for bathroom access—then we will withhold free lunch aid,” says Emmons. “You can’t even quantify how many women commit crimes in Canada because men are included in that number.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/libby-emmons-why-biological-men-are-entering-womens-prisons-across-america-and-the-west_5327403.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Libby Emmons, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Libby Emmons: Thanks so much, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with a headline from the publication where you are the chief editor, The Post Millennial. “Protestors demand removal of trans-identified males from New Jersey women’s prison.” Sub-headline, “”The solution to male violence in male prisons is not male violence in women’s prisons. This needs to stop. Get men out!” This is a quote from one of the inmates, presumably. This is an issue that you’ve been covering for quite some time. Let’s dig right into it. Ms. Emmons: There have been some changes in law, and in the definition of words, that have enabled males who claim to be women to gain access to women’s prisons and to be housed there. Many of these men are violent, and many of these men have committed crimes against women. They find themselves then surrounded by women in prisons that are remarkably less secure, and locked down than the male prisons are. A man’s prison, men’s maximum security prisons and women’s maximum security prisons have very different levels of security. A women’s maximum security prison is more like a man’s medium security prison. You get a lot more benefits and freedoms, such as they are, than you would in a male prison. Mr. Jekielek: What you’re suggesting is that there might be some people perhaps looking to game the system. Ms. Emmons: Any man who has been incarcerated and then decides that he is actually transgender and identifies as a woman, and seeks entry into a women’s prison is a grifter and a fraud. These are not the same men who are trans prior to committing crimes, and ending up in prison. These are men in a lot of cases, who end up locked up, then decide they’re women, and then seek entry into women’s prisons. That happens a lot, as it turns out. I don’t think those men are doing anything other than trying to get a better housing situation for their time in lockup, really. Mr. Jekielek: Or worse, as this headline would suggest. Ms. Emmons: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What exactly is happening in this New Jersey prison? Ms. Emmons: In New Jersey prisons, men are given access to women’s prisons simply by saying that they are female. There was a man, Demi Minor is his trans name, who impregnated two women, was then removed, and has sought to gain entry back. I’m pretty sure that’s the only women’s prison in New Jersey. The women don’t like it. The women don’t want men in their prisons, for a variety of reasons. Many women who are in prison have suffered domestic violence at the hands of men, and now, here they are subjected to the potential of more male violence. Having spoken to women who are either currently incarcerated in women’s prisons, or who have been released and had served time in women’s prisons, there are other concerns as well, such as the changing dynamic that happens among women when a man is introduced. You also have a situation in California, where I was talking to one inmate at the Central California Women’s Correctional Facility, who was saying that when a man comes into the women’s estate, oftentimes an eight woman prison cell will be cleared, and the man will be housed there. This one woman, Tomiekia Johnson, was telling me that one man that was housed there got the eight person prison cell to himself, and then was actually allowed to have a woman in that cell with him, with whom he was enjoying sort of playing house, and they had some kind of relationship. There are additional atrocities and horrors that we can discuss, of what happens to women who are locked in prison with male criminals who claim to be women. Mr. Jekielek: I definitely want to touch on that. But since you mentioned California, there’s actually a new law signed in by Governor Gavin Newsom, as I understand it. Ms. Emmons: It was signed into law by Gavin Newsom. It was brought by California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is an absolute and complete menace to California. At one point, I actually talked to New York State Senator Brad Hoylman’s office. The person I spoke with on the phone there revealed to me with pride that Hoylman and Wiener work together to bring similar bills in California and New York, which I think is actually really terrifying, given the conditions in New York. Wiener brought this bill, and it was signed into law. As soon as it was signed into law inmates in male correctional facilities petitioned to be moved into women’s correctional facilities, 261 trans-identified inmates. Of these there were hardly any trans men, and the trans men’s petitions to be moved into the male prisons were denied, clearly for their own safety. Yet, no one had any concern about the women who were going to be impacted by the men transferring in. All 261 of those cases have yet seen the man transferred into the women’s prison. But there are increasing numbers, and each case is reviewed., However, even prior to this law being signed into effect, there were men who claimed to be women who were given access to the women’s prisons. In those cases, the man had to have undergone surgery. There was actually a case of a man called Jessica Marie Hann, who after being castrated, ended up being housed in the same prison with the woman who was mother of the two children that he had murdered. Mr. Jekielek: Unbelievable. How exactly does this relatively new California law change things? Ms. Emmons: It changes things because now you have women who are at the mercy of these men, yet again. When I talked to Ms. Johnson about it, she said that women were extremely unhappy about it. No one likes this. The California prison system started putting condoms machines in women’s prisons. Being locked up in prison, why would women need condoms? You only need condoms if you’re going to be subjected to men, and having sex with men. Now, there are men in the prisons, who only have to self ID. I certainly don’t think that the state should be forcefully drugging anyone, but they don’t even have to be taking estrogen. They don’t have to show that their manhood is non-functioning. In fact, their manhood is functioning. Tomeikia Johnson also told me, and this is something that I have not personally verified, though she did tell me that she spoke with guards. She told me that a woman that she knew did fall pregnant to a man who said he was a woman, in the prison. Then, he beat her mercilessly so that she would miscarry. The miscarried child got buried in the prison yard. Mr. Jekielek: Unbelievable stories. Does the law say that self ID is basically enough to make that transfer? Ms. Emmons: Self ID, yes. Self ID is enough. It’s enough to say that you are the opposite sex, to be believed that you are the opposite sex. Self ID, of course, is what is permeating so many of these laws. That’s a huge part of what goes on. Mr. Jekielek: But the activists for these laws would say, “There were all these trans men in the male prisons, and were in danger. Finally, they can be their true selves in this new place.” I imagine that’s what they would say. Ms. Emmons: Sure. But that doesn’t change the nature of your biology, and it certainly doesn’t change the impact that a male person can have on a large group of women, many of whom have already suffered abuse at the hands of men. It’s just inhumane to think that one man’s feeling that he is unsafe in a prison means that he needs to create a situation where hundreds of other women are completely unsafe. Why is his need so much greater? In England, they decided to create separate sections for trans inmates, because they were finding that there was trouble. There have been rapes all through the system; New Jersey, Washington state, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, and in England. We’ve seen this all across the board. Obviously, not all men perpetrate violence against women. But why do we now have this feeling that men who have been locked up are now all of a sudden not going to perpetrate violent crimes against women, even though that’s what they have been convicted of? Mr. Jekielek: There’s a recent disclosure that James O’Keefe made about male inmates, exactly this situation. In the recording there is a discussion of gaming the system by getting someone pregnant, getting them to sue the correctional system, and thereby getting a million dollar baby. Have you heard about anything like this? Ms. Emmons: I’ve heard about this just like you, with the James O’Keefe story. Certainly, gaming the system is something that’s going to be on the minds of criminals who have been working to game the system for whoever knows how long. There were rapes in Washington state prisons. Dori Monson, who was a radio talk show host in Washington state, had covered that. He recently died, I believe. He had covered that a while back, but nobody wanted to believe it, and nobody wanted to discuss it. There could be a lawsuit that would maybe say, “This woman was victimized because this man was let into the prison and raped her.” That would show the fallacy of this law. What if California were to suffer some result where they had to pay out a million dollars, admit their guilt and admit their complicity in the rape of women where they are literally locked up? They can’t leave, and they can’t go anywhere else. When they complain about men being in women’s prisons and say, “There’s these men around,” they are told that they are bigots. They are told that they are transphobic, and that they are the problem. You are gaslighting these women, you’re further traumatizing these women, and California certainly should be held liable. Mr. Jekielek: How long has this been going on? Ms. Emmons: In California, this has been going on since 2021. But we also have a situation where it’s very hard to tell how long it’s been going on, in somewhere like Canada. Heather Mason, who was incarcerated for a time, has come out of prison and has spoken out against men being incarcerated along with women. But in Canada, they did this totally insane thing, where they said that men who identify as women, are now counted as women. They said, “We’re going to take this new definition of woman, and we’re going to apply it to our statistics.” In Canada, in statistics for crime, you will see statistics of women raping women. Those women are actually men, but their crimes are now part of this statistical database of women’s crimes. You can’t even look at the data and get an accurate understanding of what has been going on, because the lies are embedded in the system. They are embedded into the system. They changed the definition of woman, and then they changed the statistics recording data to match that lie. So, you can’t tell. How long have men been in women’s prisons? No one knows, because the government tells you that they are women. Mr. Jekielek: That’s absolutely incredible. Ms. Emmons: It is absolutely incredible. It’s happening in the U.S. right now. President Biden has been working really hard with his team to change the definition of woman to be anyone who identifies as a woman. Then, he is using this definition and tasking every single federal agency to use this new definition of women as they introduce and implement their policies. He put out a couple of executive orders about this, saying, “Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, I need you to use this new definition of woman. Reassess all of your policies and programs, and make sure that you’re not being biased against men who say that they’re women. Use this new definition.” By conflating gender identity and biological sex, because you have changed the definitions, you are rewriting all the laws to date that have protections for women. You are changing the entire structure of society, and you’re doing it by not even having to pass any laws. You don’t have to do anything but completely corrupt the language. Federal prisons have been tasked with making sure that they are not transphobic, by allowing men who identify as women into women’s federal prisons. They’re working on that. The Department of Agriculture took this directive and said, “We give out funding for free student lunches across the country, so that kids can eat lunch.” If their parents don’t have the money for lunch, kids can still eat lunch. They said, “If your school has a policy of not allowing gender self ID for bathroom access, then we will withhold free lunch aid.” That’s what the Department of Agriculture said. The Department of Health and Human Services, they are doing their own thing to make sure that insurance companies pay for gender transition surgeries. The Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine is a man who underwent gender transition after having his own children, and now advocates for the sterilization of minors through gender-affirming care, as they call it, which is absolutely another bastardization of language. Levine is out there saying, “Insurance companies must cover what is essentially cosmetic surgery for men who want to appear as women.” But he does not advocate covering for women’s surgery to appear more female, for breast enlargement or whatever it is. In a sense, Biden is boosting boob jobs for men through the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s pushing for boys and girls to be in opposite sex bathrooms in schools. We saw what happened in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a trans-identified student raped a girl in a bathroom, and then the school board covered it up, at length. That turned into such a giant headache, for not just that school district, but for the entire country. In 2021, the father of the girl who was raped in the bathroom went to a school board meeting. He said, “My daughter was raped in the bathroom by this trans student, and you guys didn’t do anything about it.” This was the same school board meeting where a gym teacher was coming under fire for not wanting to use the preferred pronouns of students. This father showing up at the school board meeting, led directly over a period of time, to the Department of Justice instructing the FBI to investigate parents with the same tools that they use to investigate domestic extremism, if those parents complain at school board meetings about anything from masking to, apparently, their daughters being raped in the bathroom. The Department of Education is using Biden’s brand new definitions for women that include men, to insist that males are permitted to play on women’s sports teams, and threatening to withhold funding from any academic institution that doesn’t allow that. Title IX was put into place to make sure that women had equal opportunities to compete in sports, and now, Title IX is being used directly to deprive women of the right to compete on an equal playing field in athletic competition in schools. It’s absolutely insane. It’s just absolutely insane. It starts with the most minuscule little thing, which is asking compassion for those who feel differently about themselves. Women were asked to be compassionate for trans-identified males, “Let them say that they are women. That’s all they’re asking for. They just want to be recognized as women.” We have taken that little tiny kernel—calling a man a woman—and we have turned it into removing protections for women in the workplace, removing protections for women in prisons, and removing protections for children not to undergo medical sex changes as minors. We are taking away free lunches. We are taking away all of these things from women, who just had that one little ask. “Be compassionate, just say that the men are women. That’s all we’re asking.” No. That’s not all they’re asking. The ask by these trans activists, which I do not believe includes all trans people or gay people, is an activist ask— and the ask is to erase women. The ask is to completely change the language, and change our understanding of reality. The ask is to tell us not to believe our eyes, not to believe our senses, but to believe what we are told to believe. This is an indoctrination on a mass scale, and it’s absolutely horrifying. We saw this happening so far back in the arts. I was involved in the arts, and it was somewhere around 2007 when I started seeing this. Because when you’re in the arts, you ask for money. You put in for grants, and you say, “I want to do this project, please give me money to do it.” A lot of times the foundations want to give money to their own pet causes. You would put in a grant proposal for a project, and you would say, “I am a woman artist. Please give me money because I am a woman artist, and I’m writing about women.” The proposals said, “Must be a woman artist.” Then, they started to change and started saying, “Must be a woman, or woman-identified artist.” I was someone who was making their money off grants, and I had funded my entire maternity leave off grant money. I remember looking at this and saying, “What is woman-identified? Does that mean men? Am I now competing for women’s grant money alongside men, just like I’m competing alongside men for the bulk of the other grant proposals?” What is the difference now, except that that man who says he’s a woman is a much special-er woman, then just your basic woman? I was just born this way, but now he identifies as a woman, and this is special and new. I was concerned that this kind of thing might eventually happen. I spoke out about it to my friends who were also in the arts, and they would say things like, “I can see how that’s logical, but that’s crazy.” At the time, I would speak about this to my other liberal friends. Everyone would say, “This is crazy.” Now, here we are, in Congress, they took away the word mother. They replaced it with parent and birthing person. You had Cori Bush, a congresswoman from Missouri who rose to prominence during BLM, Michael Brown in St. Louis, and that whole situation. She literally went to Congress to give her testimony about her difficulty birthing her children, as a mother. What happened to her in the medical system. Cori Bush: I am committed to doing the absolute most to protect black mothers, to protect black babies, to protect black birthing people, and to save lives. Ms. Emmons: What we have done to mothers is taken away their language to identify themselves, because somehow saying that you’re mother is offensive to someone who is not. It’s absolutely insane. It began with the destruction of language, and here we are. You can’t even quantify how many women commit crimes in Canada, because men are included in that number. Mr. Jekielek: You’re talking about discovering that this new terminology appeared around 2007 in the arts scene, and you became up in arms about it. A few things happened after that, you becoming the chief editor for The Post Millennial and Human Events. There was some cancellation along the way, correct? Ms. Emmons: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me the story. What happened to you? Ms. Emmons: Yes, I was writing plays. I was producing plays in downtown New York, which is really the only downtown in the universe as far as I’m concerned. We were producing plays downtown. My friends and I were in residence at a poetry club, Bowery Poetry Club, which was great. It actually closed in 2012. I wrote a play called, “How to Sell Your Gang Rape Baby for Parts,” and it was very much about all this stuff. The play was about two HR professionals. My friend and I played those characters. All of the action happened off-stage, it was just the two of us. We had a trans boss, and we had an intern who had been raped by a football team and was now pregnant, and the insurance didn’t cover an abortion, so the boss was fundraising for the abortion. There was just all of this stuff. One of the characters decided that they wanted to get female genderization surgery, which is where you become even more female. You get all of the accoutrements that you might get as a trans-identified male who’s undergoing this stuff. Anyway, it was very satirical, it was very dark, and audiences would either crack up laughing because they understood that it was a joke, or they would just gasp in horror. But I did not really feel like this was doing enough. A lot of people couldn’t tell who I was sending up. Was I sending up the Left, or was I sending up the Right? Who was I critiquing in this? I started doing some research into transhumanism, which is a fascinating concept. I wrote this piece for Quillette, which I had heard about from podcasts with Jordan Peterson. It was about the undercurrents of transhumanism in Western culture, which I identified as transgender ideology, and AI human integration, such as Neuralink, and also body hacking, which is like where you could put RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] chips in your hands, and open your garage door. The story went pretty viral. With the people in the theater community it took about six months before anyone noticed that I had written this, which was fine with me. I just kept doing my work. But eventually, the theater community got wind of this, decided that I was transphobic, and I essentially lost my audience. No one was going to come see my plays, once it was determined that I was transphobic. In fact, once when I started to go to other plays, people that I knew would just ignore me entirely. My friends that I was doing a theater project with said, “Maybe if you apologize, we can still do our project. Maybe if you apologize to the non-binary lesbians who are angry because you think trans people are weird future robot people. Maybe if you apologize, we’ll be okay.” I said, “You guys, I’ll never do that. You know me better than that.” My theater company closed. We had a nice beautiful space to produce this musical that we were working on. We lost the grant, because the theater company closed, and the women didn’t want to work on the project anymore. I said, “Listen, just take the project. I’ll leave the company. You guys just work on the project.” They were like, “No, it’s your project. Everyone knows it’s your project, so we can’t just do it.” They were angry with me, and we’re no longer friends. Some of the women I was friends with for a very long time, going back to college. I don’t know what they’re doing now. I’ve given this a lot of thought, since this happened in October 2018. At first, I was very angry with them, but I think that to a certain extent they were right. We had no company if we had no audience, and no one was going to come see a show that I was involved in. I know that they agreed with me, though, that men aren’t women. They know that fully. None of these women were in their 20s. They all know very clearly that being a man is not being a woman. It’s a totally different thing. I do wonder if we could have stayed friends. I reached out to them over a period of weeks saying, “I think we could do this, guys. It doesn’t have to be like this.” I got no response, so I just decided to stop writing artwork, and start writing a lot more directly about these issues, which I did. Mr. Jekielek: I vaguely recall the piece that you’re talking about now. I don’t remember there being anything against trans people. Ms. Emmons: Yes. If you say you have nothing against trans people, that’s just more evidence of your transphobia. As a producer of plays, I produced the work of trans playwrights. I produced plays about trans issues, and gender, and identity, and all of that stuff. Because for me, if it was well written, if it told the story well, if it was compelling, I was interested in producing it. I wasn’t interested in your identity. I wasn’t interested in the identity of your characters. I was interested in producing artwork that made you feel something. Over a period of the following year, I would get emails from people who said, “We no longer need your play for this project,” or, “We’re giving you the rights back for your play and we’re not going to produce it.” I had one instance where someone reached out to me and said, “Would you like to be in this project?” I said, “Yes, thank you so much. I would love to be involved in this project.” I thought, “Oh, it’s over. It’s over. It’s okay now.” But no, they realized instantly that that was the wrong thing to do, and they never contacted me again. There were certainly some artists who either didn’t know, or didn’t care, and I worked with them for a while. But it was pretty clear that there wasn’t going to be space for me on a stage with audiences who would come, once they knew who I was and what had happened, and what the story was. So, I gave it up. I gave up theater. Mr. Jekielek: Talking about trans in minors and in the schools is not just academic for you, you have a son. Ms. Emmons: I have a son, he is 13-years-old. Mr. Jekielek: That’s right. There is a policy in a lot of schools that now this is something that should be kept secret from parents. I’ve been discovering lately that this is much more common than I realized. Ms. Emmons: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know if you were even thinking about this back then, but obviously you were in the midst of realizing what this whole activist movement was. Ms. Emmons: Yes. In 2016, the American School Counselors Association sent out a directive to schools saying that you could be causing harm to students by telling the parents that counselors are having this gender identity conversation in school. Essentially, the idea is that parents are likely to be so abusive that you will be harming students by telling their parents what’s going on with them at school. This is absolutely insane, and part of why it’s insane is because of the way language has been used to completely bastardize the entire conversation. First of all, gender identity doesn’t mean anything. Everyone is gender-nonconforming. Everyone has things about themselves, or their desires, or their interests, that do not specifically align with the stereotypical understanding of male and female. Of course, we all do. I played with mud pies, and my cousin played with dolls. They were wrestling dolls, but they were still dolls. When you consider it like that, if you are female, your body is female. That’s just how it is. It’s a biological condition, and yes, there’s stuff that goes along with that. Every woman is more or less involved with that. You think of Dr. Deborah Soh, who speaks about her understanding that she was exposed to more testosterone in the womb, and this is perhaps why she has sometimes more masculine interests. She’s still very much female. That’s just obvious. It’s very clear. It doesn’t matter that perhaps she has more masculine interests, that doesn’t make her less female. That’s part of it too. They say to a little boy, “You like to wear a dress, that means you’re a girl.” Probably what it means is the little boy is not feeling more comfortable with a gender identity, but it has something to do with the way his skin feels or the way that air moves in those clothes. There’s no big deal about that, and that’s a perfectly fine thing. Kids are just weird. I remember when my son was little and he would have something he would want to do. I would say, “Okay, but what’s your weird kid reason?” He would say, “Because I just wanted to go pick up that leaf.” I replied, “Okay, that’s not a good reason to run in front of the truck, so just hang on. We can get you the leaf.” They’re not actually suicidal, because they’re aiming to run in front of the truck. They are just trying to pick up a leaf. Mr. Jekielek: Kids come up with all sorts of things. Ms. Emmons: Kids have weird reasons. Mr. Jekielek: Kids play make believe, and this is part of growing up. Ms. Emmons: Right. Some kids decide they’re tractors for a while. It’s not a big deal, and you don’t affirm that your kid is a tractor. But meanwhile, you had President Biden coming out last year on Transgender Day of Visibility, which is a brand new, made up, stupid holiday, saying, “Parents, affirm your kids.” He did it all like this, “Affirm your kids.” Joe Biden: To parents of transgender children, affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy. Ms. Emmons: I don’t even think he knows what affirming your kids means. A lot of parents hear, “Affirm your kids,” and it sounds very positive. It sounds compassionate and kind. But what it really means is, “Stop your child from growing up naturally. Stop your child from having natural puberty, and growing up into an adult. Halt that progress, and put them on cross-sex hormones to disrupt their brain development, disrupt their bone and muscle development, and to permanently change their bodies. In boys, estrogen will stunt their growth. In girls, testosterone will deepen their voices and give them facial hair, forever. In many cases, this also will lead to sterilization, certainly, if you have a boy who undergoes vaginoplasty, which is the removal of the penis, and its inversion to create the appearance of a vaginal opening. This is not a vaginal opening, there’s no ovaries in there. There’s no uterus. Why does any woman have a vagina? A woman has a vagina because it’s part of a reproductive system that creates more human beings. That’s the whole point of our reproductive systems. A boy will become sterile once you put him on these drugs, and remove his penis. Marci Bowers, one of the surgeons who operated on Jazz Jennings, had a reality TV show documenting his journey from baby boy to adult transgender-identified male. Marci Bowers has operated on countless trans patients, was the head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which identifies eunuch as a valid gender identity in their latest guidelines. Bowers was on a panel and said that they had never seen a boy patient who had gone on puberty blockers and onto cross-sex hormones grow up to have an orgasm. Marci Bowers: Every single child who was, or adolescent who was truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 has has never experienced orgasm. Ms. Emmons: When you put your son on puberty blockers, and on to cross-sex hormones, you are not only denying them a life of reproductive capability, you are denying them a life of any kind of sexual pleasure. What does that mean? Maybe you could say, “Oh, that’s shallow. Who needs that, anyway?” But what is sexual pleasure, in the context of a loving relationship? It’s a big deal. It’s part of a loving, thoughtful, caring relationship, where you give each other pleasure. But these boys will never have pleasure. Jazz Jennings has spoken about never having an orgasm, not even understanding what that means. At one point, Jennings said, “Is it kind of like a sneeze?” Jennings will never have sexual pleasure, and will never have children. That is what happens. When you have gender-affirming care for a young girl, we’re seeing now that a young girl will hit puberty, and will decide that she does not feel great about growing up female. Let’s be honest, when you’re a female and you hit puberty and you realize what’s ahead of you, it is not an amazing experience. You’re talking about that there’s going to be blood. It’s probably going to be embarrassing. You can bleed through your clothing. This is a terrible thing that happens. It has happened to me. It’s happened to every woman, and it sucks. Your body’s going to change, and you’re going to get curvy. Nobody’s going to let you climb trees anymore. Boys are going to look at you weirdly. Suddenly you’re going to be less strong than the boys. The boys are going to get stronger. You’re not going to be as fast as them at hurdles, or whatever it is. Nobody wants that. I struggled with growing up female until I was in my 30s, until I said, “Oh, okay. It’s okay. ” In many of these clinics, age 13 is where they will remove your breasts, and they will do it. There’s a doctor in Miami who removes breasts. She calls it, “yeeting the teets,” and carries no malpractice insurance because then it’s harder to sue. Because no one’s going to take up a case if the doctor doesn’t have malpractice insurance, because they’re not going to get any money. That’s crazy. You are removing the healthy breasts of a young girl before she’s had a chance to consider motherhood and consider nursing. What is nursing? Nursing is not just nourishment for your child. It is a bonding thing. Also, once you take the breasts away, you lose sensation in that area. Again, we are depriving pleasure. When you put a young woman on testosterone, she’s going to experience vaginal atrophy, which is a very painful condition. There’s even a trans-identified woman, Buck Angel, who talks about having had vaginal atrophy. Angel presents as male and looks very male. Nobody said to Angel, “You’re going to have this experience.” Vaginal atrophy can result in tearing, bleeding, and all kinds of horrible things. Uterine atrophy happens as well, and it is very painful. This is a sterilization process. Bowers and other trans doctors have said this, along with men who did their whole medical training and had children, then decided that they’re trans, and go around operating on minors who are feeling this way. It’s not affirming. Affirming your child means telling them that you love them, telling them they are beautiful just the way that they are, encouraging them in their talents and gifts, letting them know that how the outside world views them has absolutely nothing to do with who they are or what they’re capable of, and giving them pride in themselves, regardless of whether or not someone uses their correct pronouns. That’s what affirmation is. It is giving your kids the opportunity to grow up whole, without medical intervention. That’s already been wiped out in our culture. We already have a situation where children are being overprescribed. They’re being classified as having mental health issues, and they’re being given psych drugs. A lot of the kids who are being given anti-psych drugs are black boys in foster care in the South. Why are we doing this? If these kids are unmanageable, it’s probably because they’re in foster care and they’re having a tough time. It’s not because of anything inherently wrong with them or their brains. They’re growing up in crappy situations. They need love. They need actual affirmation. They don’t need psych drugs. The New York Times did an expose over the summer about the drug cocktails that teenagers are put on, that are not FDA approved for their age group. We’re over prescribing our kids. We’re telling them they have mental health concerns. We’re telling them they can be any gender they want. We’re watching them release videos on TikTok, talking about how their pronouns are demon, and demon self. Jasper: Hi, my name’s Jasper. I use they/it pronouns. Liana: Hi, my name is Liana. I use they/demon pronouns. Jasper: This video is how to use our pronouns. Ms. Emmons: We’re acting as though this is in some way legitimate. We’re not teaching our children that growing up into an adult is a great thing to grow up to be. We’re not teaching them that being parents is really a pretty spectacular thing to grow up to be. We’re not teaching them to engage in their own gifts and in their own love of learning. People who identify as this, have been co-opted themselves, they’re part of the LGBTQIA2S community, or what have you. Maybe it’s a large number of activists, or maybe it’s a small number of activists. Nobody knows because they’re very loud and they drown out everybody else. You have gays against groomers who say, “Listen, we’re gay. We hate all of this. We’re not into it. We don’t want porn in schools. We don’t want you gender transitioning children.” Because the other thing too is that many of these kids, if left to their own devices, would just grow up gay. We’re eliminating lesbians. We’re eliminating gay men. Our culture has long since accepted lesbians and gay men, and now we are turning our back on them and saying, “Actually, if you’re a woman and you’re sexually attracted to other women, that probably means you’re a man.” “If you’re a man and you’re sexually attracted to other men, that probably means you’re a woman.” Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on the surgeries for minors, which you’ve mentioned a couple of times. There was testimony in the Tennessee House recently where experts testified that just simply doesn’t happen. Ms. Emmons: It does happen, and you have women who said it happens to them. We watched it happen to Jazz Jennings on live television. Chloe Cole had her breasts removed at a young age. There are many more women who have had this happen to them as minors. Mr. Jekielek: I’m very aware that this is happening to minors, but it’s bizarre that experts will come in and say, “This just isn’t real.” Ms. Emmons: The really wild thing is not that they will say that it’s not real, because we are already being lied to about this stuff all the time. For example, there was an instance over the summer. Boston Children’s Hospital had put out a number of promotional videos about their gender clinic for kids. It was all over their website with massive production and beautiful graphics. It was very sweet and calm, saying, “Everything’s going to be just fixed and great once you come into this gender clinic.” “This is how we remove breasts. This is how we remove penises. This is how we remove ovaries, and it’s all so affirming. This is how we make sure you get puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Families have moved here to Boston because we give them this care.” It’s so-called, “care,” which is a complete bastardization of the word, obviously. “We give them this care where they can’t get it anywhere else.” The videos were on their website. Also on their website were intake forms, which gave guidance for different kinds of surgeries. I have this stored on my computer, I downloaded it. Vaginoplasty is at age 17, and mastectomies at age 13. It said it right there, in black and white pixels, in these PDFs. We reported on this at The Post Millennial. We did a rather in-depth report. Chris Elston, who goes by Billboard Chris on Twitter, had also recorded a bunch of these videos, and we worked with him. Libs of TikTok, an account that exposes the Leftist insanity in their own words, she put something on Twitter about how minors were being given hysterectomies. On the Boston Children’s Hospital website, it said age 18 for phalloplasty. The extrapolation was that if you can get a phalloplasty at 17, there’s a substantial amount of surgical procedure that has to go into it before you can get the phalloplasty. The idea was that you could start it prior to being 18, so that you’d be ready for the surgery at 18. That was the extrapolation. However, there was a massive fact check engagement. Everyone got slammed, “This never happens.” All the fact-checkers said, “This never happens.” Boston Children’s Hospital said, “This never happens,” because they just latched onto that one thing. Perhaps the hysterectomy doesn’t actually happen at 17, perhaps it happens at 18. We don’t even necessarily know, but this is what they said. They used just that one little assertion, that one little assumption, to debunk all of the research that was done. Even though the research that was done was simply exposing the videos that they had made, and the guidance that they had written. It was a misdirection. What happened after that is that we doubled down, and we just kept talking about it. Libs of TikTok then went on to expose another children’s hospital who said, “Yes, hysterectomy at age 17,” in Washington DC. You started seeing articles in the New York Times. First they were saying, “It’s not happening.” Then, they started saying, “It’s good that it’s happening.” They can’t decide, really. When they get caught, first they try and tell you it’s not true, and then they tell you that it’s good. I don’t believe anything that they’re saying about it not happening, and they don’t either. Because as soon as they realize it is happening, they’ll just tell you it’s good. To use the word Orwellian is almost an understatement at this point. It’s so double-plus-ungood, what they’re doing here. Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to what you were writing about transhumanism, and what further thoughts you have had. Ms. Emmons: In a lot of ways, transhumanism and transgender ideology are attempting to answer the Cartesian question about the mind body split. Are the mind and the body connected? Are they two separate things? Does what you do to one have an impact on the other? This, of course, was Descartes. “I think, therefore, I am.” Transgender ideology and transhumanism both say that the mind and the body are completely distinct, and that what happens to the one has no impact on the other. That’s the going idea. What happens in my mind I can manifest on my body, and then that changes my body because I have changed it, and my mind rules. Mr. Jekielek: Or I will use technology to do that. Ms. Emmons: Transgender medicine is medical technology. That’s what it is. A hundred years ago, there wouldn’t be puberty blockers. Puberty blockers are a technological development, isolating male and female hormones into a drug, and giving them to someone. That’s a medical technological advancement. Trans implementation is technological. You can’t cut off someone’s penis and create the appearance of a vagina in its place without medical technology. That’s exactly what it is. The idea is that I can change my body to match the image of myself in my head. That’s the first step. The other step is, “I can make everyone else believe it too. If everyone else doesn’t believe my delusion, there’s something wrong with them.” Both of those things combined are really deadly, and it’s why Jordan Peterson first came to prominence talking about how he would not be compelled to speak a person’s pronouns. The idea behind what he was saying was that you cannot force me to lie. I will not lie just because you tell me to. We need to stick to that. We need to not lie just because we are told to. What is gender-affirming care? It is child sex changes. That’s what that is. Don’t lie about it. Don’t use these words that are complete fabrications designed to obfuscate the truth and obfuscate reality. I certainly understand preferred pronouns in personal relationships, and it very much can be gray and dodgy. Ben Shapiro talks about this as well. But en masse, as a culture, we are lying to ourselves and to each other. Jazz Jennings is not a female. Jazz Jennings is a butchered young man, who is trapped in a body that does not reflect who he is, as it turns out. It turns out you can’t change your body completely to match your image of yourself, and have that not have a huge impact on your mind. With these things, we are in concert, we are one being. It’s a pretty devastating situation we have here. Mr. Jekielek: You are committed to exposing these things in your journalism, and in the journalism of your publications. Ms. Emmons: Yes. We’re working really hard on that. The Post Millennial is dedicated to that. We have a writer whose entire project is to write about gender and these issues. We’ve talked to women who are incarcerated, and tried to get their stories. We’re really committed to that at Human Events as well, and we work on that. Yes, I’m really proud of the work that we’re doing at both outlets to expose this, and also to expose so many of the other fallacies that are being pushed on us by the political establishment right now. People need to stand up, they need to know the truth, and they need to stand on that truth and not be swayed, no matter how many people tell you that you are not compassionate for not speaking lies. Mr. Jekielek: Libby Emmons, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Emmons: Thanks so much, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Libby Emmons and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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The Supreme Court is expected this month to make a major ruling on affirmative action. To understand the case, we sat down with Kenny Xu, an insider in the lawsuit and president of Color Us United. He is the author of “An Inconvenient Minority” and the upcoming book “School of Woke.” We also discuss his recent investigations into the dumbing down of academic standards, the protection of sexual predators if they espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology, and the spread of DEI ideology in medical schools. “Medical schools across America are basically advocating that you stop abiding by the Hippocratic Oath and that you start administering preferential care,” Xu says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/david-stockman-debt-default-the-doomsday-budget-machine-and-failed-fiscal-restraint-explained_5311019.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek. Kenny Xu, great to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Kenny Xu: Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Kenny, you’ve played a very significant role in the removal of DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] requirements from the University of North Carolina school system, which actually comprises 17 universities. Please tell me about it. Mr. Xu: I’m president of Color Us United, and we are a group dedicated to a race-blind, meritocratic America. What the University of North Carolina has been doing, and really medical schools all across the nation, is compromising meritocratic ideals in the name of what they call diversity, equity and inclusion. My organization learned about what the University of North Carolina was doing, requiring diversity, equity and inclusion statements for medical faculty to be promoted. You had to sign on saying, “I’m going to commit to these woke principles,” if you wanted to be promoted as a doctor. They were also teaching unconscious bias to their medical students. If you’re learning how to be a doctor, you should be learning how to treat people based on biological facts, not based on critical race theory. Finally, they were doing things like racial preferences in admissions, which I’ve extensively covered in my previous talk with you and in my book, An Inconvenient Minority. They were having racial preferences. If you were a black or Latino medical student, you would have a better chance of getting in than if you’re a white or Asian student. It shouldn’t be about that. Ultimately, it should be about if you are the best qualified doctor. Color Us United launched a campaign to fight against these diversity standards in medicine. On February 23, 2023, the board of governors voted to ban diversity, equity and inclusion statements from promotion and tenure of faculty. It’s a small win towards our larger goal of having the dean of the medical school renounce DEI entirely, but it’s a welcome one. Mr. Jekielek: I imagine they didn’t just do this immediately. Mr. Xu: They didn’t. What happened was there are a group of trustees at the University of North Carolina that are very supportive of our colorblind meritocratic ideals. They have been interested in fighting wokeness within the university. As you can see, it’s encroaching upon territory where it should not, like medical schools and the practice of medicine. If you’re a patient, do you want the most qualified doctor, or do you want a doctor of a certain race? The vast majority of Americans want the most qualified doctor. There is already a lot of concern at the university. But the dean, Wesley Burks, released a video in 2020 advocating for a plan to integrate social justice into the UNC Medical School curriculum. It was a very scary proposition. That means new doctors are going to be educated according to the tenets of social justice and critical race theory, instead of according to the biological practice of medicine. We exposed this in outlets across America and generated a lot of attention. We created a petition campaign, which you can still sign at colorusunited.org. On February 23rd, the board of governors took steps to start ridding the university and the medical system of diversity, equity and inclusion principles. Mr. Jekielek: The bottom line here is that in order to get into medical school and other departments, you actually have to show that you adhere to these principles. How does that work? Mr. Xu: Even more than that actually. UNC, up until recently, had a list of sample DEI statements that you could write if you want to apply to be a medical faculty or a student. In this DEI statement, you have to basically prove to a committee of highly progressive Leftists that you are sufficiently committed to inclusion. You have to talk about what diversity committees you have been on in college or in the workforce, and what advocacy you have done on the behalf of so-called underrepresented minorities. They get to interrogate you about this. It has nothing to do with medicine, because these kids and these faculties devote their entire lives to serving everybody, not serving just black people, not serving just Latino or Asian people, but serving all Americans. That is what the Hippocratic Oath is about. Diversity, equity and inclusion is antithetical to the Hippocratic Oath. They were basically advocating, and medical schools across America are basically advocating that you stop abiding by the Hippocratic Oath and that you start administering preferential care. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain briefly why deciding to care for more people of a particular race would violate the Hippocratic Oath. Mr. Xu: When you’re a doctor, you have to make a statement that first, you do no harm. You treat everybody with dignity and respect equally. But the new Hippocratic Oath, an oath that was taken by students at the University of Minnesota Medical School, for example, said, “I commit to Black Lives Matter principles. I commit to treating certain groups more preferentially than others.” In fact, you saw this in the administration of the vaccine. The city of Oakland, during the 2021 rollout of the vaccine said, “We’re going to start administering the vaccine first to underrepresented populations,” and they meant black and Hispanic Americans. It’s a repudiation of, “Let’s treat people according to fair principles, not based on the color of their skin.” Another thing that this is violating is the principle of doctors treating everybody with dignity and respect. If you start getting educated about white privilege and you’re a doctor and you start getting educated to basically despise white people, just imagine you’re performing a surgery in the operating room 10 years from now when you finally have your own practice. That is going to leak into your thinking for the rest of your life. This is indoctrination. These days, practicing CRT [Critical Race Theory] and medicine is an alternative way that you can get into the medical community. The big medical journals like Nature and Science, the ones that publish the big pharmaceutical papers, you can get credit and actually get published in those journals by advocating for nothing at all except, “This practice creates certain racial disparities in medicine here, so we need to use a critical race theory analysis.” There are people in our medical system right now who have built their entire careers off of CRT. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating and deeply disturbing. What has been the reaction to this? Mr. Xu: It has been positive. Patients and doctors have come out in support of this. In fact, we recently had a Cameroon-born doctor named Dr. Nche Zama come to UNC Medical School. He actually trained at Harvard Medical School and knows all the ins and outs of the profession. He came and he railed against DEI. It was just incredible. Certain doctors have started coming out and speaking out for themselves too and speaking out for the entire profession. Because this isn’t just about themselves, this is about the future of medical care, and this is about fairness. The problem that the healthcare industry has right now is access to care. Access to care is not a racial issue. There are white Americans in rural areas who lack the same access to care as black Americans in urban areas. By the way, the best way to give people the best access to care is to produce the most competent doctors. That’s how you get the best access to care. You need to be transparent and show patients your patient outcome data. That is something the healthcare industry has been very reluctant to do. Do you want to restore trust in the healthcare system? It’s not about black doctors or white doctors. Black patients don’t care, and white patients don’t care. It’s not about race, it’s about quality. Mr. Jekielek: You can also imagine in society where these DEI and CRT principles are being promulgated where people might be afraid to go to a doctor of a particular race, if it’s different from theirs. What a terrible thing we’re doing with this. Mr. Xu: We’re doing a terrible thing to incoming black doctors for sure. By embedding racial preferences in admissions, by making this about social justice and race, we are actually priming the public to distrust black doctors in the future. That is very sad because I know some of the highest quality black doctors in the nation, like Dr. Nche Zama and Dr. Ben Carson. Some of the most highly trained and highly skilled doctors in America are black, but they are lumped in with people who definitely got into medical school because of racial preferences. That is unfair to them. Mr. Jekielek: I was even thinking in the opposite direction where someone who’s black might have been taught that whites are out to get them, so they wouldn’t go to a white doctor. Mr. Xu: Yes, that’s also a good point. That’s also a good point. What the CRT folks like to say in response to my argument is that black patients are literally being killed by white doctors. They’ll point to studies that say a white doctor who administers care to a black newborn has a three times higher likelihood of mortality, than a black patient being administered care from a black doctor. That is a study that was retweeted by CNN. They focused on that study on TV. You can go to the methodology of that study and see that it is all wrong. It’s a bad methodology and those are studies that should not be used. There’s another study that I want to mention. They claim that white doctors are more likely to leave black patients in pain in diabetic insulin treatments. When you’re diabetic, you need insulin and white doctors are less likely to prescribe this less painful insulin treatment than black doctors. But they forget a lot of confounding factors. When doctors are evaluating whether to prescribe something to a patient, they’re evaluating on a number of reasons and a number of things. One of those is their concern about the patient’s ability to consistently do the treatment by themselves. When they’re not certain of that, then prescribing that treatment actually harms the patient more because if the patient is not doing it, then they have to pay for this treatment that they’re not consistently administering themselves. Yes, the doctors are making a judgment, but this judgment is not racist. It is based on the patient’s needs and it should not be ascribed to racism. Mr. Jekielek: What do the students at the school think about this? Mr. Xu: Right now, we’re in the process of making students more aware. A lot of the students are already aware about what’s going on, but they are afraid to speak out. I spoke with a physical therapy student who talked about a medical school professor coming in and saying, “We need to be concerned about access to healthcare. You need to take this implicit bias test.” He took a thing called an implicit bias test [IAT], which is a now discredited model of trying to determine whether you’re secretly a racist. They made him take this test, so he took it. He had to take a credit hour of a class that investigated racial disparities in healthcare and queer disparities in healthcare. It was told from the lens of critical race theory and queer theory. The students are definitely aware that these DEI programs are going on, but they’re yet unaware about how fully it is infiltrated into the medical profession, and also how much they’re going to be judged by these things later on in their career. I’m in the process of talking to students right now. I’m literally out on the street at the medical school talking to these students. I’m talking to the students, “Hey, did you know that these principles that you’re learning are actually going to affect your career? They’re going to affect your eligibility for fellowships. Right now, UNC is offering a black-only fellowship for neurosurgery. It’s only available to black applicants.” “It’s going to affect your ability to get fellowships and residencies. It’s going to affect how patients treat you, and it’s going to affect how hospital administrators treat you. If the Biden agenda is allowed to continue, the equity agenda, which is of course about race, it’s going to affect the grant money that you’re going to get in the future. We have to put a stop to this.” Mr. Jekielek: You have another case that you’ve been involved with, the Harvard Discrimination Against Asians case. It’s now at the Supreme Court. Where are things at with respect to that? Mr. Xu: That’s a great question. The Supreme Court justices are going to decide on the Harvard case most likely in June. I do expect that Students For Fair Admissions, which is the organization that I’m on the board of, will win. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to me what the case is, and then how far it’s come. What are the strongest arguments that you’ve presented? Mr. Xu: In 2014, a group called Students For Fair Admissions sued Harvard for discrimination against Asians. People said, “Why would they do that?” The reason why they do that is because Harvard has this diversity rationale, a DEI rationale. They say they need more diverse applicants, and they just happen to label Asians as not diverse. We know what they mean by diverse student body, they want more black and Hispanic students. They don’t want more Asian students. Mr. Jekielek: The Asians perform too well. Mr. Xu: Yes. What we learned in the process of the discovery of the case is that an Asian in the highest 10 percent of all Harvard admissions academically has a lower chance to get in than a black person in the fourth-lowest decile of admissions at Harvard. There are standards. An Asian has to score about 273 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a black person, and about 120 points higher to have the same chance of admission as a white person. That’s based on the discovery data that we learned. There are different standards. It is discrimination. Mr. Jekielek: What is the judge saying? Mr. Xu: In 2019, Harvard presents this competing case. Their case is that Asians are not discriminated against if you include a thing called a personality score. When you apply to Harvard, you’re judged on three things, academics, extracurriculars and a personality score. Asians score the highest in academics, highest in extracurriculars, and then, they score the lowest out of all of the races on the personality score. This was used as evidence in the trial that Harvard wasn’t discriminating. But what Students For Fair Admissions, my organization, has been arguing and I think successfully, is that the personality score is just a proxy for Harvard’s discrimination. They will look at an essay written by a guy with the last name Wong or Xu and they will say, “This student is good, but he’s not amazing.” They will look at a student whose last name is Hernandez and they would say, “This student is amazing, we have to take him.” We actually had an economist break down the applications, application by application. The economist, Peter Arcidiacono, says after reading those applications, he sees the unfair standards that were given. He could read the exact same application. The only thing changed is a person’s name and race. Harvard would label one standard strong, which is SS, which means good but not good enough, and they would label the other, “This is amazing, we have to take him.” Mr. Jekielek: With the only other determinant being race, presumably. Mr. Xu: What would a Harvard admissions officer grade a personality on? It could be things like maybe a teacher recommendation, alumni recommendation, or the strength of your personal essay. But what we found was that the Asians actually score highest on alumni recommendations, they score highest out of all the races on teacher recommendations, and they score second highest out of all the races on counselor recommendations. There’s no objective metric that you can link to the personality score except for race. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating, and again, disturbing. Are you confident you’re going to win this one? Mr. Xu: You can never be too confident. But even a swing Justice, Chief Justice John Roberts, who defended Obamacare, has made public his disdain for affirmative action. He said in a 2005 decision when he was a dissenter, “The only way to stop discrimination on the basis of race, is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.” In 2014, we had a similar affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas, that we thought was going to go our way too, but ended up going the other way. But here we’re even more confident. Ketanji Brown Jackson actually recused herself, because she was on the Harvard Board of Overseers, and she’s most likely to be sympathetic to Harvard’s viewpoint. That was a question asked during her Supreme Court hearing and she did say, “I will recuse myself,” and she did recuse herself. Mr. Jekielek: Before we talk about your book, School of Woke, I’ve just been reading James Lindsay’s new book, The Marxification of Education. It’s helping me understand a lot of what’s happened in the academy. Before we go there, I want to talk about the academic scandal at Thomas Jefferson High School, which of course you know a lot about. Mr. Xu: I wrote the first chapter of my previous book, An Inconvenient Minority, all about Thomas Jefferson High School. What I discovered at Thomas Jefferson High School was that the school board is controlled by woke progressives. Thomas Jefferson High School is the number one math and science high school in the nation. Recently, the school has become about 70 percent Asian. It used to be 70 percent white, and now it’s 70 percent Asian. Why? Because the Asians were studying harder. They were getting the top math scores in the nation. Therefore, they were going to Thomas Jefferson. The progressive school board got mad about that. What happened? The George Floyd incident happened and they brought in the critical race theorist, Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be Antiracist, to speak about how standardized tests are racist. They got rid of that whole admissions process. They made it into a holistic lottery admissions process, which they are now being sued for. There’s actually a lawsuit against that right now. Even more recently, because of this admissions process, they started admitting kids who were just not qualified. This is the number one math and science high school, and these kids are going to be nuclear engineers. But if 30 percent of the kids who are admitted are now not qualified, it creates a great imbalance in the school’s makeup. They decided to rectify this imbalance not by rectifying their admissions process, but by withholding awards from the actual high performing students, because they wanted to make the low performing students feel better. That’s what happened at Thomas Jefferson School. It is a consequence of the racial preferences that they were already doing. They admitted lower qualified students, and now, because they admitted lower qualified students, they wanted to make these students feel better. They stopped doing the awards for the higher qualified students, who by the way, were almost entirely Asian. They were withholding these National Merit Scholarship Awards from well-qualified Asians who could have used those scholarship awards to apply for colleges, for the sake of appeasing the feelings of those at the lower end of the spectrum. Mr. Jekielek: What is the substance of this lawsuit? Mr. Xu: The substance of the lawsuit at Thomas Jefferson High School, from my understanding, is that you are penalizing Asian students. It’s the same script and it’s the same lawsuit as what Students For Fair Admissions filed against Harvard. It’s true. You are penalizing Asian students for being Asian. Let me share a statistic with your viewers. The average Asian American studies 13 hours a week. The average white person studies eight hours a week. The average black person studies five hours a week. I’m talking about kids in K-12. Why are there disparities in educational achievement? It’s not because of racism, it’s because of study habits. It’s because of family structure. It’s because Asian Americans have the highest rate of two-parent families, the lowest rates of drug use, and the lowest rates of crime in the country. It’s about culture. If you’re really going to fix the problems in these school systems, if you’re really going to fix the fact that Thomas Jefferson only had 1 percent or lower of their students that are black, which I also lament, but if you’re really going to fix that problem, racial quotas are not the way to fix the problem. You have to go into the K-12 middle schools and elementary schools, diagnose the discipline issues that are going there, diagnose the study habit issues going on there, and diagnose the single parenthood issues, meaning that you can’t read to your kid, and you’re too caught up with work to do these things. I’m very sympathetic to these mothers who are in those situations, but those are leading to these problems. Mr. Jekielek: Tell me about your book and when is it coming out? Mr. Xu: My new book is called, School of Woke. It’s coming out on August 1st this year. My motivation for writing this book was as I was investigating racial preferences, I became very concerned with the racial achievement gap in our country, because there is a racial achievement gap in our country. I guarantee it. People always talk about how America is not an educated country, because our PISA scores, an international performance score, are lower compared to European nations. The sad part that they’ll never tell you is that if you break it down by race, the Asian PISA scores are basically on par with Singapore and some of the best educated countries in the nation. The white PISA scores are also very good, they’re equivalent to some of the Scandinavian countries. But the black PISA scores are terrible. They’re just terrible. The racial achievement gap hasn’t closed, and it hasn’t closed over the past 30 years. By the way, we’ve spent three times as much money on public education in those past 30 years, adjusted for inflation. What have we been spending it on? The answer is, as a result of my investigation in School of Woke, we’ve been spending it on internalizing critical race theory principles in our school system. We’ve been spending it on teaching black kids that society is against them. We’ve been spending them on new diversity, equity and inclusion administrators to teach queer theory and relationship-oriented pedagogy to teachers so that they can continue to derail these students. They are not pushing them in math or pushing them in science, but instead pushing a false racist narrative on them. It just sickens me, and it’s a heartbreaking investigation. I went into two major school districts, Loudoun County Public Schools and Santa Barbara Public Schools in California. I found that what they’re teaching in these public schools that they get so much funding for fundamentally doesn’t teach them things, it’s anti-learning. At Santa Barbara High School, if you check, born in Mexico, and you have an immigrant parent, a lot of these parents are illegal immigrants, if you check, born in Mexico, they put your kid through a so-called bilingual program where you’re not actually learning English anymore. They teach you 10 percent English, and 90 percent in Spanish. They do this in the name of diversity and equity. “We want to make sure all our cultures are represented. We want to teach Spanish to people. Oh, Spanish, it’s great.” But they’re dooming these kids to not being able to learn English for the rest of their lives, because they want to facilitate a critical race theory narrative of multiculturalism. Mr. Jekielek: Explain to me how it’s anti-education. Mr. Xu: Think about the traditional model of education. The traditional model of education is that taxpayer dollars pay for schools who educate your children who later become taxpayers. It’s a beneficial cycle. Now, invert that model. The model is changing. Your taxpayer dollars are going into the school system, and the school system has become a massive bureaucracy whose purpose is to benefit the bureaucracy. They are now paying diversity administrators and human resource counselors. They’re paying superintendents massive salaries. They’re paying businesses. I talk about one of these businesses, Panorama Education, which is the brainchild of Merrick Garland’s son-in-law, a student surveying platform. He got paid millions of dollars to work with Fairfax and Loudoun County Public Schools to survey their children on critical race theory. They’re paying these businesses and they’re creating a new fiefdom, a new little kingdom of wokeness. The new principles that they’re teaching within this kingdom is justifying this kingdom. Let me tell you about what’s happening in our education schools. They’re teaching new teachers that the primary purpose of being a teacher is to build a, “Relationship,” with your student. It’s not to teach them math. It’s not to build their cognitive abilities. It’s not to help them become a better social person. It’s to build a personal relationship with this student. In fact, Jamie Almanzan, from the equity collaborative, he was one of the coordinators at Loudoun County Public Schools, preached to teachers that the internet teaches information better than these teachers ever could. What does this relationship pedagogy mean? It means that these teachers are trying to be your friends. They’re trying to help you with your social problems, including by the way whether you’re gay or not, and whether you should come out in school at the age of 9 or 10. These teachers are taught to be a supportive friend, which justifies the entire DEI bureaucracy. That means that we need more guidance counselors, because these kids are so mentally anxious. That means we need more tech consultants, because we need to survey these kids and all of their real problems. They generate a list of problems including their so-called racial oppression to justify the new K-12 education bureaucracy. Mr. Jekielek: Kenny, what is the most egregious example of the application of DEI or CRT principles in the education system that you’re aware of? Mr. Xu: It is the protection of predators, so long as they espouse DEI and CRT principles. In Santa Barbara, in one of the investigations that I did, and this is so sad, there was a world history teacher who was an avowed Marxist, who also preyed on his students. I had an interview with one of these students. She told me about how the school system protected this man because this man was instrumental in Santa Barbara’s progressive CRT agenda. He would attend all of the seminars and all of the parties with the liberal funders. He would get grant money for ethnic studies in Santa Barbara, which is CRT ideology, it’s a CRT history class. He was a black man in a town that is 1 percent black. He was the shining living hope of everything that progressives and Leftists wanted. There was only one problem, he was a predator. This is not just theory, this really motivates people with a religious conviction almost where they will protect their own if their own make CRT a priority in the school system. Mr. Jekielek: Even to that extent, it’s unbelievable. Mr. Xu: The nonprofits that protected this man are even more unbelievable. One of the things I talk about is social emotional learning, it’s a principle that says that students need to learn how to be better behaved. We want to prevent teen suicides. Okay, it’s a very nice sounding principle. But there are nonprofits in Santa Barbara and schools across the nation that claim to use the social emotional learning model. What they’re really doing is getting these students to touch each other, they’re getting these students to be emotionally vulnerable to grown adults in ways that are inappropriate, and they protect these predators. One of the nonprofits really protected this man who assaulted this young lady. It is horrible. By the way, this nonprofit was funded by the Santa Barbara Public School system, which goes into my larger point. The school system’s money is now being redirected away from genuinely teaching the students into helping the growing industry of CRT and DEI bureaucracy that is impacting our nation negatively. Mr. Jekielek: Everything you’re telling me very much comports with what James Lindsay has found. When bureaucracies grow and become entrenched, it can be very hard to free institutions from them. I’m sure you’ve thought about this. Mr. Xu: James and I have actually talked and my interview with him is in the book, School of Woke. He says that the best way to fight this monkey is to shine the light on it. When you shine the light, the cockroaches flee. I have to disagree with James slightly. It may take out the worst 20 percent of actors, but this entire system is deeply entrenched. They will come back with a new acronym. If it’s not CRT, if it’s not DEI, it will be something else. People need to know that this is coming from the same Marxist framework that is coming out of our education schools, which says that a teacher’s primary job is to build a relationship with students, and to teach them to realize their own oppression. That’s what Paulo Freire said, the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which sold 750,000 copies in the United States. The object of education is to make a kid realize their own oppression. Parents, activists, and everybody needs to understand that this is fundamentally what is being taught in our school system right now. It is affecting the lives of many children, primarily minority children, but now leaking into all kinds of places in our country right now. Mr. Jekielek: If shining the light on the realities of what these bureaucracies do isn’t enough, what else are you proposing? Mr. Xu: I propose a couple of different things. One, as people who care about our children, we need to actually not just bring to attention what’s going on at these school board meetings and everything like that, but we need to propose something. We need to propose something and we need to hold these people accountable. One thing that I talk about in my book, for example, is proposing school choice. Okay, fine, you can have your indoctrination factory, but allow me to send my kid to someplace else. Actually, this is something that is very popular with black Americans. In fact, over 60 percent of black Americans have a favorable opinion of school choice. Another thing that I talk about is doing more investigations of the schools and holding the actors, especially the superintendents, accountable. In Loudoun County Public Schools, the superintendent Scott Ziegler sat on a case of a transgender sexual assault. This has now been confirmed. There was a gender-fluid person who sexually assaulted a child. Scott Ziegler, the superintendent, saw this and sat on it. He would not tell the public about this even when directly asked if there were confirmed cases of gender-fluid sexual assaults at his school. He would not confirm it, and he lied. But when Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial election, he brought his Attorney General to investigate that school system. They determined that Loudoun County Public Schools did sit on this case and they had to fire him the next day. Scott Ziegler is no longer superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools. But we need to hold the people who are in charge accountable, that’s what I would say. More than just exposure, but correctly framing this as an issue that deserves the superintendent’s attention. If they make the wrong decisions, then fire them. Mr. Jekielek: Kenny Xu, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Xu: Jan, thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Kenny Xu and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. 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

“There is no life without suffering. There is no love without suffering … You cannot have this perfect hedonistic life. It doesn’t exist, even if advertising, media, and everybody tells you so,” says Eduard Habsburg, the archduke of Austria and Hungary’s ambassador to the Vatican. He is from the royal line of the Habsburgs and author of “The Habsburg Way: 7 Rules for Turbulent Times.” In this wide-ranging interview, we take a look at what it means to live a good life, and to die a good death. What is the value of faith, family, and traditional values? Is there something to learn from the ruling philosophy of the Habsburgs? What core principles unite America’s founding and the Habsburg approach? Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/david-stockman-debt-default-the-doomsday-budget-machine-and-failed-fiscal-restraint-explained_5311019.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Ambassador Eduard Habsburg, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Eduard Habsburg: Thank you very much for having me on the show. Mr. Jekielek: I am really enjoying reading your book, The Habsburg Way. Let’s start with this. In the U.S. and in Canada, and frankly in many places, when you think of aristocracy, you think of the Howard Zinn version of aristocracy. Basically, they are the people that made others suffer while they enjoyed all the luxuries of life. This is certainly not the picture that you get from reading The Habsburg Way, and I want to give you a chance to talk about that at the outset here. Ambassador Habsburg: First of all, I’m very aware that the United States is built on the idea and on the myth of fighting tyrants and fighting against oppressors. Aristocracy has a bad rap in movies and in books. I try to make a case for seeing the positive sides of royalty in my book. What I’m saying is that I’m in the privileged position of having been able to meet the current kings of Europe, the grand dukes of Europe, and the current rulers when they were rulers in training. These experiences led me to understand that these people, the ones I’ve met—I haven’t met the English, but I’ve met all the others, the Catholic ones—the people I’ve met were deeply humble servants that from their earliest childhood were taught to serve. They grew up getting to know every important player in their country, all the topics important for the country, all the fault lines, and the dangerous topics. They were raised all of their childhood and their youth to serve. For instance, if your country has two languages, you try not to prefer one of those two. If your country has Protestants and Catholics, and you’re a Christian ruler, you try not to show your preference too strongly. You try to be balanced. You are acutely aware of which topics threaten the unity in your country. But the most important topic of all and the great difference to the political leaders of today is that you’re in it for life. You cannot go on and then after a while say, “That’s it. I’m getting out of here and I’m finding a nice plum job where I earn millions and I will never have to bother with this country again.” That’s a temptation in today’s political world. A monarch doesn’t do that. A monarch is in it for life. They know not only that their life is bound to their country and their responsibilities for the country, but they know that their children, their son or daughter that one day will take over, will have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This gives a totally different frame of mind. Also, a monarch will have a different approach to a crisis, because a politician will be always tempted to say, “Which headline will help me get reelected in the election in one-and-a-half years, and which headline risks my career?” A monarch does not have this problem. Of course, that’s a danger in a way, but it’s also an advantage. You can really think about what is good for my country, and not what is good for my career. There’s a few strong arguments. No, not all rulers were always like this, but I can really and confidently assess that all current rulers in European monarchies that I have met are exactly like that. Mr. Jekielek: That’s absolutely fascinating. I lived in Thailand for a while under the king that recently passed who was there for many, many decades. With so many coups and so many changes in government, it was actually the king that provided stability to the country every time. What you’re saying makes sense to me. Ambassador Habsburg: On the other hand, the current royal families and the current kingdoms and dukedoms are probably only a shadow of what monarchy once was. The king of Belgium, for instance, who is a devout Catholic, signed one of the worst euthanasia laws in Europe, because in his position he has to sign every law presented to him by the parliament. That is not what a monarch is about. If you are a glorified president with a crown, then it’s not really what it used to be. I repeat once more, they are signs of stability. Their duty is to keep the country together and to not do anything that will hurt the unity and the peace in the country, which is quite a lot. Also, I want to add something. Americans know kings and monarchs mostly from movies. They don’t know how it is to grow up, and to have your grandparents growing up in the same monarchy, seeing the children of the monarch growing up, like in England. Now, everybody’s seeing the future king of England as a little boy. They will grow up with that. They will see how his parents, Kate and William, serve the country, try to be gentle, try to be helpful, and try to be a symbol of unity. This gives stability, and this gives a country hope. You’ve seen this in the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, when people queued up 10 to 14 hours in order to be in front of a coffin for 5 to 10 seconds, just as a sign of respect. I would say 60 percent of that was perhaps the respect for this woman. But at least 40 percent of that was simply a sign of respect for the institution of monarchy. We see that with the coronation of King Charles in England. In the United States you never had a monarchy, along with other countries. But if you meet people who live in a monarchy, they will have a very different outlook on monarchy than most people have nowadays. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the origin of America. The founders decided that essentially the monarchy was oppressive to them, and that’s what catalyzed the set of ideas that came into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A lot of European countries then adopted this as a great model. Ambassador Habsburg: Absolutely. Mr. Jekielek: The obvious problem with monarchy is what happens when you get that despotic king or despotic ruler and you can’t get rid of them? Ambassador Habsburg: Yes, of course. Mr. Jekielek: There have been plenty in history, and I also certainly believe there have been the benevolent ones. Ambassador Habsburg: Yes, that’s a problem. I’d like to talk about America. America is a great continent. Just before coming here, I reread deTocqueville’s, Democracy in America. I read this at least once a year, because America is built on a great idea and has a totally different and unique structure of how townships are built, and how counties are built. It’s totally different from what we have in Europe, and it’s great. America has the seed of really being the land of freedom, the land of the free. One of the things that surprised me writing my book about The Habsburg Way was how close some of the ideas of the Holy Roman Empire, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the United States are, which you wouldn’t think to be the case. You would think on the one hand, with the despots and tyrants, and on the other hand, with the land of the free, there are few key ideas that are very similar. One of these concepts is the topic of subsidiarity that I talk a lot about in this book. That for me, is one of the key concepts that made the Habsburg Empire great and functioning, and in theory at least, the opposite from an oppressive tyranny. Mr. Jekielek: I had never heard of this word before, but it’s such a powerful word, this idea that you let the smallest possible unit of government deal with issues that it can deal with. You can clarify beyond what I just said, but it’s a powerful motivating idea and certainly the idea behind America in many ways. Ambassador Habsburg: Yes. America is built from the bottom up. America is built in the order of homestead, township, county, and state, with states already being very soft and very weak in power. The strongest power is at the base. At the federal level it is very weak with very little power. This is something great. Why is it something great? First of all, because man is local. We are local. Democracy functions best on a local level. The higher up we go, the more abstract it becomes, and the less people feel that they’re really involved in what’s going on in the country. The Habsburg principle is already visible in one quote in my book. Charles V wrote to his son Philip II when he was king of Spain saying, “If you rule over several nations and countries, you have to respect their languages, their rights, their political institutions, their local habits and their peculiarities, or you’ll be in deep trouble.” The Habsburgs had this from the beginning, even from the 13th century. Let me say this differently. Our idea of empire is the idea from Star Wars, an evil emperor suppressing everybody with stormtroopers and a glorious band of rebels that stands up against this. The Habsburg empire was far closer to the empire in the Dune novels of Frank Herbert. The emperor had no real power. He had to juggle different houses, different dukedoms, and different princedoms. The Habsburg emperor in the Holy Roman Empire had no great army or lots of money. He only had authority by his sacred rule, and he was supposed to be the judge of all and keep all of this together, which was a complicated diplomatic game. It only worked with subsidiarity. The moment you didn’t respect one of the parts of this empire, there was trouble, there were revolts, and there were conflicts. You had to respect everybody. I’ll give you an example. The Habsburgs learned this from the relationship between the Habsburgs and Hungary. Hungary was seen as a rebel country, subdued and suppressed by the Habsburgs, always standing up for freedom, which was sometimes unpleasant for the emperors. The moment the Habsburgs began to respect them, for instance, giving the Hungarians the right to call in their own diet, going to Hungary and let themselves be crowned king of Hungary. These gestures of respect for the local customs, for the local rights, these gestures made the Austro- Hungarian Empire become great. The United States are really the “united states.” We say this without thinking, but originally, these were states that had sovereignty and could decide things on a local level. We have seen in the last two or three years that some states decided to go different ways than what the federal level wanted. This is still there in the United States. It’s a strong thing. Subsidiarity is the ultimate antidote and answer to what I see as the menace of globalism, the idea that decisions are being made not on a local level, not even on a national level, but on a supernational level. Single nations don’t even have a choice anymore other than to follow things that have been decided by very different powers. If this happens, people lose faith in democracy. They lose faith in their political leaders, because they say, “I can vote for somebody, but the decisions are being made on a very different level. What does it have to do with me?” Democracy is supposed to function because the citizen is the sovereign in democracy. Listen to me, a Habsburg saying these things. But you see the similarities between what the Habsburgs in the best moments try to achieve and what the United States stands for and can be. The subtitle of my book is, 7 Rules for Turbulent Times. We live in turbulent times. Funny that the Habsburgs should teach us a lesson in the 21st century. Mr. Jekielek: My family has a mixed relationship with the Habsburgs, because my family was in Galicia when Poland was under partition prior to the end of World War I. My family was basically in that partition of land. There was Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of course. Ambassador Habsburg: Yes, exactly. Mr. Jekielek: But you know what I have to say, we didn’t like being under someone else’s rule. Ambassador Habsburg: Nobody likes it. Mr. Jekielek: Nobody likes that. However, if you had to choose between the three, Galicia would definitely be the place where you would go. Essentially, the way I characterize it glibly and simply is that they said, “Just give us the money and do what you want.” Whereas, in the other places, they were actively destroying Polish culture and destroying Polish language. There was active persecution. Ambassador Habsburg: Can I give you an example? Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Ambassador Habsburg: The reason why our last emperor, blessed Emperor Karl, was beatified by Pope John Paul II was because his name was Karol. He was called Karol because his father had served in the monarchy and was a great fan of Karl of Austria, blessed Emperor Karl. For him the monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a positive experience. Therefore, he instilled in his son a great love for this last Habsburg emperor, and he gave him the name of that last Habsburg. Therefore, Karol Wojtyła, as Pope, had the dream to help this Habsburg to the altar. There were good experiences and bad, of course. For the Hungarians, for instance, being part of the Habsburg empire was up and down. It was traumatic sometimes, and it was beautiful sometimes. It was a long struggle to find a balance where the Hungarians really saw themself being taken seriously. The end result now is that my prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has written the foreword to my book about the Habsburgs. This is incredible, because it’s a step forward in Hungary towards living with the Habsburgs in a positive way. Mr. Jekielek: You recently had an audience with the Pope, and I want to ask you about that. Before we go there, you are the Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See, and of course, a very devout Catholic. It’s very interesting to see that you associate the Habsburgs with Austria. What I’ve learned is that in Austria it’s illegal to use titles in Austria, and you’re the Hungarian ambassador. How does that work? Ambassador Habsburg: Okay. I would say Austria has a cramped up relationship with the Habsburgs. They’re not relaxed with the Habsburgs. On the one hand, they take the money because the Habsburgs are the number one product of tourism. All the people coming to Vienna, to Schönbrunn, and to Salzburg, come for the Habsburg heritage. On the other hand, Austria is somehow traumatized by having been the Habsburg Empire, or at least a certain class of intellectuals are traumatized by that. After the end of the Habsburg Empire, there were very severe laws banning all aristocratic titles, banning the Habsburgs from ever taking a political charge again, and banning members of the Habsburg family for decades from reentering Austria. There was a very, very traumatic situation up until a very short time ago. Just 10 years ago, a law was abolished that forbade members of the Habsburg family to ever run for Austrian president. For a while that made sense because of the trauma probably, but the reason why the Austrian government abolished that law was that a woman that married a Habsburg told the Austrian President, “Listen, up until five minutes before my marriage with a Habsburg, I could have run for president. The moment I was married, I couldn’t anymore. I see some sort of racism here.” In the end, this law was abolished. The Austrians have a very tense and complicated relationship, and they still will need at least one more generation to have a relaxed relationship with the Habsburgs. I feel it, especially when I speak about blessed emperor Karl, the last emperor. Normal and calm intellectuals get angry and furious when they speak about him, because he was a very remarkable Catholic and this is unpopular with some people nowadays. But Hungary that suffered far more under the Habsburgs has now come to embrace its Habsburg heritage. I am the ambassador of Hungary to the Holy See. My cousin, Georg, is the ambassador of Hungary in Paris to the French state. We have two Habsburg ambassadors for Hungary. In Hungary, there’s a joke on the streets which goes, “Austria lives off the Habsburgs and Hungary lives with the Habsburgs.” I am a Hungarian citizen. My father was born in Hungary as a member of the Habsburg Hungarian branch of our family. Therefore, I’ve always been Hungarian, but I lived outside of Hungary until I became an ambassador. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s a very interesting turnaround of the situation. We’ll hope that Austria will, with time, get relaxed and more at ease with the Habsburg heritage. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about this principle of subsidiarity and Hungary and how it’s placed in the EU. This is the obvious question, and then we’ll talk about your audience with the Pope. I’m very curious to learn about this. Ambassador Habsburg: Some people have pointed out when they read the foreword of Viktor Orbán in which he speaks about the freedom fight of the Hungarian, the proud Hungarians against the Habsburgs over centuries, the times when the Habsburgs opened up and respected Hungary, and the times when the Habsburg suppressed Hungary. Somebody read that and said, “He writes about his struggles with Brussels.” It’s a very good comparison. There is a topic in my book, “What is the EU compared to the Austro-Hungarian Empire?” This comparison has been made. The EU is a supernatural union of sovereign nations that have united under certain ideas to work together under certain conditions, under a common idea and under common values. The moment this becomes difficult, like it did in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was when the single nation doesn’t feel respected. One of the things I say in my book is that I believe in the right of nations to their own sovereignty. Nation is a positive concept and not a negative one like it’s seen nowadays. But the sign of a maturity of a nation is its ability to participate in a supernatural structure if subsidiarity is maintained, the nation remains sovereign, and their sovereign principles are respected. In the European Union right now, you have the impression that a few of the countries in the European Union are not respected in their sovereignty. Because the moment their ideas are somewhat different than what is lived in Brussels, Brussels clamps down, tries to punish you, and tries to find ways of cutting off financial flows to punish you for having different ideas. They don’t call it that, but that’s what really happens. This is like the Habsburgs clamping down on the sovereign rights of Hungary. There’s so many parallels here. An empire or a supernatural construction of states works if the center is weak and if the federal level respects the single nations. Then, it will work. One thing missing in the European Union right now that you had in the Austro-Hungarian Empire is you had a symbol above all these countries and nations. You had a symbol that everybody knew when you looked, it was this bearded old emperor, this is it what united us. In the European Union if you ask people on the street, what is the European idea? What unites us Europeans? What do we stand for? You will get very different and confusing answers. One story that I’d like to tell about this topic is that the Brussels leaders sometimes say that central European countries like Poland and Hungary don’t stand for European values anymore. Orbán, when he came visiting the Pope in Rome, and afterwards gave a talk in the garden of the Hungarian embassy, he said, “We are sometimes accused of not standing for European values anymore. But I ask you if the founders of the European Union; Schuman, De Gasperi, and Adenauer, would come back today, where would they find the European values, in Brussels or in central Europe? It’s a question, what are our values? What do we stand for? The Pope has just visited Hungary and he said in two of his talks that Hungary is more or less the beating heart of Europe. The way Hungary handles things should be an example for many countries in Europe. That encourages me a lot, I have to say. Mr. Jekielek: Right. He’s actually been vocal about this and I haven’t covered this on the show. Please tell me the ways that he thinks Hungary has been successful. I could share my opinion too, but I would love to hear that. Ambassador Habsburg: He sees that we stand for certain basic values. Some of them are very similar to what I write about in my book. We stand for sovereignty. We stand for traditional values like faith and family. Viktor Orbán is not a Catholic, he’s a Calvinist, but faith and religious communities are very visibly present in the Hungarian public space. We are not afraid of showing a crucifix or a cross. Hungary is probably the only country in Europe where you’re actively encouraged to wear a kippah in public. Our Jewish community is one of the most flourishing in all of Europe. New synagogues are being built, and the government is strongly encouraging this. You could say Hungary is a place where religion is visible in public space. This is something that in the western part of Europe has gone missing. Political leaders don’t show their faith. On the contrary, it’s seen as a positive thing if you’re totally neutral, have no supernatural leanings, have no transcendent aspect, but are totally neutral in your spiritual life. This is not a good thing, because I believe man is, as Aristotle once said, transcendent. We can’t change that. The states should be a place where religious confession is visible, and Hungary does that. The Pope appreciates the fact that faith is visible. He appreciates that Hungary right now helps refugees. People always say Hungary is against refugees, but that’s not true. Hungary is against illegal migration. Hungary was against 10,000 migrants crossing their border into Hungary in 2015. That’s why we built a fence in order to control them, because they just came in without passports and entered the Schengen Area and could move freely in all of Europe. The other European countries told us, “You are nasty and evil. You don’t love those migrants.” But at the same time told us, “Make sure that the Schengen border is protected.” The Pope has thanked us that we have taken 1.1 million Ukrainian refugees across the border into Hungary. Those who want to remain will be taken up, will be put into housing, will be put into schools, and put into the workplace. We encourage employers to take Ukrainian refugees. It’s the greatest humanitarian action that Hungary has ever taken. The Pope has noticed this and has thanked us for our solidarity. The Pope knows about our help for persecuted Christians all over the world, which is also a part of the effort to help communities remain in their countries and not having to embark with human trafficking into other countries. Pope Francis also speaks about the right to remain and not having to depart as a migrant. The Pope very strongly appreciates our family politics. Hungary, for 12 years, is actively and strongly encouraging families to have more children. While we don’t enforce an idea of stay-at-home moms, we offer the possibility. With the subsidies that the Hungarian state gives, you can choose to stay at home if you want to or you can work. Most Hungarian women go to work, but we have a system of subsidies, tax help and many other things that encourage a family to say yes to children, to say yes to more than one-and-a-half children, and ideally to say yes to more than three children. Personally, I have six children. We have been blessed with that. It’s a great gift, because Hungary believes that numerous families are the basis of a good state. A good state is built upon families with many children, because around the dinner table you learn all the virtues you need for a just society. The elder siblings learn to look after the younger siblings. You learn to not always think about yourself, but to take others into consideration. You learn that you cannot speak about everything, because the youngest might be shocked. I have one son and five daughters, so you can imagine that the talk around the evening table is always very vivid, very loud, and everybody speaks at the top of their voices. The younger siblings try to say something once, twice, and they don’t get through. They cry and they run out. Then, the older siblings bring them back in and they get a voice. These are all things you learn around the dinner table in a large family. These are virtues that will help these people to engage in a positive way in the state and to stand for a more merciful, more solid state. Pope Francis regularly speaks about the demographic winter in Europe. In Hungary, he said that Europeans don’t have children anymore. This country does something against the demographic winter. But also another thing that we stand for and that the Pope was very thankful for, is our political leaders show themselves with the family. If you look around Europe, you don’t see leaders with family. They are all singles or unmarried singles, or if married people, then without children. Orbán shows himself with his children and with his grandchildren. Hungary has posters, “Welcome to Hungary, a family friendly country.” This may seem like political propaganda, but it isn’t. Because if you say, “Okay, we get married, and we want to have several children,” you are a pariah in Western Europe. People look at you and say, “You’re a weirdo. You want to have several children.” You go and work, and you work more and more. Then, towards the end of your career, you can have one child, to have the child experience. The idea that you would have a big family is very frightening, because nobody else has one. A country that shows that having children is something positive and something that our leaders do, this is a country that can turn around the demographic situation. It’s hard and it’s slow, but we are ahead of all the countries in Europe in this and the Pope has appreciated that. Mr. Jekielek: This is extremely important, because if you don’t have a positive growth rate in your country, essentially the culture of that country is dying. That’s how I view it anyway. Ambassador Habsburg: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: You can deal with it with immigration, of course, which is what some people do. Ambassador Habsburg: That’s the answer that you always hear in Europe, that migration will settle the problem. But Pope Francis has said, “If a country doesn’t feel that they can integrate migrants from another culture in their country, they should think about whether they take them.” Hungary, for instance, has never had a Muslim community. We have a homeopathically small Muslim community. With tens of thousands of Muslim migrants coming into such a country, we have no experience with integrating them. If we observe how integration has worked or not worked in countries like France or Belgium or the Netherlands or other places, we are doubly cautious on this topic. That’s why Hungary has been very, very cautious in doing things like that, and has been bombarded and attacked aggressively for not being open to others. Pope Francis, of course, always encourages you to be more open, to have a bigger heart, to take in a bit more. We listen to that. We listen to that, but we have our sovereign principles, and that’s how Hungary handles things. Mr. Jekielek: Talking about family, I wanted to mention that this principle of subsidiarity goes all the way down to the family unit. Ambassador Habsburg: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What can you accomplish in the family? Actually, quite a lot. It should be done in the family if it can be. There are debates here in America on whether it is the public school system or the parents that are ultimately responsible for raising the children? Ambassador Habsburg: Yes. One of my arguments for a numerous family is that you build a little fortress at home. This is frightening for the state sometimes. You build a fortress where you have a secure space where you can teach your children your values. Because out there, let’s be honest, we’re in a world where the media, politics and many forces try to tear families apart. There is a strong urge to push people into being lonely in front of a screen, glued to the screen, all alone without family, and without roots. We have this bombardment of the wholesome unit of the family from all sides. But if you are a family around the table, then you have a space where those forces can’t put their wires into our brains there. You can talk to each other. You can really learn those values from the bottom up. Again, this is a place to learn the reality of life, not the social media type of abstract ideas that are bombarded onto you through your phone and through your computer screen. It’s the antidote to the crazy world we’re living in—a family with many children. Therefore, every state should encourage families to have children. Families will dare to have children if they feel that the state has their back, if they feel that the state cherishes it, and if they feel that the state doesn’t say, “This is your private hobby, like collecting bonsai trees.” No,the state should say, “What you do is raise children, bring them into society, and raise stable children that later will be responsible citizens. We appreciate that. We will help you with this.” Mr. Jekielek: The face of the emperor, in a way, was the binding factor in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What is the binding factor in America? What immediately came to mind is a part of the Pledge of Allegiance, “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” This is the idea that’s the binding concept. Ambassador Habsburg: Not with the current president, for instance. I immediately thought of the flag. When I drive through America and I drive through the suburbs, you have the flag in the garden, something that is very similar in Hungary. Hungarians have the flag everywhere. Americans have that. Other countries in Europe don’t have the flag in the garden. Yes, the Pledge of Allegiance is also a strong idea of freedom, a strong idea of creating something together. America has a very strong idea. Europe seems to have lost a bit of that. Therefore, there is an identity crisis in the European Union. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was very easy. On your coin was the image of the emperor. He had this beard, he was this old man, and your grandparents already knew him. Your parents were born under him and you were born and your children will still be born. This is a very strong binding element. Again, I don’t want to romanticize monarchy, because it can go wrong. In the current world it will not go wrong because there are checks and balances, and there is experience. As I said, the monarchs that I know are very different from those cliches. Mr. Jekielek: Another thing in the Pledge of Allegiance is one nation under God. Ambassador Habsburg: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: The faith or the reality of the transcendent features, correct? Ambassador Habsburg: Yes, absolutely. That’s an antidote to the nihilistic world we’re living in, where the idea is that nothing makes sense. If you have a God above you, then there is more than just everyday life and the fight for income. Then, there is far more. America has always been religious. It’s also one of the strong things. You can be a conservative, religious person, you can be a progressive, but it exists. It’s also something that we Hungarians and Americans have in common. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned this nihilism, and we see the fruits of something like that everywhere in Canada, where my parents emigrated to. They came from Poland. Poland is actually similar to Hungary in this respect, where faith is actually very, very openly important. This aggressive secularization that you described is happening in a lot of Europe. What do you view as the costs of that, because you live in a situation that is juxtaposed to that? Ambassador Habsburg: I feel that Hungarians know what is up and what is down, and on what floor they stand. They are fiercely protective of traditional values. Even if the wind blows really cold from outside Hungary, they will stand with that. Viktor Orbán is the image of that. I have the impression that in other parts of Europe, people drift and they will be victim to every fad that comes along, because you don’t know where you stand, and you don’t know what is up and down. You don’t know where you’re going and where you’re coming from. The famous saying that Otto Habsburg, our last head of family always used to say, “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going, because you don’t know where you stand.” Mr. Jekielek: That’s actually your rule number five. It’s a rule about knowing who you are. Ambassador Habsburg: Yes. I’m a strong believer in traditional values. We live in a time where society, the internet, and politics tries to convince us that we can wake up every morning and be something different and change our identity. In my book, I very much encourage people to embrace their roots, to embrace their family history, to embrace their values, to embrace where they come from, to learn about their history, to learn about the values that have shaped their parents and grandparents, and to live up to that. It’s the contrary of the message we hear every day now. You can be whatever you want, every day something different. This doesn’t make you happy. Know where you come from, know your roots and live according to that. It’s something that the Habsburgs did. The Habsburgs were fiercely traditional people. They stood for values, they stood for traditions for a certain court ceremonial. They stood for old decorations like the golden fleas that stood for honor, that stood for chivalry. All these values made the Habsburgs what they were. They were fiercely proud of the family tree. They were proud of their ancestors. Every Habsburg who grew up knew who their greatest ancestors were, and they wanted to be like them. This is what I encourage people to do, know who you are and live accordingly. It’s now a counter-cultural message because we basically said you don’t have a past, you don’t even have a set future, and you invent yourself every day. This is something that won’t make man happy. We’re not built like that. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t imagine there were crowds of people bursting down your door, “Tell us the Habsburg principles.” Where did the idea to codify these in a book come from? Ambassador Habsburg: There were two things. A friend of mine from the States told me, “Why don’t you write a book about the Habsburgs for Sophia Press? I happen to know the publisher and that would be something that could be interesting.” Then, I said, “Okay, why not?” But I don’t want to write simply a family history, because there are already very good family histories. I want to write something else. What could it be? I remembered that about a year ago I gave a talk in a club in Boston. The man inviting me to talk about my family said, “In this club, I wanted to warn you, not all are Catholic, so please don’t hammer your Catholic message. Be a bit careful and talk about the other things that are Habsburg values.” I said, “That’s actually a good point. What else do we have apart from our Catholic faith?” What immediately springs to mind; family and children and marriage. What are the other topics? I sat down and began to think. I called my father, and I called my uncles. I said, “What are our values?” I looked into books and I came up with a list. For the talk I had 10 values. You will see that some of the points in the books are pulling together two or three things. Seven is a nicer number than 10, and so, I went for seven values. I proposed that to Sophia Press, the publisher. They said, “Yes, go for it.” I suddenly realized, “Wait a minute, these seven things are things that we don’t see anymore in our society.” The next step was perhaps our world would be a better place if these things would come back, because they were good things. They were good things that characterized hundreds of years of Habsburg rule. The next surprise was how close some of these ideas were to American thinking. I was writing a book for readers in the United States. I would say, of my 60,000 followers on Twitter, a large part are American. They like me. I bond with Americans. I said, “Wow, America and the Habsburgs are not that far apart on a few core concepts.” When I arrived in the States for my book tour reading, I gave talks about the core points of the book, and I saw Americans reacting and saying, “We understand what you’re saying.” I had one online interview with a radio host somewhere from the deep south who said to me, “I understand everything you’re saying. I read this and I said, ‘He’s talking about me.'” I said, “A Habsburg from Europe writes a book about Habsburg history and connects to someone from the United States who says, ‘This is about me.'” That was surprising. It’s an interesting book. It’s not too long. You can read it in a short time as you have done, Jan, but the idea is two things. You want to learn a bit about this topic. It’s a shameless love letter to my family, but I try not to hide the difficult side of the Habsburgs in that book. You will learn something about the family. At the end of the book you will have a few dates, a few characters, and a few people that you’ll remember when you talk about the Habsburgs. You’ll be able to competently speak about this family. On the other hand, I want you to take something home. I want you to say, “Wow, this is actually a principle I would like to live in my life and in my family,” or “This is something I would like to see from our political leaders.” I give you an example, our last emperor, blessed Emperor Karl, was emperor for only one-and-a-half years. In the eyes of the world, he was a loser. He took over the empire from Franz Joseph who had ruled nearly 70 years. He lost the war, lost the empire, went into exile, didn’t manage to go back to Hungary where he would’ve retained his crown, and died one year later from a disease, from a bronchitis and terrible pain in Madeira. He was the ultimate loser in the eyes of the world. In our family, he’s seen as one of the greatest, which shows that there are other ways of looking at people. One of the elements that impressed me, apart from his Catholic faith that I could talk about for hours, but that’s another interview, was his readiness to offer up his suffering for his people. He was a devout man. One day in Madeira, he was standing and looking at the church on the other side of the valley and he nodded and he said, “Yes, yes.” His wife asked him a bit later, “What was that about?” He said, “I have offered God my life for my people so they may be in peace and together.” When he was dying on his bed and he was suffering terribly, he said this line very often, “I must suffer so much so my people can be in peace.” I thought that shouldn’t we wish for political leaders today that love their country so much that they would be ready to suffer for it and they would be ready to lay down their life for it? It’s difficult to imagine. I don’t know if I would be able to do that, but having an example of that kind, I think all people, we would love to have leaders like that. Because these are leaders we could respect as leaders. We would say, “Wow, these are upright people. They will stand for our country. They put the interest of the country before their own interest.” That chapter perhaps helps us to understand what we would want from political leaders. Nowadays, many people don’t trust their political leaders. I’m not saying that all monarchs were perfect, absolutely not. But we have one very concrete example in our family that is a great example. Karl of Austria is probably the most popular Habsburg in the United States, this loser. Why? Because he connects with many people. Last year I was giving a talk in October in Texas, there were 700 people in that hall and most of them were young and families, and they loved blessed Karl. This year I made a Twitter poll, I called it the Habsburg World Championship. I began with 16 male and 16 female Habsburgs. I made a poll where you could vote for your favorite Habsburgs. I always put up polls, and then I always put up a short biography and picture. You could eliminate two, then eliminate two more, and go down the list. Blessed Karl won the male competition. He must have something that is attractive to many people nowadays. Mr. Jekielek: Also, one of your rules is dying well, which is very curious. Many people would say he died terribly from everything you just described. But actually, you would say that he died very well. Ambassador Habsburg: If I could die like him, that would be the greatest thing in the world. But I don’t know whether I’m strong enough for that, and whether that is what God wants from me. But I want to say that dying well is a very important topic for the Habsburgs. Even if you don’t believe in God, having your death in front of your eyes will make you humble, because you will realize, “I am not eternal. I won’t live forever. I’m not the center of the world.” Somebody once said, “The cemetery is full with indispensable people.” We all think that the universe turns around us. The story of the world is written around us. If you have your death in front of your eyes, if you deal with your death, if you think about your death and if you prepare for your death, for a good death, then your life is better. You become humble. I will give you one example to round off this chapter, and it’s a very good description of what is the difference between my family and others. Last year when Queen Elizabeth was buried and half of the world population watched, that’s many billion people. At the end of the long day of funeral, her coffin was lowered into the crypt. One trumpet played a serenade, and it was beautiful. The master of ceremonies read her titles. It was very touching. I thought, “Not bad, but the Habsburgs did it better.” Why? Because we had the same ritual. You arrive at the church with a coffin. I saw this twice with the last Empress Zita, whom I had met, and with Otto, her son. The master of ceremonies knocks at the door of the church where the crypt is. The Capuchin priest says, “Who is there?” The reply is, “Zita, Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary, Queen of Bohemia,” and her list of titles. The priest answers, “We don’t know her.” The master knocks again and they ask him , “Who is there?” Then, the master lists all the achievements of the deceased emperor. Again, the priest says, “We don’t know her.” The third knock comes and the priest asks, “Who is there?” The master says, “Zita, a poor mortal woman.” The door of the church opens. The message that the Habsburgs, these emperors with all their glory and their gold and their crown, are poor, sinful, broken human beings that need mercy. That’s a very strong message, and we can all learn from that. Mr. Jekielek: Reading that chapter, it made me think about Canada where there has been the rise of this phenomenon, medically assisted suicide. Ambassador Habsburg: Deeply shocking numbers. But it’s not a rise, it’s like an explosion. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Ambassador Habsburg: I don’t think that is dying well. Mr. Jekielek: But clearly many people do. What are your thoughts on this? Ambassador Habsburg: I can only quote Pope Francis on that. Pope Francis says that we live in a society of throwing away life. Human life has become cheap and is thrown away without thinking. That goes for euthanasia, and it goes for abortion. It goes for all these topics. The Christian way is to accept your death the way it comes your way from God. You can never know where it comes from, or when it comes, but life is worth living even if you suffer. Life and suffering does not mean a worthless life. Most people, most human beings, for most of the last tens of thousands of years have suffered a lot during their lives, and their lives were still great lives and worthy lives. The idea that at the moment that you suffer, you should shut off this life is a terrible defeat. Most people who choose euthanasia do this because they don’t find anyone who shares their suffering, who is with them, and who listens to them. For many people, it’s the easy way out. It is a terrible decision, terrible decision. It is a defeat for solidarity in our society if people do that, and I think it’s wrong. It’s totally wrong. Mr. Jekielek: One of the themes that’s developing here is that suffering is just an inevitable part of life. Ambassador Habsburg: As Christians, we believe that God left his throne far above to become a man to suffer, and to die a miserable death to redeem human beings. This is our Christian belief. It’s a very strong message, because it says life is good even with suffering. There is no life without suffering. There is no love without suffering. You can’t love someone else without taking in suffering. You cannot have this perfect hedonistic life. It doesn’t exist. Even if advertising, media and everybody tells you so, there is no love without suffering. There is no life without death. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish? Ambassador Habsburg: As I said, read the book, befriend my family, and become a bit a part of my family. The Habsburgs were a really nice family. Some families are famous for massacres and great conquests of neighboring countries. The Habsburgs are a family that is mostly about family, lots of children, and alliances through marriage. But you can learn a bit more. You can learn a bit for your own life, and take something home. Yes, it’s nice to be a Habsburg. Mr. Jekielek: Eduard Habsburg, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ambassador Habsburg: Thank you very much. I enjoyed our talk, which went rather deep, I have to say. But that’s the idea of your show. Mr. Jekielek: I hope so. Thank you all for joining Ambassador Eduard Habsburg and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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“Here we are three years into this, with a virus that has evolved into something that for most people is a common cold, shots that are expired because the variants they cover are all extinct—I mean, it’s an absurdity that the shots are even on the market at all—and yet, we’re still seeing brilliant physicians and educators and scientists being attacked for simply calling out the truth.” At the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) conference last month, I sat down with pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole to discuss autopsies and excess deaths rates allegedly related to the mRNA shot, and to dig into what has actually been found in the vials of these shots, as well as what studies are being done to differentiate between spike damage caused by the virus, versus the vaccine. “There are two dangerous things in these vials—that’s a lipid nanoparticle, and a gene sequence that’s making your body make foreign proteins,” says Cole. “When a FOIA request was done of the European Medicines Agency, they found out that these vials were only about 50 percent pure mRNA, meaning they can potentially code for these other proteins for which we don’t even know what they’re going to do. And instead of saying, ‘Yeah, you need to purify your product and make it better,’ they said, ‘Okay, we’ll lower the standard to 50 percent.'” We also discuss the curious emergence of what doctors are calling “turbo cancers,” and how they potentially relate to the COVID genetic vaccine. “What’s happening is these cancers we are used to seeing, their growth patterns and their behavior are completely out of character … So ‘turbo cancer’ is something that wasn’t there and, all of a sudden, it’s everywhere,” says Cole. He believes one of the biggest tragedies during the pandemic has been the loss of curiosity, and considers it tragic that so many people are afraid of having to pay a consequence for telling the truth. “All doctors and scientists agree when you censor the ones who don’t. And so this construct in dialogue and free speech of not allowing a contrary voice to come into the conversation means science isn’t being done. If you can question it, it’s science. If you can’t question it, it’s propaganda,” says Cole. Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-humans-were-used-as-lab-rats-in-the-covid-pandemic-dr-ryan-cole-on-fragmented-mrna-spike-messages-and-the-vaccine-ego_5300734.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Ryan Cole, such a pleasure to have you back on American thought leaders. Dr. Ryan Cole: Great to be here with you, Jan. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about spike damage. This is something that’s been a focus for you recently and a big focus actually at this conference. I see numerous people are talking about it. What do we know at this point? Dr. Cole: There’s so much literature surrounding the bad effects of this protein. Certainly, the virus caused a lot of damage to a lot of individuals. But what we’re seeing with the spike protein induced by the injections is that it persists longer in the body. With a normal infection, your body’s going to clear it in a couple of days or a couple of weeks depending on your immune competence. But what we’re finding with this synthetic mRNA is that it persists in the body longer. There are a lot of studies on that. In addition to that, it’s making spike protein at low levels for a longer period of time. The spike protein inflames the blood vessels. The spike protein breaks some of the barriers in the blood vessels, allowing spike protein to leak into organs. It can leak into the brain tissues. It can show up in the heart tissues. It can show up in the adrenal glands. The spike protein itself, wherever it lands, causes the body to become inflamed, and it also triggers alterations in the immune response. We’re seeing a lot of immune suppression in individuals. We’re also seeing a lot of autoimmune disease where the body attacks itself. That’s the tip of the iceberg, because there are so many things that spike protein does. These are things, scientifically, we all wish the agencies and powers that be would have studied before using humans as the lab rats for this technology. Unfortunately, that spike protein is a known toxin, irritant, and poison, whatever you want to call it. We know it causes a lot of bad inflammatory patterns in the body, which can lead to organ failure. Mr. Jekielek: There have also been reports of mRNA appearing in mother’s milk and being passed on to newborns. What do you make of this? Dr. Cole: In the literature it is reported that for up to 48 hours after injection the mRNA itself was showing up in the mother’s breast milk. That means the mRNA can be transferred. Now, the gastric juices may break that mRNA down. Again, it’s a synthetic mRNA, so it may not. We know that spike protein can be transferred in secretions and is being transferred in mother’s milk. The other concern, and I showed some images in my presentation today from my colleagues in Germany, is that they’ve identified spike protein in the uterine lining, in the testes, and in the sperm. But more concerningly, they have identified spike protein in the placenta. The Pfizer data that came out recently, forced by the judge that made the Pfizer data release happen, shows that Pfizer knew that it was going to cross into the placenta. Again, we know this isn’t a benign protein. This protein has toxic effects. Have we seen birth rate changes and miscarriage rate changes? You bet we have. Are there statistical increases in birth defects in animal models? Yes, there are. We never roll out a new modality on children and pregnant women. We know it’s crossing into the placenta. We know it’s going into the baby. We know it’s going into breast milk. We know it’s being consumed by the baby. These are things that should be reported on and transparent across the media. People should be able to say, “If I’m going to do something risky to my body with a new modality and risk the next generation, I should have informed consent and the ability to say yes or no.” Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned there’s a distinction between the spike in SARS-CoV-2 and the spike in the mRNA vaccines. What studies are being done on this? You mentioned they weren’t done beforehand. What’s being done now? Dr. Cole: In the laboratory, on a small scale, and I really wish I could do more and clone myself, I’m looking at the protein deposition and tissues. We have special stains we have used in pathology for years called immunohistochemistry stains. In the tissues we look at a little lock and key pattern. If an antibody binds to that spike protein, we have another piece that makes the tail of the antibody light up. When we look through the microscope, we can see present or absent. In the laboratory, we look for that spike protein in different tissues and look for it in autopsy cases. In living patients, we’ve also seen it in several cancers as well. My colleagues in Germany that first pioneered this, Dr. Burkhart, Dr. Moors and others, have also been looking at these same patterns. We’re comparing it to antibodies looking for viruses, where we look for spike nucleocapsid membranes and other proteins that would be present to determine if this is virally-caused or is it spike protein-caused. The NIH [National Institutes of Health] had done some small studies looking at a handful of patients early on, looking at proteins, and then they suddenly stopped. There are some universities that have done some spike protein studies in a case report here and there. There are not a lot of entities doing this. Unfortunately, the reagents are commercially available from multiple vendors. It’s not a new pathology technique. It’s a known technique. Yes, you have to do the validation and dialing of the process, but once you’ve done that, then you can proceed any time that a stain is requested. You can look and determine if this is present in the tissues or not. Now at the university level, Stanford, Harvard, and others have looked for circulating spike protein in certain patients. Is there free spike protein that can continue to deposit in these organs? That’s a different type of testing. It’s not commercially available yet. Along with a couple of other laboratories, I am working on that, because that’s the one question a lot of clinicians have, “Do my patients still have circulating spike protein in their body that could be causing all these different inflammatory pathways and disease?” Mr. Jekielek: How can you tell the difference between the two kinds of spike? Dr. Cole: That’s why we use the other proteins to determine if this is viral or this is vaccinal. Because if it were spiked from the virus, then you would see other proteins from the virus present as well. It’s simple deductive reasoning. Additionally, we’re developing mRNA primers. Pfizer and Moderna have subtle differences in their genetic sequence. We’re looking at hybridization primers where we can take a sequence and then bind that to the tissue and light it up and see if the mRNA or the complementary DNA is also still present in the tissues. We’ve been working with a couple of laboratories developing that. That’s coming. There have been some case reports in the literature where patients have skin lesions that have both spike and the mRNA in those shingles lesions. Again, at the university level, it’s kind of funny. You wonder why they do this very important study that shows, “Here’s a technique, and here’s what we’re finding in the tissues.” Then, there is never a follow-up study. In basic science, that’s not very common. With one study that showed the persistence of this synthetic mRNA in the human body and lymph nodes for up to 60 days, there was not a four month follow-up, or a six or nine month follow up on that study. It’s harder to do these basic science questions in the private setting because this costs money. You go to the NIH and say, “We want to do this. Where’s a grant for this type of study that should be done on humans, and that should have been done on animals?” There’s not a penny to be had. These big universities, if they do a study that shows a finding that may not be convenient to the narrative, even though what they’re publishing is very relevant scientifically, you don’t see the follow-up study. It begs the question as to why science the way it used to be done isn’t being followed today the way it should be. Mr. Jekielek: I understand there are a lot of studies that are being done looking at long Covid and symptoms. Dr. Cole: There are a lot of long Covid studies, and there are patients with long Covid, no doubt. But something needs to be teased out, and I find this overtly disingenuous in the literature. When you look at these patients with myocarditis or chronic brain fog or the long Covid symptoms, when you go to the end of the study they don’t break down the cohort and say, “X patients that had these symptoms in this study had Covid, and these X patients that had Covid were, or were not vaccinated.” They never mention the vaccinal status of these patients. One might have had Covid and then was urged to get a shot on top of their Covid recovery. Again, historically we have never done that. We used to recognize that recovery from a disease was better than a vaccine itself. These patients have hyperimmune responses and a lot of these hyperimmune responses are what are leading to a lot of these chronic symptoms. It’s very frustrating. I would love to see somebody give me 10 studies, five studies, or even three studies where they say, “Here are the long Covid symptoms. By the way, this number and this cohort were vaccinated, and this number wasn’t.” It’s being ignored. That’s not good science. But I never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by ignorance. But this is just scientifically ignorant to not be doing good control groups. With a novel modality, a new gene-based biologic product like these injections, they’re not doing good science that should be clear and concise. They should have a control group, and tell the truth about who has these chronic symptoms, whether they’ve had one, two, three, four, five shots. It’s incredibly relevant in terms of understanding what we need to know for the future. Mr. Jekielek: You read a lot of literature. This might be a thing where you’re not sleeping in the middle of the night. Are you telling me there aren’t any studies? Dr. Cole: There may be a handful of obscure ones where there’s a small cohort. But if you look at these larger ones from a lot of the academic settings and highly funded institutions, they are all a homage to the shot. By the way, no matter what the study shows, you should get your shot anyway. It’s very frustrating to see that they’re not breaking out those who got a shot. Sure, these patients had Covid, but a lot of them had shots too. It completely muddles the science. Mr. Jekielek: It feels preposterous to me that someone wouldn’t look at this very, very obvious factor—that you would need to separate these two groups. You mentioned that you never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by ignorance. Do you think that some of these researchers are just somehow blind to this, or is it malice? Dr. Cole: It’s willful ignorance. Nobody wants to be wrong. Part of it is because of ego. You’ve heard me joke before that a lot of doctors think MD means minor deity. A lot of us think it means we make a difference. I always say, “I’m willing to be wrong, because if you maintain an open curiosity, you have a better ability to learn.” One of the biggest tragedies and deaths during the pandemic has been the loss of curiosity. I understand that in the medical profession people are very busy, they’re overwhelmed, they’re overregulated, there’s too much paperwork, and there’s too many excess things to do within the practice of medicine that have nothing to do with medicine. At the end of the day, my colleagues may not be on the same page as me. I might say, “Hey, did you read this or did you read that?” They reply, “No, I saw my patients. I’m done for the day.” That healthy curiosity opens all these rabbit holes to say, “Wait a minute, is this true or is that true?” You’ve seen some of my talks where I love to open with the Mark Twain quote, “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” What I can comfortably say is a lot of my colleagues don’t read. There used to be a joke in medical school, “How do you hide a $100 bill from a surgeon? You put it in a textbook.” Because they’re not going to crack open that book. They’re not reading. They will during medical school and during the first parts of their training. After that, the science is always 10 years or more ahead of the practice of medicine. Unfortunately, and this is another kind of joke in medicine, “It takes a generation to die for medicine and science to advance.” Because you get entrenched thinking, and there’s a block in the ability to say that the way I was trained may not be the most current way.” We do have to keep our continuing education going, but a lot of these doctors don’t want to be wrong. They get into groupthink and an unwillingness to engage in dialogue and have a reasonable conversation, even though one doesn’t agree on an issue. That’s another death we’ve obviously seen in many fields, but especially in medicine. It’s the unwillingness of many in the profession to dialogue. Again, so many of my colleagues here are brilliant and some of the most published academicians prior to this whole Covid issue. All of a sudden, they’re not smart anymore? It’s astounding. Bringing dialogue and uncomfortable conversation back into our day-to-day life is so critical. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just hypothesize here, because most of them have seen the cost of going against the “correct view.” I wonder if a lot of people are subconsciously avoiding discovering the uncomfortable realities. Dr. Cole: That’s a great point. So many of my colleagues have seen what they’ve done to me and others. If you’re a tall blade of grass, you get cut down first. That’s a great observation, and that’s how you control a population and a profession by putting people into fear. I was personally attacked by insurance companies of all things. They’re not regulators. That put the squeeze on my practice. But you’re correct, so many people are afraid of having to pay the consequences for telling the truth, and that’s a tragedy. Mr. Jekielek: We talked about some of the challenges you faced in your career because of the pathology that you were doing and the positions you took publicly. How has that developed since? Dr. Cole: I’ve essentially had to shut my lab down. I sold it to my associate at a fire sale price because the insurance companies were canceling my contracts for my unprofessional behavior. With the Boards of Medicine, thankfully I’ve resolved four of those with the complaints that had no merit. There’s one still pending and open, and again, these are third-party complaints. These are political complaints from people that don’t like somebody speaking out against their narrative. They are baseless claims, and no patient has claimed any harm. Again, I’m at the receiving end of these absurdities. We don’t seem to have the political will to stop these agencies from running amuck from being kangaroo courts and overstepping their legal bounds. They’re using CARES Act funding that went to push a vaccine-only agenda. They don’t counter any of the claims I made. I have defended myself in front of these boards successfully. I allude to science and say, “Show me where I’m wrong.” They don’t because they know they can’t. Mr. Jekielek: But it wastes your time? Dr. Cole: It’s an absolute waste of money and time. It has been tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees because I’ve exceeded what my malpractice insurance will cover just to protect my professional life for telling the truth. Every time I do these interviews or podcasts, I say, “Look, if I’m wrong, show me where. Bring better data.” Crickets. Nobody wants to have that difficult conversation. Again, going back to the egos in medicine, they don’t want to say, “I could have done something that maybe harmed my patient.” Certainly I’m viewed as a heretic. But even worse are these colleagues who were completely in the narrative of shot only. Now, they have looked at the science, done that necessary reading, and now they’re the apostates, not the heretics. The apostate is stronger in terms of evangelizing truths, but they’re also the bigger target now. Getting philosophical about all of this stuff, it’s fascinating to see that here we are three years into this with a virus that has evolved into something that for most people is a common cold, and with shots that have expired because the variants they cover are all extinct. It’s absurd that these shots are even on the market at all. Yet, three years later, we’re still seeing brilliant physicians and educators and scientists being attacked for simply calling out the truth. Mr. Jekielek: How much do you think society has shifted in its view? Dr. Cole: I like what Chris Martenson talks about. In conversations like this we have the private knowledge where you know something’s wrong, and I know something’s wrong, and we whisper together about what we’ve discovered and found out. But what’s trickling out now is that common knowledge that Chris Martenson talks about. It is becoming common knowledge that vaccine injury is real. Now, it’s becoming common knowledge that these shots never prevented disease and never prevented transmission. Actually, if you look at the Cleveland Clinic study, the more shots you got, the more you got the disease. Those quiet mumblings are now becoming common mumblings. I would say from when we last talked many months ago, instead of 10 percent, now maybe 30 percent of the people have been woken up. It’s the same thing in the profession of medicine. It was about 10 percent a year ago, and now it’s maybe 30 to 40 percent. Mr. Jekielek: Please qualify for me that the shots never prevented disease. For people that were older with comorbidities, there was a significant effect. But you’re saying something different? Dr. Cole: Show me the gold standard double blinded placebo controlled study making that claim—it doesn’t exist. Even in the trials for the shots themselves, the placebo group was quickly crossed over, so you don’t have good science. Now, you’re back to observational science. Let’s look at the claim that it prevented hospitalization, severity, and death. Maybe for a hot minute at the very beginning of the pandemic when they first rolled out, it had an effect for a couple of weeks. However, by then the virus was already mutating away from the shots that had been formulated. By the time Comirnaty and Moderna spike vacs got their technical approval, all that data was pre-Delta variant. Number one, the data sets are corrupted because the control group is gone. Number two, it became a religious mantra. It was a mantra that kept repeating, “Safe and effective, safe and effective. It decreases hospitalization and death, it decreases hospitalization and death.” If you say something long enough, you can convince yourself it is true. But the data sets aren’t there. There’s some observational data that suggests it. But what they negate is there was a good percentage of the population that got Covid and never knew they had Covid. Now, they have some gene mutations. A good study recently came out and showed why that happened. But some claim, “I’m glad I got my shot. My Covid would’ve been so much worse.” Ask all those people who got Covid and they will say, “Oh, really, I had Covid?” Well, how about that?” You don’t have that comparator group. These claims that have been made are false claims. Mr. Jekielek: One more thing in the vein of free speech, which we were talking about. It’s just obvious that good science depends on it. Dr. Cole: Absolutely. Science is not done by consensus, contrary to what Neil deGrasse Tyson said on a big show recently, “Well, there was scientific consensus.” Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’m not interested in medical pedigree. I’m interested in medical consensus, in scientific consensus. You need someone who represents a medical consensus producing a consensus and whatever is that consensus… Dr. Cole: I’m like, “It was the heretics that were correct.” Galileo was correct about where the sun is in the center of our solar system and not the Earth. Yet, he was thrown in the tower for being a heretic. It’s that contrary voice that has to be present in science. You cannot lose this construct that scientists have to have competing hypotheses. Absolutely. You need to do the test. You need to do the experiment, and you need to be able to have open questioning. I joke that all doctors and scientists agree when you censor the ones who don’t. This construct in dialogue and free speech of not allowing a contrary voice to come into the conversation means science isn’t being done. If you can question, it’s science. If you can’t question, it’s propaganda. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been looking at the realities of the spike protein, but you’ve also been looking at the ingredients in the vials. Dr. Cole: There’s a lot of contamination in the vials. What’s in the vials now? I’ve been privileged to work with a doctor in Austria bringing together some physicists who have remained quiet so they can keep doing the research. We’ve looked at hundreds of vials together. I’ve looked at many in my lab, and they looked at many. They did mass spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy, and a lot of analytical clinical chemistry. There are sugars, salts, lipid nanoparticles, and mRNA in the vials. We also know that there’s contaminating DNA in these vials. This is the work of Kevin McKernan, and it’s been replicated in one lab. My lab’s looking at it, along with another lab I know of. Again, this relies on replicability of science and replicability of findings. We know that these were poorly manufactured. Where does that DNA come from? You grow these sequences in bacterial cultures, e-coli. They produce mRNA, and then, you’re supposed to be able to separate it out. We’re finding that little circle of complementary DNA that makes the synthetic mRNA, these vials are contaminated with a percentage of that, up to 25 to 30 percent. That’s not good, because these are little antibiotic resistant plasmids that can actually conceptually get into the bacteria of your gut and cause antibiotic resistance in your body. That little circle of DNA can go into the nucleus and camp out there and keep producing little spike messages chronically over time. There are things in the vials that don’t belong there. Some of the studies of the vials showed metal contaminants. Some of them showed the metal contaminants were actually coming from rapid needle manufacture as well. We know Japan rejected 2 million vials of Moderna because there was visible debris in the vials. This was poor manufacturing. I don’t know if you want to get into the graphene oxide controversy. I can tell you a two minute story on that. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about that. Most of the doctors I speak to look at me and say, “Why are you asking me about this?” Basically, you hear a lot of people talking about it. Dr. Cole: There was one small group in Spain that got some vials. There’s a technique called Raman spectroscopy where you put some of the vial content on a slide, and then you pick your target and you shine a laser and it’ll break down the basic elements of what you’re pointing at. When you do that, you’re supposed to do it for a millisecond or less because the laser is powerful. Then, it will fractionate the basic particles of what is there. Pablo Campra, the guy that did the Raman study, fired his laser at a handful of targets for 30 seconds each, not a millisecond, but 30 seconds. He fried them. If I take a little dish of creme brûlée, put some sugar on top of it, and we know there’s a lot of sugar in Moderna and Pfizer, and I take my little chef’s torch, what happens to that sugar? It browns and it crisps, and if I run it too long, I will scorch it. I turn it into charcoal. What is charcoal? Charcoal is carbon, and can be graphene with a little oxygen. If I fry sugar molecules, I am going to make a carbon byproduct. He burnt the toast. He burnt the creme brûlée by using bad technique. Thankfully, he published what he did. Any good physicist will say, “Wait a minute. You don’t do this for 30 seconds. You do it for a fraction of a second.” Then, if you look at it under electron microscopy, graphene is this regular sheet of 200 nanometer spaced, little hexagons, thin flat sheets. What the Spanish studies showed were 500 nanometer sheets. I said, “That’s not graphene oxide.” Basic science and good scientific practice negate this argument about graphene oxide being in the vials. There’s a Pfizer document that says, “Graphene oxide and gold.” They said, “See, it’s in the Pfizer documents.” I said, “No, that’s a different lab doing a technique for protein isolation.” They mention their technique, which is a gold and a graphene layering, but it has nothing to do with the manufacturing line. There are all these red herrings. There are two dangerous things in these vials; a lipid nanoparticle, and a gene sequence that’s making your body make foreign proteins. Your cells are meant to make human proteins. We are going down these rabbit holes and distracting pathways, when we should be stopping this platform of lipid nanoparticle shots altogether. That’s where the focus should be, and that’s what frustrates me. Do all the science you want, hypothesize and experiment. Great, that’s cool. With all these little hydras that people see, they’re non-microscopists that have an old med school microscope sitting in a dusty room. They are looking at their dog’s hair, looking at pollen particles, looking at these hydra that are actually little pieces from the bottom of a leaf. I get frustrated that people are making claims that scare people that people do not need to be scared about. It’s scary enough that we’re using a new gene-based modality with a lipid nanoparticle that goes to every organ in the body. Let’s stop doing that. Don’t worry about all this other stuff. Have your fantasy life with your fictional, hypothetical exploration, whatever it is that you want to do. Cool, but don’t make claims based on bad science. Mr. Jekielek: It creates a situation where people that are actively interested in detracting from this work will conflate the two. Dr. Cole: Absolutely, that is harmful to the cause. I absolutely agree with that assertion because they do look a little out there and tinfoil-ish, and it detracts from the actual solid good science that is happening. I spoke out on this at a conference and I literally got death threats for saying graphene oxide isn’t any of these vials. To get death threats from the Freedom Movement is really concerning. I stick to science, but when you get into some of these philosophical battles in life, it’s really fascinating to see where people cling to their concepts and constructs and ideas to the detriment of their ability to critically and broadly think. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to this RNA and DNA as well, and then the lipid nanoparticles. Aside from what the RNA produces, I understand it’s not just spike protein. Dr. Cole: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: There are other elements? Dr. Cole: This is a very good study, and it may have come from BioNTech on paper. They take cell culture, transfect it with the injection, and then once that cell culture starts producing the proteins that it’s supposed to make, then you separate those out to say, “Are these cells making the target protein we want? Are they making the spike protein?” It’s supposed to weigh about 141 kilodaltons. We put a little electrical field on, a little gel on, these proteins migrate, and then they stop according to their weight and electrical charge. It was fascinating to look at that study and say, “Wait, we have a 100 kilodalton weight protein, and one at 190, but nothing at 141, which would be a spike protein.” My concern scientifically is these products are causing the body to make unknown proteins that could be creating these autoimmune responses. You can look at the purity of the mRNA and the vials. If you go buy an aspirin, you want to know that it’s actually aspirin that you’re taking. I don’t want half of it to be aspirin and half of it to be laced with some other production side product that may be harmful. We know microRNAs are a known carcinogen. There’s medical literature showing how sequences of mRNA can either be helpful in the body, the natural ones, or they can be extremely harmful. In certain types of cancers, you see increased circulating microRNAs in these patients. These unknown fragmented parts of mRNA in these vials are, one, poor manufacturing. Two, it’s medically dangerous. Three, we don’t know what all those things could be causing. The panoply of side effects that we’re seeing in injured patients are numerous, and these are just tip of the iceberg reasons why these things could be happening. These are impure manufactured products and other proteins could be causing the harm, not just spike protein. Mr. Jekielek: This is just another area where there should be robust study, correct? Dr. Cole: Absolutely. In the way these were rushed out societally, they’ll say, “Oh, we did some animal studies.” I’m like, “Why am I at a conference right now where I have brilliant scientists and physicians explaining every mechanism of harm? Those weren’t all in the literature from all these companies and these government agencies prior to saying, “Okay, this technology is safe to use?” Why are we finding out after the fact after billions of people have had it and countless millions have been injured. It’s scientifically unethical and it’s unfathomable to think what we’ve done to humanity for a virus that ended up having a case fatality rate no worse than a flu season, other than in an elderly comorbid cohort. We used humanity as guinea pigs in a very, very unethical manner. It’s very frustrating to see science being adulterated and ignored, and the ethical and moral obligation to patients absolutely thrown out the window by a profession. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things we’ve discussed in the past is you were observing an uptick in certain rare cancers, and also lymphomas which are more common. You were noticing a bacterium that once was only in childhood now appearing in adults. You were wondering about that. With the literature around that, has the study progressed? What do we know now? What are we seeing? Dr. Cole: I’m not the only one making the claim anymore, which is comforting. Many pathologists around the world are seeing it. My colleagues in Europe have pointed it out, as I travel the world and give lectures. I’ve had so many doctors approach me, saying, “Gosh, I’m seeing this in my population.” I was talking to an oncologist in England a couple months ago about lymphomas, myelomas, and leukemias at rates he’s never seen in his 40 years of practice. I was on the phone last week with an oncologist here in Texas where we are right now, and it’s the same thing. He has patients that are cancer free, their markers are all down, and they have been cancer free for one, two, five, 10, 17, 20 years. Then, after they’re shot with the second, third, or fourth, the cancer is back like wildfire. That goes back to all these immune suppression mechanisms that are multitudinous. It’s trackable now in the CDC data. There is one researcher who has a great Substack, The Ethical Skeptic. He shows the CDC manipulating their data sets. But if you do the pulled forward data and look at what we call variation above trend, in the lymphomas we’re seeing about a four sigma increase. Mr. Jekielek: What does that mean exactly, a four sigma? Dr. Cole: A four sigma. If I have a 100 patients that get lymphoma out of 100,000 every year, now I’m seeing maybe 105 patients. That’s a subtle change, but it’s a statistically significant change. Then, you say, “Wait, this month it was four above the 100. Now it’s five above the 100. Now it’s 12 above the 100.” You’re seeing that the trend should be this, historically, but what you’re actually watching is the trend doing something else. If you read some of the breakdowns of his dataset in some of the solid tissue tumor cancers, ages zero to 54, what we’re seeing now is a 12 sigma increase. These are massive amounts compared to past statistical analysis, year by year. Mr. Jekielek: The baseline, basically? Dr. Cole: The baseline, yes. You would expect, “Okay, there’s going to be some of that from people missing oncology screenings during the pandemic.” I appreciate that argument. A degree of that is going to be true. But look at the population zero to 54 where the cancer rate is very low to start with. All of a sudden, why are we seeing very aggressive cancers in these age cohorts? Now, this is an easy study to do. If our government would be honest, HHS, Health and Human Services, has the data. As physicians, we report. If a doctor sees a patient in a clinic, they code using ICD 10 codes, saying, “Here’s my code, and here’s what I did. I did this, I did this, and I did this. They get paid for it based on the code.” In the laboratory if a patient has a diagnosis, we put down a code. If it’s a certain type of cancer, it has its own code. These codes all go to the government, and the government has this database. They literally could go into their database. The insurance companies could do this too. Every week they could say, “Here’s the change in the data in this age group and in this age group.” It’s a simple spreadsheet analysis with nothing to hide. Show us the data and be transparent. Most governments and health agencies around the world have this ability. Look at Australia, why haven’t we gotten birth data out of them for seven months, when we can look at the birth rates in Europe? There is a 10 to 20 percent decrease in birth rates across most European countries. It’s the same thing with the cancer trends. We can have good researchers tease out information from knowing how to look at the data systems. But why isn’t the government just saying, “Okay, your tax dollars pay for this information and pay for our agency to exist. We will give you what we have whether we like it or not.” Sometimes that data is inconvenient because it tells the truth, but that’s what matters to humanity. That’s why we supposedly have these agencies, is to keep us healthy and well, or at least monitor that so we can change healthcare and society. You can call it anecdotal, great. If you start looking at the Bradford Hill criteria of causation and correlation, things start adding up very quickly across the board. In the meeting today when I gave my talk, I said, “Raise your hand if you have a friend or a family member that ended up with cancer after the shots.” It was astounding the number of hands that went up in that room. Is it everybody? Do I want to scare people, “Oh, you got the shot, you’re going to get cancer?” No, but it’s more significant statistically than it was before. It was after the shots rolled out that this started happening due to multiple immune reasons and other harm reasons. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve experienced a pandemic of fear. Dr. Cole: Correct. Mr. Jekielek: Which caused some of the problems that we’re experiencing today, and we don’t want to be part of that. Just in terms of raw numbers, what kind of differences are we talking about in the areas that come to mind? Dr. Cole: The raw numbers are going up, the percentage numbers look scarier than the raw numbers, but the trend line is consistently going up. Take care of your body and take care of your health. Do not panic, but if you have risk factors, take care of those. If you haven’t had your screenings, get your screenings, because we’re seeing things that we shouldn’t. Mr. Jekielek: So to your point, I was recently talking with a physician out of Virginia, Brooke Miller, who’s been treating Covid and treating some levels of vaccine injury. You said some of the best results have to do with very basic things like changing diet and lifestyle. Those things are kind of foundational. Dr. Cole: That is absolutely correct. I like to joke, the best medicine is the tip of your fork. Mr. Jekielek: You hear the term turbo cancers. What does that mean? Dr. Cole: Good question. It was popularized by a colleague over in Europe in an article she wrote, and she’s a breast pathologist. I’ve met with her at some of the national or international meetings. In her cohort, she noticed younger women developing more aggressive cancers. In oncology and pathology, we look at certain tumors and say, “Okay, they have this stage of cancer and they have this grade of tumor.” You know how it’s going to behave over a set period of time. What’s happening is that with these cancers we’re used to seeing, their growth patterns and their behavior are completely out of character. This adjective that’s been tacked onto cancer is describing a phenomenon that’s unusual in the practice of medicine. Observationally, countless professionals around the world are saying, “Wait a minute, I haven’t seen cancer behave this way before. What’s going on?” Turbo cancer is something that wasn’t there, and all of a sudden it’s everywhere. It goes from being in one spot to everywhere all at once, and it happens in a manner that is timeline accelerated. Many months back, a radiologist called me and he had two 31-year-old women come into his office for scans on that same day. They both had stage four breast cancer after their third shot. These are the types of stories we hear. A young, healthy, marathon runner gets his third shot, and all of a sudden he has stage four lymphoma. Mr. Jekielek: I really like this idea of making the databases available. A lot of very interesting and valuable work could be done. It would probably save quite a few lives, ultimately. What do you think is really holding back these data sets? Is it just that it’s going to be inconvenient what these data sets will show? Will someone point this out and it will be disinformation in the sense that it’s inconvenient information? That is increasingly what that word seems to mean. Dr. Cole: Yes. Who knows what those words mean. It means whatever those that weaponize those words want them to mean. It’s all just information. Whether you like it or not, it’s information, but allow all the information to come out. Again, I’ll go back to Mark Twain, “There are lies. There are damn lies. And then, there are statistics.” That means allowing transparency in those data sets, and making sure it’s a complete dataset, not excluding data. Again, one can massage the data to make it say what you want it to say. You should use raw data and put in all the data points, whether it’s convenient to whatever story you’re trying to tell or not. No one should be trying to tell a story with the data other than the truth. I like that construct also. That’s where I’ve met many brilliant mathematical colleagues who do these data analyses and dive into data sets and point out the things that the agencies maybe did or didn’t see, but intentionally did not report. It is helpful in truth seeking to have those who are willing to make the inconvenient statements of, “Guess what the data is really showing?” It may be against the wishes of a government agency, a pharmaceutical company, or a university’s vested interest in grants. But let the truth be transparent. Mr. Jekielek: What is your reaction to the Twitter Files release that we’ve seen over past months? Dr. Cole: Obviously, it’s highly concerning the degree of infiltration into Twitter that intelligence agencies did have and government interference did have. I’m grateful that things have opened up in terms of the ability to actually have some dialogue and get some truth out there now. It’s very telling that we’re kind of at a precipice of freedom in terms of realizing our government will violate our own constitution and weaponize any media source they can against its own people. That’s a highly concerning harbinger of things to come if we don’t step up and stand against that. Why do I keep speaking out? Because I want people to be free and I want patients to be well. It’s disturbing to see a government inserting itself where it doesn’t belong on behalf of bigger entities with financial interests, like large pharmaceutical lobbies. I’m grateful the Twitter Files have been exposing what they have been exposing. I think we need the Facebook files. You name the social media source. We need the MSNBC and CNBC files. We need all the ones that are being paid off by the government and/or infiltrated by media control groups. That’s why I like The Epoch Times because you guys are seeking transparency and allowing a breadth of voices to actually come out and say, “This is free speech. Let’s talk about the issues.” It’s a great question. It’s very frustrating to see a nation going in the wrong direction. I’ll go back to the curiosity question, why are so many citizens here and in other countries not curious enough to ask the question, “Why can’t I talk about this?” That’s what this nation was founded upon; that ability to protest, that ability to disagree, and that ability to have your voice heard. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned it’s important to open up these databases. For these large entities that have the money, what is the most important research that should begin right now? Dr. Cole: The basic one that the CDC is supposed to report is morbidity mortality trends, the MMWR, in their weekly report. Many of these data sleuths have shown us the life insurance and disability insurance data. We need to know what that excess death rate actually is. Every young, unexpected, sudden death should be autopsied. In these previous studies, you and I talked about spike proteins and about these conditions happening in the body with this new modality that’s been rolled out onto humanity. We need to know why there’s an increase in excess deaths across a lot of age cohorts. My personal bias is that I want to see the cancer datasets because this is so important, not just to us. I’ll also be testifying in the EU Parliament next week. This is critical to the economic stability of nations in terms of knowing the death rates within your populace, especially if you’re losing young, healthy cohorts of your populace in terms of productivity in the workplace, your tax base, and your social security base. To ignore death signals and/or ignore disability and cancer signals is political foolery, because you’re going to pay the piper down the road socially and economically if you don’t focus on the facts. Those would be some of the basic ones to tease out of that data right up front. Mr. Jekielek: What you just described seem like incredibly easy studies to do. Dr. Cole: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What are the double blind RCTs [randomized control trial] that need to begin right now that cost however many millions that really it’s the only NIH or perhaps the Gates Foundation that has the money to fund? What would be a study that we should launch right now? Dr. Cole: I would like to see a sudden death study on healthy young individuals from age 10 to 50. I would love to see every one of those individuals with no preexisting condition. If they’ve had multiple injections, I would like to see a large autopsy study. Prove me right, prove me wrong. That’s critically important. Not just because of the COVID shot, because now we have an avaricious pharmaceutical industry that has now built a $500 million factory in Kenya, has built an mRNA factory in the UK, is building an mRNA factory in Canada, and is building an mRNA factory in Australia. They’re acting as though they have this permission now to use this new technology, which many of us know is very dangerous. They want to use it for all these other pathogens, be it influenza, HIV, RSV, you name it. We need to study why this technology is causing death before we continue to roll it out into all these other branches. They made their billions and now they think, “Oh, we have billions now, we can do this and get away with it.” The science isn’t there to say this is safe. It’s important to do these sudden death studies and look at the presence of lipid nanoparticles by mass spectroscopy. Which part of the body did it go to? Were these genes being expressed? Because even if we look at rat studies with lipid nanoparticles and influenza gene sequences, we’re finding that that’s altering the gene expression of future generations of mice and rats. We already know it’s causing genetic imprint problems. We know the technology is doing things the body isn’t supposed to do. These data sets should be opened, obviously. Just statistical analysis would be the easiest study to do. That’s a computer algorithm. Get a couple of smart programmers, query the databases, and boom, you got the information. We need to do the physical studies on suddenly deceased individuals in different age cohorts, looking at the tissues, finding which you find or don’t find, but honestly reporting it. That would be critically important because it’s still not happening like you and I talked about a year ago—why are the autopsies not being done? If the autopsies are done, why aren’t the laboratories doing the appropriate stains to look for causes? Mr. Jekielek: Let’s say you’re someone who’s gotten one shot, two shots, maybe more, and you’re wondering to yourself, “There are all these unknowns and studies aren’t being done. There are a few doctors trying to figure this stuff out. There doesn’t seem like there’s much wrong with me right now. What should I be doing?” Dr. Cole: That’s a great question. I start by saying, “If you got one shot, don’t get two. If you got two, don’t get three. If you got three, don’t get four. If you never got one, don’t get one.” That’s how you start. Halt the harm where it may be. Thankfully, 85 percent of the people seem to be fine. There was a poll that said 15 out of a 100 Americans had a new chronic condition after the shots. That means 85 percent didn’t. Now what do you do? This concerns me as well. I have two older daughters that are adults that made the decision. One got one J&J, another got three Modernas. She’s the one I’m a little more concerned about in terms of long-term harm. They both seem to have no side effects, thankfully, like many people don’t. Optimize your health if you are in a more inflamed state. All of these different pathways of harm that the spike can induce include clotting, autoimmune disease, and immune suppression. Again, at the tip of your fork, what are you putting in? What are you not? What’s your vitamin D level? Are you moving your body enough to optimize physical health? There are supplements one can take. I won’t long list those. I’ll refer to my colleagues at the FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance], because they have good long lists of things one can do. We also need to minimize our exposure to excessively industrialized products, be they chemicals, or be they foods that are sprayed with pesticides. We need to get back to who we are naturally as human beings and not be dependent on big agriculture or big pharma or big industry to make our lives more convenient at the long term cost of our health and wellness. Fasting several days a week is one thing. Use near infrared light. I would like to see America become less insulin-resistant, and less obese. I would like to see us actually emphasize public health as a nation, instead focusing on convenience and profits and greed. The healthier the nation is, the happier the nation is. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Ryan Cole, it’s such a pleasure to have you on again. Dr. Cole: Always an honor. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Ryan Cole and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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“For capitalism to work, you have to have effectively functioning, solid capital markets. And in order to do that, you need savings—real savings, not money printed by a central bank, but real savings from businesses and households,” says David Stockman, who served as budget director for President Ronald Reagan. “Back then, the public debt was 30-40 percent of GDP—not good, but tolerable in terms of historic trends,” says Stockman. “Today, it’s 120 percent and growing rapidly—total change. We basically tried to borrow our way to prosperity.” Stockman is the author of “The Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself from the Coming Inflation Storm.” “You can’t keep borrowing two or three trillion a year, building up the public debt, and leaving that massive burden to future generations. You can’t do it,” says Stockman. “There’s a lot of whining on Wall Street and elsewhere about how fast the Fed has raised interest rates. But the problem is they started at zero.” How did we end up in the current fiscal crisis, what happens when we raise the debt ceiling, and what are we not being told? “In this deal, there are no enforcement mechanisms at all beyond the current year,” says Stockman. “The mainstream media didn’t want any alternative except for the Republicans to blink and the debt to be raised yet again. And that’s exactly what happened.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/david-stockman-debt-default-the-doomsday-budget-machine-and-failed-fiscal-restraint-explained_5311019.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: David Stockman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. David Stockman: Great to be with you. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to start with something I picked up from your book, The Great Money Bubble. You write, “We should put an end to the insane central bank campaign against a non-existent deflationary threat.” Mr. Stockman: Yes. But it’s relevant because for 10 years we heard from the Fed that we didn’t have enough inflation, that they were missing their 2 percent target from below, from the low side, and therefore, they had to keep printing the money and keep interest rates practically at zero in order to get inflation up to target. That was absurd. It led to a drastic overshoot. It flooded the financial system with liquidity, which eventually worked its way through the world economy and delivered, once we had a big bump, which was the Covid and the supply chain breakdowns, and then, the war in Ukraine. All those things dislocated the world economy. All that liquidity was out there. Suddenly, we had 4, 6, 8 percent inflation, and they didn’t know where it was coming from. But they had caused it along with other central banks that followed the Fed’s lead. When inflation was clearly way, way above target a year-and-a-half ago, they said, “It’s only transitory. It’ll be gone soon.” But it wasn’t. Finally, in March 2022, they had to abruptly reverse course and begin to raise interest rates, so-called dramatically, because they were so far behind the curve. But here’s the thing. There’s a lot of whining on Wall Street and elsewhere about how fast the Fed has raised interest rates. But the problem is they started at zero, and they never should have been at zero. The interest rate, the one where they set the overnight rate, the so-called federal funds rate, is still kind of low by historical standards. The perception that they have drastically and sharply raised interest rates is only because they started from the rock bottom, from what I call the sub-basement of history in terms of relative positions. You have to understand that the big problem in the world today is the Fed and the central banks. All of them have gotten into some big money printers convoy. They’ve so flooded the world market with fiat credit that it has distorted everything. That’s why we have inflation. That’s why we have these huge financial bubbles on Wall Street. That’s why real estate values got so far overvalued and became so excessive. That’s why people are suffering today, who have a paycheck that’s not keeping up with inflation and living standards. Purchasing power is shrinking or falling, and that’s where the great majority of Main Street is today. The whole thing was really a fiasco. It’s not going to change if the Fed merely retunes its policy or slightly adjusts its approach to things. We need a house cleaning from top to bottom at the Federal Reserve and in other central banks. We also need to recognize that it was all of this easy money, these ultra-low interest rates that enabled Congress to spend like there was no tomorrow, and to build up the national debt to this $32 trillion level that we’re at today. That set the table, so to speak, for the big debt ceiling crisis that we’re having at the moment. Frankly, I would predict it is going to happen over and over and over as far as the eye can see because the Congress has allowed fiscal matters to drift totally out of control. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve just given us a massive macro view of the last 40 to 50 years. Mr. Stockman: Since the ’70s, really. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been watching this closely because you were the budget director at one point under Reagan in the early ’80s. Mr. Stockman: That’s correct. I would just put a number in. People now recognize because of the debt ceiling battle that’s going on, that the public debt is $32 trillion, which is a pretty big number. But I’m still here. I’m not 900 years old. Okay. When I went to Washington in 1970 to begin as a young guy working on Capitol Hill, the public debt was $200 billion. When I became budget director in late 1981 for Ronald Reagan, we were trying to hold the public debt under $1 trillion. Now, that wasn’t that long ago. That’s 40 years ago. And now, we’re at $32 trillion, a 32-fold increase in a few decades. The economy has maybe increased by three or four times, and the budget or the public debt by 32 times. Back then, the public debt was 30 to 40 percent of GDP; not good, but tolerable in terms of historic trends. Today, it’s 120 percent and growing rapidly, a total change. We basically tried to borrow our way to prosperity. What we’ve ended up doing is creating an almost impossible fiscal equation, because as we look forward, what’s happening? The baby boom generation, 80 million strong, is all going into retirement. I was in the first year of the baby boom, 1946. Then, there’s 12 to15 years worth of baby boomers. After that, they’re all going to be retired on Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement programs. We are drifting into a condition where the pressure is on spending due to pure demographics, and it’s baked into the cake. Everybody that’s relevant, workers or retirees has already been born. They’re there. They can be counted. It’s going to get a lot worse because the number of workers relative to the number of retirees will keep shrinking. So, we have big problems. Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to first principles here. I learned a ton from reading your book as you chart the progress of the development of the Fed. I think you call it the infernal money machine. Mr. Stockman: Yes, the infernal money machine. Mr. Jekielek: From a layman’s perspective, a lot of money is being made through manipulating money as opposed to through actually creating value, which one would hope would be the main way. The cost of that is huge, obviously, because there are huge industries that are dedicated to manipulating money, instead of actually creating something of value. Mr. Stockman: Sure. If you look back in history 100 to 120 years ago, the great prosperity in America was created by new industry. The steel industry grew and boomed. The automobile industry was born in the 1890s, and by 1930 was a major U.S. industry, along with the modern chemical industry and plastics. All the products that came from that grew in that time. And then, along came radio and TV. These were all useful things that produced something of value based on tangible goods that ended up in the economy. Yes, John D. Rockefeller became a very rich billionaire in today’s dollars in his day, or Frick or Carnegie in steel, or many, many others. Actually, Thomas Edison became quite wealthy from his inventions. Today, a lot of the wealth that has been created was created on Wall Street, not out in the real economy. It was created as a result of the Fed saturating the financial system, the stock market, the bond market, and real estate markets with cheap money, which was then used to invest in leverage speculation. As long as the money bubble kept expanding, stock prices could go higher and higher and higher. People could get richer and richer and richer, but they weren’t necessarily creating anything new. They were simply revaluing what was already there, even the new companies that were really innovating and generating things. Amazon is a great company. Google is a great company, but their valuations have become so extreme. Tesla would be the best example of all. Maybe there’s a role for electric vehicles in the future with a major share of the market, or maybe not. Tesla became massively overvalued due to all of this speculation in the stock market. That’s the dilemma we have today. Finally, the Fed has realized it has to stop printing money. I know that sounds kind of simplistic. But the fact is, a year ago in March, they shut the printing press down because inflation was accelerating and getting out of control. For a year and two or three months now, they have printed no new money, and interest rates have consequently risen. Bubbles have begun to break everywhere. The stock market has not yet totally collapsed, but it will. We’re now finally having to reverse course after this enormous money bubble, as I called it in my book, and as I write about every day in my newsletter, “The Contra Corner.” It’s a contrarian view of what’s going on in the world. All of this now is being reversed. If people think that tomorrow is going to be like yesterday, then, they need to rethink where we are, because tomorrow is not going to be like yesterday. We’ve had a party for several decades. We’ve had huge bubbles. We’ve had unsustainable money printing by the Fed. We’ve had a public debt that has grown from one trillion to 32 trillion in a short period of time. None of this was really sustainable. It didn’t represent sound economics or sound money or sound public finance. It was all kind of a fantasy. Now, we’re going to have to deal with the consequences. That’s what I was trying to say in my book. The direction of history is now changing, and there’s going to be some very difficult, unavoidable adjustments coming ahead. Mr. Jekielek: This relationship between interest rates and- Mr. Stockman: Inflation. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: … inflation, exactly. That is not necessarily obvious to everybody. Why is that always so tightly connected? Mr. Stockman: Capitalism is the only road to prosperity. Everything else that we’ve tried, government statism, democratic socialism, or communism, none of those work. We can see that in the pages of history. But for capitalism to work, you have to have effectively functioning solid capital markets. In order to do that, you need real savings, not money printed by a central bank, but real savings from businesses and households that can then go into investment for new capacity, new productivity, new goods and services. That will not happen if the interest rate on savings is lower than the inflation rate. What that means is that if you save, you’re stupid. You’re losing money because every year everything you’ve saved is worth less than the interest you earned on it. That’s where we’ve been now for the last 20 or 30 years with a negative interest rate after inflation. We call it the real interest rate, or real inflation adjusted interest rate. That created all these great bubbles that created this sort of full prosperity, temporary prosperity, but it was wrecking the system. Now, what’s happening is the Fed is finally, reluctantly, in the daylight and a dollar short, trying to get interest rates back up above the inflation rate. They have a long way to go. Right now, the federal funds rate that they control, the short term money that you can earn in a money market, is at 4 percent. The inflation rate is 6 or 7 percent. Savers are still behind the curve. Until you get the inflation rate down dramatically or interest rates up even higher than they are today, that isn’t going to change. That’s the pivot that we’re in today, trying to get interest rates back above the inflation rate and get honest price discovery back into the marketplace. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get real healthy capital markets and financial markets. Without those, you’re not going to have the investment you need for an economy to grow on a sustainable basis. Mr. Jekielek: It’s really Main Street, the working class, the middle class that face the cost of this scenario the most, because their savings are effectively depreciating. The value they have is depreciating. Whereas, people that are speculating in these larger areas are possibly benefiting, correct? Mr. Stockman: Yes. For a while, I would say the policy of the Fed— of course, they would never say it this way, but I would put it in delicately—their policy was to savage the saver. Because they decreed that short-term money, which is what a bank interest rate or a short-term CD, certificate of deposit, rate is based on, shall be 0.5 percent. In other words, 120 at the 1 percent. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Mr. Stockman: That’s all savers were allowed to earn, or maybe a third of a percent or a half a percent. Even then, inflation was running at 2 percent, and if measured accurately would have been even higher. For years and years and years, the Fed said, “Keep saving suckers, because we’re going to shrink the value of whatever you’re putting in the bank.” People weren’t that stupid, so they stopped saving. Our savings rate nationally kept going lower and lower, even as the governments were borrowing more and more. Deficits got bigger, and no one even bothered to balance the budget anymore. There’s a pool out there. All the savings from private households or businesses come into the pool, and then out of that comes the investment of the private sector, plus all the money governments have to borrow, which has been several trillion a year to make ends meet in their current operations. Essentially, the real evil of the deficit is that it absorbs. It sups up all the savings that should be going into new factories or new shopping opportunities or new transportation systems, and ends up getting channeled into government budgets to fund the shortfall from current taxation. That’s really what’s been going on. We have been redirecting savings which have been shrinking away from high value, high productivity, private investments into low value, in fact, often wasteful government spending and budgets. You can only do that for so long, and it catches up with you. That’s where we are today. Mr. Jekielek: This is a good place to jump into our discussion about the debt ceiling. Mr. Stockman: Sure. Mr. Jekielek: Apparently, a deal has been reached. It’s going to be voted on sometime in the near future. You have a lot of thoughts about this. Mr. Stockman: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve gotten your newsletter. I’ll quote something you wrote, which I thought was fascinating and disturbing. You said, “We were within perhaps five days of breaking the iron grip of America’s fiscal doomsday machine.” That is the machine that we’ve just been describing right here. Mr. Stockman: Right. Mr. Jekielek: What do you mean here? Mr. Stockman: Let’s look at the federal budget on a 10-year basis because one year at a time, they can only do so much. But on a 10-year basis, you have a pretty good take on where we’re going. If you take all of the current laws that are in place in policies for defense and nondefense and Social Security and Medicare and the safety net and all the other programs, spending will be $80 trillion over the next decade. Unfortunately, if we look at the tax laws that are in place; the payroll tax, the income tax, and the corporate tax, only $60 trillion worth of revenue will be coming in. You have a gap of $20 trillion, which will be more deficit, more borrowing, and an even bigger public debt if nothing is done to change the trajectory, which is what they’re talking about, spending versus revenue. Now, we were talking about how $32 trillion of public debt is a pretty terrible thing. But actually, if you look at the 10-year outlook and this built-in projection that I just described, you’re really heading towards $50 to $55 trillion of public debt by the early 2030s. In other words, if they don’t do something, that’s where we’re going to be in a short period of time. That’s why we need to have big sweeping changes in policy, from my point of view, with much less spending, but if necessary, more taxes or a combination of the two. But you can’t keep borrowing $2 or $3 trillion a year building up the public debt and leaving that massive burden to future generations. You can’t do it. So, that’s the background. That’s the context of the battle that’s going on today. Now, I consider the deal that they made a joke. They didn’t address either the $60 trillion of revenue, or the $80 trillion of spending. Let’s look at the spending side which naturally would be our first point of reform and first point of change. Of that $80 trillion, nearly $50 trillion of that is in entitlements and mainly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, student loans, and a few other big ones. How much of that did they decide to save in this package that was agreed to? The total spending is $80 trillion, and $50 trillion of it is made up by these entitlements. It’s important to understand that they’re not approved every year by Congress. In other words, entitlements have that name because they are automatic. If you don’t change the law, there’s 75 million people that are going to get Social Security. If you don’t change the law, even more than that are going to get Medicaid and Medicare costing $100 million. How much is in this compromise that would maybe reduce that just a little bit and help close the gap? The answer is zero. Zero. In fact, it actually goes the other way. The House Republican package at least put a work requirement improvement on Medicaid and food stamps and family assistance. That would’ve saved $130 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office over the next decade. They went into negotiations a few weeks ago, and they kept reporting day after day. There’s a push and pull as they negotiate. They came out of the room with a deal that did not cut $130 billion, or $70 billion, or $10 billion. It actually increased spending for those programs by two billion. In other words, it went in the wrong direction. It saved nothing. Then, if you ask, “What’s on top of the $50 trillion that they didn’t cut at all,” the next $10 trillion is actually interest. You’re going to have to pay the interest or else the whole bond market of the world will fall apart. There is nothing you can cut. You’ve got to pay and you’ve built up the debt. Mr. Jekielek: We’re up to $60 trillion. Mr. Stockman: We’re up to $60 trillion. Now, what’s the next layer on that? There’s $10 trillion of defense over the next decade. How much of that did they cut? Zero. In fact, the Republicans who were supposed to be the fiscally conservative party are constantly beating the drums for even more defense spending. Now, we’re totally out of control on defense spending. It’s $900 billion a year now, as much as the next 12 countries in the world combined. That was set aside. That was off the table. There’s nothing in this package that will save a red cent from the $10 trillion defense. Now, we’re up to $70 trillion, right? What’s left? There’s $10 trillion left for the national parks, for grants to state and local governments, and for highway construction and veterans and a few other things. They said, “We can’t cut veterans’ healthcare.” They set that aside, and they exempted healthcare. You see where I’m going. They back themselves into a tiny corner of the budget by exempting everything that would make a difference; no revenues, no entitlements, no interest cuts, and no defense savings. Even in the so-called nondefense discretionary programs like the ones I mentioned, they came up with a freeze on a level that is higher than it’s ever been before. In other words, if we go back to when big spender Obama left the White House in January, 2017, nondefense, domestic spending, the little corner that’s left after all these others are set aside, was about $600 billion a year. Then, in comes the Republicans and President Trump and the majority both for a while in both the House and the Senate. Where did we end up? They kept raising the spending, not cutting it, even though they spent years criticizing Obama for being a big spender. Then, came Covid, and they went nuts with trillions and trillions of free stuff and stimulus checks and unemployment insurance toppers and all kinds of money that was pumped into every sector of the economy. My point was that today in 2023, non defense discretionary spending was $900 billion, 50 percent more than where Obama left it, which was bad enough. Then, the Republicans have the gall to come out and tell everybody, “We’ve frozen domestic spending for one year at that very high level.” That doesn’t make a dent. It doesn’t make a scratch in closing this massive $20 trillion gap between spending and revenue that we’re facing as we go down the road. Why do I think this was a failure? Not just because it didn’t cut anything and exempted practically everything, but also because it’s the only tool of budget control left, because Washington is so off the deep end on this debt ceiling. Back in the day when I was there, I was a member of Congress from Michigan for a period of time. Then, while I was in the Reagan administration, we took very seriously the law that said, “Congress and the White House shall agree upon and pass an annual budget resolution that lays out all the policies that will generate revenue on the one side and spending on the other side.” Hopefully, the two can come close to balance. That was to be done every year with something called the budget resolution, and then something called reconciliation, which was a set of policies designed to make more revenue or less spending in order to have a solid budget plan. We did that year after year. No one even imagined that you would skip having a budget. A business has to have a budget. Most families have some kind of budget. Congress, in collusion with the White House basically said, “Forget it.” They haven’t passed a real budget resolution in years and years and years. That tool of financial management and fiscal management has just been kicked into the ditch. The second thing is that if you look at the overall budget, 25 percent of it is appropriated each year for defense and these domestic programs that I’ve mentioned. 75 percent is for interest and entitlements. In the 25 percent, it used to be that you would have 12 appropriations bills every year, one for agriculture, one for Health and Human Services, one for the Interior Department, the national parks, and so on. People have vaguely heard about that. When I went to work on Capitol Hill in the 1970s and then when I was in the White House in the ’80s, the annual appropriation cycle was a big deal. You had to get those 12 bills hammered out. You had to have them brought to both the House and Senate through committee, approved, reconciled in a conference, and sent to the president to sign. If he vetoed it, it had to then be re-enacted on Capitol Hill. All of that was part of the routine of the financial management and fiscal management of the government. Guess what? They don’t pass appropriations bills anymore. They wait till the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30th. There are no appropriations bills for the coming year. They pass something called a continuing resolution, a CR, that says for the next 30 days, you only spend at the rate you had approved last year. Then, the 30 days are up, and they still haven’t passed the bills, so they extend for another 30 days. Finally, nobody can agree on the bills. They can’t get them out of committee. So, they pass some giant thing called an Omnibus Appropriation that is typically 3,000 to 4,000 pages long put together in the middle of the night, sprung on the House and the Senate the next day. They pass it sight unseen. No one could possibly read it or comprehend it. That becomes the appropriations bill substitute for another year. Why am I going through this? Because if you don’t have an annual budget plan or a resolution, if you don’t do anything about entitlements, which is what reconciliation used to do, if you don’t pass any appropriations bills, then you don’t have any tools of financial management left, except that once in a while when the debt ceiling is reached you use that as kind of a leverage point to force action to do something about the spending and the borrowing and a fiscal process that’s out of control. That’s the only thing left. In other words, the debt ceiling is a last resort fiscal tool. That is the only thing that’s going to stop what I call this doomsday budget machine from eventually taking this under financially. That was the battle that was going on all last month. That was the battle that was being addressed in this so-called deal that the speaker and president have agreed to. What did they do in that deal? They threw away the leverage that the House Republicans had by saying, “We’re not going to agree to another debt ceiling increase unless we get some real fiscal retrenchment and spending cuts and reforms.” They said this, and they said it over and over. They went into negotiations. They came out. Now, the debt ceiling will be effectively raised by another $4 trillion. We’ll go to $36 trillion from the $32 trillion that we’re at, with no spending cuts that make any difference that amount to a hill of beans in return. They gave up the tool, the debt ceiling leverage. What did they get for it? Essentially nothing. Mr. Jekielek: There are savings that are being touted. You’re saying they’re not significant. Mr. Stockman: Right. Mr. Jekielek: There’s some kind of loophole that can be used against them. You keep hearing the debt default is going to be the end of the world. That’s exaggerating a little bit, but it’s very serious. You call that a canard, and you actually call it a bogeyman. Mr. Stockman: Yes. They say the savings will be a big number. They’re probably throwing around a trillion, but that is based on targets for the last eight years of the 10-year window that we’re in that are not binding, that have no enforcement mechanism, and that history proves never materialized. Just in 2011, we had a great debt ceiling crisis and showdown between the Republican Congress and President Obama. They came up with a deal, and it actually had 10 years worth of spending caps or reductions and a quite forceful mechanism to enforce it if they overshot the targets. But even with that mechanism and 10 years of enforcement, they ended up spending 25 percent more than was actually targeted. In this current deal, there are no enforcement mechanisms at all beyond the current year. It’s all just pie in the sky. Wouldn’t it be nice to cap these programs going forward over the next of the eight years? Again, that is only on the nondefense discretionary part of the budget, which is 15 percent of the total. They’re not talking about any savings in any of the entitlements. They’re not talking about any savings in defense. They save money on a work requirement for food stamps. It’s important to understand the cons and the tricks that these Washington types play, because they’ve been involved in this gamesmanship so long, even as the fiscal affairs of the country go to hell in a handbasket. They’ve been so caught up in these games that they have lost sight of the negligence that’s really going on. But they’re saying, “For food stamps, the current requirement is that if you are 49 or under, you’re able-bodied, and you don’t have dependents, then you have to meet a work requirement of 20 hours per week.” Nobody should complain about that. If you’re able-bodied, no kids, and 49, yes, you better be working. The Republicans got them to raise that requirement age to 55 from 49. There’s a lot of liberals screaming and beating the tom-toms about how unfair that is. That’s ridiculous. A 55-year old with no dependents and able-bodied should be working if they’re going to get food stamps, period. Anyway, that would save a few billion dollars and that’s the savings they’re talking about. But what they forgot to tell you was that as part of the compromise, they entirely removed the work requirement for all veterans, no matter what their age. If they’re 20 or 25-years-old and they’re out of the military, they can get food stamps, and they don’t have to work. If you’re homeless, you get food stamps, whether you’re able-bodied or not. That goes for anybody that comes out of foster care, and they could be 19-years-old. The extra cost is more than what they saved by raising the work requirement from 49 to 54 years old for everybody else. This is just a shell game. They didn’t save anything. They actually spent a lot more money to save a little bit. In terms of the big picture that we’re talking about here, it’s a total scam. Speaker McCarthy keeps saying, “We’re going to bend the trajectory. I know it’s heading in a bad direction, but we’re going to bend the trajectory.” But if you’re going to exempt defense and all entitlements and you have to pay the interest, and that’s over 85 percent of the entire projected spending stream of $80 trillion over the next 10 years, how are you going to bend? How are you going to bend the curve? But even getting to the part that you haven’t exempted, and simply freezing it at a very high level for one year with no binding targets for the out years, is nonsense. It accomplishes a rounding error at best. Mr. Jekielek: Politicians are deeply afraid of any sort of cutting because people will say, “Look, you’re cutting. Look how needy everybody is, especially at this time. Look, we’re having all these struggles in the economy.” Therefore, it looks like you’re going to make life more difficult for people? That doesn’t sound like a winning proposition. Mr. Stockman: This is the same thing that I had to deal with back in the early ’80s in the Reagan administration, when we were trying to slow the runaway growth of big government under Johnson and Jimmy Carter. It was, “Oh, you’re going to throw the old ladies and the children out in the snow.” We never proposed any of that. It was all based on very logical things such as raising the work requirement age from 49 to 55 if you don’t have children and you’re able-bodied. Who can argue against that? Now, my point is there’s tons of reforms that can be made to re-target a lot of these programs to what we call the truly needy and require that the rest of the population pitch in, pull their fair share of the weight, and not become lifetime dependence on the taxpayer. Because the taxpayers are being crushed with, one, the inflation that comes from all this borrowing, two, the taxes that they’re already paying, and, three, the prospects that it’s only going to get worse as we go forward because all these big entitlement programs are becoming insolvent. The point that I should have made more clear is that there is no such thing as a debt default; if the Treasury is running low on cash, the president and the secretary of the Treasury have the power to decide whether some bills will be paid, and others will be deferred. I spent a lot of time as an investor and in business, and we had a couple of businesses that got in big trouble with cash flow. What does a business do when they really get squeezed hard, but they can see a way out the road? Well, they leave some bills in the drawer. They pay their bills late. They defer the payments so they can keep their cash balance and then implement policies that hopefully will reduce their costs and get them back on a sustainable footing financially. The federal government can do the same thing. Let’s just look at some numbers, which I think will show how silly this whole debt default thing is. Right now, and this has been the case for the last six or seven months, the Treasury is taking in $450 billion a month in revenue, even at the current kind of sloppy economy we have that’s bouncing along—$450 billion. What is the monthly average interest payment on this big public debt? $61 billion. It’s 13 percent of the revenue coming in. If you make that the number one central priority, you will always pay the debt. The second thing you could say is, “There’s a lot of retired people on Social Security. You really can’t leave them out in the cold.” Okay. How much are we spending a month typically on Social Security? $128 billion. Okay. There’s 450 billion coming in. There’s plenty of room to cover Social Security. Then, they’ll say, “But we’ve got men in the military defending the country. They expect a paycheck. We’ve got planes that need to fly and ships that need to sail.” How much do we spend a month on military pay and operations and maintenance? $50 billion. All right. We could take the $128 billion, the $50 billion and the $61 billion. We still got room. Okay. Then, what about the veterans because a lot of them got injured for life and have disabilities. They need to get their pensions. Okay. How much is that? $25 billion a month. All right. So when we pay a lot of these priorities starting with interest, we still have $180 billion left on an average monthly basis to pay everything else. If we have to pay some highway contractors a little bit late because Congress hasn’t raised the debt ceiling because they’re fighting over spending cuts, so what? They can get by for five days, or 10 days, or 20 days. The same thing is true with all the other spending. Grants to colleges can be deferred for a short period of time. The idea that if on any given day there is a dime less revenue coming in than what we need to spend for due bills and scheduled payments owed, that we have to pay none of them if one penny short, is ridiculous. What you do is prioritize. You pay the important bills. Then, you have a big fight in Washington to find ways to reduce spending or, in the worst case, increase revenue so you don’t have to keep borrowing all the money and raising the public debt time and time again. This is a big opportunity that was totally blown. They blew it. They had a chance to prove that within five days, if there weren’t a debt ceiling increase, the Treasury would’ve been down to zero cash. Going forward, they very easily could have taken the huge amount of revenue coming in every day and allocated it to these high priorities that I’ve just mentioned. They could have gone for day after day after day. There would’ve been no default on the public debt. There would’ve been no default on the interest payments. The credit of the United States would not have been impaired in some lasting way. All of this is what should happen. The fiscal equation would change dramatically, and would be turned upside down if we ever finally killed the bogeyman of debt default and if we forced the Treasury to prioritize and allocate current revenue rather than raise the debt ceiling until some serious fiscal reform and restraint is put into place. That could happen. It should have happened. We were within days of doing that. This is a horrible, horrible deal. It’s an open-ended increase in the public debt. It wasn’t even like earlier times. We’ve had these battles many times in the last two decades. But instead of raising it by a set amount like one trillion, it’s open-ended. It’s suspended. They suspended the debt ceiling limit until January 2025, which means that if somehow things really got out of hand and they borrowed another eight trillion between now and January 2025, fine. It goes right on the public debt, and there’s no debt ceiling limit to stop it. It was a terrible, terrible thing to give an open-ended increase in the debt through the next election and into the next Congress. That’s exactly what Speaker McCarthy agreed to. Mr. Jekielek: What is the best way forward in your mind? Is there something that can yet be done? Mr. Stockman: Yes. That’s a huge question. Obviously, fiscal policy could be totally reoriented. We don’t need to spend $900 billion on defense. We could cut that to $400 or $500 billion and take a big chunk out of the $2 trillion a year of borrowing that we’re doing now. We could have a better means test for Social Security. If you’re wealthy, you don’t need to get your Social Security. But you have a means test and refocus Social Security only on people that don’t have a pension or don’t have other sources of income in their retirement or graduated. That’s basically the case. We could have sweeping changes in how much we spend on providers for Medicare and Medicaid. Those two together cost $1.2 trillion. There are sweeping changes needed there. These are the things in substance that need to be done. But it won’t happen as long as there are no tools to address budget policy. These substantive issues require a policy change. The policy change is to recognize that the debt ceiling is the only tool we have left as leverage to force changes in revenue and spending policy. But we’re never going to get that as long as we allow the establishment media; CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post and all the establishment media to repeat over and over and over and over about this debt default bogeyman as this crisis has emerged. They never have the nerve. Actually, they never have the honesty, it’s actually not nerve. It’s honest to tell you that back during the two 2011 crises when Obama was in the White House and the Republicans were trying to force spending cuts that the Obama people didn’t agree to. It was then that the dean of liberal constitutional scholars, the head and shoulders of everybody at Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe—a lot of people will recognize that name, he’s the ultimate liberal jurist—said in these exact words, “If they don’t get the debt ceiling increase, Obama should prioritize spending, and should allocate the revenues coming in to debt service and other priorities.” Now, they forgot that he said that 11 years ago, and that it didn’t come from some Right-wing source. It wasn’t some ultra-conservative law professor from the boondocks in Nebraska. It was from Laurence Tribe at Harvard Law School. But did you hear a word about that during this whole debate? The media blanked it out. They shut it out. The mainstream media didn’t want any alternative except for the Republicans to blink and the debt to be raised yet again, and that’s exactly what happened. The debt ceiling is going to be raised by $4 trillion or more because it’s open-ended. The Republicans blinked yet again because nothing substantive and lasting was done about the fiscal equation. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think the end game is for the people that seek these ever greater increases, because I’m certain that this isn’t the agenda of everybody? Mr. Stockman: No. But it’s the agenda of the political class, the permanent apparatchiks that inhabit Washington. Look at Congress today. It is dominated by people who have been there 10, 20, 30 years as careerists. The staff are all careerists, or at least they’re building their resume so they can go get a good job somewhere out in corporate America and make more money. The city is just saturated with think tanks and so-called non-government organizations that milk the money tree from both government agencies and private foundations. They spend all their money doing research in propaganda for more government. They just keep spending money to support operations and organizations that write justifications for what they’re doing and why they need more. It’s going to take an almost grassroots political revolution. We have got to basically get government back in the control of the people and elected representatives who are not making a career out of it. That’s why one of my pet ideas for how to change the big direction is that we’ve got to have term limits. Don’t let the careerists take control of the government because if they’ve been on the Potomac long enough. They think the be all and end all of life is government programs, and they’re totally wrong. We need a career limit; six years in the House, one term in the Senate, six years for a president, with no reelection. We basically need to get money out of politics, and this is not a very conservative position. But I actually believe in government funding and public funding of elections, so there’s no interest group money buying off politicians. The elected representatives then don’t spend half their time raising money for the next election; one, because it’s illegal, and two, because they can’t run again. That is a sweeping change. That is a change in the basic rhythm and structure of how our political system works. It may sound a little radical and impossible. But unless we do something like that, the system isn’t going to change. The people who live on the banks of the Potomac and have a career there and never leave, they’re carried out feet first. As long as they’re running everything, we’re going to have a state-dominated, state-oriented policy when actually democracy and free market prosperity is about the opposite. The real history of personal liberty, free market economics and small government is that the private sector is where the action occurs, and government needs to be minimized and constrained and hobbled to the greatest degree possible. We’re nowhere near that today. We’re at the opposite end of the field. Mr. Jekielek: As a society we accepted some pretty egregious top-down policy in 2020 and through 2021. We essentially shut down the economy. I saw in your newsletter that it was 56 percent of the hospitality sector. Mr. Stockman: In the hospitality and leisure sector; hotels, restaurants, bars, museums, and sporting arenas, within two months, the number of employed people dropped from 16-and-a-half million in February before the whole Covid lockdown started to barely eight million in April, two months later, when the lockdown was slammed on the economy, especially on those kinds of venues where people congregate socially. Now, I want to be clear, the whole thing was a drastic, terrible mistake. We weren’t faced with a Black Plague type situation where the very existence of society was at stake or at risk. That wasn’t true. This was always a bad virus that attacked a small portion of the public that had compromised immune systems or comorbidities or were aged. We should have done a targeted policy that was focused on helping nursing homes. We shouldn’t have been shutting down gyms. Now, how stupid was that? It wasn’t just that this was stupid—it was unconstitutional. People who had spent their lifetime building up through sweat equity, a small business neighborhood bar, or a chain of three or four local restaurants, or a few gyms, or that had purchased a couple local theaters, their livelihood was wiped out when Fauci ordered them to close. He did that. On March 16th, he got right there in the White House at this famous press conference that Trump held, and read what it said on the paper in small print; restaurants and bars are to be closed. All of a sudden, it was like a trap door opened, and a large share of the economy went right into a black hole. This was terrible. Then, they had the audacity to say that since we’re ordering the supply side of the economy to contract—that’s what you do when you close all the restaurants and bars and hotels and movie theaters and malls and everything else—that’s going to cause a recession. Let’s borrow trillions and trillions of dollars and pump it back into the economy when there’s nothing to buy. Okay. Well, that was a recipe right then and there for this virulent inflation that emerged over the next two or three years. The whole thing was a fiasco. Harry Truman, who was a president of some standing, who I don’t agree with on a lot of what he did, but he had a big plaque on his desk that said, “The buck stops here.” What he meant was, “I’m not going to make excuses. If some bad policies were adopted and it was in my purview to sign off or I could have prevented it, then, the responsibility and the accountability lies with me.” That’s the story with Trump. The whole lockdown was, at the end of the day, a Donald J. Trump production. Rather than listen to all of the dissenting voices that were out there in the medical community and in the scientific community and among epidemiologists and the people that eventually signed the Great Barrington Declaration, rather than listen to any of them during that period, he allowed what I called the virus patrol led by Fauci. They economically ruined the lives of millions and millions and millions of workers and millions of small business people and entrepreneurs, and changed the face of our economy almost overnight. Mr. Jekielek: I just want to mention one thing. Mr. Stockman: Sure. Mr. Jekielek: One of the characteristics of this time period was that there was a lot of guidance that was given by different agencies, which was then adopted as if it was rule, whether it was hospitals, whether it was doctors, or whether it was governors making decisions based on Fauci’s edicts. It’s like all of society accepted this and didn’t come out with pitchforks and torches, so to speak, and didn’t respond. Mr. Stockman: It’s because the system was so unbalanced. In other words, there’s a whole bunch of people out there that think Donald Trump walks on water. Donald Trump was there every night with the White House Coronavirus Task Force basically endorsing or repeating what they were saying. His constituency, at least for a while, said, “I guess we have to do this. It must be the Black Plague. We’re all going to die. The government has to engage in extraordinarily interventionist activities.” Then, of course, on the other side of the political equation, they could see this was going to disrupt the economy, and this was going to help them, because they were way behind in the 2020 election. This was just part of the Trump derangement syndrome on the Left side of the political equation and in all of the mainstream media. They jumped on this thing with eyes wide shut. No one asked any questions. Any dissenting voices got drowned out. We know about all the censorship, the cancellations, all the terrible things that were being done in the social media either on their own motion or at the instruction of the federal agencies. All of this happened. Therefore, the people out there didn’t hear very much of the true facts of the matter of the alternative, at least for a while. But eventually, it did creep through. Some people started to raise their hand and say, “This isn’t right.” I give Senator Rand Paul a lot of credit. He was the first one that was willing to sit there in the Senate Committee hearing and take the battle right to Fauci and call him a liar and call him a fraud to his face, which both of which are true. But we need now to rewrite the true history, that this was a catastrophe beyond imagination that no one could have predicted five or six or eight years ago. We can’t allow it to be repeated ever again. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of people were fooled, or didn’t realize how far things had gone in the wrong direction. But here we are. Mr. Stockman: Right. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that you talk about, and indeed is an important part of your book that I so enjoyed reading and I want to recommend to everyone while I have the moment, is how individual people on Main Street can actually deal with this financial bubble that seems to keep growing as we’ve discussed today. Mr. Stockman: I would say two things. First, people need to start with a recognition that we’re in a totally new ballgame. This party of decade after decade of easy money and rapidly rising stock prices and bubble wealth and so forth is over. Therefore, you need a new game plan. Whatever worked in the last four years or the last 12 years or the last 30 years is not going to work going forward because the central banks have reached the point where even they have had to shut down their printing press. Ultimately, all of this was a result of printing press money flooding into the system. That’s the first point. The second point is people know but sometimes don’t think about what really matters is your net worth, your wealth. That’s the financial security you have for the future and for a rainy day. But net worth or wealth is a function of liabilities on one side and assets on the other. The difference, of course, is your wealth, your net worth. Over the last 30 years, the way to build net worth was to buy more and more assets and borrow money if you had to in order to purchase them or margin them because assets were rising rapidly in value. The cost of debt, the cost of liabilities was being pushed lower and lower to practically nothing by the Fed. That was the game plan; accumulate assets and gather assets. If you have to borrow money to do it, so be it because the assets will grow faster than the cost of the debt will increase. We’re in the opposite ballgame now. Asset values are going to fall over time, and the cost of carrying debt or liabilities is going to increase and stay high. The strategy today is to work on the liability side and reduce it rather than on the asset side and increase it. That’s hard to do. If you have debt, it’s hard to reduce the debt. But if you’ve made a killing on tech stocks, you can liquidate them and pay off debt, including home mortgages for that matter. You can spend less and save more. It’s not necessarily a pleasant thing to do. But the point is the new strategy is to work on liability reduction rather than asset accumulation. Basically, the financial markets are now a dangerous place. Stocks are way overvalued on average. There’s still some gems you can find, but most people don’t have time or the capacity to do that. Bonds are way overvalued because the yields are still way too low, which means that the price is too high. Real estate, particularly commercial real estate, is way overvalued because it was all inflated by debt funded speculation in the real estate markets. That’s the nature of where things stand today; overvalued bonds, overvalued stock, overvalued real estate, and way too much debt. In fact, if you look at our whole economy, there’s $93 trillion of debt on households, businesses, and governments combined. When I went into the White House and the Reagan administration, the number was $5 trillion. It’s now $94 trillion. That’s how much debt is built up in our economy at all levels and is a measure of how out of kilter and out of balance the system is and why even personal financial management strategies need to change to recognize it’s a totally new ballgame. Mr. Jekielek: Bottom line is, in a situation where inflation is still more than your yield that you’re getting in a savings account, where do you park your money? Mr. Stockman: Inflation will be slowly coming down and the yields right now on treasuries, even short term treasuries, are in the 4 or 5 percent range. Now, that may not be satisfactory if inflation still feels like 7 or 8 percent. But it’s a lot better to be in the 5 percent yield than to be chasing tech stocks that are going to have a big comeuppance or some of the other high-flyers in the stock market. In fact, even if you’re buying the S&P 500 through an ETF [Exchange-Traded Fund], the whole thing is way overvalued. It’s better to preserve capital with a modest yield than to swing for the fences in the high risk asset markets and lose a lot of capital when this day of reckoning fully resolves itself. Mr. Jekielek: David Stockman, any final thoughts? Mr. Stockman: There’s a lot to think about because the world has unfolded in a way that we couldn’t have predicted two decades ago or certainly three or four, but all is not lost. There’s a lot of good things going on in our economy today, but we need better governance. We need to recognize that we can’t borrow and print our way to prosperity. We need to invent, work, save, and invest our way to prosperity. If we could get back to those fundamentals, things can get a lot better. Mr. Jekielek: David Stockman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Stockman: Great to be with you, and there’s a lot more to talk about on a future occasion. Mr. Jekielek: Love hearing that, and we’ll do it. Mr. Stockman: Sure. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining David Stockman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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The FBI has repeatedly declined a request from House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) to hand over an internal document detailing an alleged “criminal scheme” involving President Joe Biden’s family. Rep. Comer says he’s going to move forward on holding FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress. What Congress should do, says Kash Patel, is to fence the money of the FBI. “There’s a fencing process on Capitol Hill. Without getting into all the details … you can just imagine an imaginary fence goes around a big pile of money, and Congress has the lock and key. And if the FBI wants their big pile of money in this fence, they have to comply with a request from Congress, i.e. give us the document unredacted.” We also discuss former FBI Director James Comey’s response to the Durham report and recent news that the DOJ has charged two alleged Chinese agents for a bribery scheme targeting Falun Gong practitioners in the United States. The suspected Chinese agents bribed what they thought was an IRS official—actually an FBI undercover agent—with thousands of dollars, and promised $50,000 more, in an attempt to strip the tax-exempt status of an entity run by Falun Gong practitioners, according to court filings. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kash-patel-its-time-to-fence-the-fbis-money-and-force-them-to-release-document-on-biden-family-dealings_5307339.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Kash Patel: Hey everybody, and welcome back to Kash’s Corner. Before we get started, Jan, I know we have a special announcement for our audience. Next Friday night, June 9th, we are going to be airing a live, unedited episode of Kash’s Corner. That’s June 9th, 4:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. We’ll also be doing a live chat and have a live audience with us on that occasion. That’s next Friday at 4:30 PM EST. If you can’t catch us on the live show, we will be replaying it at our normal broadcasted time of 8:00 PM EST. Jan Jekielek: Kash, we have a lot to talk about today. As usual, a lot of it has to do with the FBI and the DOJ. We’re going to talk about the FBI refusing to respond to Rep. Comer’s subpoena, that’s number one. Secondly, we have former FBI director Comey responding to the Durham Report with something possibly outrageous. We’ll get you to comment on this. The third thing is I want to highlight some important and powerful work that the FBI and DOJ has done recently. Mr. Patel: It should be a good episode. Jan, where would you like to kick it off? Mr. Jekielek: The big story is that the FBI has refused to comply with this subpoena from Congress, which I didn’t realize was an option for them. Mr. Patel: I don’t think you’re the only person, Jan, that didn’t realize that was an actual option. Let’s bring our audience up to speed. I know there have been a lot of different whistleblowers that we’ve been covering in a lot of different areas. Let’s narrow it down as to what this subpoena specifically asked for and what it’s directed at. Chairman Comer of the House Oversight Committee, together with Senator Grassley have been pretty keen on protecting whistleblowers who provide credible information. They’ve also been very demanding, and rightfully so, of documentation that backs up and supports the claims the whistleblowers are making. Chairman Comer and his team have methodically laid out over the course of months the investigation into what has been dubbed in the media, the Biden pay-for-play scheme. Over time Chairman Comer has been doing this investigation, getting documentation from the FBI, talking to witnesses and whistleblowers, and having interviews conducted under oath of officials and private citizens to advance this investigation. He’s doing it very methodically in a way I completely agree with, like we did when we ran the Russiagate investigation from the House Intel Committee. You have to collect both witness testimony and documentary testimony. Congress is a separate branch of government, so they don’t have direct access to the executive branch’s holdings, the FBI and DOJ. How they determine what the FBI and DOJ have is through these types of investigations that I’ve just described. Chairman Comer and his committee have put out a number of documents outlining nine specific Biden family members. Chairman Comer, through prior investigative subpoenas from Congress acquired banking records that showed those nine individuals have received monies from LLCs and companies with direct ties to the CCP to the tune of $10 million and more. This is in aggregate, and so that’s pretty alarming if the Biden family has been doing business with each other and the CCP. But what’s more alarming is were they doing it—this is what Comer has been looking at—while President Biden has been president and how far back did it go? What Chairman Comer has told us through what we covered in the prior episode is about the money and the transactions. As we always say on our show, Jan, money doesn’t lie and the banking transactions go back years to his time as Vice President of the United States. He has spawned an investigation that goes back nearly a decade, and that to me is the most troubling part. Now, Jan, returning to the subpoena in question- Mr. Jekielek: Let me jump in. I’m going to read Comer’s statement “Today the FBI informed the committee that it will not provide the unclassified documents subpoenaed by the committee.” I’ll just comment that those are documents that have been identified by a whistleblower and they’re looking to get the original document from the FBI. Now, back to Comer here, “The FBI’s decision to stiff arm Congress and hide this information from the American people is obstructionist and unacceptable. I have a call scheduled with FBI Director Wray tomorrow,” that’s today as we’re filming right now, “to discuss his response further. The committee has been clear in its intent to protect Congressional oversight authorities and will now be taking steps to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress.” I still didn’t realize that the FBI could say to its oversight body, “No, we will not produce what you want.” Then secondly, that an FBI director could be held in contempt of Congress. Why don’t you flesh this out for me? Mr. Patel: The answer to your first question is they’re not allowed to do it. The answer to your second question is, yes, they can be held in contempt, but we’ll get to that. I want to return real quick to the specific document because it’s important. The subpoena doesn’t ask for the FBI’s entire vault on everything Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Joe Biden’s brother, and family. It asks for one specific document, what we call an FBI 1023, that’s just fancy FBI verbiage for a source or a confidential human report. That means that at some point in time, and not just in this investigation, the FBI conducts investigations through its agents. They meet with and through confidential human sources and interact and produce investigative leads, and they document it. In this instance, Jan, what Chairman Comer or Senator Grassley have been saying is they have had whistleblowers come forward from the FBI and DOJ and elsewhere and tell them that this document specifically exists. That means they have firsthand knowledge of this source reporting that the FBI has documented. I would note that we are not talking about a classified document. How do we know that? Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley have informed the FBI that this document is in fact unclassified and the FBI has confirmed that the document is unclassified. I highlight that because the FBI and DOJ have a habit of going back and putting up a protectional wall to stiff arm Congress, to borrow from chairman Comer’s language, to say, “No classified information. We can’t give you any of that,” which is a total farce. But now we don’t even have that layer. If you recall, Jan, we did this similar play when I was running the Russiagate investigation with Chairman Nunes. We were the first ones in Congress to subpoena the FBI 1023s on Christopher Steele. Do you recall what happened, Jan, when we issued those subpoenas? The FBI and the media came out and lambasted us. They said that we are going to ruin foreign relations, we are going to kill people in the field, and we are going to destroy investigations. Do you know what happened, Jan, when we finally forced them to produce the documentation? We showed the corruption of the FBI’s Confidential Human Source program to cover up the FBI’s corruption. We showed its lies to the FISA court. We basically dismantled the criminal syndicate operated from within the FBI by the likes of James Comey, who we’ll get to in a second. The reason I bring that up is because we did it with a righteous investigation, and I believe Chairman Comer is doing the exact same thing and he’s following this exact same path. He has requested it formally via letter, he’s requested it publicly, he’s informed the public of what he’s doing and why he wants it. He has established credible whistleblower testimony. He’s not out there just shooting willy-nilly. He has done this very methodically, and now he’s at the point where the FBI has for months, if not weeks, but I think now it’s months, Jan, refused to produce this document. They’ve acknowledged that it exists. They’ve told the chairman who has oversight constitutionally over the FBI and this investigation that, “You can’t have it.” The reason they’re saying that is the same pretextual farce, “Sources and methods are going to be exposed and people are going to die, and you’re going to jeopardize investigations.” First of all, we now know without a doubt that you can deliver this sort of information to Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley and their team and protect sources and methods. We’ve done it a hundred times over in the past. We also know that they can—and I think this is where they’ll go—they’ll redact information. Here’s an interesting thing, Jan, now that we’re talking about redactions, this actually reminds me. After stonewalling Congress like they’re known to do when it comes to oversight and production of documents, the FBI would have produced a document. They put one up that’s mostly black lines, 90 percent redacted. You can’t see what’s there and then you have to fight to get the redactions removed. In this instance, they didn’t even do that. They just said, “No, you are not getting an unclassified 1023 document to further the constitutional oversight that you Chairman Coleman and Senator Grassley have over us.” That is shocking, Jan. They just skipped all the in between processes. We call it the accommodation process where there’s always a back and forth between Congress and the agencies and departments it oversees to get to this material. Usually, you can do a number of things like we did. We created a whole separate room at the DOJ where these documents were kept so nobody could go in and out. We limited access and worked with the DOJ and FBI to do that. This was a month-long accommodation process. They didn’t even do that in this instance. They didn’t even give the actual members of Congress the opportunity to have access to it. Now, I want to know what it says more than ever. What Comer has publicly said about it is very limited, so we obviously don’t know the contents. But Chairman Comer and his team have reported that the document has information specifically related to payments, and Vice President Biden and/or his family. That’s what we know is public. He even provided that verbiage to the FBI to help them tailor the production. Comer was going out of his way to say, “You don’t even have to give us the whole big file, just give us the one that relates to this.” It’s like doing a keyword search in your search engine on the internet. That’s exactly what Comer did for them, because he knows what’s in it and he wants to obtain it properly and show the world. Mr. Jekielek: As a layperson, I was just flabbergasted at this. I suppose it’s one thing to have someone that’s just out in society refuse to comply with something, but it’s a whole different thing when it’s like the head of the agency that you are providing oversight to. You’re the boss of what happens. How is this possible? What do the rules say? Mr. Patel: Let’s look at recent history, Jan. We can look at both my Russiagate investigation, and then the January 6th committee and their investigation from the House of Representatives. What you can normally do, Jan, is what we did. You fight the agencies and departments. They say, “No, there’s no corruption.” You say, “No, we have information that there is.” Then, you get the heads together, the chairmen and chairwomen and directors. They sit in a room and say, “Okay, let’s figure this out.” Obviously we’re past all of that. There’s basically two things that can happen, and Speaker McCarthy has been very public about this. He said beforehand that should Director Wray refuse to comply with Chairman Comer’s subpoena, he as the Speaker of the House would permit the initiation of a contempt proceeding against Director Wray. That’s important because you have to have the speaker’s say-so in order to initiate a contempt proceeding against a senior level official in the United States government. The director of the FBI would qualify, since he’s the head of law enforcement. But what I’m advising Chairman Comer, Speaker McCarthy and company to do is to hold Director Wray in contempt of Congress and look to the past to see why that’s possible and doable. The January 6th committee issued subpoenas for two private citizens, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, and those individuals refused to comply with those congressional subpoenas. The matter was referred to the Department of Justice to hold those individuals in contempt. The DOJ ran a quick investigation and brought federal charges. Those individuals have been tried and convicted in federal court for violating a congressional subpoena after being held in contempt of Congress. It’s a two-step process. First, what happens is there’s a referral to the entire House of Representatives. It stays on that side of the Congressional House for now, and there is a vote. There must be a majority-plus vote to pass the article to hold an individual, whether private citizen or government official, in contempt of Congress, like the Jan 6 committee did with Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon. They’ll do the same thing here, supposedly, if Speaker McCarthy goes through on his word to hold Chris Wray in contempt. Once that vote is complete, I believe the Republicans have the vote to cross the threshold and hold Christopher Wray in contempt. What happens next? What should happen is a referral to the DOJ. But Jan, we’ve talked about this on our show ad nauseum, how this DOJ and FBI are working in concert to cover up their own corruption. They’ve done so repeatedly, in order to retaliate against whistleblowers, and to not obey congressional subpoenas. You’re basically asking them to police themselves. This is a whole other problem we’ll get into on another show. I don’t believe for a second that Attorney General Garland is going to investigate and charge his director of the FBI. That would be what should happen. I don’t think that’s going to happen, Jan. How do you resolve this in a way where Congress gets what it’s supposed to have under its constitutional authority? What you should do, and we did this once during Russiagate when we had 17 subpoenas out there for everything from DOJ, FBI, CIA and other agencies, is you do the one thing that these agencies and departments need to live—our money. They are funded by taxpayer dollars. Congress passes a budget every year to fund every facet of each and every agency and department. The FBI is no different. Now, I’m not saying, and I’ve never said that we should defund the entire FBI. That is dangerous and that is rhetoric that can get us into a lot of trouble. It’s where we are because people are calling for what I’ve referred to as an overcorrection, due to the past misconduct and unlawful activities of the FBI, which we’ve highlighted. My suggestion is there’s a fencing process on Capitol Hill. Without getting into all the details, you can just think of an imaginary fence that goes around a big pile of money and Congress has the lock and key. If the FBI wants their big pile of money within this fence, they have to comply with a request from Congress, i.e. give us the document unredacted so we can continue our investigation. That’s the fencing process that is a little tricky with the budgeting minutiae and maneuvers you have to take. Hopefully, Chairman Comer and company have set the groundwork to do that because it takes a little while. But you go out there and you just say, “Okay, the 40 new Escalades that you were getting, you’re not getting those anymore,” or “Your new government headquarters building that you wanted funded, that’s on hold.” You do clever and creative things like that. You don’t defund the everyday FBI agents doing their job chasing down criminals like the majority of them do. This is a leadership problem at the FBI. Let me be abundantly clear, I have never, nor will I ever attack the men and women who run the FBI every day on the ground like I did when I was there with them. They do the job. Unfortunately, individuals like Chris Wray and his leadership team think that as the head of law enforcement in the United States of America, they don’t have to obey the law. That’s where we are here. This is a train hitting another train coming in the opposite direction head on. We’ll see what happens. Now, Congress also has a unique ability, and it hasn’t been used in a few hundred years, if my history is correct. But if the DOJ won’t act on contempt proceedings to charge Christopher Wray after the vote is done in the House, they can actually go and have the Sergeant at Arms arrest Christopher Wray. That’s a drastic measure. I don’t think they’ll do that, but there is an inherent contempt of Congress power. It’s almost built for the scenario we outlined earlier, where this DOJ is never going to police itself. It’s up to Congress who has law enforcement capabilities to go out there, arrest Chris Wray, and hold him in contempt in a jail cell until the documents are produced. That’s what would happen to any other individual who was held in contempt of Congress for failing to produce a document. Jan, that’s where we are, it’s gotten to that head again. It also got there about five years ago. The ironic thing is that Chris Wray was head of the FBI when we were running our Russiagate investigation. We subpoenaed Chris Wray, he’s not new to this. They obstructed back then. They blocked the Bruce Ohr 302s, they blocked the release of the FISA warrants, and they blocked the release of our 1023 showing Christopher Steele’s corrupt FBI reporting and how the FBI was in on it. He’s not new to this game. He’s very well-versed in it, and we were able to defeat him to a degree because we held certain pockets of money and got some of the documentation. Remember, we still never got it all. That’s a story for another day. But in this instance, you’re talking about one document. I’m guessing it’s three to five pages long, maybe a little longer, but that’s it. The FBI and Chris Wray have basically said, “Nope, you’re not getting anything.” We will see if Congress has the gall and the audacity to take the steps that I’ve outlined here. In my opinion, that is the only way you can continue the investigation Chairman Comer’s doing lawfully and provide the oversight to the American public to show the corruption at the FBI, DOJ, and the Biden family. Mr. Jekielek: As you’re describing this, I’m imagining this standoff between the Sergeant at Arms and some FBI people. It’s just bizarre to even contemplate such a thing. I want to switch gears. We do spend a lot of time criticizing the FBI and DOJ on this show. There’s a recent case that has come to our attention, which seems to be the FBI and DOJ doing things exactly right. We’ve got two people linked directly to the Chinese communist regime attempting to bribe an FBI official posing as an IRS agent, basically targeting a Falun Gong-related nonprofit in New York. It’s not the only case that the FBI is working on, but it’s a big one. Mr. Patel: Absolutely. This highlights what I said earlier. There’s so much work that the DOJ and FBI need to do to safeguard our country to shut down criminals and crime syndicates and make sure our neighborhoods are safe for our children and our youth. This is just one example of how they do it every day. It’s big for our Epoch audience, so I’m glad we’re covering it. I’ll just run through it quickly and remind the audience this comes on the heels of another prosecution in recent history that the DOJ and FBI took on to take down the CCP operating police stations illegally in New York City. It’s good that this line of work is continuing because it needs to. It’s an example of why I still believe the FBI does good work every day. It’s just the leadership that destroys it. I’ll just give us a quick summary of what the FBI and DOJ would’ve been working on, and it’s a years long investigation, I’ll get to why in a second. Two individuals with direct ties to the CCP actually went and conducted an operation on mainland soil in the United States of America. Of all things, I don’t know if it’s coincidental or not, but I guess the word is ironic. These guys filed a whistleblower complaint with the IRS. What do I mean by that? Anybody can file a whistleblower complaint. You don’t need to be in government to do so. You can be a private citizen or a CCP operative, as is the case here. They filed it with the New York office and they said specifically, we in this complaint are alleging that a 501(c)(3) aligned with the Falun Gong practitioners is committing a crime. Now, if it was done truthfully and honestly, then that’s a righteous whistleblower complaint and you’d want citizens informing the FBI and DOJ of this thing. What actually happened in this instance was it turned out that these CCP operatives had concocted a scheme in connection with mainland China and the government there to root out Falun Gong practitioners in the United States of America and retaliate against them as they’ve done so for the last 20-plus years. That is illegal. You cannot do that via a whistleblower complaint. The FBI and the IRS and the DOJ initiated an investigation. They conducted a lot of surveillance, they followed these guys, and they set up a scheme that continued the bribery motives that these two CCP folks had. What they set out to do was after they filed a whistleblower complaint, they basically met what they thought were government officials and agents and sources. Mr. Jekielek: IRS agents too, I might add. We’ve been talking a lot about the IRS here as well. Mr. Patel: Right. They met what they thought were IRS agents because what they were telling these individuals who were actually working for the DOJ and FBI was, “Hey, these two CCP guys are offering us thousands of dollars if we take out the Falun Gong practitioners, because that’s what we, the Chinese CCP government, wants us to do.” They were literally doling out money. It’s in the complaint in a great article that Epoch wrote if you wanted a play by play on it. But the reason I bring this up is because these types of investigations take years. They also have audio surveillance of an individual from mainland China. These two individuals here, after they made the initial inquiries and filings with the IRS and FBI and DOJ, they engaged with the informants. This is the righteous use of informants, Jan, it’s interesting that we’re all talking about this in one episode. Then, the two individuals flew back to CCP offices in China, got audio recordings of a CCP official, and then sent that back to the investigative team. Of course, they didn’t know they were government officials and sources. There’s recordings of it. It’s interesting that the DOJ has not identified the senior level CCP official on those recordings from China. As a former federal prosecutor I bring that up, because you can’t just use that evidence at the drop of a hat. That information is acquired through sensitive collection, and it’s classified. What that tells me is that the FBI and DOJ in this instance methodically played out a scenario where they were going to prosecute these individuals, and at the same time embarked upon the declassification process that takes months and months and months, because they knew they’d have to use that information, not in the charging document alone, but to present to a jury at trial. They thought this thing through. That’s why I highlight the fact that there’s a great team out there doing great cases like this. These individuals have been arrested and charged in New York City and federal court, and they are being transported or on the way to the detention center in New York City. I don’t believe they’ll receive bond, if they haven’t already. They’ll be denied bond because they’re clearly a flight risk. But it’s a great case, Jan. It’s a great instance of the DOJ and FBI doing the work they should, handling fake whistleblowers the way they should be handled, and utilizing sources and informants the way they’re supposed to. Maybe Chris Wray should take a play out of the agent’s playbooks who ran this operation, because it was done lawfully. Mr. Jekielek: Sometimes you hear that things take a lot of time because of government bureaucracy. Like you said, the declassification efforts can take months. But here, from the moment that this bribe was attempted to the purported IRS agent, actually the FBI agent, by one of these purported agents, a week later this complaint was filed and was made public from that last bribery attempt. It struck me that this is really fast. Mr. Patel: Let me just give you the behind the curtains scenario. That doesn’t mean they were able to do all that work in a week. What that tells me is they had preloaded all the work, the declassification, all the sourcing, and all the material they would need. Then, they waited until that last overt step needed to be taken in terms of them being charged with the allegations of bribery and corruption and fraud. That was the overt act they were waiting for the final payment and the money exchange at JFK International. They had the complaint and the charging document in the pipeline the whole time. That’s how it’s done. But it shows you the government can move swiftly if they’ve operated a lawful prosecution. Mr. Jekielek: This also highlights that the issue of focus is so important. We’ve talked about this in the past on the show. When you have the FBI focused on so-called domestic terrorism, which are moms and dads at school board meetings and with investigative resources being put towards that instead of these actual serious subversion scenarios, it shifts things in a direction we probably wouldn’t want. There’s probably a lot of really important proper investigations that the FBI is doing, and it’s easy to forget about that because we’re focused so much on the huge problems that we’re seeing in the agencies. Let’s jump to this last thing. You have former FBI director Comey reacting to the findings of the Durham Report. With the Durham Report, we knew a lot of what was in there, but let’s just say it doesn’t look very good for former director Comey, it looks really bad. Now, he’s weighing in. What is your reaction to that? Mr. Patel: We should play the clip for our audience. Director Comey was on a nationally syndicated program just this past week commenting on the Durham Report. Let’s play it. James Comey: There’s nothing new in that report about the FBI, no new facts. He’s got his analysis and his take on things, but after all this time, there’s nothing new. And so my reaction, honestly, is that it is an enormous waste of time and taxpayer money to give us a nothing burger. Mr. Patel: This man is the biggest pathological liar to ever sit in the directorship of the FBI. I’m saying that on the heels of what we just talked about, Chris Wray’s tenure. Just let this set in, Comey was the one who launched Russiagate, illegally. Comey was the one who unlawfully disclosed classified information while the FBI director, or shortly thereafter. Comey was the one who went to the FISA court and lied knowingly, just to surveil a political target. Then, Comey was one of the many individuals who had said for the last five or six years that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, when he knew for a fact he wasn’t. This man comes out on national TV, after the Durham Report excoriates his FBI and landed a devastating blow. That’s not my verbiage, that’s CNN saying this about the Durham Report on Comey’s FBI. Speaker 4: Devastating to the FBI. And to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump. Mr. Patel: He has the audacity to come out and say, “I didn’t see anything new. No big deal. Some small mistakes were made.” That to me, sums up director Comey’s entire career in about 10 seconds with his own words. That the mainstream media and that program that aired it allowed him to get away with it, shows you how much they were in on it with Director Comey back then. Did he even bother to read the Durham Report, Jan? How can he say there was nothing new in there when the entire world is now pivoting to the Durham Report to say the FBI unlawfully surveilled President Trump? They never had a lawful justification for doing so. Director Comey was the one who specifically signed off on those warrants and that investigation. John Durham just said, “No, you didn’t have the legal justification for doing so.” You can take the credibility of a guy who writes some preposterous book after he leaves the directorship at the FBI and Comey and just runs around on the media circuit, making money, making millions— or you can look at John Durham’s work and our work during Russiagate. The unequivocal truth is that Director Comey illegally launched the biggest fraudulent investigation in U.S. history because he wanted to take out a political target. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, I can’t help but wonder what the historical record will ultimately show about what happened with Russiagate, the Durham investigation, and all these schemes. I really hope we can get full transparency. Mr. Patel: Yes, I hope so too, Jan. It’s going to take a lot of work from Congress and I think Chairman Comer and the like are on the right track. They just have to follow through now. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, it’s time for our shout-out. Mr. Patel: Indeed, it is Jan. This week’s shout out goes to Sammy Wong. Thanks so much for your commentary on the Kash’s Corner’s chat board. We look at that board weekly and we appreciate your words, specifically about honesty and courageous reporting. It’s what we try to do every week on Kash’s Corner. Jan and I take a lot of time to deliver on that messaging and that theme. Thanks to everybody who commented on the board, and thanks to everybody who participated in the live chat. We’ll see you next week for a special live presentation of Kash’s Corner from Arizona. Mr. Jekielek: Just a quick reminder that’s going to be at 4:30 PM EST live. If you can put questions into the live chat, Kash and I will answer them. If you can’t make it at 4:30 PM EST, we’ll be able to do it as normal at 8:00 PM EST. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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