FORT WORTH, TEXAS—A top U.S. hospital has a study in pre-print that shows the more COVID-19 shots their employees get, the higher their chance is of catching COVID-19 itself. The Cleveland Clinic is the world’s largest network of hospitals and outpatient facilities. “When a study comes out of Cleveland Clinic, people take it very seriously,” said Steve Kirsch on Frontline Health. Kirsch is a tech entrepreneur, inventor of the optical mouse and founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation. “The bottom line here is that if the medical community was honest, they need to now reverse the mandates,” he said. “And by reverse mandates, I mean that every hospital in the world should now say, if you got the vaccine, you’re fired.” The logic here is that if the vaccinated healthcare workers are more vulnerable to catching COVID-19, they pose a greater risk to patients. And since the U.S. is still in a state of emergency, Kirsch says that the hospitals need to stay consistent and protect their patients. “They need to then rehire the [unvaccinated] people that they fired,” he said. We spoke with Kirsch at the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) second Education Conference. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/top-us-hospital-for-every-vaccine-dose-rate-of-covid-19-infection-goes-up_5246810.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

“Right now the topic is: will there be war with China? How soon? Someday, there might be another set of questions. Can we win a war with China? If so, how?” says Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow for China strategy at The Heritage Foundation and a co-author of the new report: “Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China.” “We have to be able to think through: what are our advantages? What are our weaknesses? And how would this war be conducted?” Pillsbury says. Dozens of laws to counter the Chinese Communist Party threat have been proposed in recent years, but how many have actually been passed and implemented? “If you just watch television, you see all these members of the House and Senate bragging about their new legislation. So of course, I would think—and others would think—we’re doing a lot to stop the Chinese. What if it’s not true?” Pillsbury says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/michael-pillsbury-this-is-what-a-war-with-communist-china-would-look-like_5237087.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Michael Pillsbury, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Michael Pillsbury: Thank you very much. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with the hard stuff first. Yesterday on stage, here at the Heritage 50th Anniversary Leadership Summit, you said you expect war with China sometime this century. When exactly do you expect this to happen? Dr. Pillsbury: This is a highly speculative topic. The panel moderator, a 33-year-old talk show host specializing in domestic issues, asked the panelists, “Is war coming for sure or not?” Here’s the key thing, she wanted a yes or no answer. I couldn’t say, “No, there’s no chance of war with China,” so I chose yes. But obviously, nothing is inevitable. There are various ways to deter a war. Also, the definition of war varies from the really small incursion or incident, a few people killed, ceasefire, and it doesn’t really happen, to a real war like World War II that goes on for three years. Inside the U.S. government, when I was a government official, I was in many war games involving China. To get the game started, you always assume a war breaks out. For me, it’s not shocking to say yes or no to whether there could be a war with China. There are a variety of wars with China that could happen. There are a number of programs to prevent those different wars from happening. This is a business for many people in Washington, both at the CIA and in the Pentagon. To some degree, White House planning also takes place. We think about imaginary scenarios just to see if we can challenge ourselves with one that might happen, that we hadn’t even thought of. The reason for that is so often in the real world, things happen that nobody expected. The origins of World War I, now referred to as sleepwalking into a war, happened because of some random incidents, and then, the countries involved did not understand what the other might do. There was a very high level of suspicion, mobilization, trains being loaded with weapons, and soldiers. Pretty soon, millions of people are dead, and nobody anticipated that this particular incident would trigger World War I. It was the same thing with World War II. After World War II everybody said, “Why didn’t we do something when Hitler announced, ‘I’m going to fortify the Rhineland. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ They were violations of the Versailles Peace Treaty from World War I.” At the time people thought Hitler was bluffing, or he would stop at just step one. He never killed anybody. He peacefully occupied these places. 30 years later, historians dug out the debates in London, in Paris, even in Washington, DC, about what were Hitler’s intentions? Why did World War II begin? One of the discoveries historians have made is very similar to World War I, the events that happened were not anticipated. Hitler kept saying, “I want peace. I’m only taking these steps with my army to get peace.” We have something like that happening with China. Now, it’s very difficult to imagine how a war with China would break out. Is this something we can anticipate? I worked at the Pentagon at the Office of Net Assessment, and also with the intelligence community on war games trying to anticipate wars that we hadn’t thought of. We then asked ourselves, “Do we have a strategy to deter or prevent this war from happening?” And secondly, “If such a thing does happen, are we going to win or not?” For me, this is very routine to talk about war, how to plan it, how to prevent it, what happens, and the history of war over the last 500 years. But you can see a 33-year-old TV podcast lady might find it quite shocking that someone would say, “Yes, a war with China is quite possible, even very likely.” Now, she said she didn’t have time. She didn’t go into, “What kind of war do you think is the most likely? Will we win that war?” This is considered to not be part of the current journalistic coverage of China. Right now the topic is, “Will there be war with China? How soon?” Someday there might be another set of questions, “Can we win a war with China? If so, how?” Mr. Jekielek: You’ve done a great job at proposing the question I should ask. This my next question, what kind of a war would this be? This is something we’ve talked about in our past discussions. Is this a war that the U.S. can actually win? Dr. Pillsbury: It depends on the quality of strategy the U.S. brings to the war. We have certain advantages in terms of economy, and experience in war with Afghanistan and Iraq. But we have certain major disadvantages, one of which is distance. It’s up to 10,000 miles away from our best ports, our munition storage areas, and our bomber bases to get over near China. Whether it’s to defend Korea, to defend India, or to defend Taiwan, we have a huge disadvantage in that it takes our forces two or three weeks to sail there. It takes them 24 hours to fly there. The Chinese are right there with quick action to seize something, like a piece of Indian territory, or do something involving Taiwan. They have a series of islands around Taiwan that have been attacked in the past. China has the advantage for a short war that involves short distances close to China, something that would be over within three or four days. Then, the Chinese simply announce, “We’ve done this, please don’t overreact. We’ll be happy to debate this with you at the UN Security Council, where we Chinese have veto power.” That’s one kind of war I’m implying that we would probably lose. It’s the topic of a very interesting book called, The Strategy of Denial, by Elbridge Colby. In chapter 10 of that book, he goes into detail. He was a Pentagon official for a few years, so it’s important to know what his thesis is. He says, “Taiwan would probably fall. It would collapse within a week of combat. There would be 50,000 to 100,000 Chinese PLA [People’s Liberation Army] troops on Taiwan. Should we Americans surrender?” He says, “No, this is a great opportunity for us. We can land our own forces, and link up with whatever’s left of the Taiwan forces. Then, in a kind of guerrilla warfare movement, we can force the PLA off of Taiwan and to return to the mainland.” I’m summarizing a 30-page description. He says, “This will be a good thing, because right now most countries in Asia want to hedge their bets. They’re all on the fence. They want to be friends with America. They want to be friends with China.” But according to Mr. Colby’s argument, “When the Asian leaders see that China has attacked Taiwan and occupied half of it, and they see that America is fighting back, they will then be galvanized. “They will see for the first time just how evil Communist China is. They’ll stop being fence sitters. They’ll stop hedging. They’ll join our new coalition. They will have a whole new world in which we’re taking the China threat more seriously.” I interviewed him once on TV myself. I recommend his book, and please read chapter 10. It’s quite fascinating that someone thinks this way. Notice what his answer would be. He might avoid answering yes or no to the question, “Is war coming?” But he certainly has devoted a lot of thinking to the contingency where we can’t get there in time. We don’t store munitions in Taiwan. We have almost no U.S. troops on Taiwan, only a few trainers. We don’t have exercises with Taiwan. They’re a non-country, diplomatically speaking. We don’t recognize their government. We don’t call them a country. It’s quite a stretch to say, “Here’s this island with 23 million people. Here’s how close they are to China, 100 miles away. Here’s all the forces that could be landed on the island. How are we going to take it back?” But at least the Colby book is raising the issue publicly. You might say, “Maybe this should be something that is secret internal planning in the Pentagon, because it will never happen, or the chances are a million-to-one.” But he’s introduced this subject publicly, and then gone around the country making speeches about it. You can imagine the Chinese reaction to this. It’s good news from their point of view. Here’s a former American defense official saying, “The Chinese can capture at least half of Taiwan, if not more. All they have to worry about is making sure the Americans don’t come and land on Taiwan and start a guerrilla warfare movement to push the PLA off.” This might sound like good news in Beijing. One thing I focused on is what can we do to make the Chinese leadership think we can’t win this war? That’s another whole topic. But the idea of deterring the Chinese leadership gets you into how they think about war. How do they make calculations about, “Can we win or should we wait another two or three years?” The topic is how much they believe the politics on Taiwan is in their favor. As long as they believe Taiwan is going in the direction of unification, and a pro-China candidate is becoming president and leading Taiwan, there’s no incentive for them to start a war. It would be idiotic. Taiwan is going in their direction. If Taiwan is going in a different direction, then war becomes the only hope they have of reunifying the island. This is a complex area, where to win a war with China, we would have to be able to think through, “What are our advantages? What are our weaknesses? How would this war be conducted?” Some war games looked at a three-year war with China over Taiwan. The first thing we learned is that we run out of ammunition. The U.S. Navy, in each of its submarines, only has so many torpedoes. Each Navy warship has what they call loading. How many of each kind of missile goes into that ship? You can mix different kinds of missiles. When you make this decision, you’re deciding what happens in the first couple of weeks of the war. How many ships can you shoot down on the Chinese side? What will happen to our side? There is a very scary Rand Corporation report from 2015, highly recommended by me, called, “Military Scorecard.” It shows how the balance of power between Washington, DC and Beijing has shifted. In almost every category, we do worse and worse and worse over the last 30 years. One of the worst cases is a long war where we cannot produce anti-ship missiles, air-to-air missiles, torpedoes for submarines, or even fuel. A lot of our Navy still runs on fuel. It doesn’t have nuclear reactors the way aircraft carriers do. We will run out of all of these things. Here’s China, right there, highly productive, with major arms factories already building hundreds of missiles of various types over the past 15 years. It doesn’t look good for the United States to win in a long war. The other related issue is will our allies be with us? All of our forces to defend the area of Taiwan involve going through Okinawa and other bases in Japan. What if the Japanese are attacked by China and they’re told, “Keep out of this war. This is between us and the Americans. Taiwan is our own land. You Japanese keep out or we’re going to punish you with another set of missile strikes.” The Japanese may say, “We don’t care. We’re for this war. We love Taiwan. We don’t care if you hit us again, we’re going to let the Americans use our bases.” Because Okinawa is the closest air base to Taiwan. That’s a big question, isn’t it? It’s the same thing to the south of Taiwan. We would need the Philippine naval and air bases. Some Filipino leaders say, “Yes, you can have them. Taiwan is like us. It’s a vulnerable island. So, you’re most welcome.” Other Filipinos say, “No, this is madness. China will attack us.” In a long war of six months or a year or more, if the U.S. is denied access to Japanese bases, denied access to Filipino bases, and if our main forces on the island of Guam are also harmed by Chinese missiles and bombers that they’ve been flying around to show us they can attack Guam, then we don’t have any support infrastructure. That’s why other historians and I have gone back to World War II to ask, “How did it happen then, when the Japanese took such a large area in just a few months?” The answer is that the Pacific Islands were the fallback. We had to start out in Australia and New Zealand, go north, and take these Japanese-occupied islands one by one. A lot of people know these islands names, because they have a parent who was killed there. No one knew the names. We hadn’t built bases in advance. The Japanese very carefully left to themselves the privilege of using these islands. It took two years to reclaim these islands that could then be used as air bases, depots, or naval storage areas. Only then could the war be brought to an end by a complete blockade of Japan. Could we do that again today? There has been a lot of public discussion by the Pentagon, “We need to focus on the Pacific Islands.” There’s only a few hints as to why. By logic, if we have to fall back from the Japan ring, the first island chain and the Philippines, if we have no bases, the next set of bases are in the Pacific Islands. What do we find China doing there? They are opening embassies, signing security agreements, and building air bases. As early as five or 10 years ago, the Chinese have obviously thought this, saying, “We can take care of the Americans near China in the first island chain. What we have to be careful of now is making sure the Americans can’t use the Pacific Islands like they did in World War II to come back into the war zone.” So, that also looks not promising, if you start thinking about what a war with China would look like. The United States has only started in the last two or three years, beginning under President Trump, to start looking at access agreements. It’s a whole set of measures that the Defense Department has announced in a paper about the Indo-Pacific. The word Pacific includes all these islands. A lot of people don’t think about war with China in terms of geographical scope, but that’s another factor. There’s another issue that’s come up in a lot of war games. This is nuclear power. China’s nuclear power, at a minimum, is 300 warheads. What would they do with all this? Some smart people interested in nuclear strategy write a lot about deterrence through demonstration. They might fire off a nuclear weapon someplace in the ocean just as a demonstration, “Look what we can do. We’re really serious about this, pull out.” Or would they not touch nuclear weapons? Would they consider them something that’s only for long-term strategic purposes? Would they use nuclear weapons more readily, more easily than we might, because it’s their territory, in the case of Taiwan? The whole nuclear balance is another thing that’s changing quite strikingly. It used to be that everybody wrote articles about Chinese nuclear strategy. They will never exceed 200 or 300 weapons. This is Confucius. It’s a philosophical principle. They don’t think like we do or the Russians do, in terms of 5,000 or 10,000 nuclear warheads. Everybody in the academic world was very certain of this. I actually raised a contrarian view, and next thing we know, the Defense Department has just announced in the past year that within five to seven years, China can and probably will go to 1,000 more warheads, and then to 1500 warheads by 2035. By the way, 1500 is an important number. Our ceiling for strategic nuclear warheads is 1500. The Russians have the same cap. It was negotiated. The Chinese refused to come to the talks. President Trump invited them, actually. They refused to come, even at the last minute. The nuclear balance is also changing against us. When you line up these various trends, you can get yourself into a very pessimistic mood. You can start thinking about Mr. Ma in Taiwan. He’s already been president. He’s western-educated, and fluent in English. He wants to run again and come back in January of next year. If he wins the presidency of Taiwan, his platform is to be friends with China. That starts looking pretty good to China. Nuclear war with thousands or millions dead versus a guy who’s doing well in the polls in Taiwan and wins. Then, he says, “China is our friend.” I couldn’t get into this in detail with our 33-year-old host, because of lack of time. Mr. Jekielek: There are some lessons from the pre-World War II period to be learned with the mentality that you just described, even though nuclear weapons obviously weren’t in play. Dr. Pillsbury: The main thing is deterrence. How do you deter the leadership in Beijing that may not think the same way we do about the nature of the world? The Chinese view of what we’re doing to them right now is very different from what we’re actually doing. You can see this almost daily in Chinese propaganda. They say, “Number one, America is trying to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. The Americans did this to the Soviet Union. They got Gorbachev to be their puppet. They overthrew the Soviet Union, and that was a great victory for America. They’re trying to do that to China today.” We tell them, “That’s not true. There’s no such program. We’re not trying to overthrow the Communist Party of China. That is not U.S. policy, and it never has been U.S. policy.” They just don’t believe it. The second area is a very recent Chinese foreign ministry article. It’s a long attack on America. It says, “America dominates the world in culture, economics, politics, propaganda, the use of armed forces to invade little countries.” It’s quite a long article, and very detailed. If they believe this, they see us as the evil, malevolent force that not only wants to overthrow the Communist Party of China, but wants to seize Chinese territory, like they claim Taiwan wants to. We’re perceived by them to be a demonic force. Let’s say a little incident happens, and one jet fighter pilot shoots down another jet fighter pilot. Our side is thinking, “This is an accident. Let’s get in contact.” This actually happened in 2001, when our plane had to crash-land on Hainan Island. Our motives were magnanimous. This P-3 aircraft needed to land safely, because of a Chinese fighter pilot’s reckless behavior. They didn’t see it that way. They essentially held our crew hostage, and sent us a bill for a million dollars. If there’s an incident involving shooting down two jet fighters, our leadership will probably think, “This was an accident. We’re all adults here, let’s contact each other. Maybe we have to pay something for the accident.” “Whose fault was it? Let’s review the tapes.” Can we assume the Chinese view will be the same, or will they see this as a hostile test? That is how they saw our B2 bombing 25 years ago. Will they see it as a test to which they need to respond in kind with another use of force against us? Then, an accident explodes into a really major war within 24 to 48 hours. I’m not confident that the Chinese leadership has a lot of goodwill toward America and would think, “Yes, we understand, this must have been an accident. You didn’t intend it.” More than likely they will have an interpretation which is very unflattering. Unlike in the past, when they couldn’t do anything about it, they will now be able to use force and intimidate the American leadership. Mr. Jekielek: There are so many things I want to ask you. There were joint naval exercises, the largest ever, with the Philippines. You’re saying that doesn’t mean the Philippines and the Americans are on the same side? Dr. Pillsbury: No, not at all. Everything I said about war with China is hypothetical speculation based on war games and thinking about what might happen for extremely unlikely events, one chance in a million. Reporters and journalists sometimes hear something about exercises, war games, or something that has happened, and they don’t have the background to understand the circumstances. They usually approach two different kinds of sources; sources that will tell them, “Don’t worry about it, everything’s fine. There’s nothing to look at here. Just move on to your next story.” Or it could be sources who exaggerate and scare everybody and say, “Yes, World War III could happen tomorrow. You better get ready, because we’re all going to die.” We’ve got a school of thought that says China is going to collapse. They’re not going to be around as a great power more than a few years into the future. This view, when it’s understood by our military planners, they will come to the civilian leaders and say, “Why should we plan against China? The place is going to collapse.” You can see how the assumptions that you make for war games or studies or forecasts, whether it’s a journalist or a military planner, depend on your initial thinking. Those who said, “Hitler just wants to straighten out the Versailles treaty and it’s okay for him to take these few steps.” What we learned later from declassified German documents—and this is very important for Chinese deterrence—Hitler and his generals had many conversations, where the generals, and they’ve been preserved in records that were found later by the American Army, the generals said to Hitler, “Don’t do this. If you do this, the French and British and the Poles will contain us and encircle us and harm Germany. This will be a disaster if you do this.” Hitler said, “I’m doing it anyway. You’re wrong in your forecast of their reactions.” The records show that after Hitler would do these things, the generals backed down and began to not criticize him or advise caution. They were not a deterrence. This wasn’t internal German master planning, it was Hitler testing and then seeing if he could get away with it. If something like that is happening in China today, which is a big if, this is the message they’re taking from the reaction of the environment—that the Americans think China’s going to collapse, and that we have to be alert to an American effort to overthrow the Communist Party, which doesn’t actually exist. By the way, are we going to create an effort to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party? There are ways to do that. It was done against the Soviet Union. Everything has been declassified now. If it’s not being done, why not? The issue ought to be discussed and people should think about it. But have you seen any debate about overthrowing the Communist Party? I have not. It’s not a topic. Do you see how deterrence theory works? You have to understand both sides of the deterrence equation. Then, you have to plug in how the two sides each see history. My next book is about how Chinese see history differently than we do. Mr. Jekielek: I’m extremely interested in that book. Based on the example that you gave of Hitler testing and seeing what the reaction was, we have had decades of appeasement policy, and not any form of deterrence. Dr. Pillsbury: It’s certainly true, we have no organization to fight a war with China. If you look around the world at the Pentagon’s structure, where are the admirals and generals working? What’s the name of the command? What’s their area of responsibility? You have commands in charge of the Middle East. You have the NATO planning staff that allocates weapons systems and makes war plans for NATO. We have exercises and we have scenarios. We know this might happen and that might happen. Here’s what our Japanese and American forces will do together. You may have noticed where I’m leading you. Do we have a command in charge of fighting a war with China? No, we don’t. Is there any kind of China command somewhere in the world? Is there an admiral or general with four stars who can be brought before the press or testify in Congress who will say, “My duty is to prepare to win a war with China?” The answer is no. We have a command in Honolulu up on a mountain called Camp Smith. It used to have about 700 people total. They’re in charge of exercises, planning, and arm sales for about 35 nations running all the way from India around to South Korea. To some degree China falls in their domain. It’s one of the 35 nations. But is it the China combat command? No, there’s no such thing. If you go in the building, which I have done many, many times, do you think you’re going to see a sign saying China division? No, it’s not set up that way. We don’t have a command for war against China or to deter China within our whole U.S. government. Mr. Jekielek: This is a great opportunity. Dr. Pillsbury: Some people might say it’s provocative to do such a thing. “Dr. Pillsbury raised that issue. Oh, how stupid. If we have a command for fighting China, that will just provoke China and cause a war. How irresponsible can you get? Besides, we have a few China experts scattered around various places. They must know what they’re doing.” Mr. Jekielek: It’s a fantastic question and deeply concerning. We’re here at Heritage, and you have a proposal on how to counter the China threat. Dr. Pillsbury: Not exactly. This exercise ordered by the new president of Heritage was not to create a new set of measures, it was to survey and canvas the best ideas that have been proposed so far, mainly in legislation by Senate and House members. There’s also a couple of congressional commissions that have been producing recommendations for almost 20 years. One is called the United-States China Economic Security Review Commission. Every year it produces about a 500-page report. Usually, it averages 70 to 80 recommendations. None of them ever get implemented. For example, the current one is to monitor American high-tech investment going into China. Most people are surprised that we don’t do that. We have no idea what American high-tech firms are investing in China’s state-of-the-art technology. Myself and others went back through the last five years looking for ideas. We found a lot. We found 300 pieces of legislation, each one quite useful and quite thoughtful. Marco Rubio had a proposal in 2018 for the White House to set up a technology czar to review technology about to be sent to China, and stop it if necessary. It should coordinate across all departments of government. Technology czar was the title. It never passed. We put it in there. Another proposal was discussed many times, and never got more than 10 votes. American federal pension money should not go into China, especially to the company that builds formations and little islands in the South China Sea. It was voted on. President Trump said, “Do something about it.” The people in charge refused. They got fired. It’s a long story. Three years later, technically speaking, federal pension money can still go to companies in China. Mr. Jekielek: To the CCCC [China Communications Construction Company]. Dr. Pillsbury: Yes, the Chinese Construction Company, so that’s in here. But this is not a new Heritage plan or a new Pillsbury plan for China. It’s pointing out that there were so many good ideas that were proposed which never happened, and that were never implemented. As a former Senate staffer myself, I saw it happen in at least 200 pieces of legislation where the sponsor would introduce it, get a number on it, and then go on television and say, “Today, I introduced a bill to block the purchase of farmland by the Chinese Communist Party.” It was a big news story. The media would cover it. Mr. Jekielek: Of course. Dr. Pillsbury: At last, the CCP will be denied American farmland near sensitive military installations. As a staffer, you take a look at how many co-sponsors there are. When you want to bill to pass, you do a lot of work. You go around and get co-sponsors. In some cases, the majority of senators would sign up as co-sponsors. I did this as a staffer for Radio Free Asia for broadcasts in Tibetan, Uyghur, Cantonese, and Mandarin. This was 1994, and we got a lot of opposition. We got 40 co-sponsors, including Joe Biden and Teddy Kennedy, and a lot of liberals, as well as Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, and a lot of conservatives. When the average senator sees that there’s 40 co-sponsors from both sides, “Hey, I’ll sign on to that.” We got Radio Free Asia, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. But today, that’s not happening. You get senators and congressmen who have a sexy bill. They introduce it and get on Fox News or the Epoch Times, because they’re a hero. They are going to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party. But is there a follow-up a month later, six months later, or two years later? “Senator or Congressman, whatever happened to that bill of yours?” They reply, “I don’t know. Somebody blocked it.” We had a very shocking incident. It’s in this Heritage Foundation list of recommendations that others have made in the past. There was a great concern that the U.S. Army’s drones are being bought from China, and they can send data back to China about U.S. Army operations. Lots of other people in America were buying from this one particular drone company in China. Legislation was actually passed in the House and the Senate banning purchase of Chinese drones by a variety of organizations. It was supposed to go into the National Defense Authorization Act. You know what happened? It mysteriously disappeared from the bill. It was passed, and the President signed it. The drone termination legislation was removed. At the conference meeting, if you’re a staffer, you know this, but the conference meetings are in secret. We say in the report, “We don’t know who took this out, but it passed both chambers. We’d like to see it put back in.” There’s actually almost a hundred examples here of good ideas that have gone nowhere. However, the people who have introduced the ideas get a lot of credit in the media. Mr. Jekielek: Let me cite one of your recommendations, which is to cut off all Chinese regime lobbying dollars. I suspect that those lobbying dollars may have had something to do with what you’re talking about. Dr. Pillsbury: That’s just speculation. Mr. Jekielek: Of course. Dr. Pillsbury: What surprised me about our report, I thought we would find 10 or 15 examples of this. I had the impression that a lot more legislation was passing than actually is. The media may be taken in, and saying, “Oh my God, at last Congress is standing up to China.” Because if you just watched television, you would see all these members of the House and Senate bragging about their new legislation. Of course, I would think, and others would think that we’re doing a lot to stop the Chinese. What if it’s not true? I run into people all over the world who think China’s going to collapse soon. It’s been found out that the Chinese themselves sometimes pushed this argument. “Don’t worry about us.” They don’t say we’re going to collapse. They say, “We have so many problems with our one child policy, cancer, pollution, the water table, and the lack of agricultural production, you Americans don’t need to worry about China. We’ll be lucky to be around 20 years from now.” I remember thinking to myself when I heard a Chinese official say that to an American delegation that I was part of, “I’ve heard this before.” In the meantime, the U.S. government has other threats that hit it right in the face; 9/11, the towers coming down with dead people, the discovery that there are Islamic terrorists all over the place who want to create terrorist incidents, kill Americans, and blow up embassies. This is really vivid and really clear. We had to do something about it, and we did. I’ve seen various estimates that $2 trillion was spent on counterterrorism. We built new organizations. We built Homeland Security. We built the Global War on Terror infrastructure. We took it really seriously, and we were right to take it as a threat. Like Pearl Harbor, where it’s vivid and American ships are being sunk by a Japanese sneak attack, sailors are drowning in those ships, and 3000 are dead, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to say, “We have to do something now about Japan.” But in the case of China, their strategy is very, very different. They deny that they seek hegemony, and they deny that they seek domination. With critics like the Falun Gong movement, they attack them ruthlessly and smear them. They keep a list of critics of China around the world, and make sure they are never invited to visit China. It’s a whole series of things, which a friend of mine once called a stealth superpower. China is a stealthy superpower that denies it’s going to hurt you. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of rhetoric, but not a lot of actual action, as we’ve discussed in the past. Dr. Pillsbury: Yes, and the counter-rhetoric is also very strong. It’s not as though China lacks friends or cheerleaders in Washington, DC, and in the various states around the country. China either has a lobby, or has people who honestly believe that China is a good, healthy force in the world. Here, we have a very weak effort to stop China, combined with a very powerful lobby and cheerleading force, and frankly, lots of goodhearted Americans who think everybody is like us, and think, “They all want to have a constitution and democracy. This will break out in China someday. There’s no need for us to do anything.” Mr. Jekielek: One of the recommendations is a crackdown on illegal Chinese police operations in the U.S. Indeed, it looks like that recommendation is being taken up as we speak. Dr. Pillsbury: Not exactly. Again, this is from legislation, and others have raised this idea. The police station, in the case of Manhattan, has been going on for many years, and somebody tolerated it. For accountability, once a better number is known for how many of these police stations there are, and once the set of arrests has been conducted, wouldn’t it be interesting to find out why this was tolerated for so long? Usually a foreign country, unless it’s a friendly ally, would not be allowed to have its own police stations tracking dissidents and critics inside the U.S., and then sending them back, in this case, to China. It’s unthinkable. Who approved this? Was it mayors and governors who were told, “The Chinese have this friendly office, and it’s above a noodle shop. Should we worry about it? We should not, because they’re just hunting down criminals.” That’s the Chinese explanation of what they’re doing. “These are criminals we’re trying to catch, and we’re going to take them home and save you Americans trouble.” Who tolerated this? Where is the congressional hearing? Accountability is going to be very important moving forward— accountability of what has been happening, who’s been asleep at the switch, how many switches is someone asleep at, and for how long? Now people can say, “That’s just bringing up old grudges. We don’t need to worry about the past. We have to look forward.” But my contention is if we don’t understand how we got here, we’re not going to pass legislation like this. We’re going to continue to talk tough about China, but actually do nothing. The Chinese are very aware that that is exactly what’s happening right now. Mr. Jekielek: Talking about these theories of how the Chinese economy is fragile, we know that there’s fragility in our own economy. We know there’s a huge housing bubble. Dr. Pillsbury: Sure. Mr. Jekielek: All of this. At the same time, we know there’s still massive investment from the U.S. through these index funds that you were talking about. Dr. Pillsbury: It’s not even tracked. We don’t have the number. There’s one guy in the private sector, Roger Robinson, who’s come up with different estimates of up to $3 trillion or more. But the important thing is there’s no government law that says, “Track this. We care.” It’s the same thing with farmlands. It was just revealed a couple weeks ago that the Farm Service Agency on a voluntary basis can be told the Chinese or someone fronting for them is buying land. It’s voluntary. If you don’t want to tell the Farm Service Agency, you don’t have to. Plus, these are often county-level transactions, and counties don’t necessarily say, “This is national security being threatened. I better call somebody in Washington.” It’s at the level of, what’s a good word? I hate to say complacency, but it’s keeping the level of perception of threat very low. This seems to be what I would call the Chinese secret formula that over time really pays off. To counter it, and that’s the purpose of our exercise here, is to pull together all this legislation that has not passed. In a way, it’s to have a shock effect on the reader. Because if it’s just one or two bills never passed, “Okay, let’s work on them next year.” But what if it’s a 100 bills that haven’t passed, but members and senators have taken credit for it when they introduced it? That means we’re looking at a disaster on our hands. We can’t respond to China other than by talk, rhetoric, papers, articles, condemning the Chinese, which they simply laugh at. It confirms their hope that the Americans are not going to wake up, other than talking, of which we have plenty. I was watching a recent TV show. The guy called in and said, “It sounds like, from what your guest is saying, we’re a nation of talkers. That’s all we can do.” I saw the host kind of smile, like this is a pretty shrewd observation. Our hope is that we’re going to track these recommendations to see how many co-sponsors it had? Did it go into conference? Did it come out as law? Did the president sign it? Because it’s fairly simple. With some of them, the legislation is no longer active. The person who introduced it just gave up hope. But if you would be interested, I’m happy to keep you informed on what we’re learning and what is actually happening. Mr. Jekielek: I would love that. How does this relate to this index of strategic competition? You mentioned your book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, earlier. That’s something that you suggested in that book, and now I believe you’re implementing it as part of the Heritage program. Dr. Pillsbury: Yes. Eight years ago, when The Hundred-Year Marathon came out, I thought it was pretty obvious that if we see China as a competitor, at the minimum, a competitor, we need an index to keep track of how we’re doing with supercomputers and biotech. I mentioned a number of categories. Because I knew from my government experience that this is not being done now. At the minimum, the National Science Foundation, every few years publishes reports on how many people get degrees of various kinds. I thought this would be immediately taken up. No legislation was written for eight years to do this. I went around to different government departments and asked, “Do you have any kind of indicator system that could be made into an index?” Because Heritage does this for economic freedom, and Heritage does it for American military strength, has various indicators of how we’re doing in different categories, and what the metrics are. For example, in the military metric, it came out this year that America is quite weak, because the number of combat hours American Air Force pilots put in has been declining, and there’s a graphic. There are a number of other measures of American military strength that are quite shocking when you see them all together. The Pentagon does not produce a report on, “These are our weaknesses.” It probably should, but it doesn’t. The idea was if no one else will do it, partly because it’s very difficult to know which indicators to look at, why doesn’t the Heritage Foundation? We started our own index of the strategic competition. Some of our initial findings have been quite shocking. We are falling behind in a number of high technology areas with, again, no press coverage. It’s not a new story to say this. People know hypersonic missiles are falling behind, but they don’t know about biotech. There are a number of indicators that when put together in our report will have quite a shock effect. They are superior to us in a number of areas where we thought we were superior. Mr. Jekielek: I was thinking about this index of competition, or as you’re suggesting an index of policy implementation as well. I was reminded of the Chinese regime’s comprehensive national power measurement. Dr. Pillsbury: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Which, again, makes a lot of sense. Dr. Pillsbury: That’s actually where I got the idea. I wrote a book in the year 2000 with a long chapter on how does China measure national power? I was quite surprised when I visited China in the ’90s, a lot of think tanks were producing these reports looking ahead 20 or 25 years asking, “What rank will China be? What rank will the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan be?” They had very fine-tuned analysis of their indicators, and they had debates among themselves. I came back to the U.S. saying, “The Chinese are doing all this. What’s our counterpart? Certainly, we must have this kind of measurement.” I was told, “No, nobody cares, because we’re going to be number one forever. We have no need to measure how other competitors are doing against us.” Mr. Jekielek: As we’ve discussed before, the Chinese regime is very focused on these unconventional warfare methods. As you’ve been describing an elaborate way of subverting the U.S., is this part of the Chinese regime’s plan, in your view? Dr. Pillsbury: The Chinese say they have no plan. They translated my book into Mandarin, a perfect translation. They classified it secret just to be read by party members. “Look at this guy. He’s claiming we have some kind of strategy,” and they did counter propaganda against The Hundred-Year Marathon. I collected some of the articles. You’re welcome to them. Basically, the argument was, “We Chinese have no plan. We don’t want to be number one. Our constitution says we will never seek hegemony. Anyone who says these kinds of things has no basis for it.” I soon found critics of the book in the United States writing book reviews saying, “China has no plan. China doesn’t want to be number one, and we’re just muddling through. Pillsbury’s material that he cites is all just anecdotes.” Well, that’s not true. There’s 60 pages of footnotes through this book with large numbers of citations to Chinese materials. But the critics simply ignored that. You have at least one author, and now I’m no longer alone, but a few of us sound the alarm. We can’t succeed. Our voices are too few, and they’re countered by this group of cheerleaders who say the opposite. For one of my examples I put in the afterward for this report, I heard from people who were with President Trump when he went down to see Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires. The meeting began, and they sat down. There’s always the same dialogue, “Our custom is you go first.” “No, you go first.” Trump got Xi Jinping to go first. Xi Jinping said, “I think you should know, President Trump, we are not pursuing a hundred-year marathon.” He used the exact words from the title of my book. “We do not seek global dominance. We do not have any plan to replace America,” and some more things concerning the book. Now, four people who were there on the American team told me about this. I didn’t hear it myself. I’m not disclosing a Trump/Xi Jinping meeting, but I heard it from four people who were there. Some of them have put it in their own books, by the way. John Bolton put it in his book. Jared Kushner put it in his book. Peter Navarro put it in his book. What is happening here? Now, President Trump is the kind of guy who, if Xi Jinping says, “I don’t have these plans,” do you think he’s gullible and he believes it? He said, “I’m very glad to hear that.” No, for President Trump, it strengthened his view that this book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, must have something in it that the Chinese don’t want us to think about. One of the things was the Index of Strategic Competition. But there are many other recommendations I made in the book, none of which have been implemented. In some cases, they were partially implemented. How am I going to respond to the China collapse? Another really big one, and I’m sure you know this, is the Chinese Communist Party is going to reform itself and turn into a democratic system. There are Chinese authors who advocate this, but it’s like they’re either in jail or they became exiles or they got real quiet. I have a section in the book where I talk about the constitutional debate, where one famous professor at Beijing University said, “The Constitution should be above the Communist Party.” Xi Jinping, at one point, seemed to endorse that, but then it all reversed. They began to say, “No, the legal system and the Constitution are below the Communist Party.” This professor, by the way, was not invited on TV programs. He should have been a hero. People should have gone to him in Beijing and interviewed him. He was writing for public national debate magazines. He would have granted the interview. Our media ignored him like he’s nobody. Mr. Jekielek: They were afraid they would get kicked out if they covered it. Dr. Pillsbury: At that point, the system was debating this. Later on, when they said, “It’s subversion to argue this way,” it would be much more dangerous. That’s one topic I cover in my recommendations for The Hundred-Year Marathon. We need to pay attention to debates inside China, especially in order to be able to give feedback to China, “This is what’s happening at the top.” Most people in China did not know about this constitution versus the party debate. We have Radio Free Asia to do that. But we made a mistake, including myself, when we created Radio Free Asia. We were modeling it on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Radio Free Europe, by Congress, created a large research staff and publications, including a weekly which cost a lot of money. People all over the world would cite the Radio Free Europe research report, and there would be quotations from speeches and articles. I don’t know what the reason was, maybe just laziness. When we created Radio Free Asia, especially at the broadcasts in Chinese, we didn’t create a research center. If you visit Radio Free Asia in DC, you’ll see a huge area where all the broadcasters are broadcasting. You will not see a weekly report on new developments in Communist China. You will not see original research on things that are happening. I think that should be fixed. I’m sure Radio Free Asia would like the additional money, but once again, it would take legislation. It would take some focus. People might say, “Oh, we don’t need a research report on what’s going on in China.” I maintain we do, because there are debates. Xi Jinping himself, every now and then, you get the impression he’s worried about something. A British book by Roger Garside, called China Coup, about how the Prime Minister could overthrow Xi Jinping got their attention. The next thing we know, the Prime Minister is not continuing in office. That taught me there’s probably a debate going on around Xi Jinping, but where is our media coverage of it? Mr. Jekielek: In The Epoch Times. Dr. Pillsbury: Hopefully, you can interview Xi Jinping’s advisors. Mr. Jekielek: We’ll have to give it a shot. Is your policy recommendation to start passing these pieces of legislation that you reference in this report? Dr. Pillsbury: There’s a book about the Heritage Foundation by Lee Edwards, called The Power of Ideas. It points out how, beginning 50 years ago, Heritage Foundation executives tended to be House and Senate staffers. They knew how to do legislation, but they complained, because the Left had the Brookings Institution and a couple other think tanks to help them draft legislation. The conservatives did not have that. They had themselves. So the idea of Heritage from the beginning has been to help legislation get drafted and considered in a friendly way, with ideas and research. Otherwise, there’s no support system for them. These recommendations are feeding back to current members of Congress and especially their staff from people at Heritage who, like me, are former Senate staffers or House staffers. The long-term President and founder of Heritage, Ed Feulner, helped create something called the Republican Study Committee. There’s something on the Senate side called, which still exists, called the Senate Steering Committee. Both of these are active on China policy. But our idea is having this together kind of like a guidebook. It’s not fresh new recommendations from Heritage, but it’s saying, “Look at what could be done.” It’s extremely specific about each recommendation and how to implement it. We will know within about two years how many of these action items have actually passed both the House and Senate, and been signed by the President. It’s going to be very obvious. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, your overall thesis in this interview is that we are not awake to the China threat as a society. Dr. Pillsbury: No. Society is awake. The polls show that a high percentage of Americans are very concerned about the China threat. No, I’m talking about members of Congress who don’t pass legislation. I’m talking about the county governments that don’t report Chinese farmland purchases. These are government people. This collection of recommendations is not for the broad American society to read and go, “Gee, I like those.” No, this is a handbook for insiders. You are going to be judged. People are going to know a year or two from now if your legislation passed or not. Is the Army still buying drones from China? Or did the legislation pass banning that? It’s going to be yes or no, and it’s going to be graphic. It’s not for American society at all. We’re not going to publish this as 100,000 copies, and please read it. No. This is a very sophisticated guide on how our government is doing on China at local, state, and congressional levels. We have some things in here, very few, that are Executive branch, White House jurisdiction. No, you misunderstand me. If you think this is some sort of recommendation to read as your university textbook, no. This is designed to alert Washington, DC insiders, “If you fail to take actions with this legislation, people are going to know, including the donors to your campaign. I saw an interesting article. Recently, 40 percent of the time of members of the House of Representatives is used to meet with donors to raise money. Now, if the donors start saying, “You introduced that legislation, but it never passed. I think I’ll pass on my $5,000 check,” if that starts getting around, that’s really bad. When I was a Senate staffer, we had a phrase, “There are two kinds of senators, showboats, and work horses.” The work horses were not very well known publicly, but they got a lot of legislation passed. With the showboats, that is self-explanatory. Mr. Jekielek: To the person that’s watching that is in the broader society that might feel a bit despondent after watching this interview, what is your recommendation to them about how to respond? Dr. Pillsbury: We’ve got to have accountability. What is the government and the Congress actually doing about China? Very few people in America are actually involved with the government. There’s been interesting efforts to find out how many people ever vote? What kind of elections do they vote in at the school board, county, state or national levels? Probably the most important is how many American citizens actually donate money to a candidate at any level; local, county, state, or national? There’s a website you can go to called opensecrets.com. Put in somebody’s name, put in Michael Pillsbury, you can see every donation I’ve made for the last 20 years over about $200. You can see it right there. You can’t secretly make donations, at least not for direct funds. But it turns out, apparently less than two percent of the American public make any kind of campaign contribution to a political election. This is amazing to me. If you’re a donor, and you know a member could do better if you remind him or her, that’s the key to viewers who otherwise might be despondent. You could say, “Well, I can do something about this.” Mr. Jekielek: Michael Pillsbury, it’s such a pleasure having you on again. I’m sure we’ll have you back. Dr. Pillsbury: You’d like a progress report- Mr. Jekielek: That’s right. Dr. Pillsbury: -on these various indicators and whether the legislation actually is passing. Okay, I promise to keep you informed. Mr. Jekielek: Wonderful. Dr. Pillsbury: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Michael Pillsbury and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 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Former Marine Daniel Penny was arrested for the killing of Neely. He’s now facing charges of manslaughter and holds that he acted in self-defense. VIDEO: Can Americans Still Defend Themselves Without Getting Arrested? --- 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/SelfDefenseCR_YT TRANSCRIPT: If someone you love were threatened, or even get physically attacked, do you have the right to defend them? And even more so, when police are being defunded and when criminals are being released on the streets, do you have a right to protect yourself? Do you have to just let things happen? Do you just watch while innocent people get victimized by criminals? Well, this question is what’s currently on trial in New York. This is the case of Jordan Neely. Now, if you read most news outlets on the left, you’ll hear the 30-year-old black man was a street performer and Michael Jackson impersonator. That his friends said he was a sweet kid. And that he later became homeless and suffered from mental disabilities. If you read news outlets on the right, you’ll hear he was arrested 42 times between 2013 and 2021. In 2015, he was convicted for four months after trying to kidnap a 7-year-old girl. He was caught dragging the child down a street in Inwood. Then in 2021, he was arrested for punching a 67-year-old woman in the face as she exited a subway train in New York’s East Village. He broke the nose of the elderly woman and fractured her orbital bone. He plead guilty, he was facing 15 months in an alternative-to-incarceration program, he skipped his court date, and had a warrant out for his arrest since February. Both sides of Jordan Neely’s story are true. He was a talented dancer who suffered from mental problems and had become a criminal menace in New York. The justice system was repeatedly letting him off the hook. Even outside of his arrests, people were posting online about personal experiences of being threatened or attacked by Neely. And then on May 1, Neely was allegedly threatening passengers on a New York subway car. A former U.S. Marine intervened and restrained Neely with a chokehold while two other men helped subdue him. Neely lost consciousness, and the men placed Neely in a recovery position, yet Neely died. Nobody was initially charged. Video of the incident was limited to when Neely had already been restrained. And the video quickly was picked up by political actors to play into the country’s race narratives. Democrat Representative Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter a couple of days later that “Jordan Neely was murdered.” Others on the far left came forward also to criticize the case as being about race, and to suggest that justice was needed. Although, even among Democrats, not everyone was in agreement. The political attacks sounded like a dog whistle to radical groups in New York. A few dozen protesters went viral when they jumped on the subway tracks and forced a Q train to slam on its breaks. It also turned out the protesters were not grassroots protesters. They were with an organization called Voices of Community Activists and Leaders, which has funding from billionaires including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg through the Forward dot U-S Education Fund, and radical left billionaire George Soros through his Open Society Foundations. And it also turned out that the radical organization that staged the subway protest had previously teamed up in other protests with the Young Communist League of the Communist Party USA. The outright communist group was also involved in the Neely protests, and stated in a tweet, “Thank you to all our comrades who answered the call today! We’re just getting started!” And the communist connection to the whole staged protests, brings the whole incident full circle, right back to Representative Ocasio-Cortez being the frontrunner in calling for charges in the case. Justine Medina, a former aide of AOC, is a member of the Executive Committee of the New York State Communist Party and is co-chair of the New York Young Communist League. That’s the same group that staged the subway protest. So let’s dig into this… Soros finances the campaigns of radical district attorneys letting criminals off the hook. A criminal is killed by people defending themselves when the city’s justice system fails. A radical congress member, whose political campaign was notably assisted by a media network with funding from Soros, comes out and calls for arrests. Then a radical group funded by Soros stages a protest while being backed by a communist group tied to that same politician, also calling for arrests. Seems there’s a lot of overlap here. Regardless of the Soros “above and below” strategy at play, former Marine Daniel Penny was arrested for the killing of Neely. He’s now facing charges of manslaughter and holds that he acted in self-defense. So is this really about crime then? Is it really about justice? Or is it about something else? Well, it’s not clear. But what we can say is that the narratives aren’t lining up. Many politicians who called for Penny’s arrest were simultaneously criticizing the use of justice. They were noting that young men are being sent to prison when in reality many just need help. Yet, they did this while also calling for Penny to be sent to prison. Others were more direct. Others suggested this may not be about manslaughter, or about justice, or about mental health. Instead, they’re saying this is about race. New York City Mayor Eric Adams flip-flopped on this point. He appeared on CNN and criticized AOC for claiming that Penny murdered Neely. Let me show you: “Well, both the congresswoman and the comptroller — the comptroller is a citywide leader — and I don’t think that’s very responsible at a time when we’re still investigating the situation.” But then Adams followed this with race-based narratives on the case. Well, for conservatives it’s not about race. Instead, it’s about whether you’re allowed to defend yourself. The case has become a symbol of what’s wrong with defunding the police, and whether people are being selectively prosecuted based not on the crime, but based on the color of their skin. And when people like Adams make it about race, other people start wondering if the case would be treated differently if race wasn’t an issue. This is partly why people like the rock star, Kid Rock, donated $5,000 to Penny’s defense fund. It’s why even politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are getting on board to fundraise for Daniel Penny. And it’s also why people are now bringing up the idea of self-defense. Al Sharpton, for example, was stating that if Penny was not charged, it will encourage others to become vigilantes. And this is where many cities in the United States are now at. The common view, at least among conservatives, is this: police have been made unable to do their jobs. The courts appear to have a swinging door. Violent maniacs like Neely are allowed to attack people, harass people, and generally cause a menace. Nobody will protect you. And so what are your options? Even if you see others being attacked or harassed, should you do anything to help them? Should you allow them to be attacked? Or do you face going to prison if you step in to help? Back in 2021, we watched in shock at what took place in Pennsylvania. Passengers on a train in the Philadelphia area just watched as a woman was raped on a train. Nobody stepped forward to help her. They listened to her cries, and they allowed it to happen. And it raised the question of what we become as a society if people don’t stand up against evil. In the natural world, self-defense is written into the DNA of life. Even bugs have the means to defend themselves. Nearly every creature on earth has been given by God a means to defend itself, whether with claws, teeth, stingers, or other means. Humans create tools, like swords and guns, to defend themselves. And this has held true throughout all human history. The right to self-defense is the right to life. And the right to guard life is one of the main pillars of the law. Part 2: 🔵 Watch HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/SelfDefenseCR_YT Meanwhile, a leaked Pentagon report dismantles what we’ve been told about COVID-19 and its origins. In particular, it contradicts the Proximal Origin study that was used by people including Dr. Anthony Fauci when trying to debunk the lab leak theory. We speak about this with Hans Mahncke, author of the report and co-host of EpochTV’s “Truth Over News.” Also, a recent Epoch Times investigation found something shocking. An activist group has been secretly sending sex-change kits to children, and they’ve been shipping these kits to kids all over the United States. To speak with us on this is the author of that investigative piece, Epoch Times reporter Jackson Elliot. LIVE Q&A: Will Self-Defense Become Illegal Through the Jordan Neely Case? 🔴 Unlimited EpochTV Access. Only $1 Trial (Limited Time Offer): https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW

“People stand to profit handsomely from this experimental medicalization—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, body-altering surgeries … all in pursuit of a lie,” says Brandon Showalter. Showalter and Jeff Myers are co-authors of “Exposing the Gender Lie: How to Protect Children and Teens From the Transgender Industry’s False Ideology.” “It’s an ideology that came out of the postmodern movement from the 1980s that is attempting to gain power by confusing people about the nature of reality. And then there’s an industry, medically, that comes along and … they stand to make tens of billions of dollars,” says Myers. The NIH is funding a study on cross-sex hormones for children as young as 8 years old, according to a document released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Dr. Michael Laidlaw. The document shows the lower age limit was lowered from 13 years old to 8 years old. “The U.S. government has no business funding this kind of experimental research, especially on children,” says Showalter, a senior investigative reporter at The Christian Post. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/one-of-the-worst-medical-scandals-that-the-world-has-ever-seen-brandon-showalter-and-jeff-myers-on-exposing-the-gender-lie_5231091.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jeff Myers, Brandon Showalter, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jeff Myers: Thank you, Jan. Great to be with you. Brandon Showalter: Thank you Jan. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve really been enjoying reading your new field guide and I’m going to call it a field guide, Exposing the Gender Lie. It’s a very short book, incredibly pithy, and very helpful. I want to encourage people to learn about this issue. You guys have done a very, very good job at condensing a whole bunch of information into the book to try to understand how we got to the place we are today, and what might be done to deal with it. Jeff, let’s start with you. Mr. Myers: A lot of people think that transgender is about drag queen fetishes, who can play on what sports team, or who can use what bathrooms. All of those are symptoms of both an industry and an ideology. It’s an ideology that came out of the postmodern movement in the 1980s that is attempting to gain power by confusing people about the nature of reality. There’s a medical industry that comes along and says that if children are confused they’ll use our products, and then, they stand to make tens of billions of dollars. The ideology and the industry fuels a problem and actually makes children double victims. Mr. Jekielek: You talk about the social contagion of people believing they’re transgender, or that their gender doesn’t align with their sex. At the same time there is a social contagion around how you think about these things in the medical community itself. Would you say that? Mr. Showalter: That is correct. Indisputably, there is a social contagion fueled largely by social media, online platforms, Tumblr, YouTube, and influencers to convince young people, many of whom are on the autism spectrum, and many of whom have a variety of mental health struggles, comorbidities, and psychiatric issues, to believe that they were born in the wrong body. It is physiologically impossible to become the opposite sex. We’ve seen this happen with previous social contagions, like anorexia, cutting, and other modes of self-harm that spread by social contagion. The same thing is happening with this situation. The watershed book that really articulated this a few years ago was Abigail Shrier’s, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters. Because now, for the first time in approximately 100 years of clinical diagnostic history, the primary demographic is teenage girls. We never saw that before with gender dysphoria, as it was overwhelmingly something that afflicted preteen boys. But now things have changed, in large part due to the industry that comes along with all of the ideologues who are pushing this message. People stand to profit handsomely from this experimental medicalization, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and body-altering surgeries, again, all in pursuit of a lie. Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, I want to understand where you’re coming from. Why this book, and why now? What got you interested in this whole issue, Jeff? Mr. Myers: Transgenderism is a product of academic thinking in postmodernism starting in the 1980s. When I was a doctoral student studying for a doctor of philosophy, working in human communication studies, we were reading articles about how gender is a performance, and gender and sexuality are different. It was a theory at the time that your gender and your sex could actually be different things. Now, it’s taken for granted, even though there’s no medical way to understand this. There’s nothing more than just the theory that gender and sex are different things. It’s now become so popularly accepted that people just assume that your sex is what your body says, what is assigned to you at birth. Your gender is how you feel about yourself inside. Healthline.com says there’s 68 different genders, and there could be thousands of potential genders. Gender essentially becomes an irrelevant category now, but at the same time becomes the only thing that is important. The fact that there are 6,500 cataloged biological differences between males and females is set aside, and whatever you feel about yourself is what everybody else in society has to respond to. Mr. Jekielek: Is this what made you start asking questions? Where does your motivation to write this book come from? Mr. Myers: Voltaire said, “If you can make people believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities.” For me, this book came about because I have a focus on truth. Through Summit Ministries, I’m preparing a rising generation to embrace the truth. I want them to champion the truth. I want them to be leaders for the truth, and they can’t do that in a culture that lives by lies. Mr. Jekielek: What about you, Brandon? How did you come to work together? Mr. Showalter: Confronting this issue was definitely not something I signed up for at a career fair. It was soon after I got my start in journalism at The Christian Post, that I began to see how there were various laws being passed to prohibit conversion therapy. It was being applied to this amorphous gender identity where if someone was confused about their body, male or female, they couldn’t receive any sort of counseling that would help them accept their bodies as they really are, as the sex that they really are. That was alarming to me. I also began to see how language was being manipulated in the corporate press, phrases like sex assigned at birth, and referring to males as she and her. I began to understand about the medicalization of vulnerable people, especially children. Specifically, when I learned that hormone blockers were to arrest natural puberty, something inside me just snapped. I said, “Absolutely not.” I remember the experience that I had as a 14-year-old-child when I read the Reader’s Digest cover story about the Somalian born supermodel, Waris Dirie, who had a campaign to end FGM [female general mutilation]. I was so viscerally horrified as a teenager reading that story. That’s exactly what I felt, that same visceral horror as a 31-year-old in journalism here in DC, and I just knew I had to do something about it. Hearing about the medical abuse and the child abuse, something inside me snapped. Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on this. Earlier, you mentioned vulnerable people. Many of the people that this industry is interested in are on the autism spectrum. Please tell me about that reality. These are very vulnerable people. Mr. Showalter: They are very vulnerable people. We are seeing many more people than I ever knew were even on the autism spectrum. It seems like it’s every third or fourth person sometimes. But what happens with autistic people, however severe or moderate or mild their autism is, what often happens is they become enmeshed in a culture where their issues can be explained away by way of gender identity ideology. What autistic people often do is just rigidly fixate on this issue and it becomes the solution to all their problems. It’s that fixation that is the deadly combo of this false ideology that the industry perpetuates, coupled with mental health comorbidities, not least of which in some cases is autism. I would want to be very careful that I’m not necessarily linking the two. But it seems that of all the phone calls that I field from parents who are desperate, and who read my coverage at the Christian Post, they say, “My daughter’s on the spectrum. My son’s on the spectrum, he got obsessed with this and now he won’t let it go.” Somehow, with the transgender identification and the autism thing, there needs to be an entire book written about what’s going on with this connection, but there is one. I don’t want to make a correlation/causation error. These people who are dealing with these struggles, not just autism, but social anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric ailments and disorders, they’re all very vulnerable to this. That’s probably one of the worst aspects of what this ideology does to people. Not only is it false that you can become the opposite sex, it preys upon those who are already having a really hard time in life with their mental health and psychological struggles, including and especially autistic people. Mr. Jekielek: Jeff, it’s such a strange thing for a child to say, “Oh, I’m the opposite sex.” The way that you’re supposed to deal with this is to unquestionably affirm it. I’ve been told by parents of children who have been in this situation that if they don’t do that, if they don’t wholly affirm, their child will commit suicide. In many cases, it’s more likely people say they will. Of course, now parents become very vulnerable, and they say, “My goodness, I wouldn’t want my child to do that. That would be the worst thing in the world.” Mr. Myers: In our book, Exposing the Gender Lie, we look at the supposed studies that were done to say that children who don’t get transgender procedures, and medical procedures will commit suicide. I’m not giving this as counseling advice, but as a social scientist, those studies are dead wrong. In fact, the interpretation of these studies in the media is a lie. I will go that far to say that. When you look back at them, you realize, at very best, those studies show that people who go through these medical procedures see no improvement. In my experience, young people who experience gender dysphoria, and I work with several thousand young people every year, always have comorbidities such as anxiety, depression, unresolved childhood trauma, and unresolved childhood trauma. It’s all of these things all mixed together. When the industry says treat gender ideology first, it’s sort of like saying, “You’re about to have a stroke, let’s give you an aspirin.” It’s treating one of the symptoms, rather than really getting back to what is at the root, what are the causes that are causing a person to question their gender identity. Mr. Jekielek: How did it come to be treated this way medically? I’m not aware of other scenarios where a doctor would do this. Mr. Showalter: One of the things that I say a lot is institutional capture. When I say that sometimes people will say, “That’s a tinfoil hat conspiracy.” No. You have professional societies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, and all of the major counseling and therapy organizations completely buying in with brutal speed that this is how you treat this disorder. This is the approach you take; only affirm whatever the child or the young person says that they are. You are to immediately and unquestionably say that is correct, and never, ever challenge it. The remarkable thing, and it’s horrifying, is how quickly this has all happened. But understand that a lot of the ideologues active in this space, the academic medicine types, they’ve been making very sneaky and stealthy moves very gradually, to the point where once you capture enough institutions and entities, a lot can happen very quickly. Back in 2009, the Endocrine Society revised its professional guidelines about how to treat gender dysphoria, and that was a big overhaul. A lot of the academic medicine types really re-engineered a lot of those guidelines, and it was quite a departure from previous standards. In 2017, those guidelines were revisited and revised again. Dr. Quentin Van Meter is an Atlanta-based pediatric endocrinologist, who is a leader in the American College of Pediatricians, the alternative to the American Academy of Pediatrics. He has told me that he was at a conference, a joint combined session of the American and European endocrine societies in the early two thousands where he heard Dr. Norman Spack, who founded the first ever pediatric gender clinic in Boston. He heard Spack talk about all this wild nonsense of children deciding the gender that they are. Little did he know then that Spack would help re-engineer these guidelines in 2009, and then again in subsequent years. Since then, there’s been a massive campaign throughout all of culture; throughout popular media, and through the news programming where they have pushed this ideology as though it is scientific. This is emblazoned on corporate outlets, and it’s everywhere. There’s nowhere to escape from it. Concurrent with the industry’s marketing of these medical products to vulnerable youth, you see these ad campaigns throughout the press promoting this as a way of being cool. It’s the next frontier of civil rights, hooked on to the wagon of LGBT, whatever you think of that. It’s a very strategic, very savvy, and very slick marketing campaign. That’s how this has taken off so quickly. In addition to the capture of these professional organizations and doctors, it should be noted, they have great social trust in our society. They wear the white coats, they have their degrees on the wall, and you tend to believe what they say. They know the science, and so they carry a lot of gravitas. People just accept what they say without much of a question. When you are pushing medical practices that are at such odds with reality and with basic biology, you can do a lot of harm very quickly. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a reckoning. The question becomes how many people have to be irreversibly harmed, sterilized, disfigured in the meantime? Mr. Jekielek: It’s unfathomable to many people. You mentioned the people are wearing the white lab coat and the stethoscope. There’s an air of gravitas and belief that this person is acting on the best available medical knowledge. The question is how did the information and approaches that Spack was promoting at the time, which didn’t have a medical basis, become an orthodoxy? Mr. Myers: Even the smartest medical doctor can’t know everything about everything. They will go back to the computer for their medical association and look for the standards of care, saying this is the best way to treat this, or this is the best way to treat that. When it comes to the treatment of transgender medicine, the standards of care were developed by an organization called the World Association for Transgender Health. This WPATH set of standards of care were developed in 2009 and revised several times since. We’re now in the eighth version of it. They specifically state that there is a highly choreographed way to handle transgender medicine. This is the only way, and it is recommended by the WPATH. It is that you start with social transition and refer to someone by their new chosen name and change pronouns, then alert their teachers and their parents that they must use these new pronouns. Then, to the level of comfort of the patient, you move toward puberty blockers, you move toward cross-sex hormones, and you move toward surgery. This is not a radical step. It’s the natural choreographed path outlined by the standards of care that doctors are given. The question is, where did those standards come from? There was a study published in January of 2023 by the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, which is a highly respected publication in the field of psychology. It said that the shocking lack of evidence is almost unbelievable for transgender health. They were actually led to ask, “How did we ever get to this place, when there’s no evidence for this approach?” They called it runaway diffusion, where some kind of a medical innovation in one clinic is taken for a standard of practice and then it spreads very, very rapidly. The American Academy of Pediatrics is one we focus on in the book, because there are 60,000 members of that association. Fewer than 30 people had anything to do with developing the transgender standards of care. Mr. Showalter: The vast majority of doctors don’t support it, but many are just keeping their heads down if they work for institutions that are very large and corporatized. This is the dogma that rules the day. I actually believe that most doctors object to it, but there just aren’t very many who are willing to speak up and say, “I oppose it.” Mr. Myers: One of the reasons doctors don’t speak up is because there is actually a legal groundwork being laid right now that if you don’t follow the standards of care, which are ordinarily taken by doctors as recommendations, not demands, if you don’t follow the standards of care, then you might open yourself up to a lawsuit by someone who didn’t want to go through puberty as a male or a female. Now, your refusal to treat them is medical neglect. A lot of doctors, just for malpractice reasons, are following the standards of care, or recommending the standards of care, even though they don’t personally buy into them. Mr. Showalter: There’s another dynamic as well. The gender industry has been very successful at making everybody else think that they are the experts and you must defer to them. I’m aware of general practitioners who are busy doctors seeing patients all the time. They’re not able to be up to speed on what the latest literature says. Given the institutional capture, and given how journals are pumping out this stuff that is just complete nonsense, they just assume, “It’s in this trusted journal that I respect. If I don’t know anything about it, I’m just going to make a referral to the gender clinic,” thinking that they’re doing the right thing. But they’re not abreast of what’s really going on. That is becoming inexcusable. I know doctors are busy, that I can understand. They can’t be up to speed about everything. I’ve been searching for answers from many different angles as I’ve covered this issue for the Christian Post. With the institutional trust in respected publications, within certain hospital systems, and with people who are respected in the field, there’s been a real lag where people are just not up to speed. They think, “I’ve trusted this person before, it’s probably fine.” They just don’t realize all that has happened. Mr. Jekielek: A few years ago, what you’re describing to me would have been unfathomable. But now that we’ve seen how most doctors and many medical practitioners responded to the pandemic, I’m ready to accept what you’re saying. We had a situation, and many doctors have reprised this for me, where a disease was treatable by many existing medications. I’m not even talking about the unspeakables, like ivermectin and hydroxy, but some of these other drugs were being tested early on, trying to find a way. The standards of care said, “Do not treat early. Just simply wait until someone gets into a very serious situation and then come to the hospital.” The outcomes were already very poor. How is it even possible that such a thing could have happened? It had to do with business, and it had to do with ideology. As I’ve learned, it had to do with doctors trusting that the system knew better. But it’s still kind of unfathomable that this would be so easy. The focus lately has been on the children. Have you encountered in your work with youth, any children that are having this confusion? Mr. Myers: In my work with young adults, I regularly encounter young people who are what I would call gender insecure. They have lots of mental health issues. Maybe they were isolated during COVID, and there are all those kinds of things that happen. There’s a lot of anxiety, and there’s a lot of depression. 75 percent of the young adults I work with say they don’t have a sense of purpose that gives meaning to their lives. There’s the existential aspect to this as well. If what’s afflicting you is going on inside your mind, if the part of you that is supposed to think about the problem is the part that is sick, what do you do? It’s very easy for them to start believing, “I was born in the wrong body,” not just that there’s something wrong with their body, but that, “My body itself is actually wrong.” When they watch TikTok videos of people who’ve gone through gender transition and say, “I feel at peace with myself,” they begin to think, “Maybe that’s me.” But there are a lot of young people who don’t have anything wrong with them, that are being convinced that they do. Actually one student said, “Is there something wrong with me, if there’s nothing wrong with me? Because it seems like you don’t really have an identity unless you’ve been to a psychiatrist and have gotten two or three different diagnoses of what’s wrong with you. There once was an idea that adolescence can be very confusing and there was an adult who you could trust, who would guide you into becoming a strong young man who stands for truth and fights against evil injustice, or who would guide you into becoming a strong young woman who stands for truth and breathes life into others. That missing thing between the generations, added to the idea that everything is psychological, has made this a social contagion. It is to the point now where in some cases almost half of the young people in a given school will say they identify as transgender. Mr. Showalter: Or some other gender identity. Mr. Myers: Or some other gender identity. Mr. Showalter: Right. And who knows what they even mean. Mr. Jekielek: What does the existing literature say about why this might be? Because this is clearly a very new phenomenon. Mr. Showalter: I mentioned Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage. There was a landmark study, Lisa Littman’s study in 2018, which was excoriated by transgender activists. It was in the journal PLOS One, which documented this phenomenon. The phrase that was coined was rapid-onset gender dysphoria, coming from young people spending inordinate amounts of time online. Then, in their friend groups and clusters, they are all somehow coming out as trans, or non-binary, or some other gender identity that is different from their biological sex. It’s an indisputably true phenomenon, and it bears out. I get phone calls all the time saying, “Yes, that sounds exactly like what happened to my daughter.” They become invested in these friend groups, spending inordinate amounts of time online. They become convinced that this is going to be the pathway to their authentic self, that this is the pathway to liberation, and that this will give them a fresh start on life. The problem is that the psychological conditioning that they need to be something other than the sex is then priming the pump. That belief, that indoctrination, and the brainwashing that happens is the prelude to one of the worst medical scandals that the world has ever seen. Concurrent with this breakdown of the mental health of a generation, there’s been a breakdown in social trust. For years, the corporate press has been inculcating the public with this notion that you have an amorphous gender identity apart from sex. If they’re going to flat out lie to you about biology, of course they can twist and deceive about epidemiology or immunology or respiratory viruses. If you can’t get the basics of biology right, why on earth would you expect the public to trust you on much loftier themes, about diseases that you haven’t heard of, or how to treat them appropriately? They’re undercutting the foundational units of our knowledge here. It’s an epistemological crisis. Until we puncture the epistemological blockade, I don’t think we’re going to get very far. Because they have assaulted the very idea that the words that we use can refer to anything real. Mr. Jekielek: You actually dedicated an entire chapter to this whole issue of how language has been altered and weaponized to facilitate this epistemologically different way of thinking. Mr. Myers: Epistemology is the word we use for how we know what we know, but it is a philosophical problem at root. The biology will tell us, and the theology also tells us that there is male and female. In the spectrum of male, you might have very masculine males and you might have not so masculine males, and the same thing inside of femininity. The gender ideology approach says there aren’t two spectrums. There’s one spectrum with extreme masculinity on one end, and extreme femininity on the other. Our students are regularly told, “You’re a girl who doesn’t really enjoy girly things. Maybe you’re actually a boy. Maybe you’re born in the wrong body.” People slide back and forth along that spectrum and it’s very confusing. What ideology do they take? What box are they in today? That’s at the core of what’s really going on. It’s actually an attack on language then, because at what point do you stop calling someone a he, and start calling them a she. Who decides that, if everything is on one spectrum? The whole idea of the spectrum is philosophical and theoretical and wrong from an actual philosophical standpoint. But now, that’s where we’re operating, so it’s all confusing. Language confusion is at the heart of every revolutionary movement. You know from your history and your family’s history growing up, that if you want to change how people see the world, if you want to revolutionize them, you first of all have to change how they see language. Just go back to the difference between the American revolution and the French Revolution. The American revolution’s goal was to restore the proper meaning of justice and freedom and liberty. The French revolution’s idea was to overthrow the standard conceptions of justice, freedom, liberty, and fraternity. Every revolutionary movement since that time has first gone to war against the language. We’re not saying that transgenderism is going to create a similar kind of revolution. But if you want to destroy a person, if you want to dehumanize them, the first thing that’s always done is to attack language. You capture the language first, then you can capture everything else. Mr. Showalter: There’s a British feminist, lesbian academic by the name of Julia Long who’s said it better than anyone I’ve ever heard. Last fall at a free speech event in Bristol, she said the word trans has one function, and that is to falsify reality. As soon as you have that word, they can institute the lie that a man is a woman. Everything is reversed. If it’s possible for some penises to be female, that a female can have a penis, then it becomes easier to say you can just harvest tissue from your forearm to make a penis for a female. If some penises can be female, the death of the meaning of words paves the way for atrocities that we never before could have possibly have imagined. When we fail to be able to convey what we mean by what we say, it opens the door for so many things to happen that would’ve been inconceivable even five minutes ago. At this point, the medical carnage and the scandal of what transgender medicalization is doing is increasingly unignorable. Detransitioners, those who have undergone this experimental medicalization with hormone blockers and surgeries, are starting to put their heads above the parapet and say, “I was irreversibly harmed.” When you see social media timelines like mine full of young girls who’ve had their breasts amputated, weeping gashes slashed across their chest, you just can’t ignore the pictures. A picture is really worth a thousand words. When you see medical atrocities, it behooves us to ask, “What led to this? Why is it that 13-year-old girls, and this has been documented in several medical journals like JAMA Pediatrics and others, have had their breasts surgically removed, physically healthy breasts. What ethical standards broke down such that that happened?” We believe it starts with the corrosion and the corruption of language. If you can’t convey what you mean by what you say, you are going to pave the way for these atrocities. Until people see them, it’s not going to change. If your thinking is governed by all of these euphemisms that are politically correct and spouted endlessly by the media, you’re going to think in those categories. It takes those jarring pictures and those testimonies of young girls with froggy voices due to synthetic testosterone for people to really be able to see the harm and hear the harm. Because of the messaging, because of the hijacking and the overhaul of language, the harm isn’t made visible because it’s covered. We write about this in the book. We believe it was a very cunning and manipulative shift from what were once called transsexuals to transgender. Because with gender being malleable, with gender being this social performance, people can accept the word transsexual, but they would get visibly uncomfortable if you say, “I have a transsexual four year old.” They would think, “Why are you sexualizing a child? A transsexual four-year-old? You don’t sexualize children like that. No.” But with the introduction of transgender, possibly with the identity add-ons and gender expressions, it softens it up. It’s not as abrasive, but it’s basically the same thing. You’re trying to convince a child that their body is wrong, that their sex is wrong, and that they can change their sex. No, you cannot. The corruption of language is everything, and that’s why I won’t be gaslit by it. At the Christian Post, we have a policy against using any of the euphemisms, because it eclipses the reality of biological sex. It eclipses biology. And biology, in the words of evolutionary biologist, Colin Wright, is our last collective tether to reality. If we lose that, we lose everything. Mr. Jekielek: When you mentioned euphemisms, what came to mind immediately is top surgery and bottom surgery, which is an incredibly serious and invasive type of surgery. Mr. Myers: That is genital mutilation and breast mutilation, and there are children being subjected to this. With the medical industrial complex, and I know that term sounds political, but this healthcare industry spends $750 million-a-year lobbying at the federal level. That’s a million-and-a-half dollars per member of Congress that they spend on lobbying. The puberty blocking drugs that are given to children to stop puberty, which have irreversible effects, damaging their ability to develop as their bodies naturally would, with bone density loss, brain swelling, vision loss, and all kinds of things might cost a parent between $5,000 and $30,000 a year. If the parents don’t pay, then of course, Medicare or Medicaid or the insurance company might have to pay. The standards say these procedures are medically necessary. That is not my term, that is in the standards of care, that these procedures are medically necessary. You look back and ask, “How many kids are we talking about?” The number of children diagnosed as gender dysphoric has tripled in the last three years, and it’s continuing to grow. Tens of thousands of children are now being treated at one of 60 pediatric gender clinics, or one of 300 other gender clinics that also treat children. Most nations have one to three clinics. We have 360 gender clinics in this country. Mr. Showalter: Or maybe more. Mr. Myers: Possibly more by this point in time. Also, some of the drugs are cheaper. Giving testosterone to a girl doesn’t cost very much money, and they’ll just give it away at Planned Parenthood without the parent’s knowledge, and it irreversibly harms these kids. If there ever was a time for people in leadership to stand up and say, “Enough with the attack on children,” this would be it. We do not want to have another medical scandal like the eugenics scandal in the 1920s. Francis Galton, a highly respected scientist, thought the way to rid ourselves of the poor and of minorities would be to sterilize them so they can’t have children, a medical horror that actually led to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The guy who invented the lobotomy actually won a Nobel Prize for that. 50,000 people were subjected to that procedure. Many of them died. Those who didn’t die had their lives ruined forever. We look back at that as a medical horror now, and we think that transgender medicine is doing something similar. Mr. Showalter: Absolutely, and perhaps worst of all, the U.S. government is actually funding it. To its great shame, the National Institutes of Health [NIH] have been funding experiments of this sort. I’ve seen FOIA documents that have made my eyes pop and my jaw drop. For example, in 2015, there was a $5.7 million grant given to a number of pediatric gender clinics to study the outcomes of various kinds of trans-identified young people. My friend Dr. Michael Laidlaw, who’s an endocrinologist based in California, along with his colleagues, made a freedom of information request about what was going on with this study. They unearthed the progress report and found that one of the leading pediatricians in the gender clinic world, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who’s based at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, altered the protocol for these experiments that were being done, again, funded by our government. They lowered the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria age from 13-years-old to eight-years-old. The NIH has signed off on that for not just blockers, but also cross-sex hormones for children as young as eight. Studies of that kind have continued to be funded to the tune of $10.6 million through January of 2026. There was a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine where the whole cast of characters, the who’s who of gender doctors, analyzed psychosocial outcomes of 315 non-binary or trans-identified young people, ages 12 to 20. Two of those young people involved in the study took their own lies by suicide, but the gender doctors breezily dismissed that as adverse events. That’s how they do it. They paper over the disastrous outcomes and they spin the narrative that this is actually a positive development. Even as a whole rash of young people are being experimented on, it’s hailed as this universally wonderful, positive, groundbreaking, great thing for young people who claim to be born in the wrong body or the opposite sex. Meanwhile, what they’re really doing is committing atrocities that should make us all hang our heads in shame. The U.S. government has no business funding this kind of experimental research, especially on children. Mr. Jekielek: Many European countries have tried this, and most of them have put the brakes on this. They’ve been studying longitudinally the outcomes for people, and it turns out that this affirm at any cost approach isn’t actually beneficial. Can you speak to what the literature says on that? Mr. Myers: The United States is not the first nation to experiment with gender mutilation of children. It is the most horrific example of it, but it’s not the first. Some of these processes started in the Netherlands, and then, Finland and the UK were also leaders in this. In Finland and in the UK, where their medicine isn’t as motivated by the profits that drug companies could potentially make, and because of the way their system is set up, they’ve backed away from medicalization as the first line treatment of gender dysphoria. Now, they’re saying therapy is the first line treatment. You take someone through psychotherapy, because there are underlying traumas, adverse childhood experiences, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, all of these things that are the core problem. If you address those, these nations have found in 75 percent, and in some cases, up to 95 percent of the time, the gender dysphoria symptoms are resolved by the time the child completes puberty. They are backing away from the medicalization in the countries that pioneered it. Because not only does it not work, it hurts kids and there is a better approach that really does help. Mr. Showalter: Europe is indeed backing away from this experimental protocol. A lot of this is called the Dutch protocol, because the first well-established case report emerged out of the Netherlands. An endocrinologist working together with a psychologist decided to use that intervention on a troubled young person. The therapeutic idea was that puberty would be too traumatic to endure. Dutch doctors, Dr. Thomas Steensma and Dr. Annelou de Vries, have criticized the American approach. They say that the kinds of young people that were being studied in the Netherlands were vastly different. I’m personally not a fan of the Dutch protocol at all, but the analogy that I’ve used is that the American approach has largely been to just stomp on the gas. They’re pouring gasoline on the fire. They’re taking the Dutch protocol and amplifying it throughout all of society, and that is horrible to consider. When I go home to the countryside of Virginia and I speak to friends and family, they look at me as though I have four heads, and they think it’s so terrible. It’s as though an analysis paralysis sets in on them and they think that can be happening. First, doctors take an oath to do no harm with the Hippocratic Oath. They have no idea about how much biomedical ethics has collapsed. It has collapsed, and children are being irreversibly harmed, disfigured, and sterilized. We won’t be silent until it stops. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve seen over the last few years how powerful a motivator profit can be, even when people’s lives are at stake or negatively effective. This is a reality that we have to face. Knowing this, and even seeing it in other disciplines, I still find it very difficult to accept that there could be a whole medical industrial complex, as you call it. It’s true, once you get people medicalized with some of these different puberty blockers, hormones, and especially surgeries, that person becomes a patient for life. I still find it difficult to accept that people would be pursuing this for money. Mr. Myers: Yes. In our research, Brandon and I found a market analysis, not from the medical field, but just from the standpoint of investors saying, this is the new market. This is a new thing to invest in. There are billions of dollars to be made through these surgeries and through pharmaceuticals. But you’ve pointed out something that’s very appropriate. A child who gets a $30,000 puberty blocking implant is not just going to be a medical patient for one year. They’re essentially going to be a medical patient at $30,000 a year or more for the rest of their lives, as long as they don’t want the onset of puberty. Then, there are cross-sex hormones, and then surgery. A lot of people are looking at the bottom line dollars. We’ve seen this before in the opioid crisis. The companies making the opioids specifically lobbied the medical industry to get pain itself viewed as a disease, to be not only a symptom of a disease, but to be the disease itself. Then, doctors were given the opioids to prescribe. This especially adversely affected poor people. If you were wealthier, your doctor, through your insurance, might take you through physical therapy, which could actually help resolve your pain. If you were poor, they would just give you pills, because your insurance didn’t really cover much. The pills don’t cost much. The pharmaceutical companies now are being sued for tens of billions of dollars. Many of these lawsuits have been successful, and we’re now looking at another medical scandal on that scale. Mr. Showalter: For those who have trouble believing that doctors are just out to make money with this gender medicalization, there have been doctors on tape saying it. Very famously, the Daily Wire exposed Vanderbilt Hospital, where they actually had a doctor on videotape saying, “This is a great money maker for our hospital.” It’s come right out of the horse’s mouth, as it were. Speaker 4: Starting on January 1st, 2017, according to the Affordable Care Act insurance cover carriers are mandated to cover medical expenses for trans folks. Some of our BMC financial folks in August of 20, I’m sorry, October of 2016, this was already a couple years ago, cut down some costs of how much money we think each patient would bring in, and this is only including top surgery. This doesn’t include any bottom surgery, and it’s a lot of money. These surgeries make a lot of money, so female and male chest reconstruction can bring in $40,000. A patient just on routine hormone treatment, who I’m only seeing a few times a year, can bring in several thousand dollars because that requires a lot of visits and labs. It actually makes money for the hospital. Now, these I got from the internet, but it’s from the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, which does a lot of surgery for patients, and I just wanted to give you an idea of how much these bottom surgeries are making, and I think this has to be an underestimate. This is for a vaginoplasty. They’re saying they’re quoting roughly around $20,000 for a vaginoplasty, but that doesn’t include your hospital stay. That doesn’t include your post-op visits. That doesn’t include your anesthesia, your OR, so I would think that this has to be a gross underestimate. I think that’s just like the surgeon’s piece of it, which anybody who’s ever been in the hospital knows that’s like 10 percent of it. And then, the female to male bottom surgeries, these are huge money makers. Again, I think this has to be an underestimate if they’re quoting around $20,000 for a phalloplasty. There’s been different things that I’ve read that said it could be up to a hundred thousand dollars. Dr. Winaker, who’s our surgeon, says that there’s entire clinics where the entire clinic is supported just by their phalloplasties, and that is like a fraction of the surgeries that they’re doing. These surgeries are labor intensive. They require a lot of follow ups. They require a lot of cohort time, and they make money. They make money for the hospital. Mr. Showalter: Even for those who are not motivated by money, what needs to be emphasized is that the ideological power is very strong in this space. In a culture where we see the breakdown of faith, we see the breakdown of family. There’s a generation that’s crying out to know who they are. This has been marketed to young people who don’t have any sense of their own identity. If the battle is about who you are, the stakes are pretty high. This has tremendous power; you don’t dare tell someone that they can’t be who they are. But when we’re speaking about a medical scandal, biology has to matter. The basics have to matter. We have to insist upon a common frame of reference from which we can all have good faith conversations, discuss ideas, and operate from shared premises. If we lose that, we’ve lost everything. Jeff mentioned lobotomies, and I sometimes speak about thalidomide. These medical scandals of yesteryear were not presented to young people in an identity nomenclature, but this one is. When this psychosis, this ideological power, this spell finally breaks off of our society, we will be among the few that are not shocked by the vast scope of how many children, young people, and young adults were harmed by it. The medical scandal is bad enough, but when we see the social scandal along with that, how many families have been fractured, and how many young people have been brainwashed into believing the nonsense, the fallout of this is going to be absolutely staggering. There’s got to be a point where we see just how deep and pervasive this has become, to where it shocks the conscience. Our senses have been so dulled by all of this talk about being who you are and identity, it’s made people afraid to criticize it. You don’t dare do that, lest you offend and hurt somebody’s feelings, and then, maybe drive them towards suicide, which the trans activists like to use to intimidate people. Mr. Jekielek: Which by the way, the evidence doesn’t support. Mr. Showalter: Correct. Right. Absolutely not. Mr. Jekielek: As I understand it. Mr. Showalter: That’s right. But when you see the social cost in addition to the medical harm, that probably holds the key to turning the tide. As a case in point, I was recently a part of an indie film called, “Dead Name,” which profiles three families that have been torn apart by this. In that movie, which you can see at deadnamedocumentary.com, there’s a little boy, captured on home video, who was the son of a lesbian couple. One of his mothers tried to socially transition him, and his other mom was trying to keep him intact. Captured on home video, he says, “If you want girl parts and you don’t have them, you can do special surgery where they turn your penis inside out and there’s a vagina that’s inside. He was four-years-old. It’s moments like that when you say, “Okay, we really need to take a step back. What are we doing to children? What are we doing to the human body? How has this taken off to the point where you hear something like that coming out of the mouth of a little kid. I’m sorry. No, this is wrong.” People of goodwill, whatever their politics, whatever their faith, need to say, “We insist upon sane, ethical standards to guide us once again, especially in the medical arena.” Mr. Jekielek: Aside from this profit motive in the medical industry, there has also been a centralization of medicine as well, which I’ve discussed with guests talking about the COVID realities. These guidelines and standards of care have gone from being suggestions, back when doctors had individual practices, to now when the entire medical system essentially says, “This is how we’re doing things,” and doctors have to follow that. Mr. Myers: The centralization of medicine, making the federal government the dispenser of medical information, means that the lobbying efforts of the pharmaceutical industry become critically important. If they want to make a lot of money off of transgender medicine, then they go lobby the federal government, and they go lobby the state governments. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, you mentioned theology influencing your thinking. You work for the Christian Post, so there’s no surprise there. I want to bring that in, because sometimes people will say, “You guys are just Christians. You just want to enforce your Christian worldview here.” How does your Christianity fit into the picture? Mr. Showalter: As someone who does journalistic work for the Christian Post, it certainly informs and inspires everything that I do. It motivates me to do truthful work, and I’m animated by my faith. It does drive me. It’s the most important thing to me. But what I found is that if you just value the truth, a lot of people will listen. The Lord Jesus Christ said, “You should know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Jeff likes to point out that the word truth in that passage in the book of John is actually the word for reality. He will know reality. Reality will set you free. Yes, I love the Lord. I want to serve him all my days, and I want that to influence everything I do, including my reporting. But a lot of people who don’t have a religious faith at all appreciate good, decent, honest people who tell the truth. I always try to link back to original source materials, so even if people don’t want to read the Christian Post, they can see the receipts for themselves. They can see that we’re not making this up. I work with radical feminists. I work with Left-wing lesbians. The truth is true, no matter who says it. Truth is not contingent on whether you believe it or not. It will always be true. To the extent that you can report truthfully, it’s a win for everyone all around, but it just so happens that my faith inspires me to adhere to that standard no matter what. Even if you don’t believe as I do, that Genesis 1:27 is true, and that we’re made male and female in God’s image, the knowledge that human beings are sexually dimorphic mammals is knowledge that is accessible to everyone by human reason. Everybody can know that. It’s a manifestly true scientific fact. Psalm 1:39 declares that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. I believe that with great vigorous enthusiasm. You’ll hear me talk about it in that kind of spiritual language, but I want good science too. I want those sound, ethical, and sane standards. My faith bolsters that and reinforces that, but you don’t have to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ to know that what we’re saying is true. Mr. Myers: The way I would phrase it is, “If you don’t go along with us on theology, at least go along with us on biology.” Virtually every cell in the body is stamped XX if you’re a female, and XY if you’re a male. The lie that you can change from being male to female or vice versa is just a lie. A lot of young people have been led to believe it through social media and through medical misinformation, sometimes even given by their healthcare providers, but the theology and the biology intersect. The Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said, “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” Science and religion need to work together on this issue, because it’s not just a cold clinical issue. It is literally an attack on an entire generation of young people. Mr. Showalter: And an attack on truth and reality as we know it. Mr. Jekielek: I understand that you’re offering your book to anybody that wants it. Where can they find it? Mr. Myers: You can download it for free. Go to summit.org, Summit Ministries, summit.org/protect. You can also go to Christian Post and find the book there. We are making it available for free. It’s the first time we’ve ever done something like that, because we really want people to download it and then get it out to as many friends and influencers as possible. Mr. Showalter: Christianpost.com/ebook/gender-lie. Mr. Jekielek: Jeff Meyers and Brandon Showalter, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Showalter: Thank you, Jan. Mr. Myers: Thanks, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jeff Myers, Brandon Showalter, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 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Today, I sit down with the president of The Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, to discuss Heritage’s comprehensive strategy to win “the new Cold War” with the Chinese Communist Party, how Heritage has changed since Roberts’s arrival, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, and Tucker Carlson’s last speech as a Fox host at Heritage’s 50th Anniversary Celebration. “The deep state, the administrative state more broadly, is the rotten fruit of our individual members of Congress … not having the courage to pass bills or kill bills on behalf of self-governance,” says Roberts. “This is precisely why Heritage—along with 54 other conservative organizations, 400 policy scholars—has been working so intently on Project 2025, the aim of which is to take the biggest dagger ever and place it firmly in the center of the heart of the deep state.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kevin-roberts-a-roadmap-to-defeating-the-deep-state-and-winning-the-new-cold-war-with-communist-china_5229954.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Kevin Roberts, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Kevin Roberts: It is always great to be with you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: First of all, congratulations on this huge event that you just organized celebrating Heritage’s 50th anniversary. Your keynote was Tucker Carlson, his last appearance before he left Fox suddenly. This was something none of us were expecting. Did you get any hints about this? Mr. Roberts: No, I had no firsthand knowledge about that. I even made a joke about Tucker coming back to Heritage if his then current gig went south and that was completely in jest. But what I do know about Tucker is he’s one of the visionaries of our movement. We look forward to him landing on his feet, which I’m sure he will. Mr. Jekielek: But what do you think happened? Mr. Roberts: Fox was too focused on being the big corporate media giant and has lost touch with the everyday American. Heritage will always be on Fox if we’re invited to talk about the everyday American. We consider them friends, but Tucker’s an even closer friend. He’s bigger than Fox and the future of America really goes through Tucker’s mind, if you will. Mr. Jekielek: This has been the number one rated show on television for quite some time and by quite a margin. You wonder what could possibly be the rationale in this situation, but we are in unprecedented times in the media. I felt like this is something we could actually discuss, because that’s very relevant to what Heritage is doing. Mr. Roberts: If I may, and I know you well enough personally and know Epoch Times well enough to know that you love the truth. We live in a time when the larger an organization gets, the larger a corporation gets, even if it’s a friendly one like our friends at Fox, they become less enamored with telling the truth when it hurts. What so many Americans and so many people around the world love about Tucker and love about Epoch Times, is that you tell the truth. And dare I say, that’s also what they love about the Heritage Foundation. It’s our job at Heritage. It’s my job in particular at Heritage to always sustain friendships with people who tell the truth, even when it hurts, because we have a country to save. Mr. Jekielek: Are you ever worried about the fact that Heritage is kind of big when it comes to think tanks? It may be the largest one. I’m not sure, but I would guess it would be up there. Mr. Roberts: Yes, sure. Sometimes when people use the derogatory phrase “Conservative, Inc,” sometimes when they’re thinking about Heritage. You know that I’m going to take the elephant in the room and put it on the table, and so I’m aware of that. But if you step inside Heritage, as you have done a few times, you know that because we’re supported by hundreds of thousands of regular Americans each year, as opposed to five or 10 white knights inside the imperial city of DC. Our DNA is to fight for everyday Americans. It’s something we have to be aware of, but part of our culture internally at Heritage is to be aware of that and to check whatever impulse that may come from, like going to the cocktail parties that so many establishment people like to do. It’s just not our jam, it’s not mine, and that’s one of the ways that we keep it real. Mr. Jekielek: Since we’re talking about this, with systemic problems in many, many areas in our society, when things get very big, when the scale becomes very large, they start to take on a life of their own. They start acting to self-perpetuate. Mr. Roberts: Self-perpetuation is the unhealthy symptom of bureaucracy. Any business and any organization is prone to that if it gets large enough. I see this most often in second or third generation family businesses, which were probably started with 100 bucks or 1,000 bucks that someone saved on the side and they put all their chips on the table. By the second or third generation, because of the success of that entrepreneur, his or her children and grandchildren haven’t really shared in that sacrifice. Having started a K-12 school, being the second president of a small college, and running two nonprofit policy groups, the key is to always have each generation of colleagues participate and sacrifice—to know what it means, in our case at Heritage, to fight for the everyday American. When you start seeing an organization not take risks, that’s a key sign. To me, it’s a red flag that they’ve become part of the problem. They’re more focused on self-perpetuation. Mr. Jekielek: Under your tenure, it seems like Heritage has started taking a lot more risks, and that seems very deliberate on your part. Mr. Roberts: It’s very intentional every day. Mr. Jekielek: What risk did you take that paid off the best, up to this point? Mr. Roberts: A lot come to mind. My colleagues deserve all the credit for that, because they’re the ones in the trenches taking the risks. They’re the ones getting belligerent emails from the establishment in DC about why they are taking these risks. But the one that’s paid off so much is our China paper. For the better part of a year we’ve been focused on making sure that the policy prescriptions coming out of Heritage relative to the Chinese Communist Party are vigorous, and that they understand and explain the stakes for free people around the world. I will say, and no hubris when I say this, I’m so proud of my colleagues at Heritage. Jan, this is almost literally true, almost every policy person at Heritage, a couple hundred people, had a hand in that China paper—our domestic policy folks, our economists, our education scholars, and our foreign policy colleagues, particularly those who know about East Asia. The CCP has infiltrated nearly every country in the world. This had to be a whole-of-Heritage approach to a whole-of-government problem. It’s already paying off because you see a shift in the rhetoric. In Congress, hopefully soon we’ll see a shift in some of the legislative priorities that are coming out. Let’s hope that on January 20th, 2025, we replace the very CCP-friendly President of the United States with a man or a woman who knows what time it is, and that it’s time to confront them, to defeat them, and to eliminate them. Mr. Jekielek: This is the “Winning the New Cold War,” paper. This is a very, very impressive piece of work. Recently, as I interviewed one of your fellows, Michael Pillsbury, I learned that you were looking at past proposed bills in many cases that were offered. This is thinking that has already been done. This isn’t something that you’ve rehashed from scratch. A great many of these bills were actually very smart about what they were trying to accomplish, they just never made it. In one case, a bill got passed by the House, passed by the Senate, and then disappeared when the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] was passed in the end. That was astounding to me. Mr. Roberts: It is, and that example is but one of several dozen. What we’re trying to do with this paper is survey the legislation, in the case of that particular law that has been passed. But also in addition to that, we want to propose new legislation that can piggyback on those good ideas. But more than anything else we want to provide an honest, objective assessment of the policy landscape; that is, the problem side of policy, as well as on the solution side of policy. What we’re hoping to do with this paper is to build a foundation on which subsequent analyses by Heritage, and by a growing number of friends in the movement will be able to assess what we must do to confront the CCP. We’re more than cautiously optimistic that we have made some progress here. We’re really confident that we have helped to change the debate. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll mention one piece, which is very risky in this town. You are advocating for stopping all CCP-lobbying dollars in this town, and there’s a lot of people that like those dollars. Mr. Roberts: It’s outrageous to me, Jan, that there would be any American citizen within blocks of where you and I are sitting having this conversation who would take $1 from a CCP-interest. In other words, it would seem to me that someone would love this country so much, and understand the evil that the CCP represents and advocates around the planet, that they wouldn’t do that. If it takes legislation to correct that, then Heritage is very happy to lead the way. We’re not going to stop working on that issue until there is a bill that bans lobbyists in this town from representing the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Jekielek: What are the one or two most important recommendations in that paper? I know that you’ve looked at this closely. Mr. Roberts: There are several dozen recommendations. I would encourage people watching or listening to this to track it down. I say that as the President of Heritage, not just because it’s a Heritage paper, but as someone who loves this country, who wants every person on the planet to flourish, and knows that the CCP is standing in the way. This paper is the blueprint for how to fix it. Having said that, at the top of the list is recognizing that there shouldn’t be CCP investment in the American military industry. We live at a time when we have supply chain issues, accentuated by overspending on the heroic Ukrainians. But the other problem is that we have American investment in China. We have to be careful, those of us who like a market economy, of banning American investment elsewhere. What we also need to be doing is reinstilling in the CEOs and corporate boards of American businesses a desire not to invest in CCP-owned interests in China and elsewhere. Which leads me to the final point in terms of recommendations, because this goes beyond just the CCP. We need to be reshoring or friendshoring jobs that are in China. Americans should be benefiting by any additional military production that we’re going to be engaged in order to defend Taiwan, who we will defend. There are a lot of recommendations in that paper. The ones that I’ve mentioned are focused on the defense posture that the United States must have toward the CCP. But I’ll also say we have to be really cognizant of the influence the CCP has in education, with the formerly named Confucius Institutes that have already been renamed something else. We should not be allowing the CCP to infiltrate our major research universities. Mr. Jekielek: This bill that passed the House, passed the Senate, then disappeared from the NDAA was a bill that dealt with not buying drones from China. You would think, “Wow, that would be crazy.” Mr. Roberts: It should be common sense. Mr. Jekielek: Right. But to your other point about reshoring and friendshoring, there just aren’t a lot of other options. This is what I have heard from the industry. Let’s say you want to buy drones. Where do you get them? It’s a very serious situation in many areas. Mr. Roberts: That’s true. There aren’t a lot of options for drones, and yet that’s a result of our own choices. That is to say it’s one thing for Heritage and some friends to push good bills through Congress. It’s one thing for a majority of members of the House and Senate to vote for that and for the President to sign it, that’s one thing. But it’s a much more important matter and a greater obligation for individual Americans, especially those who have capital to invest, to stop being so significantly worried about a few pennies of difference in investment. That is, it’s more important to have an American-made drone or a drone made in a country that’s a real ally of ours, than it is to save a few dollars on a drone made in China. This is the kind of thing that must change in the United States. In other words, we’re not going to defeat the CCP simply by passing legislation. We need American entrepreneurs to worry about the United States first, American workers first, and the future of American freedom first, before they worry about, as they would tell you and me, their bottom line. Mr. Jekielek: There is this idea that a strong America provides a higher level of security than a weaker America. Nobody would argue that America is not weaker now than it was 10 years ago. That creates a lot of instability, not just here, but also internationally. Mr. Roberts: Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s, with each passing five years, or each passing decade, we have gotten weaker. Of course, we had the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, but actually those were a sign of weakness. They were the sign of a country that was decaying from within, and that was losing its own moral authority, not just abroad, but also domestically. This is why at Heritage, we believe when we’re talking about the CCP and the threat that it poses, we aren’t just talking about a military posture, but we’re also talking about an economic and social posture. The United States is weaker, best as I can tell, in every way. The weakest that it’s become is not just with its own politics, but with our own society and culture, where you can’t love what you don’t know. Given how poorly we teach American history and civics, we have a full generation, if not more, of Americans who don’t appreciate what it is about America that causes most people in the world to see us as the North Star. Mr. Jekielek: I want to ask you something, because Heritage is obviously considered a conservative think tank. Mr. Roberts: I hope so. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of people have been discussing, and I like to ask this question of my guests, with these conventional Left and Right measures people will say, “What does that even mean?” In the speech that Tucker Carlson gave, he talked about agreeing with people that he wouldn’t have imagined being on the same side with five years ago before COVID. There’s a few alternative spectrums which have been proposed. One is a cognitive liberty spectrum; people that believe that you should be able to believe what you want to believe, versus people who believe you should believe something very specific and that everyone should believe that way. That’s one. Another one is the people who have some sense of the transcendent, versus people who are purely transactional. It’s a very different mentality. It strikes me that is what Heritage is doing, and I haven’t seen the entirety, because you do a lot. Mr. Roberts: It’s hard to keep up with everything we do. Mr. Jekielek: A lot. I’m amazed you even know all of it. Mr. Roberts: You just assume that I do. Mr. Jekielek: Is it really just for conservatives? When I look at this China plan, this is not just for conservatives. This is just basic common sense. Mr. Roberts: Yes, great question. Of course, this China plan, we would hope it would be adopted, endorsed, and advocated for by every American. In fact, I grew up at a time in the United States when Left-of-center folks and politicians would have endorsed this China plan that Heritage put out. We operate that way. We talk to Democrat offices in the House and Senate whose members would be real important advocates for this. To your larger point about conservatism, I will say conservatism has always been about the transcendent. What Heritage is trying to do with the China paper, but even more broadly, is to say we’re just getting back to our roots as conservatives. We’ve always been focused on the permanent things, as we like to say, in the American and Anglo tradition. The free market is part of that, and the economy obviously is part of that, and those are healthy symptoms of a very healthy society. Conservatives like Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, or T.S. Eliot have always been focused on the permanent things. Heritage is trying to remind people that the reason you want to endorse the China paper, and the reason you want to pass those bills isn’t just to defeat the CCP. It isn’t just to say that conservatives in America have to win, but it’s for every American and every human being on earth to live a good life. That’s what conservatives care about the most. Mr. Jekielek: Interesting. That’s definitely not the common rhetoric. Mr. Roberts: No, especially in DC, because we have so many people who are former conservatives. They’re no longer conservatives. They actually reject the transcendent, and they reject the permanent things. What do they do? They’re only focused on the free market as if that’s the totality of American conservative thinking. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. I was speaking with Mark Tapscott, one of our congressional correspondents. He actually worked at Heritage for six years under Ed Feulner. He said, “After Ed Feulner left Heritage, there was this perceived lack of direction, or maybe people were wondering what was going to happen.” It certainly seems to me that today Heritage has a very clear direction in many areas, especially looking at this 2025 transition plan that you can barely lift, nevermind read. It seems to me like you’re very clear on what you’re doing at this point. How much did your joining Heritage play a role in that? Mr. Roberts: It’s a fair question. I’m not only grateful to but friends with all of my predecessors, and so people know I am building on the foundations that they laid. If I’ve brought anything to Heritage, it is a clear direction. That comes not from some wisdom that I uniquely possess, but something that tens of millions of Americans possess. You pretty much have to be a product of outside the beltway in order to possess this, and it’s called common sense. Common sense tells someone that there’s something broken about America. Common sense will then tell someone that a great venerable institution like Heritage, which has had many great leaders and many great scholars, has material resources. But even more important than the material resources, it has soft power. It has convening power, and it has influence. Let’s use all of those things for the sake of saving America. I actually believe we have a very finite amount of time to change course in this country. I’m optimistic we’re going to do it, but I also don’t believe that we have the luxury of a few decades to do it. That’s why if people observing Heritage the last couple of years in my leadership have a sense that we’re in a hurry, that we’re urgent, it’s because we are, every single day. The first thing I said to my colleagues when I was announced as president of Heritage was, “We’re going to be on offense, every hour and every day for the American people.” I’m so proud of them because we haven’t stopped yet. Mr. Jekielek: You came from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. I found the Texas Public Policy Foundation to be one of the most active groups that I have come across, and impactful in terms of crafting state policy. How much did your tenure there impact what you’re doing now? Mr. Roberts: Greatly. When I got to Texas Public Policy Foundation, it already had the reputation of being a do tank before being a think tank. That reality plus my experience in running an institution of higher education, starting my own school, and having an entrepreneurial background in the education world has created, at least from my perspective, a need for every nonprofit leader in the policy space to be worried about more than just writing white papers. The papers are important. We’ve spent some time talking about the China paper. The reason they’re important is because they’re the foundation on which the rest of our work rests. But the distinguishing thing about Heritage is the same distinguishing characteristic about Texas Public Policy Foundation, and that is that every word we write in one of those papers is oriented around policy change. Unfortunately, inside Washington DC, that action is really uncommon. What we’re hoping for at Heritage is not just for ourselves to be successful with our own policy prescriptions, but to inspire some of the other policy organizations headquartered in DC on the political Right to do the same. Mr. Jekielek: The biggest complaints I hear about what goes on in that building behind you is a lot of inaction, and a lot of avoidance of responsibility. “Maybe if I do something, someone might not like it, so it’s just better not to do anything.” I’ve actually heard that from so many people over the years. It’s unbelievable. There is also this whole question of whether Congress has ceded a lot of its authority to the agencies. Some years ago you would say the word deep state and everyone would laugh, “What are you talking about?” Now everyone says, “There’s something very deep in this state.” I don’t know if they’re thinking in those words exactly, but you know what I’m saying. Mr. Roberts: I do. There are two things. The first is there is a lot of risk aversion inside the United States Capitol. If Alexis de Tocqueville were here almost 200 years after he visited the United States, he wouldn’t be surprised. Because he observed that politicians, republics, democracies, and constitutional monarchies always suffered from a certain amount of political cowardice. It was incumbent upon the people, their constituents, to buck them up and help them grow a spine. The result of that, to your point about the deep state, point number two, is that the deep state, and the administrative state more broadly is the rotten fruit of our individual members of Congress, and our two senators from each of our respective states not having the courage to pass bills or kill bills on behalf of self-governance. This is precisely why Heritage, along with 54 other conservative organizations and 400 policy scholars, has been working so intently on Project 2025, the aim of which is to take the biggest dagger ever and place it firmly in the center of the heart of the deep state. When we do that, not if, but when we do that, not only will we see the demise of the deep state, but we’ll also see members of Congress be inspired to do their jobs. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think right now? Because I’ve heard, “Congress is now taking its oversight more seriously. There is a subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government. There are multiple committees focused on China.” At the same time, there are compelling opinions saying, “These guys look like they might just be spinning their wheels. Is there really anything happening?” What do you think? Mr. Roberts: It took a while for them, the House members of Congress, to get all of their staff together. It took a little bit longer than it should have. But as we sit here, I can report that they’re largely staffed up and they’ve always had the intention of doing their business. It goes back to the point that I made about Heritage always being in a hurry and understanding the urgency of the moment. It’s also why a year ago Heritage started our Oversight Project, which is designed to provide the ammunition and to some extent the personnel that those committees you mentioned need in order to do their jobs. I’m really happy as we sit in the middle of spring in 2023 that there’s finally some momentum there. It’s really important as we move forward that those committees focus on the right topics of investigation and pair those with good legislation, for example, debt ceiling and border security legislation. In other words, it can’t just be about the investigations. There’s some injustice that needs to be addressed. Obviously, Heritage is investing in that, but we also know from the time we spend outside DC, which is most of the hours in my week, that people are looking for an aspirational vision for the future. We’ve got to pair the redressing of grievances with what we’re going to do when we’re fully in power in a couple of years. Mr. Jekielek: It’s redressing grievances, but also having accountability for things which have gone egregiously wrong. The Twitter Files certainly exposed a lot of that, alongside multiple lawsuits. Discovery in those lawsuits has shown activity that shouldn’t be happening, whether legal or not. Mr. Roberts: That’s right. Heritage fully accepts all of that. My concern is that we get so focused on our side on the investigations, members of Congress sometimes forget to connect that investigation with how it affects the self-governance of the everyday American. The media does a really good job of driving the wedge between those two things. It’s more of a messaging criticism about American political conservatives, which is that it isn’t enough just to do the investigations. You have to constantly explain why you’re doing the investigations. It isn’t just about the people who are involved in them, per se. It’s about all of us. There’s a two-tiered system of justice, not just for President Trump, but for all of us. Ask Mark Houck, the pro-life activist in Pennsylvania. This is what Heritage brings to the table. On one hand, we bring the ammunition to conduct the investigations. On the other hand, we bring the messaging that helps remind Americans why they need to care. Mr. Jekielek: It really does seem that if you have certain political viewpoints, you can get away with a lot that you wouldn’t have been able to get away with in the past. Whereas if you have other political viewpoints, you feel the full weight of the law, even when it’s unreasonable for that to be the case. There are these FBI SWAT teams being used for situations where it’s just preposterous. Mr. Roberts: It’s true. And as we sit here, do you think that there’s much of a chance that any of the political allies of President Biden will have to deal with the 87,000 new IRS agents? Of course not. But those of us at Heritage, people in Right-of-center media outlets, common sense media outlets that are not mouthpieces for the regime, we have to be worried. That’s unconscionable in modern America. All of us at Heritage wake up every day fighting that, and looking forward to the day when we can finally fix it. Mr. Jekielek: Please describe to me the regime that you just mentioned, what is that? Mr. Roberts: There are two elements of it. The figureheads of the regime are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but the regime is a long-running project of the political Left. It really started or was amplified in the late ’60s and early ’70s in the anti-Vietnam War protest of the academic Left. The short version of the story is that those people have been in political power for the last couple of decades. They’re members of the House, members of the Senate, and staff in the executive branch of the United States. The reason I insist on calling it a regime is because these people don’t believe in small R republican principles. They don’t believe that there is a common good to which they owe a moral obligation, as many Republicans and Democrat leaders leading up to this point have. Heritage insists on calling it a regime, because they’re not focused on self-governance, and they hate what the everyday American stands for. We could sit here and go through the litany of pejorative ways that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Barack Obama have described people like me, gun owners, and people who go to church, something as radical as that. They hate us and we need to be careful not to hate them. Those of us, given our particular faith traditions, shouldn’t be filled with hatred. But we do need to be filled with a zeal in the public square to confront them, to defeat them and to make sure that they’re never in power again. Mr. Jekielek: There’s so many areas in American life where things seem to be going wrong. Examples would be all these new rules around how elections are run across many different states that have created a foundationally different way than the whole electoral process is even understood. That’s one. Similarly, another area is the border. There have been an unbelievable number of people that have crossed the border into America. In some cases there are even laws on the books to have them voting in American elections. We’ve touched on China, we’ve touched on a bit on oversight. Those are two big elephants in the room. If these things aren’t somehow dealt with, how can all of these other areas be achieved? Mr. Roberts: The answer to your question is they can’t be. This is why Heritage has worked so diligently on improving election integrity. There is a lot of progress to report. You can look at our election integrity scorecard and see those states that have, from objective analysis, legitimately done a very good job of addressing certain problems, and we rate them more highly than others. On elections, the flip side is that places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Arizona, just to name a few, will continue to have problems. The short version is that when we get into the 2024 election cycle, Americans can be a little more optimistic about the integrity of elections. But we are far from securing all of those problems. On the border, however, there is no progress to report. You know me well. I’m an optimist. I try to see the silver lining in every problem. There’s no silver lining in this. It is awful. It is one of the worst examples of policy failure by any American president ever. The reason it’s that profound is because it’s intentional. It is intentional by the President of the United States and his seemingly incompetent Secretary of Homeland Security, who actually isn’t that incompetent. He’s actually very capable at implementing what he’s doing to have two-and-a-half million illegal aliens in this country. It undermines the rule of law. It has probably permanently changed what had been very peaceful, Anglo and Mexican-American counties and communities across the border of Texas and Arizona and New Mexico. Further still, as our Heritage research has proven, those illegal aliens have arrived in every congressional district in this country. Every county in the United States of America is a border county, which isn’t a comment about people who might come here legally. We love immigrants at Heritage. It’s a comment that when you allow millions of people to cross illegally, not only are you endangering public safety, you’re endangering the rule of law and the very ideals of America. Until and unless we fix that problem, as we were beginning to do in the former administration, America’s future is in danger. Mr. Jekielek: I keep thinking about what’s been dubbed by some the disinformation industrial complex. Mr. Roberts: I love that. Mr. Jekielek: Which has grown up over the last seven-odd years to the point where there are people studying in universities to become experts at this thing. There’s this moment in our society where some of us believe that speech should be curtailed, and believe that certain beliefs should be amplified massively. This is going back to the cognitive liberty spectrum, where certain correct beliefs are acceptable, and others need to be hidden and unavailable for people to even know about. There is a whole mechanism of manufacturing perceived consensus in society. I call it the megaphone. It’s a very powerful mechanism. There are multiple organizations involved, and the media are just part of it. There is a portion of our population that’s incredibly susceptible to it, not bad or morally questionable people, they are just easy to influence. First of all, do you agree? If you do, how can we have some kind of unity in a society where this megaphone is always creating incredible strife? Mr. Roberts: I not only agree, Jan, if I have your permission, I’m going to use your phrase, manufacturing perceived consensus, because that is so true. That largely happens with our legacy media outlets, which are primarily based in New York City and in Washington. The solution to that is for people to spend more time with regular folks outside those cities, but also inside those cities. There are a lot of regular folks in Washington and New York City. That is to say, watch Epoch Times, and read the Epoch Times newspaper. But after that, be very selective with the national news that you’re consuming. Take whatever time you’re saving by no longer consuming that news and spend it with everyday people. Why? As my staff at Heritage know, when I’m outside DC, which is most of the time, whether I’m at home in Virginia or traveling on behalf of Heritage, I always stop in a McDonald’s. I’ll always stop in a convenience store. I don’t care about the neighborhood. I don’t care if I look like a middle-aged bald white guy. Those are my fellow Americans. You can be engaged in a conversation. My wife would say that she learns more about politics by being in the produce aisle at the local grocery store than she does reading most outlets. Of course, she’s a huge fan of the Epoch Times. But the point is, we should not give those people who use a megaphone to get us to stop thinking about self-governance and the power it has. The only way to do that is to be a lot more intentional with the news that we consume, and to be really focused on spending greater time in community. That still begs the question, then how do you establish unity? For more than 200 years, that’s how Americans consumed their news and there was a certain unity about that. Why? Because it’s just scientifically, biologically obvious that humans have many things in common and one of the things that we’re hardwired to do, especially in American history, is to love our country. The reason that we want to do that is because we love our neighbor. Isn’t it interesting that these people who are manufacturing perceived consensus emphasize what divides us, and what causes us to be suspicious of our neighbor? That’s not what it means to be an American. Stop consuming news that says those things. Mr. Jekielek: This ideology that has become dominant in just about every institution in the country, we could call it woke or critical social justice, is something that Heritage is looking at very deliberately. What is your work around this? Mr. Roberts: What my policy scholar colleagues at Heritage do well, regardless of the policy arena, but particularly in this case with confronting critical theory, is to go to the root cause of the problem. We can talk about critical race theory. My good friend Mike Gonzalez is perhaps the leading critic of that. But the reason Mike is persuasive about that isn’t just about critical race theory per se, but because he goes to the origins of the ideology, which is critical theory. This is something that as a young history graduate student, I had to learn. It surprises some people to know that the president of the Heritage Foundation is well-schooled in critical theory. It’s what I had to do to get through some liberal graduate departments in history, and it didn’t affect me. The root of critical theory is anti-human. It is Marxist in its origin. I don’t mean that to be name-calling. When we use the word Marxist, we conservatives need to actually know what we’re saying. To be Marxist is to reduce people to their immutable characteristics; their skin color, and where they live in a certain part of the country or the world. Therefore, critical theory doesn’t understand someone’s soul, it has no place. If someone happens to be agnostic or even atheist, it doesn’t understand the role of nature. There’s nothing about these theories that would signify that people can ever live harmoniously in a community with people who don’t look like them Mr. Jekielek: Or are in the same class, that’s the one you mentioned. Mr. Roberts: Or the same class, that’s exactly right. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Because that’s the original way we think about Marxism. Mr. Roberts: There has to be complete unanimity; socioeconomically, ethnically, and culturally. I would also say religiously, but there’s no room in Marxism for religion. Mr. Jekielek: It’s uniformity across a kind of atheism. Mr. Roberts: To come full circle in our conversation, there’s nothing transcendent. When there’s nothing transcendent for a human person, that’s an awful quality of life, which is why all of the advocates of critical theory I know are miserable people. Mr. Jekielek: In the coming years, you have a plan that you have enacted pretty quickly and deliberately, and have seen some fruits of that labor already. What are your most important directions right now? Which ones are you focusing on? Mr. Roberts: Within Project 2025? Mr. Jekielek: Within the overall direction of Heritage. But obviously, that’s a very significant part of what you’re doing. Mr. Roberts: My follow-up question tells you what the first one is, which is Project 2025. Because I look forward to the day when on January 20th, 2025, whoever the next president is, whoever he or she is, I’m pretty optimistic that they’ll be more conservative than our current president. We wish him a long and healthy retirement as ex-president. When he or she takes the oath of office they will know that the full weight of the entire political right in America is behind him or her. We will have the policy ideas and the policy solutions, and by that I mean the bills that he or she needs to push through Congress with their allies. We will have the executive orders to implement, and the rules, going back to the administrative state conversation we were having, that they must implement to undo the excesses of the radical Left. But most importantly, they also know that there are several thousand Americans who have come to DC to tithe two, four, six or let’s hope eight years or more to restore self-governance to the American people. That’s what I spend the plurality of my time on. The second thing, and it’s very related to that, Jan, and I have to some extent helped Heritage reorient itself to be more active at the state level, is being focused on federalism. In order for the next conservative president to be successful in terms of policy, he or she has to have a bubbling up of ideas from the states. We can’t rely on the folks in this building behind me in the Capitol to do that yet. But given in 2023 as we sit here that it’s already the most successful legislative session ever for conservative policy, there are a lot of great policy ideas bubbling up from the states, so I’m very focused on that. The third and final thing in terms of my priorities and the priorities for Heritage is to take a step back from the political and policy landscape. Take a step back from the frustrations we have about the two-tiered system of justice. Take a step back from the daily news and remember what’s special about being an American. Remember the privileges we have to wake up here. Whether we were born here or came here by choice, this is the greatest experiment and self-governance in history. The Heritage Foundation is aptly named. We honor the heritage of the United States. Not just with good policy, but by reminding all of our fellow Americans on the Left, on the Right, in the center, what it means to be an American—to live in self-governance so that we can live the good life. Mr. Jekielek: Kevin Roberts, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Roberts: It’s always a pleasure to be here and look forward to more. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Kevin Roberts 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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“Who is raising children? It’s not really parents, it’s not teachers, it’s not coaches or clergymen. It’s Twitter influencers. They’re the ones that have the ears and souls of our children.” I sit down with Adam Candeub, professor of law at Michigan State University and a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Candeub served as acting deputy and then acting assistant secretary of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) during Trump’s presidency. He was outspoken in his criticism of what he sees as the abuse and expansion of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Law—a federal provision that grants social media companies protection from liability. “This rather limited protection that sort-of mimicked the telephone, the telegraph, and we’ve had for hundreds of years and we couldn’t really survive without, has morphed into a protection of the platforms for anything they do,” Candeub says. Candeub currently advocates for the “common carrier” approach to social media, and is involved in a number of major First Amendment cases, both at the state and federal level, which will likely shape the future of Big Tech’s impact on our society. “We have given power to these agencies—the gobbledygook alphabet soup of security agencies—that are not really accountable to anybody. And like any other agency, they tend to be co-opted by special interests,” says Candeub. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/big-tech-immunity-explained-law-professor-adam-candeub-on-how-to-rein-in-section-230-abuse_5224595.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Adam Candeub, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Adam Candeub: A real pleasure. Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been working for years on First Amendment law, teaching it and arguing cases. Right now there are a number of related cases at the Supreme Court, quite significant cases. You’ve also been deeply involved in coming up with this common carrier approach to dealing with Big Tech or Section 230. We’ve heard a lot about Section 230. I’m going to get you to explain a little bit about the details. Before we go there, I’ll mention another thing. You’ve been involved in coming up with the concepts that have now been implemented in the Utah social media law. These are quite significant and might give people an idea of how you think about law and how you think about these things. Mr. Candeub: Involvement with protecting children on the internet is not something that gets a lot of press or news, but actually there’s an appetite for it. A lot of the states want what I want for the internet, which is an internet that is based upon user control, and for minors that means parental control. It’s amazing with the internet how technology has smashed so many expectations, that people think it’s fine for their children to essentially create contracts with these social media companies. They take their personal information, and they give them legal requirements and legal obligations, all without parental knowledge or consent. This is something very new, very different, and we’ve accepted it for the last 10 years. A lot of people have been saying this is not the right way to go. I worked with Jean Twenge who’s a leading social psychologist at San Diego State University, who’s worked on demonstrating the emotional and psychological harm that social media has imposed upon our children. I’ve worked with Bill Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies at UVA, and Clare Morell who works at the Ethics and Policy Center in Washington DC. We came up with a report with some suggestions of how the states can actually give more power to parents. Because, let’s face it, parents don’t raise children these days. Screens do. That’s a frightening thing, and that is social disintegration. Mr. Jekielek: There’s the obvious thing, with pornography being easily accessible to children right now. Most people would be deeply concerned about this. Mr. Candeub: The transformation of porn, the way people live, and the way young people live are some of the unrecognized shifts in our society. It’s kind of embarrassing and sort of yucky to think about. When I look at my students in their twenties, they’re a lot less active romantically than I remember myself being. This is not just an old guy criticizing the young generation. There’s plenty of data showing that young people are not as romantically involved, they’re marrying less, they’re going on less dates, and they’re having less sex. Pornography does very likely play a role in that, because it provides a substitute and a distraction from romance and the dance of the sexes. If we don’t have people marrying and forming love relationships and having children, it’s the end. We are looking at civilizational collapse. That’s not just hysterical conservatives saying that. If you look at the data, it’s shocking how few people in their twenties and thirties are getting married and having kids and doing the things that traditionally have allowed people to live happy, flourishing lives. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to me how this new social media law works in Utah, and also its implications? Mr. Candeub: The social media law largely does two or three things of significance. It says no social media firm can form any kind of account with a minor without parental consent. That doesn’t mean just click through consent where you say, “I hereby assert and affirm that I am of a legal age.” There has to be an independent third party verification. It requires the social media companies to give parents access to minor’s accounts, so parents can see what they’re doing. To me that’s so vital, because who is raising children? It’s not really parents, it’s not teachers, it’s not coaches or clergymen—it is Twitter influencers. They’re the ones that have the ears and souls of our children. Parents should be able to know about that. Mr. Jekielek: Or TikTok. Mr. Candeub: Or TikTok. TikTok influencers. Exactly. Which in many respects really means the Communist party of China. That’s a problem. The State of Utah said, “No, parents should have access.” We see a tremendous amount of mental deterioration among young people in the rates of depression, suicidal thoughts, and visits to the emergency room because of self-abuse. Again, this is not from a hysterical, old conservative, it’s in the data. It’s remarkable how close to over 50 percent of women are on some sort of antidepressants or psychopharmacological drug in certain areas, and in certain high schools. This is not good. One of the big debates in the social science community is, “Is it really social media or is it sleep deprivation?” It could be something simple like that, because we know that social media keeps kids up. What the Utah statute says is, “No social media for kids between 10:30 pm and 6:30 am.” To this day, there’s no indecent programming on broadcast television during those hours. It’s just like curfews that are imposed and have been upheld by courts. This is the same thing, but for the internet world. Mr. Jekielek: As I hear about the curfew, that sounds really restrictive, Adam. Mr. Candeub: Yes, I guess. But it follows all sorts of rules that we’ve always had. As I said, curfew rules are hundreds of years old and they have been upheld by the courts. Children have fewer First Amendment rights than adults. For instance, indecency programming still exists, and regulations still exist for broadcast television. For those few channels that you get on your cable that are actually broadcast channels, they can’t have nudity and they can’t say dirty words between certain hours of the day, and that’s to protect children. As a society, not so long ago, we have been quite comfortable with more aggressive efforts. When you have something like a smartphone which can be smuggled into a bedroom, it’s very difficult for a parent to control. This is an appropriate time to say, “No, we have to come up with a rule to help everyone.” Mr. Jekielek: The bottom line is that adult websites would need some kind of dialogue that required third party verification, which theoretically makes it impossible for kids to get into those sites. Mr. Jekielek: It doesn’t do everything. The limit is on account formation, because of contract law, so essentially, the state can more easily regulate children’s ability to form a contract. The problem again goes back to the boring court rulings from the Supreme Court in Reno. The ACLU said, “No, sorry, if you’re just trying to block porn, age verification is too burdensome and we should have filters instead.” They said that in 2002, and perhaps we’ll revisit this. Other states are moving on legislation to do that. No, it does not just block porn. But if you want to start an account with porn site, you can’t do that without your parents’ consent. Mr. Jekielek: Got it. What does society think about the curfews? Mr. Candeub: It depends who you ask. The corporatist, libertarian, think tank lobbyist groups in DC think it’s terrible, and that somehow children will wither and die if they can’t be on social media between the hours of 10:30 and 6:30. That’s a rather esoteric point of view. Most parents would be quite okay with that. What are they going to do? What horrible thing is going to happen? They might read a book, they might talk to their parents, and maybe even they could watch a movie together with their family. We’ll see. Courts will look at that rule and they could be absolutist and say, “No, we can’t have it, this would be terrible.” On the other hand, I hope they’ll be more realistic and say, “Look, we need this for family cohesion, for the health of our children, and for the future of our society.” Mr. Jekielek: It’s very interesting how deeply you were involved in conceptualizing this, which involves the heart and the hand of the government putting its finger on the scale. On the other hand, you’re very much a strong free speech advocate. That is reflected in your writing and the cases that you’ve taken up. Mr. Candeub: Traditionally, we have always allowed the greatest freedom for political discussion, which is essential for our society. But we’ve also recognized that other images and communications aren’t really that great for us. There is a real difference between pornography on the internet and a controversial op-ed or a tweet that people don’t like. I’m for having that distinction. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a huge discussion right now about the disinformation industrial complex. When you were working in the Trump administration, you were looking at Section 230 reform to deal with perceived overreach by Big Tech platforms. Now, we’re seeing something much bigger that before 2020 many of us didn’t quite imagine. Section 230 is interesting because it provides a lot of freedom, but it also creates huge problems at the same time. There’s some sort of path through the middle. Please explain the picture to me. Mr. Candeub: Sure. They are two very different but related issues. They’re also connected by the power of Big Tech and its interrelatedness with them. Many agencies and organs of our government and the nonprofit sectors in academe are able to create this unified front to project certain views. Certainly what the Twitter Files have revealed is—I worked in government and had no idea—the degree to which the intelligence establishment and law enforcement is involved in surveilling what Americans do and say. Something we often find in this debate is the redefining of terms, like terrorist threat. We always thought that was something from outside the United States. The legal authority that was generally only given for surveillance of foreign individuals and foreign communications, all of a sudden has been used in the United States. This is added to this weird little proliferation of all these strange nonprofit organizations that work hand in glove with the intelligence community to create warnings and to create concepts. As you were talking about disinformation and misinformation, whoever even heard these terms until about five years ago? Disinformation, yes, when talking about spies in World War II, but nobody ever talked about misinformation or disinformation on the internet before. That’s new and that has been created recently. That’s created by constellations of people who want to surveil what we say and do. That’s troublesome. Section 230 fits in a little bit differently. It’s a short statute, and I encourage your viewers to look at it. 230 C1 has become the important one, but C2 was the one that Congress was interested in. It should be a relatively simple matter. It provides this protection for the big platforms that telephone and telegraph companies have, or even common carriers who are carrying packages. When a telephone company completes a call between two conspirators who are going to commit a crime or who are going to defame, the two people in the phone call have legal liability, and the phone company doesn’t. That’s just what Section 230C1 does. It says, “Look, you go against the user. Facebook has no liability.” What the courts have done with the help of the huge proliferation of Big Tech money and influence in DC in the nonprofits and academe is to say, ”No. What C1 covers is anything having to do with speech the platforms do.” Well, that’s like everything. For instance, a particular case which I find notable and egregious and unfortunately often cited is the Sikhs for Justice. It was the claim that one of the platforms was discriminating against the religious community of Sikhs on the basis of their religion, and they got C1 protection for that. I noticed the difference between that and our libel situation. With our libel situation, there were two people saying something defamatory on the phone. You could sue the users, but you couldn’t sue the platform. Here, the Sikhs were saying, “No, Facebook discriminated against us and C1 protected them.” It has just been growing and growing and growing since then. Facebook says, “I promise I’m going to carry your postings and I won’t censor them.” Then, if Facebook censors them, too bad, so sad, C1 protects them. With consumer fraud, if you make fraudulent claims in violation of state law, too bad, so sad, that involves the editorial discretion of the companies, so therefore C1 protects them. This rather limited protection that mimicked the telephone and the telegraphs, which had for hundreds of years and we couldn’t really survive without, has morphed into a protection of the platforms for anything they do. How does this fit into this weird world in which there are all these nonprofits working with the government to censor and surveil? In a way, we’re seeing the platforms working very closely with these groups, largely under the threat of this wonderful, extraordinary legal protection being taken away. That’s what Biden has said, that is what all these hearings are about. These senators and representatives say, “If you don’t censor more people, we’ll take away 230C1.” What’s a company to do? I do see these things as related. They happened very suddenly, as you pointed out. It’s complicated and difficult to describe. It’s a perfect storm for inadequate democratic oversight, because this emerged and it’s hard to explain the situation. Mr. Jekielek: I hadn’t realized, in your view, the original rules have been abused. The original law has been abused. Mr. Candeub: Without a doubt. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: But it’s the removal of the abuse of that law which is used as the threat, basically. Mr. Candeub: Yes, exactly. That’s right. I’ve been involved in some of these cases and it’s very frustrating, because the platforms hire the best lawyers in the country. They are not quite unified, but they work loosely together to make sure the right opinions are put forward. For instance, the case I referenced, Sikhs for Justice, was actually pro se for most of the case. Essentially, they had a non-lawyer represent themselves against the Death Star of top DC lawyers. Look what happened to the opinion. It just copied all of this language from Big Tech lawyers and that became law, and then, that’s cited in the next case. It’s a unified pressure expanding C1 to an absurd degree. But that’s sort of a mixed bag, because now they rely more and more on this legal liability protection, and that becomes a bigger stick that the Democrats can hold over them. Mr. Jekielek: A small company that wants to break into the social media space where there are questions of defamatory opinions or copyright infringement would need protection, otherwise it would be sued out of existence. Mr. Candeub: What it originally conceived of makes sense. 230C1 makes sense. Facebook shouldn’t be liable for the postings of its users. I don’t want them to be liable for that. However, if they discriminate against people on the basis of their religion or their race or, as Texas social media law will come to, on the basis of their political views, there should be some repercussions. These platforms don’t communicate anything themselves. Their users use them to communicate. They provide a service, and the service is like any others. It’s like going to a restaurant or any other public accommodation. Mr. Jekielek: Your position is that you just want to bring it back to what it originally was. That’s interesting. I hadn’t fully grasped that. Mr. Candeub: Yes. I’m always the conservative. The way it was is the best. But yes, exactly. For better or worse, a large part of my legal scholarship has been the history of common carrier law and network law and very boring stuff. If we start going into it, no one will be listening to this, and they’ll quickly switch it off. But that’s been the rule for hundreds of years and it’s worked quite successfully. A power we see so often with the internet is that regulators and legislators think, “This is so special and new, we have to give extra protection, or the old rules don’t apply.” But there’s nothing new under the sun, and it would be best if we return to traditional understandings on this. Mr. Jekielek: This is the perfect opportunity. I want to find out how you came to be studying these uninteresting things, as you describe them, but things of profound importance to our society today. Please tell me about your path. Along the way, you’ve had some very interesting cases that caused you a lot of trouble, actually. Mr. Candeub: Yes, a little heartache. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Mr. Candeub: I went to UPenn Law School, and afterwards I clerked for J. Clifford Wallace, Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit. Then, as many people do, I worked as an associate in a law firm. This was in the late nineties, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, of which Section 230 is part of, had just been passed. The main part of the Telecommunications Act had nothing to do with the Communications Decency Act. It had to do with local telephone competition, and now people will start snoring. But it was this weird concocted effort to create competition at the local level. Regulatory lawyers were very busy and I got involved with that. I worked at the FCC for three years during the height of those issues. And then, I thought I’ve had enough of DC. There was a telecom bust and I was very fortunate. I did what I always wanted to do, which was to become a professor. I moved my family out to Michigan State in East Lansing, and I taught there for about 10 years, living a quiet midwestern life. Just by accident, I got involved with these two cases. One was very controversial with Jared Taylor. His outfit is called American Renaissance. He describes himself as a white advocate, but most of his detractors would call him a white nationalist. He was kicked off Twitter. Also, Megan Murphy, who is a Canadian feminist from the Vancouver area was kicked off, because she deadnamed or misgendered a very vocal political opponent of hers. I really got involved with these cases because of Section 230. I always taught my students the parameters of Section 230 mirrored the old telegraph and telephone regulations. I always thought that it protected platforms against the libelous or otherwise unlawful statements of their users. We got into court, and it’s like, “That’s not the way they do things in California. There are all these new rules that essentially say, “Section 230C1 protects Twitter’s decision that Jared Taylor is not worthy of being on Twitter. Meghan Murphy is not worthy of being on Twitter,” and that they have that editorial discretion to do so, even though it’s not in the statute. That ticked me off. It just got me really angry, because it’s not the way the system is supposed to work. You have a statute, which is very protective of platforms, which does all the good things that we like, allowing the entrance of small companies and allowing people to express themselves without making their platforms liable for what they say. And then, you see it just became even bigger through really bad arguments and abusive law. So, I started writing a lot about this. Mr. Jekielek: Just to be clear, you don’t have any particular sympathies to any of these positions. Mr. Candeub: No. I’m a middle-aged Jewish law professor, I’m not a white nationalist. Mr. Jekielek: Obviously, but the reason I ask is important in this day and age. Lawyers get criticized for taking cases, even though lawyers are supposed to take the cases of the most egregious people. Lawyers are supposed to take those cases and defend those people vigorously. That’s how our system works. Mr. Candeub: My representation of Jared Taylor has cost me career-wise. I could never move from Michigan State. If I hadn’t had tenure, it probably would’ve been very bad for me. But Jared followed the rules, and he’s polite. If he goes, all ethno-nationalists go. That means goodbye to Marine Le Pen of France, Giorgia Maloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, and Viktor Orban of Hungary. That is a slippery slope. I thought that it was wrong. He followed the rules and if he goes, then who’s next? That’s what happened. They were the beginning. He and Megan Murphy were the canaries in the coal mine. I knew if they weren’t going to follow the rules with them, then they weren’t going to follow rules with anybody. It’s the road that led right to President Trump. It was a belief that they had complete editorial control, regardless of the civil rights laws, regardless of contract, and regardless of consumer fraud, to say who was on their network. Emboldened by cases like Jared Taylor’s and Megan Murphy’s, which we lost, the platforms were able to do this. That’s why I did this, because I thought this was the beginning of the end. I hate to say I was right, but I was right. Mr. Jekielek: You hear this very often, especially in conservative debates, that this is a private company. It should be able to do whatever it wants to do. Mr. Candeub: The telephone company was a private company, it had to provide service to everybody. The telegraph company was a private company, it had to provide service to everybody. Restaurants are private companies, they have to provide service for everybody. Schools of higher education are private institutions, and they can’t discriminate. What these social media companies do is provide a service, just the telephone company, and just like FedEx. It’s perfectly reasonable and within the bounds of the constitutional authority of a state to say, “Look, you have to serve everybody. If they agree to follow your rules, you have to serve them.” Mr. Jekielek: The rules can’t be, “Your viewpoint has to be our viewpoint.” Mr. Candeub: Exactly, you’re right. That’s like the genie that says, “You have three wishes.” You say, “I want 12,000 wishes.” You can’t play by those rules, and you can’t play that game. The platforms have this wonderful sort of protean identity. On one hand, when they’re getting protection under Section 230C1 they say, “When we moderate content and use our editorial discretion, that’s using the statute’s term, ‘speech of another.’ We get protection under that,” which is what I’m talking about, this expanded notion of C1. However, when they were challenging the Texas social media law, they said, “All the statements on our platform are our own expression.” They are somehow miraculously expressing themselves through the billions and billions of tweets or postings, and that creates a coherent message, or so they claimed. Luckily, Judge Andy Oldham, one of the great rising stars of the federal judiciary said, “That makes no sense. You can’t have both of these.” Mr. Jekielek: You can’t have both at the same time, which seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? Mr. Candeub: It does, but we can talk a little bit about why the courts have been so open to Section 230 expansion. In general, judges like easy ways to dispose cases, and liability protection does that. Because at the beginning of cases they’re like, “Done. Cross it off. Next.” Also, it is a weird conjunction of ideologies, and we’ll see this when the issue gets up to the court. A lot of Republicans are very libertarian and they’re open to this idea. It’s like our wires, we get to do what we want to do, the First Amendment guarantees it. The Dems, the liberal judges, they like the censorship in there. It’s been a perfect storm where judges on both sides of the aisle have unified to expand C1. Justice Thomas, in separate statements, as well as some of the other justices in the lower courts have only recently said, “No, this is crazy.” Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about this Texas social media law, which I know you’re a fan of. Mr. Candeub: Yes, I’m a great fan of that. Kudos to Governor Abbott and Senator Hughes who really allowed this to happen. It’s a very straightforward law, and it’s short. The disclosure provisions are a little bit longer, but your viewers should just look it up. HB20, or Texas social media law even, it’s on the internet. All it does is say that platforms cannot discriminate on the basis of viewpoint. That doesn’t mean that they can’t get rid of content they don’t like. Facebook can ban nudity, and can ban four letter words. But what it does do is say that you can’t ban people on the basis of their viewpoint. If I am an advocate for naturism, they can’t cut me off. But they could- Mr. Jekielek: Not allow you to post your naturism photos. Mr. Candeub: Yes, exactly. Precisely. A very unpleasant thought, so let’s move on to the next question. Mr. Jekielek: All right. It’s pretty simple and straightforward, but being challenged. Mr. Candeub: Yes, exactly. It was a liberal judge that struck it down in the district court, and it was reversed and upheld by the fifth circuit in a really bravura opinion written by Andy Oldham. I thought it was just great. Then, CERT was taken by NetChoice, and we were all very excited to see what was going to happen earlier this year. Maybe because the Supreme Court had too many hot dishes on their plates, they punted. What they said is, “We’re going to send this over to the Solicitor General for their opinion, for its opinion on whether we should take CERT. Now, for us in the business, it was a little rich. Because after all, Texas social media law was designed to, among other things, prevent the government from pressuring the social media companies to censor or throw off politically unpopular views. We’re going to the Biden Solicitor General, given their record on that topic, to have their opinion. But they’ll probably take six to seven months and issue something in May or June, and the court will vote on it, and will decide CERT in the fall. We will return, and the Supreme Court will have to sort out this mess. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about some of the other First Amendment-related cases that the Supreme Court is taking up. Some of them have very profound implications. There’s 303 Creative v. Elenis, and Gonzalez v. Google. Please give me a quick breakdown of what’s going on and why it’s significant. Mr. Candeub: Sure. 303 Creative v. Elenis is a reprise of the famous Colorado cake master case involving whether or not anti-discrimination laws involving gay people should apply to small artisan creators who are creating specialized types of products for individuals. This time it’s not cakes, it’s wedding invitations. A gay couple asked a religious web developer to do their wedding invitations and she refused. They brought action under the Colorado law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual preference or identity. This puts conservatives in a funny spot. On one hand, we’re fine with non-discrimination requirements for the social media companies in Texas. But someone would say, “Conservatives are being hypocritical by saying the wedding invitation designer should be free on First Amendment grounds not to make the wedding invitation.” That’s actually the wrong way to look at it. These non-discrimination requirements of the kind that Texas is imposing have been imposed on large network industries that provide a commodified service that are largely unexpressive. Nobody thinks that when someone uses the telephone and defames you, that is the telephone company speaking. Furthermore, these services can be provided on an impersonal basis, as opposed to wedding invitations where you sit down with the bride and groom and work with them to have a detailed invitation that expresses their particular preferences. This bespoke, individualized work that involves the commitment and intellectual work of one individual is a very different situation. The court can reasonably distinguish that and say, “No, we can’t have anti-discrimination laws here that implicate not just an individual’s creative endeavors, their individual work, but also their religious affirmations. They could just say that this is the First Amendment freedom of religious expression, and not even get into actual speech issues. As opposed to discrimination online, where if the court says that the Texas social media law is unlawful, all of our public accommodation laws will be suspect. Because the lunch counter will say, “I’m going to express myself by having an all white lunch counter or a black white lunch counter.” The airline will be able to express themselves by having only people of a certain religion, in the same way that the platform expresses themselves by only having people of a certain viewpoint. If the court tries to make it consistent in that way, they’ll open up a Pandora’s box. It’s an interesting issue, and the court has to draw the right line between them. Mr. Jekielek: A significant part of the distinction you draw is one of scale. One idea at a small scale can become a nightmare at a large scale, even though it’s a perfectly good idea at a small scale. That’s a topic for another day. How about Gonzalez v. Google, as we finish up? Mr. Candeub: This is an interesting case. The Google plaintiffs represent numerous individuals whose family members were killed in terrorist incidents. The theory of the Gonzalez plaintiffs is that YouTube’s targeted recommendation radicalized the terrorists to commit their deeds. There is a large causation issue here, and the court was very uncomfortable with it, not only in this case, but the companion case. It could go away solely on that issue. But the case does present a very interesting Section 230C1, the issue that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. When you go to YouTube, you have these recommendations on the side after you listen to a video. The question is, are those recommendations the speech of YouTube or are they the speech of the users? YouTube says, “They’re not our speech. They’re the speech of the users, and we’re just the conveyor.” Mr. Jekielek: Because the users made them. Mr. Candeub: The users made them. But the Gonzalez plaintiff says, “You created the algorithm that selected them, so they’re yours.” Now, how that works in C1 is C1 protects you if they’re the statements of your users, the telephone company has no liability for their user statements if they are libelous. Similarly, YouTube has no liability for the videos the users upload. But for the speech of the platform itself, they would have liability. That’s the way C1 works. It was a very unusual argument. The justices were very confused and you sensed a sense of discomfort. I’m hopeful that they will punt this issue and not deal with it and just say, “We have problems with the underlying claim,” at least from my selfish perspective. My fear is that they might, in fact, take this opportunity to cement the sort of expansive Section 230C1 protections that we spoke about earlier. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a significant case to be made that it’s YouTube that decided what would go there. Mr. Candeub: Technology really has changed our expectations. Yes, they created the platform, and yet, there’s a tremendous resistance to saying they have to be liable for it. We treat them in this special little world, If this had been a newspaper that had delivered stories saying, “Look at this great terrorism. Want to learn more about all these great terrorist activities?” Of course, we would’ve held them liable. But there’s something about these online tools that make people feel differently, and I haven’t quite figured it out. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. How do we deal legally with this disinformation industrial complex that has developed, because it seems to not fit neatly into any existing rules. That’s just my gut feeling, but why don’t you tell me? Mr. Candeub: You’re right. It’s largely because it’s a product of the fourth branch of government, the administrative state. We have given power to these agencies, the gobbledy-gook alphabet soup of security agencies, that are not really accountable to anybody. Like any other agency, they tend to be co-opted by special interests. That’s a very dangerous brew, and it’s hard to prove. It’s hard to bring into the sunlight and shine a light on it, and it’s hard to bring accountability. It’s going to be a real challenge, and it’s one of the difficulties of our time. Mr. Jekielek: Adam Candeup, such a pleasure to have you on. Mr. Candeub: Thank you for having me, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Adam Candeub and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jana Kelik. 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 Digital Green Certificate, the COVID pass, that was a test balloon to get people to [have] to produce some kind of a QR code, just getting people used to that. Now, what they’re slamming us with is these 15-minute cities. Make no mistake. It’s not about your convenience,” argues Christine Anderson. She’s a member of the European Parliament, representing the Alternative for Germany Party. Anderson was one of the European Parliament’s most vocal critics of COVID-19 policies in Europe, Canada, and beyond. Western democracies are gradually moving toward digital tyranny, she argues. The next step? Climate lockdowns. “Once we end up in a totalitarian regime and it’s fully blown, given the technological means they have at their disposal today, we’re not talking about 30 years of GDR [German Democratic Republic], 40 years of GDR. We’re not talking about 70 years of the Soviet Union. We’re talking about a very, very long time. That’s what you should fear,” Anderson says. In the 1920s and 1930s, “Germany was a highly developed society, I mean, lots of smart people, well-educated people, but it was possible for this society to turn evil to an extent that is unimaginable …We always get asked: ‘How was that even possible?’ Well, take a look at the last three years, and you have your answer,” Anderson argues. “We just need to be clear on one thing: each and every one of us is capable of inflicting the most horrible atrocities on our fellow mankind, given the right circumstances. But if you are not aware of the fact that yes, you are able to do the same thing, then you have no mechanism to fight it,” Anderson says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/christine-anderson-from-15-minute-cities-to-climate-lockdowns-the-onslaught-of-digital-tyranny_5214622.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Christine Anderson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Christine Anderson: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Here in the U.S. and Canada, you’re most well known for being a harsh critic of vaccine mandate policies, and for Canadians, especially of the policies around the Freedom Convoy in Canada. Ms. Anderson: Actually, I just did a tour of Canada on the one-year anniversary of the freedom truckers. They invited me over and I had a really good time. They organized a Freedom Convoy just for me so I got to ride in a truck and participate in a Freedom Convoy, which actually now makes me a freedom trucker, which I’m really proud of. Mr. Jekielek: Your voice is unusual in the European Parliament, and among politicians around the world. I want to know more about who you are, and where you come from. How did you come to have this strange, unusual view? Ms. Anderson: I’ve always been kind of a pain in the neck, even for my parents and teachers. They will absolutely attest to that. Even as a kid, I was always interested in politics. It might have had to do with my family history. You may know my parents were born and raised in Thuringia, which was formerly in the GDR [German Democratic Republic]. They were born in the 1920s. My dad actually did fight in World War II. He was drafted when he was 16. When the war was over, he was a prisoner of war with Americans and he was released at the end of 1946. Then, he found himself in communism and that just did not sit well with him. He would speak up against this so-called democratic regime and it landed him in one of the most horrific prisons you can imagine. He was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. Luckily, he only had to serve five years of that sentence and he got released in 1955, and he still wouldn’t shut up, if you can believe that. In 1959, he was about to be arrested again, but that time he had been warned and he fled the country, which was actually a good thing. I was born and raised in Western Germany, but I grew up with this idea that you always question your government. You never take anything that they’re telling you for granted. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing. Even at school, I always challenged my teachers. But back then, we had to debate about this and it was all good. What we are seeing now, however, there is no more debate. It’s immediately good or bad, and whatever the so-called bad person is saying, you do not even deal with that. That is actually detrimental for any democracy, and we might actually lose it. Mr. Jekielek: It is very strange that it’s not just good or bad, but there’s a correct way you’re supposed to think. Ms. Anderson: Exactly, yes. That’s what we are seeing in schools today too. The students are no longer taught how to think. They’re now taught what to think. Anyone not sticking to the desired political narrative, and deviating from that, immediately gets slandered as being a bad person, and having vile views. It’s a shame and we should not allow this to happen. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about when you decided to start. What prompted you to realize something was off and start saying extremely controversial things? Ms. Anderson: Okay. Just looking at the so-called pandemic, in the beginning, it was like, “We don’t know what’s coming.” It was kind of like that. On Easter of 2020, I completely left that narrative, because the things they were doing did not add up. There were steps they could have taken but didn’t, because they were afraid of being called racist. They could have cut down on travelers coming from China. That would have been a smart thing to do, but they didn’t do that. The other thing was now there is this pandemic going and raging its way throughout the world, but the refugees still poured in. They didn’t have to provide anything. We were in the absurd situation that anyone could step foot into my country with no questions asked. But as a German citizen, I was not even allowed to enter a restaurant, a shoe store, or a hairdresser without showing a vaccine pass. This is so fundamentally off what you should do. It pretty soon occurred to me that this has nothing to do with public health. It has nothing to do with breaking any infection waves. It was always about breaking the people. That’s what they were trying to do. They simply wanted to see how far they could go, and how far the people would allow them to take away their fundamental rights. We’ve been seeing that. Once there were people that said, “No, we are not going to mask up, and we’re not going to get this mRNA shot,” they really bashed down on these people, threatening them and their livelihoods. They said, “You are no longer allowed to go to work. You’re no longer allowed to ride on a bus.” There were talks about if you do not get this mRNA shot, you will have to pay for your medical treatment yourself, because you brought it on yourself. They even were contemplating not to treat unvaccinated people at all. This is the kind of stuff that totalitarianism is actually made of; ostracizing people, scapegoating people, and ridiculing them. One high-functioning German politician even went so far as to say unvaccinated people should not be allowed to celebrate Christmas at all. Can you imagine? That’s the level we were talking about. We are not teaching our children anymore. What does it actually mean to live in a communist country? What does that mean? What did it mean to live under total totalitarian Soviet rule? What did that actually mean? Look to China and there you have it. Is this what we want? I don’t think so. That’s what I’m fighting. I do not want a government to literally have so much power and control over people that with the flip of a switch their life is pretty much over. They can’t go anywhere anymore. That’s what we are looking at. I’ve just seen Vera Sharav. She’s a Holocaust survivor, by the way. She was speaking very clearly about the future totalitarian regimes. They no longer require electrified, barbed-wire wired fences. All they need is a phone, a digital ID, a QR code, and then they can do whatever they want with you. That is scary. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. You may have read Aaron Kheriaty’s book, The New Abnormal, and he actually talks about things like how in the 1920s and 1930s, the German medical system was the top of the world. A lot of people don’t understand that. The Volk, the people as a whole, were the thing that they were trying to perfect, as opposed to what we think of in Hippocratic medicine. There, the doctor’s responsibility is to do no harm to the individual, whoever that may be, whatever their situation, and whatever bad decisions they may have made about their life. It’s not a moral question. It was very powerful to learn that. Ms. Anderson: But what is also shocking, Germany was a highly developed society with lots of smart, well-educated people, but it was possible for this society to turn evil to an extent that is unimaginable. That should get you thinking, how was that possible? That’s the question we always get asked, “How was that even possible?” Take a look at the last three years and you have your answer. There is another thing that we really need to embrace as individuals. We just need to be clear on one thing. Each and every one of us is capable of inflicting the most horrible atrocities on our fellow mankind, given the right circumstances. But if you are not aware of the fact that you are able to do the same thing, then you have no mechanism to fight it once you are put in a position like that. There’s a lot of people that would like to think that they would’ve been in the resistance back then. Take a look at what you did in the last three years and you have your answer. Most of the people would not have been in the resistance back then, because they just went right along with everything the government asked them to do. Mr. Jekielek: There is a famous line from Solzhenitsyn, “The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.” Ms. Anderson: Exactly. But we need to be aware of that. That’s the only way that we will be able to fight it. You had neighbors that had nothing better to do than to spy on their neighbors. If they had more than two people in their apartment, they would call the cops on them. On what planet is that okay? It is not your business. This whole fearmongering was going on, which, by the way, is something I’m accused of all the time, but it was actually done by the governments all around the world. Mr. Jekielek: Let me just jump in here. What fearmongering are you being accused of exactly? Ms. Anderson: By outlining the fact that if governments have too much power, eventually we will no longer have a democracy, is the fear mongering I’m accused of. But actually, the government is really terrifying people by saying “You’re all going to die a horrible death.” In Germany, there was a manual, an outline on how to get the people to do what the government wanted them to do to adhere to these restrictions. They outlined it there specifically, “Even though kids are at no risk of this COVID, we have to make them afraid. If they catch it and then they infect their grandparents, they’re responsible for having killed their grandparents.” That’s the kind of thinking that went on in the governments. Talk about fearmongering. This is fearmongering. A completely blown out of proportion kind of pandemic. For what? It was so the pharmaceutical companies could make billions and billions of dollars. Mr. Jekielek: I have to get this straight. There’s a number of places in the world now, notably in the UK documented by Laura Dodsworth, where there’s unequivocal evidence that the government was involved in sowing fear, and had a specific strategy for doing so. You’re telling me that this is the case in Germany as well and documented line by line. Is that what you’re saying? Ms. Anderson: That is what I’m saying. It was supposed to be a documentation only for internal use, but it got leaked. God bless the internet. Yes, it was right there. They were targeting kids, and then, they were also specifically talking about addressing the most rooted fear in people, which is suffocation. They said, “You will suffocate, and you will die a horrible death.” It says it right there. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of what you’re talking about is similar to things that have happened in other places around the world. There is the fact that this didn’t just happen in Germany, this didn’t just happen in the UK, and this didn’t just happen in the U.S. It’s almost like the same approach was used. This type of evidence would be found almost everywhere, because why would the same methods be used? Have you thought about this kind of global coordination? Ms. Anderson: Absolutely. That is actually the scariest part of all of this. Had it only been two or three countries going rogue, we would have had the hopes another country would step in and put a stop to it. Mr. Jekielek: There were exceptions. Ms. Anderson: There were exceptions. Mr. Jekielek: Of course, there were significant ones. Ms. Anderson: Right. But just looking at it, they were in lockstep with all of this. They literally read from the same script, repeating the same lines, “Build back better, safe and effective.” Every single Western democracy was pretty much doing the same thing. That’s the most scary part about this, because who is going to bail us out? It’s not going to be China, it’s not going to be North Korea, and it won’t be Russia either. Who will do it? It’s actually up to the people. We have to do it. But yes, it is quite frightening that they were all in agreement with whatever they did. Mr. Jekielek: What has to be done at this point? In the U.S., a number of congressional members are involved in this subcommittee on COVID, and there’s also the weaponization of the federal government. There’s a number of subcommittees that are actively trying to look at these questions in Congress now. But people don’t have a lot of faith in Congress right now, or perhaps in Parliament. I don’t exactly know what the situation is in Germany and in the EU. What do you see as reasonable for the people to act on? Ms. Anderson: First of all, what I always say is to turn off your freaking television set. It’s dumbing you down. That would be the first step to take. Especially in the Western democracies, we need to revisit democracy. What is it, what is it supposed to do, and what is it not supposed to do? The people are the employers of the elected representatives and of the government. The people get to tell the government what to do, not the other way around. But especially in the Western democracies, it’s almost as though we are such spoiled brats. We do not put any value on freedom, democracy and the rule of law anymore. We just kind of think it fell out of the blue sky on one fine day, “Oops, here it is. It’s always going to be here.” No, it won’t. As Ronald Reagan said, “It’s only one generation away.” People need to realize once again what we have now. Our freedom had to be wrestled from the former elites. Our fathers and forefathers literally spilled blood over this so that we could live in a free and democratic society. But what we are doing now is just pretty much slandering it away as though it does not hold any value anymore. We really need to revisit what does democracy even mean? We need to get back to actually holding elected representatives and the government accountable for what they did. We should never allow them to be able to move democratic processes further and further away from the people. The EU institutions are, by the way, an example of that. What we are going to be seeing next is we will have transnational lists. The people will vote for their representatives who they don’t even understand anymore, because they speak a different language. How will you be able to let your representative know what policies you want, if you don’t even speak the language? We’ve been seeing that. Look at the WHO [World Health Organization]. They were trying to seize executive powers from the member states. They’re not accountable to us, they weren’t elected by us, and this is going on everywhere. Mr. Jekielek: Are you talking about the International Health Regulations and the treaty that’s coming? Ms. Anderson: That’s an example. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. Ms. Anderson: An example, yes. We see this on so many levels of how they’re trying to actually take away the people’s right to elect their representatives and hold the politicians accountable. We need to be aware of this. What we will be seeing in the time to come is a lot of politicians will say, “We’ve been saying this all along, and we’ve been seeing this, and we’ve been on your side. “ People kind of tend to forget, so come up with an archive. The internet is here. Come up with documentation. Any politician trying to gaslight you into thinking that he’s always been on your side, pull it up and say, “Oh, excuse me, is that what you said? Did you try to lock me in my home because I was dangerous?” Get an archive going so people will not forget what the so-called elected representatives did to the people. Mr. Jekielek: This is also an interesting question. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. In Poland, I interviewed Lech Wałęsa recently, the former Polish president and now Solidarity leader. I was thinking about how societies emerge out of communism. He has a lot of supporters, and he has a lot of critics. How do societies emerge out of communism? How do societies emerge out of totalitarianism? How do they emerge out of a situation where a very significant portion of the population became complicit in something that was bad? If you subscribe to Mattias Desmet’s idea or Hannah Arendt’s ideas, they maybe did not even fully grasp what they had become a part of, which makes it even more complicated. How do you do that? Because it’s very hard for people to admit they were wrong. There’s that famous Mark Twain saying, “It is much easier to make people believe a lie- Ms. Anderson: It’s much easier to make people believe a lie, than to make them believe that they’ve been lied to. Mr. Jekielek: Fantastic. Thank you for that. Ms. Anderson: No problem. Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. In fact, this is our situation. We didn’t even talk about these genetic vaccines and their impact on society, but a lot of people got involved believing perhaps they were doing the right thing and now may have to face the fact that something went horribly wrong, and they were a part of it. There’s resistance to that. This is a difficult social situation. That’s what I’m getting at. How do we get out of this? Ms. Anderson: I’m so glad you mentioned Lech Wałęsa because when you look back to the 1980s in Poland, it was Solidarity that really started all of this. They were eventually able to overcome this communist regime under totalitarian rule by the Soviets, and he went through a lot. What people need to understand is as long as you give the government power over you, meaning as long as you buy into their fear mechanisms and as long as you fear them, they have power over you. Take that away from them. Just make it known. You say, “Yes, I understand you have a lot of power over me and you could put me in jail, I get that, but guess what? I don’t care. Go ahead and do it.” Going back to Nazi Germany, there is this saying, “First they came for the Social Democrats. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t a Social Democrat. Then, they came for the union members. I didn’t say anything, it didn’t concern me. I wasn’t a union member. Then, they came for the Jews. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t a Jew. And then, they came for me and there was no one left to speak up for me.” That’s exactly what we’re seeing. Break that chain and just say, “You can threaten me with whatever? Go ahead. I don’t care.” Because every once in a while, there are things way more important than your fear. Trust me. Once we end up in a totalitarian regime and it’s full blown, given the technological means they have at their disposal today— we’re not talking about 30 years of GDR, 40 years of GDR, or 70 years of the Soviet Union—we’re talking about a very, very long time. That’s what you should fear. That and only that. Don’t fear your government is pretty much what I’m trying to say. Mr. Jekielek: That can be hard for people, though. Ms. Anderson: I understand. I understand that people have a mortgage to pay, and they need to make ends meet every month. I get all of that. Mr. Jekielek: It’s fear of the government, but it’s also wanting to not go outside of your social group. I wonder if that’s not even a stronger mechanism, just having watched what happened over the last few years. That’s extremely difficult to do, to be the person that steps out. That’s why I’m so interested in people like yourself, because there weren’t a lot of people standing up on the floor in the EU talking like you did. Ms. Anderson: Democracy lives off of debate. If everyone is thinking the same thing, then something goes horribly wrong. If I don’t believe in what I should believe in, then I won’t say I will. But that’s another mechanism that totalitarian regimes and dictatorships always implement. You single out a specific group, you scapegoat them or slander them, and the rest will just not voice their opinion anymore because they don’t want to become those guys. Then you are complicit in what is about to happen and you are a bystander and you are not doing anything to keep it from happening. You shouldn’t do that. Mr. Jekielek: Those are very wise words. Since we mentioned the truckers, what is your reaction to this new Rouleau Commission? This is the commission that was looking at whether the use of the Emergencies Act by the Trudeau government was justified. What is your reaction to their findings? I’m paraphrasing here, but their findings were that it was justified. Ms. Anderson: That’s actually shocking that they came to that conclusion, because from what I saw, it was nowhere even close to being justified. That was actually bashing down citizens’ protest, taking away their rights to freedom of assembly, freezing their bank accounts, and literally labeling them as terrorists, which was the prerequisite for freezing their bank accounts. This is so absurd, and now they came to the conclusion this was justified. This is really a blueprint for all the governments around the world now. Whenever they fear the uprising of opposing citizens, which is the citizens’ right, by the way, they just invoke an emergency act. There you go, you no longer have any opposition. Mr. Jekielek: It allowed the Canadian government to suspend certain civil liberties. Ms. Anderson: Exactly. Mr. Jekielek: The earlier version of this was called the War Measures Act, actually. Ms. Anderson: Yes, exactly. They’ve gotten away with it. We will be seeing this in the future too. Whenever there is opposition from the citizens, opposing government, and protesting government, there you go. All they have to do is invoke an Emergencies Act. That did not turn out too well when they did that back in the 1930s in Germany, as we all know now, because that’s how the Nazis really started out. They invoked an emergency act. Mr. Jekielek: In Canada, to be fair, they got rid of it pretty quickly. Ms. Anderson: Yes, they got rid of it. Maybe they won’t next time. Who knows? Mr. Jekielek: I’m very curious what your opinion is on 15-minute cities. It’s a new idea that we’re only beginning to hear about. Maybe you can remind us what they are. I understand they’re coming to Europe now. There is legislation pushing in that direction already. Ms. Anderson: Yes, it is. The Digital Green Certificate, the COVID pass, was a test balloon to get people to have to produce some kind of a QR code, just getting people used to that. Now, they’re slamming us with these 15-minute cities. Make no mistake, it’s not about your convenience. It’s not that they want you to be able to have all of these places that you need to get to close by. It’s not about saving the planet either. With the 15-minute cities, they will have to have those before they can lock you down, and that’s what we were talking about here. In Great Britain, some counties have already passed legislation. They will be able to impose a climate lockdown. That’s the next step. That’s what we are talking about. In order to do that, they will have to have these 15-minute cities. The next step will be you are only allowed to leave your immediate area two or three times a year. But there’s other people that may have more money, and they can actually buy your passes off of you. Guess what? The poor people will be left in these 15-minute neighborhoods while the ones that are better off get to go wherever they want to go. This is what we are talking about. Look at Saudi Arabia, for instance. They’re putting up Neom City. They call it, “The Line.” This is a structure in the middle of the desert, 200 kilometers-long, 200 meters-wide, 500 meters-high, and it will house up to 9 million people. Isn’t that just brilliant? If I wanted to get total control of the people, that’s exactly where and how I would house them, and then, have them on a three-meals-a-day prescription. Guess what will happen if you do not do as you are told? They will probably cancel those meals. It’s so easy. That’s what we’re talking about. When you really take all of this together, there is no other way for me to actually say this. It will be a complete impoverishment and enslavement of all the people. I’m stating it so clearly because that’s what it seems like, and that’s what it looks like to me. Mr. Jekielek: Just briefly explain what does 15-minute city mean? Ms. Anderson: A 15-minute city is basically a neighborhood where you can reach everything you need within a 15-minute foot walk, a doctor, grocery store, and so forth. The bare necessities will be provided within a 15-minute foot walk. However, if you now fancy another store and it does not happen to be in your neighborhood, guess what? You won’t be going to that store anymore. Like I said, total control is what we’re talking about. Mr. Jekielek: Again, it sounds attractive. You have everything within walking distance. Where does the control come in exactly? Ms. Anderson: They can decide you are no longer allowed to leave your 15-minute immediate area. They don’t have to fence it in or anything. It will be done via digital ID. Mr. Jekielek: With a social credit system? Ms. Anderson: Something like that. Mr. Jekielek: Kind of maintaining compliance. Ms. Anderson: Yes. There’s pilot projects already going on in Bologna. There, it’s called the Bologna Wallet. In Vienna, it’s called the Vienna Token. It’s voluntary for now, and it’s only pretty much enticing people. If you do this, you get some tickets for a little less, to go to the theater. Voluntary. Once again, first step. But soon, there will be a time when you don’t have a choice anymore. You have to have this Digital Green Certificate with this QR code. Then, they will tell you where you can go, what you can do, and what you cannot do. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, I was almost wondering whether you want to work yourself out of a job here, because you’re a member of the European Parliament. But I get the sense you have some suspicion about these larger institutions like the European Parliament or the European Commission. What are your thoughts here? Ms. Anderson: If it was up to me, Germany would leave this hellhole today, not tomorrow. Is that what you were getting at? Mr. Jekielek: Why? Ms. Anderson: Because the institutions, they’re not only undemocratic, they’re anti-democratic. First of all, look at the way the Parliament is elected. It’s a gross violation of the principle; one man, one vote. Every German representative in the new Parliament has to get more than 850,000 votes for one seat. But a representative from Malta only needs 64,000 votes. I know that’s kind of interesting, though. But yes, that’s the way it’s done. Then, you look at the institutions, and how they work together. We are not a parliament. It’s actually a disgrace to call it a parliament, if you will. We have certain competencies we don’t have. We don’t have budget control, which actually is a good thing. Because if we had budget control, then the national parliaments would have been stripped of that. We do not pass any laws, by the way. We don’t. We vote on resolutions, which are like letters we write to the EU Commission, “It would be nice if you could do this, that or the other.” But we do not actually pass laws. Passing the law, the legislation is done by guess who? By the Council. The Council is composed of the members of the National Executive. If the German government wanted to pass a law and the German Parliament said, “No, we are not going there. We’re not doing this,” story over, right? Not in this case. Now the respective minister just travels to Brussels, speaks with his colleagues, passes the law there, which then has to be implemented as a EU law in all of the member states. There goes your rule by the people, for the people. It’s just over with. Other elected representatives of other countries get to pass legislation that the Germans will have to put into law and adhere to even though they never wanted it. So, there you go. That’s why this entire EU institution is anti-democratic. It’s just another step to a more clubeletarian, elitist world. Because all of the companies, they no longer have to negotiate with 27 different states. It’s just this one entity. Ursula von der Leyen is such a brilliant negotiator, isn’t she? She secured 4.6 billion doses of these mRNA shots, which her husband, sitting on various boards of these companies directly benefited from. Seriously? That’s what we consider democracy now? Interesting. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, what are you working on now? Ms. Anderson: What I have been doing the entire time is trying to expose their lies, whenever they come up with some kind of a legislation program. They’re so eager to tell people it’s in their best interest, and they promise an ever-increasing better world to live in. I just look at what they are trying to tell the people, and what they are actually doing to the people. That’s the only thing we can really do at this point, just to educate people on the lies. The governments, and all of these so-called elected representatives feed them to buy into their sick narratives about some kind of agenda. Whether it’s climate change, whether it’s transgender, or whether this whole COVID madness, you see it everywhere. That’s what we’re trying to do. We are working on this to see what we can do, because the WHO is not done yet with trying to seize these executive powers of the member states. I’m working with a few really good lawyers on that. But we need the people to back us up on this, because after all, we only do what the people want us to do. They need to do something, stand up, take to the streets and let their governments know they will not put up with this anymore, then, the stronger we will be able to voice our opinion. Mr. Jekielek: Christine Anderson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Anderson: It was a pleasure being on. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Christine Anderson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader

“Global health governance is not fit for purpose, and it doesn’t represent a vast majority of global needs and wants and desires, and people on the ground and what’s going to affect them. It gets captured.” Today I sit down with Garrett Brown, professor of global health policy at the University of Leeds. Brown has been working on strengthening health systems in the African context for decades. “You can talk about rights and freedoms, but none of those matter if you don’t have good health. You can’t exercise any of those things,” he says. “It’s a fundamental part of what it means to be human and have any minimally decent life.” Brown and his research team were recently hired by the World Health Organization to determine whether its $31.1 billion plan for pandemic preparedness and response was justifiable, or even feasible. “The worry is that if you’re asking nations to pony up roughly $26 billion, where are they going to find that money? They’re going to find it from existing programs,” says Brown. “Indonesia has just basically suspended their polio program and moved those human resources into vaccines.” Brown is troubled by the high cost of the WHO’s pandemic plan, which would require resources for basic health to decrease by 34 percent, and basic nutrition by 10 percent. “We saw this with malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, AIDS, reproductive health—that resources were being shifted from certain national budget lines into pandemic preparedness,” says Brown. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/an-insiders-analysis-of-the-world-health-organizations-31-billion-pandemic-plan-garrett-brown_5196306.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Garrett Brown, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Garrett Brown: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Garrett, you run a research group at the University of Leeds that provides quite a bit of information to the WHO. Mr. Brown: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: In your unique role, you have a view into how this very opaque system operates. Here we are, and we’re going to take a look. But for starters, how did you end up being someone that provides this profound pandemic research information to a group like the WHO? Mr. Brown: In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote a piece for the BMJ, which is the British Medical Journal, suggesting that we have five paradigm failures in the way we’re thinking about the pandemic. That was read by the head of evidence and analytics at the WHO. He said, “My unit is trying to think of a different way of approaching these things. Would you look over some stuff for me?” I said, “We need to evidence this better.” He invited me to do that and we provided 343 pieces of evidence for this new framework that was coming out. Then, I just started getting more and more involved in different committees. The more recent work we’ve been doing for them is thinking about financing these massive costs for pandemic preparedness that people are talking about, and the feasibility of actually financing these numbers. Mr. Jekielek: $31 billion a year was the number that’s been floated, unbelievable in scale. We’re going to definitely talk about this. Before we jump into that, what were these paradigm problems that you saw at the beginning? Mr. Brown: The first one is the way we think about health security. Instead of thinking about preparedness and prevention, we always talk about preparedness and response. I was saying that there are many things we can do to prevent these things, and not just prepare for them. We can encourage better population health, look at upstream determinants, and think about how to do that with more sophistication. The main one that I was talking about is what I called the pastorium paradigm. You wait for a pathogen, you sit, and in this case, lockdown, and then you wait for the cure to come. Then, you roll that out to as far as you can to 100 percent and you’re saved. Where are the therapeutics in that? There are other things you can do to think about this with more of a systems approach to preparedness and prevention, rather than just that model. We would need to start thinking about health systems and how you create more resilient health systems and create more adaptive health systems. It can’t just be this pastorium paradigm, which we ended up doing, and I was quite critical of that. The WHO got it and said, “We’re working on something. We’re calling it health systems for health security, and we want to think about a more sustainable way of preparing and preventing these types of events.” Mr. Jekielek: First of all, this is one of the few hopeful things I’ve heard about this system, that they were actually interested in your work and invited you to contribute. The response didn’t seem to go the way you were suggesting, but at least there was interest. Mr. Brown: Yes. They knew they couldn’t change the course of the way the momentum was heading. This was a long-term project for them thinking about how to strengthen health systems in a way that actually has routine health effects for the average person on a daily basis. It can also cover some of the concerns we have about health security, and not have this 1980s war-like mentality about health security. Let’s talk about population health, and let’s talk about other things like that. I thought that was refreshing. I’ve been working on health systems and health systems-strengthening in the African context for ages. It’s really dear to me that you need robust systems that can take shocks and do routine health for people to make them healthier, in order for them to be more resilient. More resilient people are more secure. It just makes sense. Mr. Jekielek: Most recently you’ve been working on providing analysis and research on how to create a $31 billion a year global infrastructure for pandemic preparedness. Mr. Brown: And response. Mr. Jekielek: And response, if I understand it. So, $31 billion a year? Mr. Brown: $31.1 billion is the estimated need for pandemic preparedness response at all national, regional, and global levels. This is what the WHO, the G20 and the World Bank are estimating is the requirement. Mr. Jekielek: For starters, how is this going to work? Mr. Brown: Let’s put it in perspective. The total operating budget for the global fund, which is responsible for AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, three of the biggest communicable diseases, is around four billion a year. Those are already hard to finance. That is already complicated. You have these annual replenishment models, and there’s a lot of squabbling about who’s going to pay what. They are already complicated with high transaction costs, because you have to replenish them all the time. Suddenly, you’re talking about $31.1 billion. Mr. Jekielek: Before we go there, can you give us a sense of where that money comes from? Mr. Brown: You mean the money for the global fund? Mr. Jekielek: The global fund of the WHO. Mr. Brown: A mixture of donors, usually high income countries, the United States, the UK, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The usual funding sources. Overseas development. Aid for health is what they call it. On an annual basis, the State Department will relinquish a certain amount of money to these institutions. The leaders at the G7 will commit a replenishment package to the global fund. They are willing to pay a certain amount on an annual basis for the next two years or three years. That’s where the money is generated from. Usually, high income countries pay into this. Mr. Jekielek: It’s mostly from high income countries, and then also from these large private foundations? Mr. Brown: At the moment, the big one is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, obviously, but there’s others. The Wellcome Trust has moved from a research organization to a policy organization, and they’re putting money into health. Mr. Jekielek: All right. Let’s go back. $31 billion is an extraordinary number. Please tell me about this. Mr. Brown: The $31.1 billion, I’m not quite sure how that cost was calculated. My research team gave some raw material and lots of others gave raw material and then a report was suddenly generated saying that these are what the costs are. One of the questions is whether or not this is really what pandemic preparedness and response should cost, and how we can justify those numbers. But those are the numbers being used. The idea at the moment is that $4.7 billion is what’s required at the global level in terms of coordinating surveillance and coordinating other mechanisms that they think are necessary. There’s something like 92 indicators called buckets. At the national level, we’re asking states for their national programs to be aligned with the global programs. That’s going to be about $26 billion a year. The problem with this now is you’re asking low-income countries to pony up this money, and so the donors will have to cover that as well. They’re thinking that at the global level, donors will be required to come up with around $10 billion to $15 billion a year to cover those costs and the global level costs. Mr. Jekielek: You don’t even know exactly how this $31 billion was reached. There’s different groups that contributed. Now, your job is to try to figure out how to do that. Mr. Brown: Can we finance that? What are the warring trends around current financing of pandemic preparedness and response? We tracked the official development assistance [ODA] for health. Every year the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] comes out with line items. What are we spending our development aid on? They added one for Covid for 2020, and it was an extraordinary amount of money. Mr. Jekielek: It’s funny when you say that. They added a line item, but it was big. Mr. Brown: It was a huge line item. If you start unpacking it, almost all the new development aid money went to Covid or into infectious disease control. A lot of them were Covid-based and a lot of that money went into vaccines. We started to ask, “What are the effects of this?” We saw some staggering numbers. Basic health is a line item, and basic health fell by 34 percent. You’re shifting money from basic health into pandemic preparedness and response. Basic nutrition fell by 10 percent. Nutritional programs have seen money depleted. We started looking into this further and what about task shifting at the national level? We saw that too. For example, there’s a study out of Indonesia where Indonesia has just basically suspended their polio program and moved those human resources into vaccines to administer vaccines. We saw this with malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Aids, and reproductive health. Those resources were being shifted from certain national budget lines into pandemic preparedness. The worry is that if you’re asking nations to pony up roughly $26 billion, where are they going to find that money? They’re going to find it in existing programs. Mr. Jekielek: You said this is close to your heart. On the ground in Africa, when you pull 34 percent from basic health and 10 percent from nutrition- Mr. Brown: It has impacts. Mr. Jekielek: What are the real world impacts on people? Mr. Brown: There will just be less resources available to combat malnutrition, and there will be less resources available to strengthen health systems. If you think about some of these health systems, definitely in very remote areas, they have difficulty staffing them because no one wants to live out there. They have difficulty getting materials out there, and they have difficulty keeping the lights on sometimes. Health is important. You can talk about rights and freedoms, but none of those matter if you don’t have good health. You can’t exercise any of those things. It’s a fundamental part of what it means to be human and have a minimally decent life. Once you start taking from that, there’s a cascading effect on people’s ability to engage in the economy, people’s ability to engage in their government, and the people’s ability to take care of their children. Then, those have knock-on effects. So, the number is extraordinary. I do question the number. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have pandemic preparedness. I’m just wondering if it needs to be $31.1 billion a year. My guess is, it doesn’t. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know if this is the elephant in the room. I’m sure you’ve thought about this, but the pandemic response, as it happened, was largely poor. That’s an understatement. You have a very subdued academic way of talking about these things. Let’s just say it didn’t work very well. Mr. Brown: Yes, it didn’t work very well. Mr. Jekielek: The cost of that was 100 million people descending into poverty among other things, with an upward transfer of wealth. Also, I would argue a lot of death that didn’t need to happen, if there was a smarter way of doing things. Is this being looked at? Mr. Brown: It is being looked at, but I don’t know if it’s being looked at seriously. There’s a recognition, at least where I live, that the lockdowns didn’t have the effect they wanted them to have. In the end, they were highly costly and not very effective. There were other externalities that came from it like increase in mental health issues, domestic violence, and increase in children not being educated. Those have effects. We haven’t quite calculated all those yet. One of the numbers I hear batted around is that Covid cost us somewhere between $12 and $20 trillion in stimulus packages and lost GDP [Gross Domestic Product], when you factor everything in. Mr. Jekielek: When you add up everything. Mr. Brown: No one has come up with a really good solid number yet, but they’re starting to figure that out, and it’s massive. Mr. Jekielek: It’s unfathomably massive. Mr. Brown: Those are opportunity costs, because if you just think, “What if we put $20 trillion into something else? What if we did something else with that money or have that money used in other ways at a more micro-level in an individual’s life?” It would be profound. What did we get for that 20 trillion in the end? Mr. Jekielek: As a society, and certainly among our leadership and policymakers, we forgot about the idea that everything needs a cost-benefit analysis. What you need to undertake is cost-benefit analysis. The profound positive impact that money could have in different places is also unfathomable. Mr. Brown: Or the money just staying with you, and not coming to you from somewhere else. Ultimately, this is being paid for by sovereign debt. There are massive opportunity costs with $31.1 billion. Mr. Jekielek: Quickly, just for the benefit of our audience, please explain what opportunity cost is. Mr. Brown: What could you do with that money otherwise, and what benefits would you get from that? Everything has an opportunity cost. What could have been the opportunities available to you, if you would have done something else with that money or that time? Mr. Jekielek: Or just kept going with whatever you were doing in the first place. Mr. Brown: Yes. There are some major health issues that we should think about at the global level, like antimicrobial resistance. There are things that are spooky out there that we are not very good at coordinating responses to, and that we’re not taking seriously. Because of Covid-19 and because people are angry about what happened and the loss, we are now thinking about pandemic preparedness. There’s a lot of focus on it. We should be prepared. Of course, we should be thinking about these things. But my worry is that there’s so much focus on that and so much interest on it and we’re moving very, very quickly. The pandemic treaty is moving very, very quickly. The pandemic fund, which already now exists in the World Bank, moved very, very quickly. Are we thinking these things out in the right way? Are we thinking about the opportunity costs here and are we using the right numbers? Is it even feasible to generate $31.1 billion? The answer is, “No, it’s not feasible.” Mr. Jekielek: Well, and- Mr. Brown: It’s not going to happen. Mr. Jekielek: I’m just going to- Mr. Brown: Maybe that’s a good thing. Mr. Jekielek: Right. There was some kind of global coordination with the deployment of these genetic vaccines. There was a strong push, not just in the U.S. and Canada, but everywhere. There was very similar messaging that everybody needs to get the vaccine, when the epidemiology from the beginning clearly didn’t demonstrate that. Is it a good idea to put so much control for a global response in one place? This pandemic treaty and some of these international health regulations, as I’ve been looking through them and talking to experts, really do push a lot of control. Mr. Brown: You need to have coordination mechanisms at the global level. To suggest that you can operate solely on a national level in today’s world is a non-starter. We do have to have coordination and that could be good. That could also be bad. There’s a lot of regional laboratory networks in Africa post-Ebola. Great idea. Not every nation needs to ramp up all their laboratory facilities to the same level and have duplicating systems that are literally a hundred miles away from each other. There’s just a border in the middle. By networking your laboratories, you increase information flows between them. You also increase your alert system between them and you get economies of scale. At the same time, you don’t have to have all the expertise in every single state. Those types of coordination mechanisms make sense to me. What doesn’t make sense to me is when you remove context from these debates. In health systems we always say context matters. Context matters. Contextual moderators, meaning how external factors influence the way a health system can operate, are important. You need to understand those. The only way you can understand those is by understanding the context. We’ve removed that. I’ll just give you one example. The WHO comes out early on and says, “We need to vaccinate 70 percent of Africa. African countries rightfully said, “A, we can’t afford this. B, we’re not sure about this.” People like myself were saying, “You should not be sure about this, because your mean age is 19. Your context is different from Italy where you have an older unhealthy population. You have a younger, more healthy population, and this may not be right for you.” That’s a contextual concern that moderates how you roll out any kind of program. We have to keep that in mind when we think about these coordination mechanisms at the global level, while also thinking there’s nothing wrong with having the right kind of international health regulations. It would have been very good if China sent this material up within 72 hours. It was open source and people could start working on it. They didn’t do that. But that’s what the IHR [International Health Regulations] say, and that makes perfect sense to me. It’s a cheap thing to do. It’s just about thinking more smartly. They’re also revising the international health regulations. I’ve had a look at them. A lot of it’s the same old stuff. Some of it’s better, some of it’s worse. These debates are taking place. My concern is to make these debates a little bit longer, more nuanced, and more sophisticated, so that we can get to a better answer. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know if you want to comment on this or not, but there’s also this reality that certain players like communist China are interested in co-opting such systems for their own benefit, with not a lot of interest in public health. This is a profound national security issue for any nation. Mr. Brown: Everyone has interests and that’s what politics is—trying to come to some intersubjective agreement through interest. Of course, communist China has their interest, and so does the United States. We saw this with big pharma, and we saw this with other interests. These interests are playing out. They’re aligning their interests where they can. They’re competing. Early on, the WHO and the World Bank were competing for control of this pandemic fund. Where is it going to be housed? Is it going to be in the global fund? Is it going to be a new FIF in the World Bank? Which it turns out it is going to be. There was a debate there. Once decisions were made, you see that contestation moves to cooperation or to alignment. Yes, there are interests at all levels. Years ago, there was this argument that we need to depoliticize health. You can’t depoliticize something as political as health, because politics is about who gets what and why. It’s not that we need to depoliticize it. We need to make better politics, more legitimate and accountable politics. What we have now is poor politics. But you can never depoliticize health. It’s a deeply political issue. It should be, because that’s how you make decisions. Mr. Jekielek: My concern is that you have players who say they’re going to play by the rules, but they’re absolutely uninterested in doing that. Mr. Brown: No. Let’s go back to the IHR. Only 47 percent of countries were compliant with it by 2015. Mr. Jekielek: That’s the International Health Regulations. Mr. Brown: That’s what they said. You have five years to become compliant by 2015. No one made it. They extended it and it only got to 47 percent. You can have these regulations and think they’re draconian, but it doesn’t mean that people are actually going to follow them. There’s no enforcement mechanism for them. You can name and shame, and you can make development aid conditional on you meeting those. You can inject money to try to help them do that. You can relieve sovereign debt to free up money for them to do it themselves. There’s different ways to do it. But one of the problems is people aren’t compliant with the rules that are there. China was a bad citizen on this and that should be noted. Mr. Jekielek: I keep hearing that the treaties have more force of law. As we’re filming here, we just published an article in The Epoch Times last night, talking about how the current U.S. administration hopes to ratify this treaty without the typical two-thirds Senate approval, and that they have a method to do that. Mr. Brown: I didn’t know that. Mr. Jekielek: Again, a lot of these accountability questions are coming to mind. Mr. Brown: I’m not in favor of the treaty and it’s just going to duplicate problems we already have anyway. But yes, a treaty is the highest form of international law you can have. But even so, country’s break treaties all the time. That may not be the kind of coordination mechanism we need. It’s really a knee-jerk reaction. No one was following the IHRs, and no one was living up to their requirements, and there were bad citizens. China was a bad citizen on this. We need to elevate it to this extreme level. I’m just wondering if there’s other measures we can do that can get people together for cooperation without having to be a treaty. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve already explained why you’re not for the treaty, but please expand on this. Is the main reason just because it’s so inherently coercive? Mr. Brown: I don’t know if it would be coercive. This is part of the problem. I don’t actually know what the treaty’s going to do. I know what they want it to do, but there’s not a lot of voices in the treaty in the early stages. It got moved very quickly and the enforcement mechanisms are unclear. Treaties do have enforcement mechanisms, but they have to be written into the treaty. That’s where the debate is right now. There’s pushback from a lot of countries on this, because the fear is that the enforcement mechanism is going to be conditioned development aid. If you don’t use your development aid in these ways to meet the treaty, then we’re going to pull it. If you are desperately in need of development aid after any sort of event and that gets conditioned, then you’re going to comply. That’s kind of a form of coercion where you say, “You don’t have to take this money. You have this cyclone and you need this money. You don’t have to take it, and we’re not coercing you to take it, but you’re actually desperately in need of it.” It is a form of coercion, because you’re suggesting that to get this money, you have to comply with what we want you to comply with. That will most likely be the strongest enforcement mechanism. I also heard another rumor that you could use the WTO [World Trade Organization], which is a quite powerful global institution. They have a pretty high compliance rate. I make this joke. The two strongest global institutions are FIFA, the football organization, and the WTO. If you want to duplicate that kind of authority model, then look at those two organizations. Mr. Jekielek: At least one of them is deeply corrupt from what we know, the FIFA [International Federation of Football Association]. Mr. Brown: I thought you were going to say the WTO. Mr. Jekielek: We could have debates about this, but I was just thinking about the WTO as you started speaking and I’ll tell you why. I’m someone who’s a student of the realities of communist China vis-a-vis the international system and how they’ve used it. There is a high level of accountability for following WTO regulations, except for communist China. They use the system to enforce compliance around other countries, but they themselves are constantly out of compliance. I would argue the global system has funded their rise through this particular mechanism. I would be against a treaty for precisely this reason. Mr. Brown: Strong states are always able to push back. Where the WTO is very powerful is on weaker states or smaller states, because they can’t push back. They have to comply quite quickly or they’re going to feel the force of the WTO. China’s in a position where it can push back, and the United States does this too. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just jump in. The irony is that China was allowed in as a special case. They hadn’t actually met the entry requirements. The US said, “We trust these guys. We should let them in.” I don’t think anyone would argue that they’ve been true to that. But my point is, now we have a treaty and we’re all signing it. Mr. Brown: We’re talking about a treaty. I don’t think anyone signed it yet. Mr. Jekielek: But it’s moving fast. Mr. Brown: It is moving fast. Mr. Jekielek: What moves fast in these international organizations? Not a lot. This is moving fast. I want you to comment if I’m wrong. Mr. Brown: No, they’re moving extremely fast without a lot of input. Mr. Jekielek: Without a lot of input. Mr. Brown: If you look at the pandemic fund, that thing moved super fast and there were no civil society organizations involved. Finally, after setting the foundations of what the fund was going to be, where it was going to be, and how it was going to be managed, they allowed two seats there. As to how they were nominated, it’s the same old civil society organizations that are in these other organizations. The argument for that is that it creates better networks, so that people know what other people are doing in other institutions. But you could also say that fosters groupthink and enclave thinking. My whole position on this is that maybe we need a pandemic fund, and maybe we don’t need a pandemic fund. But can we just slow down and think about if we want it housed in the World Bank? Do we want it to be operated like an FIF? Mr. Jekielek: What is an FIF? Mr. Brown: It’s a financial intermediary fund. It’s like a bank account. The Global fund has their money as a FIF inside the World Bank, and they’re separate. For the pandemic fund, they’ve decided to keep the governing body inside the World Bank. I’m curious about why those certain decisions were made? We know that you can run these funds in different ways, and manage them in different ways. Why were certain ways chosen and other ways not chosen? Who made those decisions and how those decisions were made? Where were the inputs and what was the debate about? That’s what I’m curious about. It’s very hard to find that information. Some minutes are available, and some are not available. Some you can request, and some you won’t get back. If we could just slow down and think about it a little bit more, I bet you we could come up with a better way of having a fund. Any organization is organic. It’s self-preserving in a way. When money like $30 billion is being discussed, and you’re the WHO, or you’re the World Bank, or you’re the Gavi Alliance, or you’re the global fund, you want to be part of that. Some of that might be for good reasons. We think we do good work and we think we can add value here and use that money in real positive ways. Some of it’s self-sustaining. Some of it is moving up the hierarchical rank of who’s a more important institution. That all plays out. These debates were largely taking place between the G7 and the G20 about where we are going to house these. Who’s going to be responsible for the pandemic fund? How is it going to look? Those interests were all playing out there. When we were doing the cost estimates for the WHO, they wanted to generate their numbers. The World Bank was also generating their numbers for the G20. It became very clear to me that they were all going to come around the same number, regardless of the methods of how you would generate the number. That was because somewhere in the G20, it was already determined that was the number. We were kind of meeting a number, instead of inductively figuring out, “What would it cost?” The numbers we were actually looking at were far less than $31.1 billion. Mr. Jekielek: Given that we’ve witnessed the largest upward transfer of wealth in history over the past three years, there is a lot of suspicion about big numbers these days, where those numbers come from, and who is benefiting at the top of the food chain. Mr. Brown: Absolutely. Certain big winners will benefit from the $31.1 billion, because there’s a large package for research and development. There’s a lot for vaccines, for surveillance systems, and for field epidemiology. Some of those are good, and they’re for public good. It’s good to have a field epidemiologist out there collecting and surveying, and then, you pass that public good up. “Here, we have some information on a new virus or a pathogen.” But then, it immediately gets shifted into a private good. This is public money, this $31 billion. It might be partly financed by the private sector, who knows. But you’re taking a public good, information about a potentially dangerous pathogen that we should know about, and then, you’re turning it into a private good. We do that with the flu for flu countermeasures. Every country collects their flu samples and sends them into these five WHO laboratories. The WHO laboratories look for the ones that they think are either going to be the most suspicious, and then they send those out to pharmaceutical companies to make the countermeasures. Public good turns into a private good. When you have that kind of relationship, the interests come in right there. Who’s going to get access to that raw material? Who’s going to be able to make pharmaceutical countermeasures out of that material? Mr. Jekielek: And profit. Mr. Brown: And profit. These are big interests. Countries have interests too as we saw with the vaccines that we did have. AstraZeneca was a British product, and they quickly made that a national product. Pfizer was a U.S. product. There’s prestige, there’s politics, there’s money, and there’s protecting your industries. All of those kinds of factors played out. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about your analysis here. You were intimating that this $31 billion is not remotely achievable. There is this huge opportunity cost. Even trying to achieve that will actually cause a lot of harm. Please explain this to me. Mr. Brown: We ran a series of models to see if we could meet these costs. The first one we ran was about can nations afford this $26 billion annually, and what would that take? We looked at growth, and assumed a certain percentage of GDP growth by low and middle income countries. We found that they would have to spend 77 percent of that money from their new growth on PPR [Pandemic Preparedness and Response] exclusively in their health system. Mr. Jekielek: And PPR being? Mr. Brown: Pandemic preparedness and response. Mr. Jekielek: Got it. Mr. Brown: To meet this $31.1 number, the $26 billion component of it. Mr. Jekielek: Over three quarters of their growth money for the entire country- Mr. Brown: Would have to be sunk into this. That’s just unfeasible. That’s not going to happen. It’s an untenable number. The only way for us to meet the global number would be if high income countries significantly contributed. We assumed a 2.5 percent growth between now until 2027 for health. We found that even in our best case scenario where all the countries paid in, we still wouldn’t be able to make that amount. That’s also an untenable number. The only way to meet these, if we want to make them meet them, is by injecting a significantly more amount of money on overseas development assistance for health than we do now, and dedicating more of that towards pandemic preparedness and response. What do you do here? You either have to find new innovative methods of financing these things, or you need to rethink and prioritize those five buckets for pandemic preparedness and response, and prioritize where’s the best value for money, and what ones are going to have the greatest effect. It goes back to your cost-benefit analysis. That’s probably where we’re going to go with this, because at the moment, the pandemic fund only has $1.7 billion in it. They’re not already generating the numbers that they need. That means we’re going to have to rethink our approach and come up with prioritization models that ask what are the big key priorities and how do we finance them with the money that we have. The concern for me is how do we make those determinations of what are the priorities, what are not the priorities, and where the money goes. That’s what worries me, because at the global level, global health governance is not fit for purpose. It doesn’t represent a vast majority of global needs and wants and desires of people on the ground, and what’s going to affect them. It gets captured. Mr. Jekielek: Right. I’m thinking back to what you said, there are these epistemically important players, as you described them. Mr. Brown: Epistemic authorities, I call them. Mr. Jekielek: Epistemic authorities. For example, the head of a big pharmaceutical company, just to give an example. Mr. Brown: The Lancet. Mr. Jekielek: The Lancet. Mr. Brown: A special issue of the Lancet has a massive amount of epistemic authority. People look at it and say, “It’s in the Lancet. This must be definitive. The pharmaceutical companies know more about pharmaceuticals than anyone, so it must be definitive. The WHO. They’re the ones who are supposed to be coordinating all these policies. They must be definitive.” It’s never that easy. I don’t think it’s ever that easy. Those authorities should be reason giving, as I call it. There needs to be more reason giving within the political process. I’m all about actually extending things, adding more deliberation, and coming to a better intersubjective agreement. The only way you get there is by reason giving. You can ask them, “Why do you think that’s the best way to go?” Everyone can say, “This is what I think. I tell you that, and then you tell me,” and it’s all done in good faith, hopefully. You come to some kind of agreement. These mechanisms are just not available. The World Health Assembly is two weeks long. There are a million subcommittees. It’s impossible to know everything. Most countries can’t put members in all those committees. You have a team of four and there’s 20 parallel committees going on. There’s just no mechanism for that kind of dialogue in a way that’s meaningful or legitimate. That’s where big interests with big money behind them or power behind them like the United States or China or other countries can capture those processes and steer agendas very strongly, for better or for worse. Mr. Jekielek: There’s an inordinate focus on this new vaccine technology as being an important part of what we do. From where I sit, I see this as a largely failed technology. Mr. Brown: Right. Mr. Jekielek: But there seems to be a doubling down, perhaps because of these epistemic authorities, which doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground of the effectiveness of this vaccine technology, and also the harms of the products themselves. Mr. Brown: It’s an awkward social phenomenon, and I don’t think I have my head around it. The usual suspects are there. People don’t like to lose face. People are going to double down because they don’t want to lose face. People get pathway dependent and say, “We’ve already invested so much money in this, it would be a huge loss if we shifted directions now.” People don’t like to admit they’re wrong. Governments don’t admit they’re wrong anymore. They never say, “We got this wrong.” You have a group on one side trying to give you a universal answer to health, and you have a group on another side trying to give you a universal explanation for what happened. You’re not going to be able to do either one of those. It’s way more complex than that, and it’s more nuanced and sophisticated and multilayered. On both sides, the critics and the advocates, these simplified universal explanations aren’t going to capture it. It’s not the reality on the ground, because it’s much dirtier, complex, overlapping, and contradictory. If I was a philosopher, I’d say dialectic, where it’s both good and bad at the same time. The big question, in the next 10 years, is to try to figure out this social phenomenon that you talk about. Mr. Jekielek: Garrett Brown, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Brown: Thank you very much. This was fun. Jan Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Garrett Brown 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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Retired attorney Sally Saxon, J.D., talks about our future freedoms, why there’s hope, and the tragic spark that made her write an Amazon bestseller—“The COVID-19 VACCINES & Beyond: What the Medical Industrial Complex Is NOT Telling Us.” For Saxon, it started with the injuries. When nurses and doctors across America rolled up their sleeves and took the first COVID-19 shots, they became ground zero for serious adverse events. The nation’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the first line of defense against a bad pharmaceutical product on the market, set off hundreds of safety alarms in 2021. But as Saxon details in her book, America’s regulatory agencies were looking the other way. Legacy media did the same. And injured healthcare professionals who put their faith in the system are now finding themselves abandoned. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/sally-saxon-author-of-covid-19-vaccines-beyond-talks-about-freedom-the-search-for-truth-and-why-humans-should-not-play-god_5239331.html “The irony is that the shot they took in order to keep their job ended up leading to them having to leave their job because they could no longer perform it. So you had a decrease in their family household income, but the expenses significantly increased, because their insurance wasn’t covering a lot of their expenses, their doctors were denying that there was any connection to the vaccine, and telling them that the problems were all in their head,” she told Frontline Health. Saxon is now looking to organize an event to support Americans injured by the COVID-19 vaccines. She hopes her book will help cover the expenses. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Dan Skorbach: Recently you wrote a book called ‘The COVID-19 Vaccines & Beyond… What the Medical Industrial Complex is Not Telling Us.’ Before we get into it, what we really want to know is what motivated you, and what was your intention behind writing this book or approaching the subject. Sally Saxon: Originally, I was in the middle of doing an expanded and updated version of another book, that I was going to include a couple chapters about COVID. So I had already started doing research on the topics. And then as I started hearing more interviews of people who had been injured by the vaccines, that really broke my heart. If you listen to any of their stories and their testimonies, it can be gut-wrenching to hear what they’ve been going through. So then I started focusing more just on the vaccines and decided that I need to do something, whatever I can do as an individual to help stop the vaccines. So I started writing a little report that was originally going to be just for healthcare professionals. But then, as I did more research, I found more I thought should be included. And so by the summer of last year, I had a booklet and I thought I need to get some professional medical critique of what I’d written. That’s when I was introduced to Dr. Deborah Viglione, who then showed my manuscript to Dr. James Thorp. And they decided that they should help me with this, so they added some sections to it and reviewed the whole thing. And we kept adding to it until it became what it was. And then they reached out to some of their colleagues when the manuscript was done, and got endorsements from people like Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Richard Bartlett, Dr. Bryan Ardis, and several others. And so like here we are, we started out to write a book on this subject that would become a number one bestseller on Amazon in various categories. The Vaccine Injured Have Been Abandoned Dan Skorbach: Have you talked with vaccine-injured people? Can you tell us some stories? Or what were some of the most shocking examples that really propelled you into this journey? Sally Saxon: Well, I think what impressed me overall was that I heard—and it was a common thread, in several other stories—and many of the initial stories I heard were about healthcare professionals because they were some of the first in line to get the shots early on. And some things they had in common, like the first few that I heard, they all had extreme shaking, and just all kinds of symptoms where they just couldn’t function. They had to quit their job. So the irony is that the shot they took in order to keep their job ended up leading to them having to leave their job because they could no longer perform it. So you had a decrease in their family household income, but the expenses significantly increased, because their insurance wasn’t covering a lot of their expenses, their doctors were denying that there was any connection to the vaccine, and telling them that the problems were all in their heads. And of course, because of their physical condition, their whole family life was disrupted, they could no longer do things with their kids that they had always done. I mean, everything changed and got turned upside down. And they were feeling abandoned by everyone. The government wasn’t helping them, and the drug companies aren’t helping them. Nobody’s helping them. And, you know, that’s why it’s so heartbreaking. And a lot of people just even are aware of the full extent of what these poor injured victims have had to go through. And so that really tugs on the heart. Dan Skorbach: It does, indeed, especially when it comes to medical professionals who put their lives on the line to try and save so many people during the pandemic. And they didn’t get injured by the pandemic itself, but by these shots. Sally Saxon: And then your employers were another person who abandoned them in some cases. When they had to leave their employer, their employer wasn’t helping them either with their problems. So they’ve suffered and different people, of course, had different degrees of injuries. So what I was just describing wasn’t necessarily true of all of them. But there are a lot of people for whom that story is just an example of what they’ve suffered. So it’s not a small number of people. Injury and Death Beyond All Safety Thresholds Dan Skorbach: Do you want to give us some specific examples that you’ve learned or you found through your research that made you feel like this vaccine must stop? Because you told us that you felt like you needed to write a book to stop the vaccines. What were some of these facts that you learned that really validated this conviction that you had? Sally Saxon: Okay, well, in terms of the harm that was suffered, there were a lot of different things. You know, Jim Thorp, for example, his specialty is OB-GYN. And he looked at the statistics of miscarriages or stillbirths that have just gone through the roof. And he uses the terms ‘catastrophic’ and just ‘disastrous,’ in describing the effect of the COVID vaccines on pregnancy. So the numbers and percentages of increase are just through the roof. One of the very first statistics that surprised me was if you look at the previous 30 years of data of reported injuries from vaccines to the vaccine adverse event reporting system there and then you compare that with even just the first year of injuries reported to VAERS after COVID vaccines. Well, actually I have a chart here. So over here, starting in 1990, and then going here, you can guess what year this big tall bar is. That was 2021. And that’s just looking at the deaths that were reported to VAERS. So you’re comparing just one year of COVID data with the previous 30 years of all the other vaccines combined. And you see this astronomical increase, that is a very powerful statistic there. And you would think that would be a major safety signal, that would have triggered a pause, or a stop in the vaccine campaign. But it didn’t. And even comparing it with the swine flu vaccine campaign from 1976, when they had two months into the campaign, they had only about 25 deaths or so. And in many cases of Guillain Barre syndrome. And they stopped the campaign after just two months—saying that even though there was a small possibility that there might be more cases of this, was enough. And that’s on the CDC website, where the CDC was saying back then, just even the small possibility of an increase in this kind of adverse event from the vaccine necessitated the stopping of it. And yet, we reached that threshold with COVID vaccines, probably less than one month into the vaccine campaign. And here we are over two years later, with exponentially greater injuries and deaths reported after the COVID vaccines, and it still hasn’t been stopped. Dan Skorbach: So you’re saying it should be very obvious that we should stop the vaccine, stop this campaign, this widespread campaign of vaccination? Sally Saxon: Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that surprised me too, was when there were so many safety signals—hundreds of safety signals—starting early on that would show that, hey, there’s a problem here, we need to at least stop and investigate what’s going on with this. But they didn’t do that. And they just totally ignored the data and time after time after time. And so the doctors and other professionals who are speaking out like Jim Thorp, Dr. McCullough, many, many other doctors, crying out for these jabs to be stopped, because of all the data, just every month, it gets worse and worse and worse. And still, the data is totally ignored. And it’s the government’s own data. They’re not even adhering to their own guidelines for when a particular drug should be taken off the market. I think it’s 50 deaths associated with a particular drug. If it reaches that point, it should be pulled off the market. And we’re way beyond that. And so what one thing that surprised me was the people who are pushing the campaign at the top levels—why are they so hell bent on getting this shot into every arm of every person on the planet? And that should cause people to stop and think, about what this is really all about? “Bigger Agenda at Work” Dan Skorbach: So why do you think this is being ignored? Why do you think they are ignoring the various data? Sally Saxon: Because there’s a bigger agenda at work here. And in part four of our book, it talks about the big picture that all things COVID fit into, including what is in the vaccines. And what a lot of people don’t know—they’ll see things kind of out of context. But when you look at the whole picture this is part of a much bigger agenda. A lot of people say, oh, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory, but actually—there is conspiracy. But if you look at even some of the statements, one, I quote in the book from David Rockefeller, who was one of the top globalists—a lot of people call them globalists. He even admitted that his family was part of a group that was actually working against the best interests of the United States. That was even in his memoirs. And when I first heard that, I couldn’t believe he had actually said that. So I went to the library, checked out the book and saw that he did in fact, say that. So there’s a much bigger agenda at work here, which, if you understand what it is, it explains a whole lot. It explains why so many different things are happening that don’t make sense. And as a former attorney, I look at the evidence and when things don’t make sense—I look at why it is not making sense. Just like in this case, where there’s so much data showing so much injury from the COVID shots, and they’re ignoring the data, and not even pausing the vaccine campaign? Why is that? That doesn’t make sense. And so you’ve got to look at the big picture, and that affects more than just health, it really affects all different aspects of our lives. And this is just one part of it. And so in order to advance the agenda of the globalists, they ignore this because they want to pursue something else. Dan Skorbach: So when you checked out the book, and when you looked at the quote from Rockefeller, what did he say? What did you learn? Sally Saxon: What I learned, basically, he admits that their family has been part of a group that has been pursuing an agenda to form a more integrated political, social economic order around the globe. Some people call it the “New World Order”—one world government type of thing. And that’s what they’ve been leading to. And as we saw in the measures taken in 2020, with the masking and the lockdowns and just the social distancing, and restrictions. And then later when the vaccine passports came in— if you didn’t have a vaccine passport, you could not go to certain restaurants or the gym, or various other places you couldn’t get in. And so different measures of control are in the works. So we had a taste of it already during these past few years, but there’s a whole lot of other things that are part of the bigger picture. If we cannot stop this, it will continue on a path that probably most Americans would never support, if they knew what that agenda was. Data Manipulated in Plain Sight Dan Skorbach: How do the lockdowns, masking and vaccines facilitate this agenda? If you say it’s globalization or one global governance, how does the individual vaccination, or the lockdowns for an individual facilitate this agenda? Sally Saxon: It’s about control. They can create a crisis, or take advantage of a crisis that naturally occurs. But they have certain methods. And the big thing is deception, because, as I mentioned a moment ago, if most people were aware of what the bigger globalist agenda was, they would never go along with it or support it. And so that’s why it’s so important for people to become aware and be informed of the bigger picture. The methods of deception are really staggering. And that was one of the things that surprised me about this. I’m sure you’ve interviewed several other people who talked about how the CDC and Anthony Fauci and the drug companies and others are just lying to the public about all kinds of different aspects of all things COVID. So that deception was carried out to a degree that really surprised me. I was already aware that they would do this, but there’s so many different ways that they use to deceive people, to get them to go along with what they want to do. And just when it comes to just the vaccines alone, there were many, many claims that were made. So I’m looking for evidence supporting those claims. And either in some cases, there was no evidence at all, or it was data that was manipulated, or data that was misrepresented. And in some cases, they would misrepresent their own data. And there’s different kinds of ways that they deal with that. For example, Jim Thorp gives an example of one of the Pfizer reports. This came out early on in 2020-21. It showed that a certain number of women who were pregnant had a miscarriage. Well, based on his analysis, and looking at the numbers, it was about 80 percent of the pregnancies that they knew the outcome resulted in a miscarriage. And yet, they would take their data and not even count the number of cases where they didn’t know the outcomes, which was the majority of them. So it’s kind of like looking at their own data, they represent it as only maybe 12 percent of miscarriages. Whereas when an expert like Jim Thorp looks at it, he says you can’t count the outcomes that they never followed up on, you can only count the outcomes they know about. And the ones they know about, it was 80 percent. So there’s just many different ways to cover up the data, the truth, and what the real situation is. Taking Personal Responsibility Dan Skorbach: What does this mean for the individual and for their health? What should just an average American do right now? Sally Saxon We need to take more personal responsibility. Americans are so used to going to a doctor and hoping there’s a pill for this problem or a pill for that problem, or some easy solution that takes the responsibility off of them to take better care of their own physical bodies. So taking greater personal responsibility is one. But that includes also understanding what is the cause of disease? And how do you strengthen your immune system? And how do we gain better health? How can we do that? If you go to doctors who are involved in functional and integrative medicine, or natural health, naturopathic doctors, homeopathic—there’s a whole different body of resources and treatments that they use, as opposed to those who went to traditional medical school and follow the allopathic model with the chemical drugs, and so forth. And so it’s two, kind of competing models, but I think people just need to educate themselves more. How to use more natural things, and plant-based substances, that can actually help the body to heal itself, because it was designed to do that, if given the right ingredients. We’re all very toxic, because there’s a lot of toxins in the air, and the water and the food and in different things. And so we’re all suffering from from that to one degree or another. And in order for the body to be most healthy, at an optimal level, we have to learn how to get rid of the toxins and give it the nutrients that it needs. Because as I’m sure you know, over many decades, our food has lost a lot of the nutritional value that it had. And so, how do we replenish those nutrients that were deficient? Taking the Perspective of a Jury Dan Skorbach: You bring a unique perspective to this field, because you’re not a doctor, you come from the perspective of law. Can you speak to us from tha angle? What is the future? What are the next steps forward so that we can prevent this from happening again? Sally Saxon: Thank you for that question. Yes, becoming informed. First of all, and as you know, there’s many different kinds of media outlets. And there’s certain media that are following the official narrative, like the CDC, and so forth. And if people are getting their news, only from those major media outlets, they’re not getting the full picture in there—or maybe getting the wrong picture. The Epoch Times and a lot of other media and independent media are very important sources of information that people need to look at. So part of it is keeping open minded, and not just being fixed and getting your information from one source. I heard the other day, somebody who had listened to the major media, probably his whole life, and that’s what he believed. And so he was very surprised to find out later—he was vaccine injured himself—he was very surprised to find out there was this whole body of other kinds of reports and media. It was like he didn’t even know that a whole lot of doctors and scientists and other professionals were trying to warn about the shots and all that evidence and information that they had. So people are gradually coming around, I think but it takes a decision to be proactive in your own life, and be open minded. I always encourage people to take the perspective of a jury when it comes to controversial issues, and [choosing] whose report to believe. One test is, for example, if by taking a certain position on an issue, a person stands to gain something very valuable, like money, a job, or any kind of benefits—be a little skeptical of them, because they may have conflict of interest there, or bias. But on the other hand, if a person takes a certain position on an issue, say like, Jim Thorp, Dr. McCullough—all the doctors who were speaking out and warning people about the dangers of the shots, if people are taking a stand on an issue, at the risk of losing everything, at the risk of losing something very valuable, rather than gaining something very valuable, then they’re probably telling the truth. Because otherwise, it makes no sense. Why would somebody risk their whole reputation? These doctors have been in practice for decades, they’ve worked very hard, built up an excellent reputation. An now they’re willing to risk everything—their reputation, their professional credentials, their livelihoods, many of them have lost jobs and positions. So that’s just one test of many. That’s maybe a subject for another day. “No Fence to Sit On” Dan Skorbach: How about from a spiritual angle? Where do you think wished you were going? And where do you where do you think from from that angle? What do you think America needs to go to after such a test on a global scale of a pandemic of these vaccines of everything that that has happened? What do you think is next? Sally Saxon: Yeah, that’s a great question, too. And as we discuss later in the book, what it comes down to, is that, this is basically a war. And at its root, it’s really a spiritual war. You’ve got one group— one side—wanting to play God. Because what they’re trying to do on one side, is really, if you read Klaus Schwab and the Great Reset, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution—it’s about changing what it means to be human. And the combination of artificial intelligence with the human body. And I mean, there’s certain advantages, obviously, to artificial intelligence, and a lot of good things that can come from that, but there’s a lot of bad things as well. So you’ve got one group of people, trying to sort of play God, and change the essence of what it means to be human, versus having a personal relationship with God. There is no fence to sit on in this war. I mean, we all have to take a side. And if we don’t proactively choose, I want to be on this side or that side, then the default is, you’re aligning with people on the side, seeking to play God. And when you look at the whole COVID situation and how much deception there was, how much harm has been caused—it seems like the people at the top who are totally oblivious and just do not care how much harm that they have caused people—you see that it comes down to more than just corruption or greed. It comes down to just evil. There’s no other word for it. So, which side do you want to align with, good or evil? And it’s hard for a normal person to imagine that people at the top, in positions of authority, can totally ignore and be oblivious to the harm and suffering of so many people, and not just from the shots, but as we know, from COVID too in 2020. A lot of people had their loved ones die in the hospital, and they weren’t even allowed to be with them, or to see them because of all the restrictions on contact with people in those kinds of facilities and it’s just heartbreaking what’s going on here. And so it seems like a lot of people, during these past few years, were doing a lot of things that they wouldn’t normally do. So there’s a lot of things, but ultimately, it comes down to some spiritual issues. And so we all have to make that decision. By default, if we don’t make an intentional, deliberate decision, by default, we are on the side of evil. [On the side] of those who are trying to really change what it means to be human. That’s why you see the health and freedom conferences, and freedom fighters seeking to inform people as much as possible like we do with the book. Seeking to spread the word, why people need to get involved and do something. 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

“I think we’re playing directly into the hands of what the Chinese Communist Party wants us to do,” says former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, author of “Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield & the Pentagon About America’s Most Dangerous Enemies.” “They want us to spend all our money on the military. But you know, as well as I do, a totalitarian and authoritarian regime like the Chinese Communist Party fears one thing,” Miller says. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss his vision for major reform of the military and his reflections on Operation Warp Speed, January 6, and the Afghanistan withdrawal. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kashs-corner-how-did-the-pentagon-leaker-get-access-to-all-these-documents-multiple-secret-ccp-police-stations-in-america-exposed_5213175.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Chris Miller, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Christopher Miller: Jan, I’m nervous as a kitten right now. I had to write a book to get on your show. Then, Kash Patel, my dear friend and a great American, said, “You’re going on the show.” Thanks for having me. I’m not worthy of being an American Thought Leader. I don’t consider myself that way, but I really appreciate you having me on. Mr. Jekielek: I find it difficult to believe that you’re nervous as a kitten here, because numerous times in the book, you describe situations that would make most people faint, and I’m not kidding. Those are the moments where you’re calm and collected and know what to do. You’ve had a very, very interesting career. You started as a private in the infantry. That is the toughest slog, as far as I know. This is what I’ve always heard. You went into special forces and became a special operator. Ultimately, in 2018, you ended up running counter-terrorism at the NSC [National Security Council]. Mr. Miller: Right, for President Trump. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: It was quite the trajectory to get there. You were confirmed in the Senate 99 to 0, if I recall correctly. Clearly, they were pretty confident in your abilities to do this. Mr. Miller: I’d certainly had the repetitions in, and I knew the business from one end to the other, to be able to serve at The White House and be in charge of the entire counterterrorism enterprise, which was really, really big in the United States after September 11th, 2001. Yes, it was surreal. In some ways, I was afforded the opportunity that never would have come to people like me, who just did it the hard way, which was; do your job, work hard and not worry about the political side of things. Mr. Jekielek: Tell me about how you got this appointment in the first place. Mr. Miller: I don’t know. You would have to ask President Trump. I came out of the doggone. I was a government employee. I was just a civil servant. A buddy of mine was at the National Security Council doing counterterrorism. He was leaving, and he called me and asked if I wanted to come over and interview for his job. I always tell my children, “You always interview for any job because one, you’re going to learn something. Two, you might get it.” Jan, it was at the White House. I was like, “Sure, I’ll come over for an interview. If nothing else, I’ll have a good story to tell.” I was a government employee loaned from the Pentagon to work at the National Security Council. We just worked hard. The president wanted to defeat ISIS, and the president did something amazing. Instead of controlling all decision-making at The White House, like the Obama administration had done, he said, “Decentralize and give authority to the people on the ground, so that they can operate more rapidly.” It resulted in what is probably one of the greatest irregular warfare campaigns. We have conventional war, where it’s tanks and everything. But this is irregular warfare, with small groups of intelligence officers and special operators that then propped up the indigenous forces, in this case, the Kurds, who wanted to fight back and protect themselves from tyranny, which was Assad. We were part of that change. I was part of it. Kash Patel came in. A bunch of us were part of that change. You’d have to ask the president. I’d like to think, in my internal voice, in my internal narrative, that he recognized we were serious about getting things done and supporting his agenda. Mr. Jekielek: It’s very interesting because it did seem to be very effective, especially in comparison to the prior policy. Part of it, and this is your style, was to go to the people in the field and find out what their realities were. Mr. Miller: That’s the way I was raised. I had been out of counterterrorism for a bit. I had been working at the Pentagon on some other things, and I wasn’t really clear on exactly where we were in the war against terror. I read through and I did my research. They call it a net assessment, where you figure out what the enemy’s doing and what we’re doing. The key thing was to go down there and listen. Not talk, but listen. There were some people, Jan, that had been studying and had been a part of the fight against Al-Qaeda for 20 years. I listened to them because I wanted to know where Al-Qaeda was in its evolution as a terrorist organization right now. I found out that Al-Qaeda had seven senior leaders left, and the organization was basically on life support. I asked, “What happens if we kill the final seven leaders?” Across the board, all the intelligence analysts, the people that had studied this for years said, “Al-Qaeda will be defeated. Defeated.” People would yell at me and critique me, “You can’t defeat terrorism.” I said, “I know we can’t. We can’t defeat terrorism.” Noun versus verb. “We can defeat the noun, Al-Qaeda, as a terrorist organization.” In a crazy way, Kash and I set out on this journey to try to end the war. Maybe it was completely a crazy idea, but we thought that’s what the American people wanted. We knew that’s what President Trump wanted, to end this war. That’s the crazy story of how we ended up with President Trump executing his policy. Mr. Jekielek: Just very briefly, what was the outcome? Mr. Miller: The outcome was that we didn’t get all seven. Unfortunately, we had to lose in Afghanistan. Zawahri replaced bin Laden. Zawahri was bin Laden’s second in command who took over after bin Laden was killed. We couldn’t find out where he was. We thought he was in Pakistan. We didn’t have good intelligence on him. He was killed by the Biden administration, thank goodness. The reason he was killed by the Biden administration was the collapse of Afghanistan. He somehow came under someone’s control and set up shop in downtown Kabul. His trade craft wasn’t that good, and we found him and killed him. I thought we were very successful, but we didn’t get the job done before President Trump left the office, which is one of those bittersweet things. I’m glad for America that it worked out, but I’m pretty bitter about the way the war in Afghanistan ended. Mr. Jekielek: A couple of things about this. When you became Secretary of Defense, you figured out that you could bring down the force from 8,000 to 800, like a 90 percent drop. On the surface, that sounds like setting up for failure. What is it that you saw, exactly? Mr. Miller: I went into Afghanistan on the 5th of December, 2001 when, tragically, we had a friendly fire incident that killed three Americans, wounded dozens, and killed a whole bunch of Afghans. That was my first experience in Afghanistan, in 2001. We took the country down, we defeated the Taliban, and drove off Al-Qaeda with 200 special operators and intelligence paramilitary officers. Color me stupid, but I said, “We took the country down with 200. I’m pretty confident that we can keep the Afghan National Security Forces in the fight with 200 advisors to provide air support, logistics support, intelligence support.” With the things that we had done with the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban forces in 2001, I felt that we could use the same model to protect the Afghan National Security Forces, and force an agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government. That’s where I got that from. We did this huge war game. We didn’t bring in the bigwigs and the brass because, Jan, it was too politicized. I knew, but the army did not. The military said, “We cannot go below 8,000.” I knew we could go below 8,000. They were playing this party line with President Trump that said, “If we go below 8,000, the government will collapse. We’ll lose.” I knew the number was 800. Mr. Jekielek: Based on this war game, basically. Mr. Miller: Yes, based on the war game. The idea was to keep a counterterrorism force out in the desert, away from the population, where we could keep intelligence on Al-Qaeda and ISIS, so that our terrorist enemies couldn’t catch their breath. We’d keep them on the move, and also have our intelligence assets available so that we could keep track of them. That was the idea. We could also provide some support to the Afghan National Security Forces with some contractor support, some small special operators to advise, assist, and provide them critical capabilities to keep them fighting. Mr. Jekielek: In the end, basically President Biden saw through the plan to withdraw, which I think was the original plan of President Trump as well. Would you say that’s accurate? Then, how did things collapse so terribly? Mr. Miller: That was two questions within one, Jan. You’re a genius at doing that. President Trump wanted to end the war and get our major military forces out of Afghanistan, and other places as well. I fully supported that. That’s one of the reasons why I was more than happy to take the job, because I agreed on this as acting Secretary of Defense. We pay about $20 billion a year for our military special operators, who are paid, trained, equipped to be very low-key behind enemy lines. In this case, they wouldn’t have been behind enemy lines. In this case, they were in a politically sensitive environment, to make sure to protect American equities and advance our interests. We also have a cadre of extraordinary Americans who do paramilitary work in the intelligence community. The idea was that we would maintain that force. Those are called light footprint, clandestine, low-visibility forces that could still maintain our counterterrorism presence there. That was what President Trump would’ve done. I feel very, very comfortable and confident that’s what we would have recommended to President Trump. I’m not going to speak for President Trump, because anybody that speaks for President Trump doesn’t understand President Trump. I don’t want to put words in his mouth. He’s a negotiator and he’s a business person. The negotiations with the Taliban were not done yet. There would have been the ability, and I think President Trump would have accepted a small, light footprint of special operators and intelligence forces, still in Afghanistan. But you asked about the Biden administration. I have no idea. Jan, that was August 13th. Friday the 13th was the day I knew we lost the war. I had been following this very closely, and there was a number given that the Biden administration was going to keep 800 military people in Afghanistan, which we typically do for security assistance. They work out of the embassy, defense attaches, etc. I was like, “Oh, good. They’re doing our plan. That’s exactly how I would do it.” You’d have your people look as if, “No, we’re just here, 800 people for security and whatnot.” That’s how this works. Then, I watched the news that morning and saw that the Afghan National Security Forces had collapsed. They were literally at the intersections outside Kabul, the same intersections that I had always obsessed over when I was doing combat operations in Afghanistan. The thought of the Taliban sitting there, massing their combat power to get enough so they could go into the city, I knew that the war was over. Because you expect that, Jan, when your enemy masses. I could just see the Toyota Hilux trucks lined up on the road as far as you can see. I could see this in my mind’s eye, with the American way of war. That’s what we’re waiting for, targets. I expected our warplanes to swoop in, our rockets to swoop in and just destroy this long column, like it happened in Iraq and at the end of Desert Storm. That didn’t happen. I knew the war was over at that point. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I believe in the book you say, “No one in the military really wanted to leave Afghanistan, because everybody knew when that happened, it was going to turn really bad.” No one wanted to be responsible for that. Mr. Miller: My issue is that it was a very conventional military way of thinking, which is tanks, aircraft carriers, exquisite fighter jets, and lots of people. My point was that thinking is not appropriate for this situation. I don’t think it was appropriate after we took down the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. At the end of the day, the strategic mistake we made was that it should have been a special operations war. We should have just kept a handful of people there, but instead we brought in lots of conventional forces. It was just the Pentagon doing what the Pentagon does, which is every issue is a nail with a hammer. There’s no original thought required. The irregular warfare way of small footprint, using information operations, supporting those that want to protect their freedom and fight, that would have been the way to go. I don’t blame the Afghan Security Forces at all. When we were there, we were willing to do the fighting for them. Why wouldn’t you let someone else do the fighting? That’s the genius of special operations, in particular Army Green Berets that are very small forces that train and advise larger indigenous forces in the host nation. That’s where we should have gone instead of factoring in all these huge formations. But that’s the way the Pentagon thinks. That’s really the point of my book; we’re doing the same thing again. We make the enemy out so that our Pentagon can fight the way they want. We telegraph our punch every time. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to switch gears here. Mr. Miller: That was the setup for China. Jan, that was the setup for China. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, and I fell right into it. Of course, you were an expert in irregular warfare, which is a very different approach from the conventional warfare at the Pentagon. The CCP practices unrestricted warfare. Every possible method, and anything available to the state can be a tool of warfare, and is used as a tool of warfare. What I’ve discovered, having had many China experts and military people on the show, is that in the U.S. this concept is still not largely understood, even to this day. Even though Chinese military colonels wrote about it a very long time ago, and explained it in quite a bit of detail. Mr. Miller: I feel very confident that if you go into every Army Green Beret team room, a team is 12 people, you will find that book, Unrestricted Warfare somewhere on a bookshelf or on somebody’s desk. There are two colonels that wrote that. When did that come out, in the ’90s? In Patton, the movie, General Patton is in North Africa and he’s fighting Rommel. All of a sudden he goes, “I got it.” He’s reading Rommel’s, Infantry Attacks, was the book. They have given us the book on what they’re doing, and it’s so clear. Jan. You know as well as I do that they are executing exactly along that strategic plan that is laid out, which is total unrestricted warfare. I’ll give a shout-out to President Trump. I’m not chilling here, but he recognized that the key element that could impact the Chinese Communist Party was economic warfare, not military warfare. Still, we’re so out of balance in this country with our budget, where we put about a trillion dollars into defense. It’s actually 60 percent, but I try to be nice. I say it’s 50 percent of our discretionary spending, meaning the money that is available beyond Medicare, Medicaid, social security. This is the money for roads, national parks, and libraries, etc. You’ve heard about DIME, it’s D-I-M-E. It’s the organizing construct for how we make strategy and how we utilize American power; diplomacy, information, military, economic, DIME. You want them all in balance. In many ways, that’s the art and science of strategy. Right now, 50 percent is the M of the DIME, military. Information doesn’t even make it onto the chart. Diplomacy comes in, maybe five-ish percent. Economics, it’s really, really hard to even pull up the budget figures. I’m getting these from the congressional budget office. I’m not making this up, because I was interested in this. We’re so out of balance, and that was the genius of that recognition—the thing that we need to compete with them on is economic, and I would argue, information as well. The military piece is what they want, Jan. They want us to spend all our money on the military. But you know as well as I do, a totalitarian and authoritarian regime like the Chinese Communist Party fears one thing, the instability of their population. How do they maintain control? They have to have the other. They have to have an enemy that’s out to get them. Right now, that’s exactly what we are portraying ourselves as, when we put all this money into the military arm element of power. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to jump back a little bit. I’m not letting you off the hook with China yet. We’re going to come back to China, but something that’s very interesting. You have a chapter at the end of the book where you offer prescriptions. Your prescription also sounds kind of counterintuitive. You’re saying that we really need to cut military spending, and that is actually going to save a lot more lives and make the U.S. war fighting capability much more effective. Please explain that. Mr. Miller: Thank you for actually reading my book and getting to the last chapter, which is an enormous accomplishment. No, I wrote the book to be accessible. Here’s what I learned from age 17-years-old to when I finally left government at age 55. You saw this with the Reagan administration. The only way you can force new thinking is to cut the budget. You have to reduce resources to the bureaucracy. That forces prioritization, and that forces new thinking. That’s what I’m trying to get across. Then the next question is, “How do you do this?” I know because I’ve met these incredibly talented people that are in our Pentagon and in our National Security establishment, who are young, creative people. They see the fallacy of what we’re doing right now, which is refighting the Cold War. When you have a trillion dollars a year, there is no original thinking required. We’re playing directly into the hands of what the Chinese Communist Party wants us to do. What I’m trying to get at by cutting the budget is that we have to have new operational and strategic concepts for dealing with the Chinese; an information, cyber, and indirect approach. There’s a huge population out there that are not fans of the Chinese Communist Party. We have the ability to influence that, and advance our goals, and also keep them from being too bellicose. Mr. Jekielek: I can imagine the argument that you hear when you say, “Look, we’ve got to cut defense spending.” People would say, “That’s going to cost lives.” This is probably the response, correct? Mr. Miller: You always get that anytime you try to do something new at the Pentagon. You know you’re right when they throw that red herring on the table. I was a civilian official. Civilians provide oversight of the military. That’s how our republic works. As soon as you do something that the uniformed military doesn’t want, in this case cutting force structure, cutting weapon systems, and doing something different, that’s the exact line you’re going to get. Then, they offload all the risk onto you as a civilian. I’m good with that. I said, “I’ll take it. Put some more risk on me. That’s what I get paid for.” They always use that line, and I think it’s a bankrupt idea. You brought it up earlier, “We’re going to lose more lives if we keep doing the same old thing that everyone knows.” Our playbook has nothing new in it, Jan. It’s just rinse and repeat, basically since World War II. It’s very easy for the Chinese Communist Party to operate against us, because they have our playbook. We have their playbook too. We have Unrestricted Warfare, but we are not attacking it that way. Mr. Jekielek: That’s a huge question for me. You read Stealth War, General Rob Spalding’s book. The thing that came out in my discussions with him is that people at the Pentagon don’t want to think this way. Whereas, you make the case in your book that special operators are a whole division that functions very, very differently than the conventional warfare division of the U.S. military. It’s just that it’s never playing the major role, except perhaps in some of these campaigns, like early in Afghanistan in 2001. Mr. Miller: Right. I used to get really upset with the bogeyman of the military industrial complex. It’s so easy. It just highlights what President Eisenhower was talking about. Here’s the big revelation for me. I used to get angry about it. “How could we have a system, where we have five major defense companies that make oodles and oodles of money beyond all human understanding, and we have these small startup tech companies that have these incredible technologies and ideas that can’t break through?” Then, I’m not angry anymore, and it’s been very helpful for me. I sleep a lot better at night now, because the defense prime contractors are doing exactly what the incentive structure is set up to do. We have to change the incentive structure. That’s why I talk about reducing spending. There doesn’t have to be these hard choices about weapon systems, procurement, and how we do business when there’s literally trucks full of money. It’s been freeing in some ways, and I’m not so angry anymore. They’re doing exactly what they should be doing in a free market. But it’s not a free market for military equipment. That’s my point, is we need to establish a new incentive structure to break through that. That will result in different operating concepts, different weapon systems and different ways of thinking that, in the long run, will end up saving American lives, or at least those in our armed forces. Mr. Jekielek: Listen, I have you here in this seat. Mr. Miller: It’s the hot seat, Jan, am I sweating? Mr. Jekielek: People keep talking to me about the Chinese spy balloon that got shot down, and everything associated with that. Most recently, we learned that, actually this balloon was tracked from the moment it was launched in China. What happened with this whole situation? How do you explain this? Mr. Miller: How do I explain this? I can’t, right now. I’m like the rest of America. I’m like, “What is going on here?” The president gets what’s called best military advice from the chairman, the senior ranking military officer. He’s called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His counterpart, the person that his boss is, is the Secretary of Defense. That’s the position I held. What was the best military advice they provided to the president? Either he didn’t follow it, or he did follow it. If he did follow it, that resulted in a shoot-down after the spy balloon went all the way across America. I know what they’re going to say, “We collected all sorts of great intelligence on them.” I talk about this in the book, about the intelligence community, about how it’s become unmoored from civilian oversight and control. I really want to learn more about that, because I don’t know how to answer your question. At this point, we should be able to answer the question, I would argue. Here’s the other one that really bugs me. You triggered me on this one. A trillion dollars, and we cannot take control of a balloon without having to send up a $100-million fighter plane and shoot a $400,000 missile. That’s the cost curve I’m talking about. That’s what the Chinese expect us to do, that we will bankrupt ourselves. We have all these exquisite weapons systems and we have so few of them. War is changing. We’re going from exquisite, expensive stuff with very few of them. We’re going back. You’re seeing it in Ukraine right now, with unmanned aerial systems or uncrewed aerial systems and other things. We’re going back to the cheap and plentiful, versus the expensive and few. The Chinese understand that and they love the fact that we continue to spend enormous amounts on weapon systems that aren’t going to be effective. Mr. Jekielek: Is this Reagan’s Star Wars strategy in reverse? Mr. Miller: That’s exactly my point. Jan, you got it. That’s exactly what I fear. You remember how he was ridiculed for Star Wars? In reality, it was part of this ongoing problem. It wasn’t actually a deception plan. He was legit. We’re still working on it. The advances, technologically, have been off the charts. But remember they made fun of him for that. We bankrupted the Soviets because they realized they couldn’t keep up with us, and we won the Cold War. I’m concerned that the Chinese, exactly like you said, are doing the same thing to us. They’re saying, “Look over here. Look over here.” We’re responding exactly the way they project us to, which is spending more money, and spending more money. Then, we talk about the greatest enemies. Everybody says, “Is it China? Is it Iran? Is it North Korea?” No, it’s this unbridled military spending, which could bankrupt our nation. That’s my point I’m trying to make, maybe inarticulately, but that’s the point I’m trying to make in the book. Mr. Jekielek: In the book, you describe President Trump as a neo-isolationist. You say, “That shouldn’t be a pejorative term, either.” Mr. Miller: It’s an established school of international thought. Mr. Jekielek: Right. But the foreign policy establishment and the intelligence community is very much not what you would describe as internationalist. Do you feel this is the biggest schism in government during these four years? Mr. Miller: I think that was a big schism. I also think, quite frankly, a lot of our leadership didn’t understand President Trump. They bought into this narrative that regarding foreign policy and national security, he was some sort of madman that was going to get us into a global war, and nothing could have been further from the truth. That’s what disturbed me. If you actually read what he was saying and see what he was doing, it was a classic neo-isolationist stance, proven valid. America, until World War II, was an isolationist nation. My interpretation of his foreign policy, which would’ve been called the Trump doctrine, and he doesn’t get any credit for this, is very, very consistent. His idea was, “Bring people home. Bring our forces home. Force NATO to pay more.” I love NATO. I love them to death. They need to pay for their own defense now. It was necessary during the Cold War. They’re laughing all the way to the bank right now. Good on them. We’re being played as the sucker. President Trump had it exactly right. But the internationalists said, “Coalitions are important.” Yes, they are. Alliances are important, but let’s all pay our fair share. The Trump doctrine was at the right place at the right time. He called out China for the first time, and the Biden administration has not changed their policy very much towards China. Mr. Jekielek: I encounter a lot of this type of isolationist thinking, especially with this huge commitment of funds and weaponry to the Russia-Ukraine war. I’m hearing from a lot of people, “No, America needs to look inward. We’ve got a lot of problems. They need to be fixed.” Fair enough. The Chinese Communist Party has its long-term plan to subvert America. They have none of what we would consider to be ethics, there is none of that. There are three genocides happening right now in China, and they continue. There hasn’t really been meaningful action to stop these things from happening. If America becomes more inward-focused, and decides not to look outside, these are very real threats that aren’t going away, and it’s just going to take advantage of that. How do you deal with that? Mr. Miller: Neo-isolationism, in my perception and understanding, means that we are strategically overcommitted right now. We have too many people out and about. The world is in the midst of a historic transformation, a transition which happens every 100 years. It’s just the nature of the beast. The best thing you can do when things are transforming and not stable, but chaotic, is to hedge your bets. Come home, reset, and rethink how we do things. Here’s my response to your very good question. There are other ways to compete. There are other ways to impact Chinese Communist Party decision-making. It’s called the DIME; diplomacy, information, military, and economics. Militarily, I think we can support Taiwan. Here’s my issue with Taiwan, and I’ll just go there right now. We can’t want it more than they do. That’s the lesson we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were more than happy to take our money and more than happy to have us fight for them. But in the end, they didn’t want it as much as we did. The Taiwanese have to show that resolve. Your point is, the incredible Chinese disinformation capability is, literally chipping away at that resolve. That’s what we’re talking about in many ways. It’s beyond industrial scale. It is like the next-world, science fiction scale, their ability to spread disinformation in all these systems. When I say come home, that means to reset and retool. It doesn’t mean to give ground to the Chinese Communist Party. It’s about responding. It’s not even about responding, because as soon as we’re responding, we lose. We need to take the offensive. We can do that through information, we can do that through diplomacy, and we can do that through military tools. Mr. Jekielek: You make a really, really good point here, and let’s look at Unrestricted Warfare. We actually have a lot of these tools at our disposal and we haven’t deployed them yet. We’ve deployed them to some extent. As you mentioned, the Biden administration has actually kept some of these economic tools in play up to now, but there’s a lot more that can be deployed. In fact, that is arguably the most effective tool for this particular engagement. Mr. Miller: Jan, you know as well as I do. You’ve been all over the world. You’ve seen how the Chinese are taking over, economically in Latin America, in Africa, in all these other areas of the world. We have ceded that ground. I would argue, our most effective weapon system is the free market system. Why we are not very strategically deploying capital in those areas to counter the Chinese is absolutely beyond me. These are the things we need to be talking about; how we’re going to respond in the world. Yes, I’m a neo-isolationist right now. The thing is, four days from now, if the situation dramatically changes in the world, I might become the most fervent internationalist. My point being is, we get stuck in these schools of thought. You’re one thing or the other. No, there’s got to be a third way, which is opportunistic. I thought that’s what we’re supposed to do as strategists and policymakers. That’s what I’m trying to portray with the American public in a way that isn’t really dense and boring, like Henry…no, I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything bad about Henry Kissinger. Have you ever finished one of his books? I’m going to, one day. I’m going to finish that diplomacy book that’s pretty dense. Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to something a bit earlier, which is, who dubbed you the Soldier Secretary? What does that actually mean? Mr. Miller: It made me very uncomfortable when that came up. We had just gone out to Djibouti in Africa, and we went to Somalia, a bunch of us. Kash was there, because we wanted to get on the ground and talk to the people in the intelligence community and our diplomats, because President Trump had said, “Get out of Somalia.” We wanted to go out there and make sure that it was executable, and would not put America at risk. We were out there, and I had this interesting moment. In the American military, at Thanksgiving, the leaders always serve the troops. Did you know that? Mr. Jekielek: I’ve heard about that. Yes. Mr. Miller: It’s one of the greatest traditions. We went out to serve the troops a Thanksgiving meal, which we did in four different places, and we rolled into Djibouti late at night. I had just given my talking points, and they weren’t really resonating. There were probably 200 Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines there. Out of desperation, I just started a late night show. I started interviewing the soldiers instead of me. Not just soldiers, there were Marines there as well, and Air Force. It was magical. They came alive, and it was really transcendent for me to see. I always knew the power of the people that serve, but it was amazing to see that excitement and see that energy. The generals were sitting in the back, and I could tell they were very dismissive because I wasn’t acting properly. You’re supposed to talk like this and not open your mouth. You always talk with your hand like this, and you’re always talking. You’re not listening. I could tell they were pretty disturbed by this. In their minds, it was a lack of professionalism. I got back to my room that night really late, and I just sat there and I realized I could relax. I was thinking about the day, because every day you always do your after-action review. What did you do right? What did you do wrong? How do you improve your performance? I had this moment, “Man, I did it again. I embarrassed myself.” In my mind, I embarrassed myself in front of the brass. That was a critical moment where I realized I don’t work for them. I work for those kids. I work for the soldiers in the field. That’s when some smart alec got the idea, “You’re the soldier secretary.” I’m a humble guy. I said, “Knock that off, knock that off. It’s not about me. It’s not about me. It’s about being blessed to be put in this position to serve. It’s how I was raised. So, it’s never about me.” They came up with that name and I couldn’t argue with them because in my internal monologue, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to serve those in the armed forces, veterans and their families, and give voice to those that aren’t being heard. That’s what we did. Mr. Jekielek: You highlight in the book how important it is for the military to have civilian oversight. You criticize the fact that General Mattis was put into that role at one point because it was too close. Then you, yourself were also military, correct? Mr. Miller: Yes, but there’s a difference, legally, with a general officer, which I never was. I retired as a Colonel. I made the decision to leave the service. There’s a difference between being a four star general and being a colonel. You have all those rules, laws, and regulations when you’ve spent 40 years in uniform ending up as a general officer, then coming in to be the civilian head of the armed forces, the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Inadvertently, if all these generals are your friends, which they are, it provides a different leadership challenge. We’ll just put it that way. I didn’t have that leadership challenge because I was a colonel, and I was dismissed as just another colonel. But that gave me energy and gave me the confidence that I didn’t have to play by their particular rules. Mr. Jekielek: Even though you had spent 35 years in the military, you were still an outsider to this type of structure? Mr. Miller: Exactly. Mr. Jekielek: Then, that’s what is important. Mr. Miller: Yes. I wasn’t the chosen one. I wasn’t the pampered prince of the senior officer corps. But there’s another part of my book concerning accountability. I say, “Holy cow. What are we doing with our education training and our promotion system when the same people that keep losing our wars end up getting promoted?” Getting back to Soldier Secretary, I realized that my obligation wasn’t to the generals, it was to those in the field. Mr. Jekielek: You have a very interesting prescription here, and I’ve heard this prescription before. It was Vivek Ramaswamy that mentioned this in a book that he had written. He talks about some sort of mandatory service, not military service, but some kind of service for every U.S. citizen as a way to build patriotism. Mr. Miller: I just thought, bonds of understanding. You see those World War II movies where you have the guy from New York, you have the one from the south, you have the one from Chicago, then you have your rube from Iowa, my home state. They’re put into this situation of basic training, and they bust on each other, but they realize at the end of the day, they’re all Americans. With this Balkanization that’s happened from social media, and just the way things are developing in society, we’re losing those bonds of understanding. That’s why this show is pretty important, and other shows like this. They are effective in breaking down a lot of these barriers and misunderstandings. Because when you’re working together, you have to rely on each other. You brought up a key point. It’s just not the military. There are nursing homes, healthcare, and education. Go overseas in a mini-Peace Corps. Work in the national parks. I don’t care, but have some sort of obligatory service. There has to be an out. I survey young people on this, and I’m at about 90 percent. There’s always a libertarian that says that’s against the Constitution. I agree with them. I said, “You’re right. You should have an opportunity. If this is not something for you, take conscientious objector status.” It probably sounds a little sophomoric as a policy description, but I think it’s something we need to really, really wrap our heads around. They do it in Israel. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, but in that case it’s mostly military, with some exceptions. Mr. Miller: Across the board, there are plenty of things we can do in America. You get out of high school and you get to go take a little sabbatical for two years. At the end of it, you can get your education benefits. Maybe you can get some small business-type things, or a G.I. Bill-type thing. Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of this historically low recruitment in the military right now? Mr. Miller: The military said it’s because people are afraid. Have you seen that one? The military said, “We need to study this.” It was the Army that said, “What we’re finding is that young people are afraid they’re going to get hurt.” I had that same look as you. I said, “What?” There’s more to it than that. I have to think that there’s this attitude right now about senior leadership who says, “Do as I say, not as I do.” They preach one thing up on the Hill and then they say something else when they’re back at the Pentagon or out in the field. One thing I know from my children is that if you tell them something, they’re pretty savvy about these things. When they have bosses, and they see incongruity—that’s the word between what the boss says and what the boss does—my kids get really, really frustrated and angry. There’s probably some of that. We’re seeing senior leadership taking on issues that are overly political, and not handling them well. Here’s my bumper sticker. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. I have yet to meet anybody that joined the military to fight the culture wars. It’s the ultimate meritocracy. They join because they want to serve. If they work hard and they do well, they can advance and they can have success. I don’t know of a single person that said, “The reason I’m joining the military is, I want to fight the culture wars.” They actually want to prepare to fight, and if necessary, fight real wars. Mr. Jekielek: There is an increase in the sense of entitlement, a kind of narcissism. It seems to be a societal illness that’s on the rise. I imagine that would also contribute to people. “Ask not what this country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” It has gone more towards, “Ask what this country can do for you.” Mr. Miller: I gave this stem-winding speech when I became a battalion commander responsible for 450 people in the Special Forces Battalion. I was using my old-school tool, which was always blaming others and higher headquarters. “We have to fight them. We’re all in this together.” It worked in the past. I’ve been out of the business for a few years, and I was just dying out there. I wasn’t getting any reaction. Eyes were dead. I’m like, “I’m not hitting it.” Finally, I just said, “Okay, see you later.” One of my buddies that I’d served with previously came up to me and said, “Sir, these kids believe your whole shtick, your post-Watergate shtick. Anybody over 30, I don’t trust.” They said that it doesn’t work with them. They joined the military to serve. They believe it’s an honorable profession. I humbly disagree. There’s still people that want to join. The Marine Corps did a great thing the other day. The Commandant said, “We’re not given bonuses for people to join. We’re the Marines. If you don’t want to join us, we’re not going to join you.” That’s one of the points of the book too, is we can collapse the size of our armed forces dramatically. In return, what I want to do is collapse the active duty force that shows up every day, and take those people and put them back in the communities, in the National Guard and the Reserves that serve one weekend a month, two weeks at the end of the year, or during the summer, typically. We need to reestablish those bonds of connectivity between those that serve and those they serve. Because right now, Jan, there are only a handful of large military bases, primarily in the south. We need to return our military to the people that they serve and protect. By doing that, you’d see better familiarization, because right now we just don’t do a good job at showing what military service is all about. Mr. Jekielek: You’re talking about moving these soldiers around the country instead of these big southern military bases. I’ve heard of similar suggestions for how to reform the FBI or other agencies, to put them more in the states and more localized, as opposed to centralizing them. Is this how you see it? Do you think that there’s too much centralization? Mr. Miller: Exactly. I understand why we did it, but we’re at a different place in our society right now. You brought it up, about how there’s this disconnect between the young people and their understanding of service.This is what really, really concerns me, is we keep attacking those that are in public service and in the military. Not so much the military. The military is still put on a pedestal. When we attack people that volunteer to serve, either as civil servants or as political people, and we just destroy them, what message does that send to young people that are thinking about going into government service? “Why would I ever do that when I’m going to ruin my life and have my reputation ruined?” We’re going to end up with ineffective civil servants. That really troubles me. One of my goals in the book was to show that there’s no debility in public service, and we have to stop this character assassination of every person who decides to serve. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that there’s this weird, I think you used the word, fetishization of the military in the eyes of society. We’re really putting them on a pedestal, like you just mentioned. At the same time, you also describe a growing distance that you want to change by making it more localized. I want to figure out how to square those two views. Mr. Miller: I thought they were consistent. I’ll have to think through that one. The concern is that when only 7 percent of America are veterans, and 93 percent haven’t served, that’s a great problem to have in America. I love that. We’re not an armed society. However, what I’ve seen in my career is how we came out of the tail end of the Vietnam conflict. I joined in ’83, but you still had those remnants that just despised the military. Then the Vietnam generation, to their credit, said, “Never again.” They took action. President Reagan was very clear, “Don’t blame the warrior. Blame the war. Don’t criticize the warrior. Criticize the war.” I thought that was the right thing to do. What I’ve seen, Jan is a slippery slope where the people that serve start thinking, and the leaders are willing to tolerate this, that somehow military service is more important and more patriotic than just paying your taxes. That really bothers me because we don’t need a Praetorian Guard in this country. The armed forces can’t be separated from the people they serve. That’s what I’m trying to talk about. Let’s be clear, the politicians love the military until they don’t. They’ve seen political gain by loving everything about the military, and by being at football games and flyovers. That’s potentially hazardous because the only thing that can take down our country is a misguided military. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but that’s why in the book I talk about this incredible article about the possible military coup 20 years ago. That’s my concern. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, you’re right. There’s this hypothetical situation some 20 years ago where someone shows how this could happen. You’re right that we’re closer to that scenario today than we once were, even though we might not be that close. You don’t want that, obviously. Mr. Miller: Right. I just think we have to reset our relationships between our military and our society as a whole. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just necessary. Somebody’s got to be the first one over the wall to say these things. Actually, Admiral Mike Mullen was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Obama administration. He highlighted that one of his most important undertakings was to help educate both sides, the military and the citizenry. Mr. Jekielek: I want to briefly ask about Operation Warp Speed. This is very contentious. A vaccine was developed very quickly, and rolled out very quickly. A lot of people have very serious concerns about that rollout. There’s increased evidence that there are significant harms associated with them. I want to learn about it from your perspective. Mr. Miller: Operation Warp Speed? Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Mr. Miller: Primarily, the military was responsible. I thought the president did the right thing, which was to use private industry to develop the vaccine. What we learned very early on was that the private industry did not have the logistics or capacity to distribute on such a large scale. That’s where the military came into play. The one thing the military knows how to do better than Walmart and Amazon and everybody else is huge, large-scale logistics. I do not know exactly how much the military medical labs had to do with the development of the vaccine. Sorry. I was really focused on executing the president’s guidance to make sure that when the vaccine was developed that it could be distributed nationally, and internationally as well. That was my focus. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just jump in and I’ll explain why I’m asking. From credible research that I’ve seen, the way that we responded to coronavirus, or the CCP virus, as we call it at Epoch Times, arriving in the U.S. appears to have been a biodefense response, not a public health response, which means that different agencies were involved. We can talk about what you were aware of, as this was all playing out. Mr. Miller: I was aware of the controversy of using an experimental vaccine on members of the armed forces, but at the end of the day, I was responsible for the distribution and logistics of it. You talked earlier about young people not willing to, or a lot of people not interested in joining the military. We talked about leaders saying one thing and doing another. I don’t think we have enough data, but I assume and suspect that the mandatory vaccination using an experimental drug has something to do with that break of faith, if you will, between the people that we need to enlist and join the military, and the leadership. I’m still trying to figure it out. I don’t have a good answer for you. Mr. Jekielek: Is there something you wish you could have done during your tenure that you feel like you missed? Mr. Miller: Yes. We went in there. Week one was; stabilize operations. Week two was; drawdown in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. We did that. Week three was; advance special operations in the Pentagon, or sit in the back of the kids’ table. We made some bureaucratic changes so that they got the respect they needed, having fought the global war on terror, carrying a huge burden. Obviously, others did too. Tons of Americans served overseas in the other services. Then, the final thing was, for the remainder of the time there, our focus was on helping people that weren’t being heard. I wish I would’ve taken that one on much earlier. There were so many examples of people that had been accused of something, or maybe it was an award that hadn’t been properly gone through the system. Maybe it was somebody who had been forced out of the service, or had some sort of administrative problem. You just hear that again and again. I’ll give you an example. I’m in Somalia and I said, “What problems are you having?” They’re like, “We haven’t gotten paid.” I fell off my chair. “What? You haven’t gotten paid?” They’re like, “No, the system isn’t paying us.” I was like, “How’s that affecting your family?” They’re like, “Really, really poorly. Not a good phone call when I talk to my spouse.” Stuff like that, which most people ignore. You could say, “That’s not your role as a Secretary of Defense. You’re supposed to be at The White House doing policy, and going to big-level meetings, and always looking out for the enterprise at large.” Again, I’m having Thanksgiving in different places. I turned to this one young kid, I always ate with him. He was a sailor. We were in Bahrain. I said, “If you were in my seat for one day, what would you do?” He said, “I’d get the part to fix my ID card making machine.” I said, “What?” He goes, “I’m responsible for making ID cards for family members, and right now I’m missing the flux capacitor.” He goes, “If I could just have that part, I could do my job.” I said, “We’ll take care of that for you.” That sounds silly, but the point is, we need to give voice to those that are not being heard in the armed forces, their families, and the veterans’ community. That was really powerful. I only had 73 days, so I wish I would have done more. I wish I could have done more. I could have solved a few more problems, and made lives a little bit easier. Maybe I could have reinforced faith just a little bit in some of those people that are questioning, “Should I stay in an organization that doesn’t pay me?” I could only imagine the trauma they must be experiencing, the psychological trauma with a spouse going, “How am I going to pay the bills this month because your job isn’t paying you?” That’s the kind of stuff I really wish I would’ve done more of. Mr. Jekielek: I have to ask about this because everyone is probably wondering. You were responsible for the DOD response on January 6th. Mr. Miller: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Tell me what happened. What did it look like from your vantage point? Mr. Miller: Oh, it was a horrifying situation. When the news starts hitting that the Capitol had been overrun, that’s not a good day in the Republic’s history. My point that I’ve made again and again and again, and I’m glad you brought it up, is, your armed forces should never conduct domestic law enforcement operations, except when civil society has broken down during a natural disaster, or when a city comes undone due to rioting. Then, people go, “What happened on Capitol Hill?” You have to remember something. You know this, Jan. Capitol Hill is owned by the legislative branch. The military is the executive branch. The executive branch sends the military to Capitol Hill without being invited. This sounds kind of arcane, but we need to remember this. Without being invited by the legislative branch, that’s called a military coup. I was never going to be a party to a military coup. We provided every single bit of military support requested by those authorized to request that. We were asked multiple times. At the end of the day, I have never lost a moment’s sleep on the decisions I made regarding military support on Capitol Hill that day. What’s great about your show is, you elevate the discussion beyond just the soundbites. I appreciate that. I’m so glad, in retrospect, that our armed forces didn’t have to go up there and fight protestors and demonstrators that day. That would have been a horrible, horrible day for America. At the end of the day, that’s the police’s job. At the end of the day, they failed that day. I have complete respect for the police officers that were in the field that day, but their leadership let them down. They didn’t have the capability and the support they needed that day. Mr. Jekielek: In the book, you put the responsibility on the police, because you say that they said, “We’re good.” Mr. Miller: Yes, they did. Mr. Jekielek: There were different meetings that you had, because there was intelligence that there was going to be some issues. You write that President Trump had said, “You’re going to need 10,000 people.” Mr. Miller: He did say that. Mr. Jekielek: In response, Mayor Bowser said 634. I can’t remember the exact number, whatever it was. “That’s all I can do.” You had your very clear red lines of what you could do, and what you couldn’t do at that time. Mr. Miller: Yes, exactly. The president had authorized me to do whatever was necessary, to provide support to law enforcement. I gave them exactly what they requested. You have to remember that there had been previous instances in the town, where the National Guard had been misutilized. There was this whole fear. Let’s be clear, there was a fear that the military was going to be used, counter-constitutionally, and I wasn’t going to allow that. There was that perception. Mr. Jekielek: This was a media narrative actually, ahead of January 6th. Mr. Miller: Yes. You have to remember the tension. We’re close to the Capitol now. The tension and the fear that was in the air. The last thing I was going to do was accelerate that, or accentuate this crazy narrative that somehow the military was going to be misused. That was coming from The Hill, and it was coming from a lot of people that should have known better. There were former secretaries of defense that took counsel of their fears, and cautioned me and others not to misuse the military. I found it horrifying that it could be so political that they would think that members of our armed forces would do something counter to their oath, and that I would, too. Mr. Jekielek: In the end, you described the mobilization of the National Guard that did happen as the quickest in history, if I recall. Mr. Miller: The 25,000 National Guards people up here, immediately following, because I had already moved on. In current ops, there’s nothing I can do now. The thing’s moving. We’ve mobilized the National Guard. Got the request at 2:35. I got briefed at 3:00, 3:04. Mobilized the National Guard. I was already thinking, “We have an inauguration coming up, so now we have to lock the city down. It’s my problem now. Civilian law enforcement failed. I’m going to have to do this.” It’s what I did. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. You described this moment, where your team gets on board, too. It’s a chapter that I hope everyone gets a chance to read when they read your book. Mr. Miller: I hope so. Mr. Jekielek: Chris, what’s next for you? Mr. Miller: What’s next? I hope I can just be part of the conversation. Obviously, the policy prescriptions in the book are controversial and provocative. I did that on purpose. It would be fun if one or two of them gets a little life. I have this belief that we need to reform our Department of Defense. One of the ways we’re going to do that is through the private sector. I’m trying to put my money where my mouth is, and I’m working for some really small, technologically interesting, autonomous warfare-type companies. Instead of just going to a major defense contractor, I felt it was really a requirement, and almost an obligation to those that I’ve worked with in the past, to try to drive that change, which is probably batting at windmills, but I’m going to give it a whirl and learn about business because I haven’t ever done that. The free enterprise system is the foundation of this country. It’s really, really fun to be learning a completely new field. At the end of the day, I want to make tons of money so that I can give it all back to veterans groups and help people in need. That’s what I’m going to try to do. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish? Mr. Miller: No. Thanks for having me. These long-form podcasts are so much better and important. It’s what we’re trying to do here, we in the fourth estate. We’re really trying to get beyond the fluff and the soundbites and the silly stuff that we see all too often on social media, and frankly on the shows now. Thanks for what you’re doing. You’ve been doing this for four years, and with the people you’ve had on, I’m really humbled to be one of them. Mr. Jekielek: Chris Miller, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Miller: Thanks. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Chris Miller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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In this episode of Kash’s Corner, we take a look at the two Chinese men recently arrested by the FBI in connection with a secret Chinese police station in New York City. This is just one among multiple Chinese Communist Party (CCP) police outposts in the United States, according to the watchdog group Safeguard Defenders. In two separate cases, the DOJ is charging 40 Chinese officials and police with conducting a coordinated harassment campaign against Chinese dissidents residing in the United States. And we continue looking at the Pentagon leaks. How did the suspected leaker, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsmen, get access to so many pages of classified documents? Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kashs-corner-how-did-the-pentagon-leaker-get-access-to-all-these-documents-multiple-secret-ccp-police-stations-in-america-exposed_5213175.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Kash Patel: Hey everybody, and welcome back to Kash’s Corner. Even though Jan and I are on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, there’s too much breaking news in national security, defense, and intel for us to take the week off. Thanks to the Epoch crew and staff for making this a reality. Jan, there’s a couple of things I know you want to jump into. Where should we start? Jan Jekielek: There have been two arrests in New York of people that are allegedly agents of the Chinese communist regime working out of this Chinese police station. As part of a bigger effort, Safeguard Defenders exposed these stations that have been set up by the CCP all around the world. That’s one. I really want to dig into that and the implications of what these things are and of this particular indictment. We were also looking at AI and we’ve been learning in this recent interview with Elon Musk that he says AI is being taught to lie. Finally, the Pentagon papers. We have this egregious leak, but it’s also given us some incredibly important information to work with. We have to break that all down. Let’s start with the Chinese Communist Party police stations in the U.S. I still can’t really believe that I’m saying that, and these have been operating with impunity for quite some time. Mr. Patel: Jan, it’s no surprise, certainly to you and most of our audience, that the CCP’s number one adversary is the United States of America. They don’t act with any respect to any sort of laws, international or otherwise. It doesn’t surprise me that they’re intruding on our infrastructure or personnel to gain leverage over America. The fashion in which they have now been caught doing it might be stunning to some folks who weren’t in the government or have much government intelligence experience, but let’s break it down. There’s actually two separate prosecutions. In lane A, you have prosecutions of two suspects who were actually arrested in New York City for conducting operations to damage America. Let’s just leave it at that for right now. Prosecution track number two; concerning a 40-person bot farm, the Chinese government, the CCP, has been caught utilizing them in mainland China and in the United States of America to coordinate an information attack campaign against Chinese dissidents in the United States of America. That’s the sum and substance of it, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: These two individuals in the first track that were charged, they’re actually known to The Epoch Times and known to people in Chinatown, New York, as being people who have been involved in organizing counter protests to dissident protests. Mr. Patel: Yes. What’s shocking to many, even in government, is the extent that the Chinese government, the CCP, has come in and placed individuals throughout American society, and not just in New York City. Jan, there’s actually reporting out there talking about these police stations, as we’ll call them for now, in multiple cities in the United States of America. From a government perspective, in order to install anyone overseas in an official diplomatic capacity is a major lift, because your two nations have to have a diplomatic relationship. Then, you exchange documentation, and you stand up embassies. These are the most popular examples. You allow people from your treasury, your DOJ, your law enforcement, and intel-military communities to nest over in their country and vice versa. What happens when the CCP comes on board? They use these non-benign diplomatic postings to infiltrate American society for a maleficent purpose, like trying to harm Chinese dissidents in the United States of America. They’re not just violating our national sovereignty, but as we now have been shown by the DOJ, also our federal statutes to obstruct justice and literally conspire against the United States of America. Because that’s what they’re doing. Just think of it the other way around, Jan. What if the United States of America had sent American government employees throughout Mainland China and tasked them with the following; go buy land in Mainland China, set up an infrastructure system, and on behalf of the United States government collect against Xi Jinping and his allies. The CCP would have a problem with that. They would think it’s an absolute violation of their national sovereignty. That’s what they’ve just done to us. These are the two guys that have gotten caught so far, but I don’t believe for a second they’re the only two. And that is only New York City. As the discovery process comes along, we’ll learn a lot more information. But Jan, with me being a former national security prosecutor, the problem with this case, unlike 99.9 percent of all prosecutions, is that this one involves classified information. What makes it very difficult for a federal prosecutor is that you cannot use classified information in a public court. You have to get the information declassified. You’re talking about some pretty sensitive stuff here when you are talking about collecting against CCP officials or spies who have been installed in mainland America to collect against America and our government. Now, in order to do that, some of the information’s going to be unclassified. But the way in which we go about detecting and collecting against that is going to be classified. There’s a very methodical process at DOJ, which I utilized on multiple occasions, to prosecute defendants in these types of cases that has to be undertaken before you even get to an arrest or an indictment, because you can’t have that information still be classified. That means the intelligence community, all 17 agencies have to sign off on the information you are going to put out in public to bring this prosecution. It’s a very lengthy ordeal. The fact that these guys were arrested just this week means to me this investigation is probably at least one year in the making. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Again, these so-called police stations, they’ve been running for years. This is not a new phenomenon and it just highlights to me how naive we’ve been on this side of the Atlantic or on that side of the Pacific with respect to Chinese Communist Party intentions. It strains credulity that one would allow such things, under the cover of providing diplomatic support. Many of these entities exist not just in the U.S., but around the world. Mr. Patel: Yes. There needs to be swifter action, in my opinion. A couple of individuals is step one, but as we’ve been shown by these prosecutions, the Chinese government, the CCP, has a parallel track to perpetuate these crimes. They have a bot farm in Mainland China to support this activity. That means they have an entire troll station, according to the other indictment, with 40-plus individuals sitting in Mainland China supporting this police station in New York City, in the United States of America. They have thought this thing out. Of course, they’re going to come in and deny it, but the action from the United States government should be the expulsion of Chinese diplomats, at least the majority of them, for violating the diplomatic agreement between our countries. Going back to our earlier point, just think what Xi Jinping would do, if he caught government assets from the United States of America on his soil acting in concert to violate Chinese national sovereignty? It would be an international crisis and they would not hesitate to act. That’s the distinction. While the federal prosecution is great because it holds people accountable publicly, what our government needs to do is implement some heavy trade sanctions, some swift and forceful economic sanctions and start expelling diplomats immediately. We need to say, “Xi Jinping, you have violated United States national sovereignty.” It doesn’t get much bigger than this Jan. I’m surprised, and yet I’m not surprised by the reticence from the Biden administration to make a swift response here. A prosecution is just not enough. Mr. Jekielek: This classified information piece is similar to this Pentagon leak that has been in the news everywhere. We’ve got two sides of the coin here. On one hand, we’ve got some very, very valuable information that was revealed. I want you to comment on what it means, and what we’ve actually learned. And on the other hand, how did this leak happen in the first place? There’s quite a discussion about whether this is a good or a bad thing, and I want to explore that. Let’s start with what the intelligence actually means. Mr. Patel: We now know according to the disclosures that have been reported in the media, the heart of the matter is that the effort by the United States government to fund on a large scale assistance to the Ukrainians for their war effort against Russia and Vladimir Putin has failed. Now, many organizations have been saying that, and many politicians have been saying that. But the crux of the matter is that the Biden administration and a lot of politicians have been saying, “We are succeeding in Ukraine.” The problem we have here is that you now have reporting, if accurate, that shows that to be a lie. It’s not like it’s a report from Australia or Canada or another Five Eyes partner. It’s a United States intelligence collection from the Department of Defense, a member of the intelligence community. Specifically, the DOD is the one responsible for war fighting operations, planning, assistance, and training overseas in places like the Ukraine. What I’ve asked publicly is why hasn’t the House Armed Services Committee, the Committee of Jurisdiction in the House of Representatives, and the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Senate side, immediately issued subpoenas to Secretary Austin and Chairman Milley, who lead our DOD, and asked them, “Why did you not provide accurate information to the White House and Congress? Is this leak totally incorrect? Is it completely made up? Is it a bogus story?” Also, there are questions that the Armed Services Committee needs to ask of the Gang of Eight. Reminding our audience, the Gang of Eight is the top eight leaders in Congress in the House and the Senate from Democrat and Republican parties who are put in place by law to oversee the intelligence that goes to the President, so that someone else other than just the commander-in-chief has access to it. As a co-equal branch of government, they have oversight for this specific purpose. If a president was lied to or if a president had information and went out and lied to the world about the success or failures of an operation, then they need to be held to account. But I’ve seen no action from Congress, the Armed Services Committee, or the Gang of Eight, to indicate they’re moving to acquire this information. That is as problematic as the information that was just released. Now we’ve had an arrest, just like we talked about in the first subject with the Chinese police stations. Prosecution is a good thing. It’s a step, but it does not reveal the entirety of the situation. We must look at this. It’s an internal operation, insofar as we can tell. We don’t know if he had external assistance from foreign governments or foreign actors. It looks like the leaker had assistance through chat rooms and other individuals that were involved. We can get into why I believe he had assistance in the Department of Defense. But there needs to be an accountability measure undertaken by Congress and it’s just entirely lacking right now. To me, that is as bad as the leak. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start on this side of things. In our previous episode, you mentioned the DOD or the intelligence community saying that this leaked information is categorically false, really means that it’s accurate. That’s what we said last week. This hasn’t changed. We’ve been assuming that this information is accurate. If it’s accurate, many people are saying, “Wow, this guy is a hero. This guy’s actually a whistleblower. This guy’s a whistleblower and this is really important information to shape our foreign policy decision making.” On the other hand, you’re saying that he should be prosecuted. We touched on this last week, but this is a very serious question that a lot of people have right now. Mr. Patel: The answer lies within your question, Jan. He could have been a whistleblower. There are statutes in place for individuals like this who want to expose government waste fraud and abuse and corruption to the United States Congress via the Intelligence Committee or the Armed Services Committee or the Judiciary Committee, the United States Congress has legislated for this specific purpose. Being a former senior staffer in the House Intel Committee who accepted whistleblower complaints and knowing how that process works, he could have done that. Let me remind the audience, Jan, this individual has been at it for six months at a minimum. A uniformed United States military employee decided on his own to take information over a months-long campaign and disperse it illegally on the internet. I refuse to believe for one second that his good intentions could not have been met by becoming a whistleblower. He knows the United States government. He could have hand delivered this information to many committees of jurisdiction, and this information could have gotten out and he would not have broken the law. People may regard him as a hero, because they like the information that was produced, but it does not give him the right to break the law. Then there were people commenting on our board last week. I’m glad there was such a vigorous discussion on it that compared him to Julian Assange, and called for his pardoning. I don’t call for that. I think Julian Assange committed espionage and should be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter what the substance of the information is. The ends do not justify the means in the United States of America. They never have, and they never should. If we or any sector of our community says, “Because it exposed this huge corruption, we must permit it.” Just think of what happens next. Who’s coming out next to leak all sorts of sensitive information to achieve what I identify as a political objective? If you are a U.S. employee entrusted with our nation’s secrets, and serving our nation to protect its independence and freedom, then you cannot go out there and break the law to achieve your objective. I still don’t know what his objective is. We don’t have the entire case out there yet. We don’t know who else he worked with. There’s no way he did it alone. There’s too many questions out there, putting aside my feelings on whether or not he should be prosecuted. There’s so many other questions that I think we need to get to the public, before they make their final determination on this. There’s always going to be people out there that say, “You’re wrong. He should not be prosecuted.” I just disagree. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, the response to this would be that we are living in a time when we’ve seen these Twitter Files, disclosures, and discovery from multiple lawsuits. It’s been shown that certain elements of the intelligence community, DOD, and DOJ have been weaponized against Americans. In this situation, you can imagine people thinking, “I can’t trust the system. I have to go around it.” A lot of people that heard what you just said might be thinking exactly what I’m saying right now. How do you respond to that? Mr. Patel: It’s the United States of America. You can’t break the law to perform an act which you might think is saving the union or critical to our existence. It’s the reason we are different from the majority of nations out there, especially like the CCP and Vladimir Putin and their corrupt regimes. We do not allow for that in the US of A. There’s no one more frustrated than me when you have a system in the U.S. that is failing. I am in wild agreement with you on the fact that things like the Twitter Files have exposed government waste, fraud, and abuse, but so have whistleblowers, namely the FBI whistleblowers that came forward and exposed corruption at the FBI. It’s not an easy path. It’s definitely not fun for those individuals, but we cannot have a national security apparatus that is premised in the law only to allow people to break it, because the next person says, “I did it for an objective that I thought was right, so give me a pass just like you gave that other guy.” The distinction is going to be what is the ultimate objective of the person, which becomes subjective. He could be a far-Left individual or a far-Right individual. Jan, this is the reason why I don’t agree, and why the United States of America does not allow for an illegal type of disclosure just to correct a failing part of the United States government. I agree with you, this is a massive exposure and we’re going to learn a lot from it. But I violently disagree with the way this individual went about it. I’m not cheering him on, because then I would be cheering on the next iteration of it, and the next 100 that would follow him. That is the slippery slope you never want to cannonball down. Mr. Jekielek: To your point, Kash, strategic leaking of classified information has actually been used by multiple people,during the past administration to achieve particular ends. In this case, you have also argued that the leaker in no way acted alone. Mr. Patel: Yes. Here’s why. To remind our audience, a lot of information has broken since we last covered it. That’s why we’re continuing the conversation here. From my experience as both the deputy DNI and chief of staff at DOD, and having worked operationally in the intelligence community space, that the information we’re talking about—for folks who haven’t seen last week’s episode, go check it out because it’s the underlying groundwork for answering the next question—the reason he can’t act alone is because he cannot solely access this information. More importantly, he cannot solely disclose it during a months-long campaign. Jan, it’s not like he took a sheet of paper that was classified and said, “Here you go, give it over to the media, and publish it on the internet.” From what we’re told, he has hundreds of documents, and lots of pages of material. That means he went in and out on multiple occasions. He accessed secure compartments in information facilities, skiffs, and vaults that house this type of information. With the level of information we’re talking about that we discussed last week, that style of classified intelligence, just because you have a top secret SCI clearance doesn’t mean you have the “need to know,” to access it. That’s the distinction here. Lots of government employees have a TS/SCI [Top Secret/Secure Compartment and Information Clearance]. The overwhelming majority of those individuals do not have a need to know on 95 percent of what is top secret SCI. They have never given access to it. This individual falls in that basket. Because as a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, you should not have information about Mossadi intelligence collection. As a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, you should not have troop movements in and around Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin’s response to that posturing. You just shouldn’t have it because you’re not involved in any level in the operational policy or planning decision making that that intelligence is utilized for. As a 21-year old E3, his level in the military, he just doesn’t have access to it. How did he get it? We don’t know that yet. Who else did he give it to? Was he working with someone on the outside? There’s a lot of questions that remain unanswered. Is there going to be another disclosure? Maybe. Maybe he gave a bunch of stuff to someone else. It seems from the public reporting, this individual’s objective by disclosing this information was to inform the world about these subject matters. It seems like he wanted a bunch of stuff out there. That means he thought about it methodically, being an individual in the United States military with access to classified information, and knowing it’s illegal to collect it and distribute it outside. He had to have thought of a plan to do so and acted in concert with somebody or had some assistance. Here’s the thing I haven’t talked about anywhere yet, Jan. If I’m wrong, and he acted alone, we have an even bigger problem. How did some guy at 21 years of age access the United States of America’s most secure intelligence information and then leak it all on his own? To me, that’s an even bigger problem for the intelligence community. It’s not about me being right or wrong, but the alternative is shockingly worse for the national security apparatus in this country. Mr. Jekielek: I’m imagining this situation. Let’s say you have people of different political persuasions for different strategic reasons leaking classified information. That could become a war, if you will. In the end, it is breaking down the system. This is what this extreme Left onslaught that America is facing today is actually all about. It’s about breaking down the system. This is a very difficult thing to deal with when you are on the side of fighting for rule of law, and fighting for the system that allows for freedom and liberty. Mr. Patel: Yes, absolutely. Mr. Jekielek: Another area that is endangering all this now is this development of AI. We have this recent interview with Elon Musk where he talks about AI being taught to lie. Victor Davis Hanson, whom I speak with regularly on American Thought Leaders, was on record talking about how very Left-wing false talking points have made it into the Academy revisionist history is becoming the norm. He talked about how certain AI chat bots are responding to queries around history. There’s always been this attempt in communist societies to erase history and to rewrite history. In 1984 by George Orwell, there was a whole department dedicated to this. It’s a central theme in the book. With AI, this takes this whole idea to a new level, where essentially whole swaths of digitized history can be completely erased and rewritten into something very ideological. Mr. Patel: Yes, it’s not surprising, but a shocking development. What I mean by that is we’re talking about going back and changing historical facts. That’s mentioned in one of these articles, which we can put up for our audience, about Al Gore’s father and his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, versus what AI is doing on the internet to change that hard fact of history. That’s just one example of where it’s going in terms of historical spaces. Regarding AI, my expertise doesn’t come from that part of it, but from the government’s utilization of it. It applies to both areas of conversation we’re having right now. AI serves a purpose, of course it does. But my central thesis upfront is AI cannot replace human manpower, it just can’t. When you try to do that, then you run into these problems of revisionist history. In the government space, you run into these problems of missing critical evidence and intelligence that could prevent another attack, that could lead to a criminal objective that you’ve been looking for, or that could even lead to a war, if we have missed the intelligence or got it wrong. The Persian Gulf War is a prime example of that, and also us being on the precipice of war in the Ukraine. This is why it’s so critical to talk about it. I talk to my former colleagues and they say, “AI’s great because here’s what it can do. We ingest all of this intelligence, and all of this information comes into the United States government. It’s stored in all these databases. How do we go through it?” Of course, we don’t have the human manpower to go through everything person by person. But we can’t have AI supplant human manpower. It should supplement it. If we figure out a way to do that, then they can coexist. What you’re talking about Jan with the media reporting about revisionist history is that AI is going out there and uniformly just disbanding fact and replacing it with fiction. There’s no human being in place to say, “What is this algorithm doing?” And then, to ask further, “Who put this algorithm in place? Who created it? Who bought it, who paid for it, and who sold it?” In government, you want to ask the same question, “Where’s this algorithm, this AI machinery coming from, and where are we sending it? Who has access to it?” Remember, at the end of the day, AI is artificial intelligence. That means there’s an input and an output. Someone is getting everything that is being generated by that AI system. Who is that someone? Are we open to vulnerability? Can a foreign adversary, the CCP, use AI in the United States of America and intrude upon our systems and expand their police station operation across the United States of America? I bet you they did just that, Jan. They’ve got the AI hub station in Beijing that we talked about earlier. Why wouldn’t they use it for that nefarious, illegal purposes? This discussion has gone on for a long time, and I’m glad it’s now front and center, because of things that are being discussed with AI’s involvement in Big Tech at Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like. Those institutions will continue to use more and more and more and more AI. Someone, whether it’s Congress or the executive branch needs to step in and say, “Hang on a second. What are we doing in the government intelligence space to counterman the abuses that AI has allowed, and will lead to?” Mr. Jekielek: Multiple things occur to me here. Number one, in this recent piece by Jacob Siegel in Tablet, having been an intelligence officer, he talks about how it’s this kind of dream for intelligence to have the perfect information, which can then be digested using some kind of system like AI to make perfect determinations. This is the holy grail in these communities. You’re basically explaining here why that can never work. The second piece is to imagine a situation where the people that were programming these things have rigorous commitment to measuring objective reality as best as you can. That ethic also is being programmed into the AI. But many of the people programming these things believe that reality is constructed. They believe their very specific, particular narratives should be the correct narratives, and reality be damned. What are the implications of that for AI? Elon Musk was talking about AI being taught to lie. It’s being taught to pursue narratives over reality, and explain those narratives as if they were reality to the people using AI. Mr. Patel: You said it in a very meaningful way that I want to lead with to our audience. This conversation can’t possibly end today. What happens when AI couples with bad actors? Someone has to build the AI. What happens, whether it’s in the media space, the Big Tech space or the government space, bad actors or bad individuals take that AI and use it for nefarious, unlawful purposes. That’s the ultimate problem we face with artificial intelligence, and there’s no short-term solution for it right now. Mr. Jekielek: The third piece that I didn’t mention yet, is that most of the most cutting edge AI development with Microsoft and Google is actually being done in China. That means the CCP has been given access to this technology, because those are the conditions for operating there. I find this terrifying. Again, it’s a reality where you have a system that basically has no guardrails. There is a civil-military fusion doctrine. If there is a military application for technology, which obviously there is here, it is exploited as much as possible. Why are we still doing this development in China? Mr. Jekielek: The short answer is money. There’s no regulation right now from the United States government standpoint, that is a check on performing that type of activity; taking and creating and deploying AI from a U.S. company in Mainland China. Just think about it. The Chinese government does the opposite all day long. TikTok is on some level an algorithmic-based infrastructure system that operates partially on AI that the Chinese use to tunnel into America. When we give them one that they didn’t build themselves and is hosted in Mainland China, what do you think the CCP is going to do? Look at the CCP’s unlawful conduct setting up police stations across America. Now we have companies like Google and Amazon and Apple distributing or deploying pieces of this AI that they are creating as American businesses in Mainland China. But we’re to believe that it’s fully safeguarded from the CCP. Not for one second. And that, Jan, is the biggest pending problem that’s coming up on the AI front. Mr. Jekielek: It’s huge. Major AI R&D operations are located there. I might add one more thing. I’ve described AI as a voracious devourer of information. The more information you can feed into AI, the faster it can develop, and the more information they have to make their calculations and be more effective. China would be an incredibly attractive place to do AI R&D. This might be another reason because the amount to ingest is so massive. You have this whole social credit system operating, which is micro-information, unbelievable detailed amounts of information on every single citizen. Again, the implications are staggering. Mr. Patel: Yes, it’s like anything else from a national security perspective. Jan, if the CCP is involved, you can bet that they are going to use it in some fashion to attack or degrade the United States of America. And that to me is the bottom line. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, tough topics today. It’s time for our shout-out. Mr. Patel: They are tough topics. That’s what we tackle on this show. I’m very appreciative that we have an audience that will tell us what they think, even when they disagree with us. This isn’t a show that’s supposed to go out there and have 100 percent uniformity. The topics of this week’s episode highlight that. This week’s shout-out goes to Gary Long. Thank you so much for your suggestions and commentary on our chat board. Thank you to everybody who posted so many extensive comments on last week’s episode. We review them thoroughly and it builds a better show for you all in the coming weeks. Please keep posting, and we look forward to the next live chat. We’ll see you next week on Kash’s Corner. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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1, Crossroads: Are Republican Attacks on MAGA Making Trump Only Stronger? When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, and eventually won, he did so with a key campaign promise: He said he’d “drain the swamp.” The initial sentiment after Trump left office was that he failed at this. The new sentiment is that he did in fact drain it, and now the nation is seeing all the swamp creatures that once hid below the surface. This is bringing about a new type of political debate for the country. Rather than being between Republicans and Democrats, it’s now between the “MAGA Republicans” and the establishment. And the anti-establishment camp is breaking from the old systems of information control. 🔴 Watch the full episode with live Q&A HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/JoshLive0508CR 2, Facts Matter: Beware of Toxic Chocolate: Heavy Metals Found in Major Brand Names According to a new study Consumer Reports study, many of the chocolate brands that Americans buy from the supermarket contain high levels of toxic metals—including things like cadmium and lead. These researchers were looking into some of the most popular brands, the ones that are very likely in your cupboard right now: things like Hershey’s, Dove Chocolate, Trader Joe’s, and so on. The researchers here were looking specifically at dark chocolate, which is a little bit ironic considering many people choose dark chocolate over alternatives like milk chocolate because of the supposed health benefits: including anti-oxidants and the fact that dark chocolate has less sugar. However, for many years now, the chocolate industry has been grappling with a certain problem—that heavy metals are difficult to remove during the production process, and secondly, metals like lead are introduced into the food during manufacturing. New Exclusive episode on EpochTV: Death Penalty for Child Rapists: New Law Goes into Effect in Florida Florida Gov. Ron DeSant has just signed a new bill into law that will authorize the death penalty for child rapists within his state. The new bill is called HB 1297, and it overwhelmingly passed the Florida legislature last month. In the Florida House, it passed 95–14, and in the Florida Senate, it passed 34–5. And now that it’s officially on the books, this new law will allow those individuals who have been found guilty of raping children under the age of 12 to be sentenced to execution. This death sentence does not require a unanimous jury decision. What this will mean in practice is that in the state of Florida, a prosecutor will only need the approval of 8 out of 12 jurors to be able to go ahead with a sentence of capital punishment. 🔴 Join us with a very special OFFER: https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW11 3, Truth Over News: Corporate Media Have Become Political Operatives, Messaging on the Government’s Behalf We’re at a frightening point in time. The media, which is supposed to serve as a government watchdog, is now operating hand in glove, or even worse, at the behest of a government with whom it is supposed to maintain an adversarial relationship. The purpose of traditional media is to check and challenge what our government is telling us, to operate on the assumption that the government is inclined to lie to the American public, and to uncover those lies. But today’s Corporate media has completely forsaken that role and is now openly messaging on behalf of the government—at the government’s direction and in open opposition to the best interests of American citizens. Our nation’s media has become the unquestioning propaganda arm of the intelligence community and the larger Washington establishment. 🔵 Unlimited EpochTV access to many documentaries and shows starts at only $1: https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW 4, The Beau Show: Woke Late-Night TV Shows Shut Down Screenwriters for TV and film have begun to strike as their contracts ended. The strike will affect the late-night four: Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, and Myers. Other shows that will have to halt production are “Real Time” with Bill Maher, “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver, and the weekend favorite “Saturday Night Live.” These shows could be affected for multiple weeks, but the late-night ad revenue has been declining for some time. There may be several reasons for this, but one has to do with the woke content being out of touch with viewers. This strike would be a good time for writers to step out into the public and find out what people actually think and find funny. Then, when the writers return, they should breathe some fresh life into the shows for which they write. 🔵 Watch the Full Episode on EpochTV 👉🏻 https://ept.ms/TBS-WGAYT 🔴 Unlimited EpochTV Access. Only $1 Trial (Limited Offer): https://ept.ms/1For2Months-Beau