Today I sit down with Jason Jones, a film producer and human rights worker who has devoted himself to serving the world’s most vulnerable people, from China to Afghanistan. “Through what we call Operation Noble Brother, we’re seeking to identify every widow and all of the orphans of our Afghan allies who were killed in action, and make sure we give them the support they need to live,” he says. Jones is the president of the Human-Rights Education and Relief Organization (H.E.R.O.) and founder of the Vulnerable People Project. Last winter, his team delivered coal to thousands of families of former Afghan allies, Christians, Hazaras, and other minorities in Afghanistan, so they could survive the bitter winter. His organization is maintaining safe houses for persecuted peoples under the Taliban, delivering food and medicine across Ukraine, and working to free bishops imprisoned in China. “We always say … what did the Germans know? And when did they know it? … But the question we need to ask ourselves is what did we know about the Uyghur genocide? What did we know about the Falun Gong? When did we know it?” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/our-inaction-today-will-haunt-our-grandchildren-tomorrow-jason-jones-on-helping-the-worlds-most-vulnerable-from-afghanistan-to-china_5203010.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jason Jones, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jason Jones: Jan, it’s a privilege to be with you. Mr. Jekielek: Jason, you have an organization that works in many parts of the world helping what you call vulnerable people. Examples that come to mind are Afghanistan, where you work right now supporting some of the hardest hit folks. People have lost family members. It’s just an amazing story to me. You’re also working with vulnerable people in other parts of the world, notably with this Catholic bishops project that you have in China. I want to talk about that. How did you get into all of this? Mr. Jones: Thank you for the question. David Mamet, one of the greatest playwrights of the past 100 years, said that writers write for the same reason beavers gnaw on wood—because their teeth itch. I run an organization that I founded over 20 years ago to defend the vulnerable from violence, because my teeth itch. My teeth itch at the thought of children being exposed to genocide, to democide, and trapped in total war. The idea for my organization was really birthed when I was a young soldier. I joined the army on my 17th birthday. I dropped out of high school and on my 17th birthday I joined the army. I joined the army because just a few days before my 17th birthday, my high school girlfriend rode her bicycle five miles to my house on a Saturday morning and walked up the stairs to my bedroom and woke me up with the words, “I’m pregnant.” My mother had me when she was 16. My dream as a young boy was just that I wanted to be a father of an intact family, and that my wife and children would be happy and safe. This was my daydream, and I thought being a professional football player was how I would do it. But when I found out my high school girlfriend was pregnant, I knew that I could join the army, because a friend of mine just did it through a special program for troubled youth, which I was. I knew I qualified for that designation. While I was in basic training, my high school girlfriend hid her pregnancy and took vitamins and wrote me letters. But about two weeks before I was to graduate and come home on a Sunday morning, I got a phone call. I was cleaning pots and pans and a friend came running into where I was in the kitchen and said, “Come out here and answer the phone. Your girlfriend’s crying.” She was crying like I had never heard anyone cry in my life. The only way I can explain it to you is that her soul was crying. She kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry it wasn’t me.” Then, her dad grabbed the phone and said, “I know your secret, and it’s gone. I took her to get an abortion.” A drill sergeant hung up the phone, and I punched him. Another drill sergeant grabbed me by my collar and dragged me into my captain’s office and threw me into a chair. I just kept crying saying, “Call the police. My girlfriend’s father killed my baby.” My captain, a big army ranger, had tears pouring down his eyes. Just looking at me made him cry. When I explained what happened, he looked at me confused. He said, “Why would I call the police? Abortion is legal” I never went to church a day in my life growing up. I knew nothing about politics. This was before Google or even 24-hour cable news. I did not know in our country that it was legal to destroy the most vulnerable members of our family, the child in the womb, until I found out that my child was destroyed. I can’t express to you how shocking that was to me. It was maybe just four months later, and I was on my first overseas deployment. I saw a father with his son who was very sick and dying when we were on a forced road march through the rural mountains of Thailand. I remember just locking eyes with this father who was holding his son who was not much younger than I was at 17. I was young and this boy was probably 13, but he looked like he weighed 60 pounds. I asked the translator, “What’s wrong with him?” Our interpreter said, “I don’t know, but he’s dying.” The father and I locked eyes. We were in the most rural part of Thailand in the mountains. The look in that father’s eyes holding his son as he leaned up against the fence was exactly how I was still feeling. It was at that minute I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life helping fathers protect their children when they are in impossible situations, because I thought I was a strong young man. I wanted to be strong. My whole life was about I’m going to be strong. I’m going to be intelligent. I’m going to be hardworking and my family will be safe. But I couldn’t protect my own child to birth. When I saw the look in this father’s eyes, he could not save his child. I’ve really come to understand that vulnerable people are not weak people. They’re strong people placed in impossible situations. I founded my organization so that I could stand with strong people who have been in impossible situations, and so I can inspire others to stand with them. When you have enough people standing with these vulnerable communities and impossible situations, they become possible situations. Then, we can help rescue them from the catastrophes they find themselves in. Mr. Jekielek: It’s remarkable given the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, and where relations have gone subsequently, that your organization is actually able to offer food and fuel to that country. Mr. Jones: Yes, my work in Afghanistan, again, came with a phone call. I was fighting COVID pneumonia, and was very sick. I was lying on my couch in my home office in early August of 2021, when my phone rang and it was a young woman who used to work for me. I also make films. It was a young actress from Hollywood who said, “One of my best friend’s mother-in-law, her husband is Afghan, and he made an anti-Taliban film. She got a death threat letter saying that when they come to Kabul, the Taliban is going to kill her. Can you save my friend’s mom?” I said, “Let me see what I can do.” I was taking my Prednisone for pneumonia. I opened up my laptop and I grabbed my phone and I called people I knew at the State Department. I just started reaching out to people I knew everywhere, and I was able to help this woman. By the end of the first day, word spreads. I had 12 names in an Excel file. By the end of the first week, I remember I had 576 names, and that’s how it started for me. A friend of mine who was an army captain called me, “Can you save my translator?” A pastor called me, “Can you save this small group of Christians?” By the end of the first week, we were approaching 600 people to help. Okay, if I can just get these 600 people out. Three weeks into it, I realized I needed to hire staff and build out what we called Hope For Afghanistan. From that, we built an operation that evacuated thousands and resettled thousands. But going into the winter of last year, it was a brutal winter. COVID policy was already driving the world to the brink of the greatest famine the world has known since World War II. You now have Afghanistan’s economy in total collapse and a tough winter coming down. It gets very cold there. We were raising money to evacuate and resettle folks, pay for visas, and pay for safe houses in neighboring countries. I looked at how much money we were raising. We raised a bit of money and I said, “How do I deploy this to do the most good?” One of my Afghan partners said, “There is mass starvation in these rural villages.” We had sent teams and they would go into villages and it would look like families were sleeping, but they were dead. We broke it down. It cost $250 to feed a family of seven through the winter and also to get them coal. We raised a little over half-a-million for our evacuation initiative, but no countries were granting visas. I said, “Let’s switch gears. Let’s get every penny that we’ve raised out as food and coal for this winter.” We launched what we call Coal For Christmas. As a matter of fact, I have delivered more coal on Christmas than Santa Claus ever did. Just this winter alone, 500,000 meals have been delivered by VPP [The Vulnerable People Project] since Christmas Eve, and we’ve delivered coal to communities all over Afghanistan. Oftentimes my teams are bringing coal over on donkeys through icy mountain passages. That’s our goal; to reach the ethnic minorities like the Hazara, the 30,000 Christians, but also the widows and orphans of our Afghan allies who were killed in action. They now have no one to support them. Obviously, they currently get animosity from the government now in power in Afghanistan. Through what we call Operation Noble Brother, we are seeking to identify every widow and all of the orphans of our Afghan allies who were killed in action, and make sure we give them the support they need to live. But it all started with one phone call from a young woman who worked for me who said, “Save my friend’s mom.” Mr. Jekielek: It’s hard to imagine how this government that has a lot of animosity towards the people you just described would let you operate there. How does that work? Mr. Jones: The Taliban is not monolithic. One of the things I’ve come to discover as I’ve worked around the world is that when we show up on the scene, we’re looking for white hats and black hats. I don’t look for hats. I look for suffering people and I serve them whatever the risk. When you serve vulnerable communities, you become as vulnerable as they are, period. You can even be in the United States. If you stand up to the CCP, you’re placing yourself in trouble. Enes Kanter Freedom got kicked out of the NBA, can you imagine that? He got kicked out of the NBA for speaking out against the genocide. It’s really unbelievable stuff, but this is how it works. We’re not naive. We know that there is risk with our work. I’ve been in Sudan, nose-to-nose with Al-Qaeda. I could look at ISIS in Iraq and they could look at me. In Afghanistan, the situation on the ground is that 50 percent of the country is starving to death, 90 percent of the country is experiencing hunger, and 50 percent is fighting for their life. This is really unbelievable. ISIS and maybe some more extreme elements of the Taliban are probably not happy with what we’re doing. But our teams are allowed to operate and to serve these communities. It is a bit of a mystery to us, but we just put our nose down and work. I’m pretty much of an open book. I’m a writer, I have a podcast, and I don’t have a filter. They know who we are, they know who I am, and they know my motive. My motive is just really simple. My teeth itch because there are children starving to death. The fathers are looking at their children starving to death. I want to give those fathers the support they need to keep their children alive. That’s my goal. It’s not about politics. I’m not there to proselytize. I am there to keep as many children alive through the brutal winter as I can. That’s why VPP is there, and that’s why the people who work for me are doing the work that they’re doing. Mr. Jekielek: It would be incredibly bad form for the governing bodies there to say, “Sorry, we’re not going to let you deliver these things.” Are some of these specific people that you’re aiding being watched by the government or persecuted in some way? Mr. Jones: Definitely persecuted, yes. There are people that we have to support, and when we deliver food to them, it’s a little tricky. Most definitely, yes. We always look to serve the most vulnerable. We start at the bottom with, “Who is starving to death?” Sometimes other groups will say, “Why are you going to these rural areas?” Because they’re dying. About 10 percent of the village has already died, so that’s where we are starting. I even make that clear to our partners on the ground sometimes. They are used to dealing with Western NGOs who like clout, and who like influence. When people call me and they start bragging about who they’re close to, I just say, “Yes, we don’t help you. We’re the Vulnerable People Project. We’re not the wealthy and connected grifter project. There are a lot of other organizations that you can reach out to that get excited about powerful people helping to grift with them. That is not our mission.” If you go to our website, thegreatcampaign.org, you can look at the people we serve by paying for surgeries and delivering medicine. These are the people that weren’t even being reached when the U.S. was there. That’s just my mission. I look to the image of The Pietà, this beautiful work of art of the blessed Virgin Mary with her son draped across her lap. As a Catholic, I see that as the second person of the Trinity—God, the word of life, the creator—who is lifeless across a creature’s lap, a creature out of all eternity who was created to bring God to man. But you have a weak creature holding the creator. That’s our work. We are weak. I am a weak instrument. I wish the people that I served had somebody more capable than me to serve them. It’s embarrassing sometimes, because they’re so smart, they’re so virtuous, they’re so talented, they’re so long-suffering, they’re so kind, and they got me. I’m sorry. I wish you had somebody smarter than me, more connected than me, more influential than me, but I’m what you got, and it’s a little embarrassing. These people that we support are so noble, they’re so hardworking, and they’re so brave. They might be the poorest people in the world, but they’re also the most impressive and most beautiful people in the world. Mr. Jekielek: With these kinds of impossible situations, you have to try and see what happens, and that’s what you’ve been doing, correct? Mr. Jones: Yes. They’re not impossible. I just tell my team, there is no impossible situation. We have problems that seem impossible, but they’re not. We have to stop and think, and we have to have fortitude. We have to have manageable goals that bring us into the right direction. Write that press release, get that news story, raise the money you need, and then successfully distribute it. I was in the infantry in the army. When you’re in an ambush, when you’re surrounded by the enemy and it’s chaos and you smell human flesh and there are bullets flying and bombs going off and you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you’re scared, you are trained in an ambush situation to shoot the target in front of you and keep moving until there are no more targets. I tell my team, we save the life in front of us and we don’t stop moving until there are no lives to save. But that’s not going to happen. No matter how confusing it is, no matter how fearful we are, no matter how hopeless it seems, our job is just to save the life in front of us. That one life. We just had a notable rescue that got international media attention and my friend said, “Did you feel good?” I have to say, to be honest, I didn’t feel good. I just didn’t feel bad that day. Because we always know who we didn’t rescue today. We know how many people are starving to death today, but maybe that day I just didn’t feel so bad. Mr. Jekielek: Talk about impossible situations. Mr. Jones: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: The Vatican has a deal with the Chinese Communist Party around ordaining bishops. A lot of people don’t know about this, maybe I’ll get you to reprise it for me. There is an official state Catholic Church, and there is the official Catholic Church. What a bizarre reality. Mr. Jones: It’s a bizarre reality. Mr. Jekielek: You’re trying to help these persecuted Catholic bishops in this structure, and there is still cooperation. It’s hard to imagine how this could be possible. Mr. Jones: It’s confusing, isn’t it? One of the things I always try to express to people, the vulnerable are not always poor. Sometimes they’re wealthy people. Sometimes the wealthy are the snow at the top of the hill seen from the valley. If you look at China right now, the CCP has convicted Jimmy Lai, a Catholic layman, very prominent and very wealthy, who will probably die in prison. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Rome has been silent. You have Cardinal Zen. I am an American lay Catholic in the United States, but Cardinal Zen is someone I’ve admired greatly for years. Many of us hoped that he would be Pope. It wasn’t until the passing of Pope Benedict that he was even able to get a brief audience with Pope Francis. Cardinal Zen is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the CCP’s persecution of bishops. We have seven bishops that are sitting and rotting in black prison sites. Some of them are rumored to have been killed. We have just countless thousands of Catholic lay people who are rotting away in CCP prisons. They become very sophisticated in how they round people up and how they disappear them. Of course, in the West, there’s not a peep. But the silence of Pope Francis, and the silence of the hierarchy of the church is quite scandalous. Scandal means stumbling block. I always tell my team, we’re going to pile up these stumbling blocks and stand on them and shout to the world. In many ways, the silence of Pope Francis can be our megaphone. Why has Pope Francis been silent on the persecution of the Falun Gong? Why is he even silent on this great genocide of the Uyghurs, an ethnic and religious minority, with 3 million in concentration camps? It was just six centuries ago in history that Christians were suffering a great genocide. There are unimaginable evils, like live organ harvesting. It’s unspeakable and unimaginable. Pope Francis has never said the word Uyghur aloud—never said the word aloud. We always say, “What did the Germans know and when did they know it?” Actually, they didn’t know much. Of course they didn’t. They lived within a tyrannical regime without mass communication. What they knew was all rumors that could probably be easily dismissed. The question we need to ask ourself is what did we know about the Uyghur genocide? What did we know about Falun Gong? When did we know it? What did we know about American corporations using slave labor to manufacture their products? If we were to put a blue light, metaphorically speaking, throughout all of our homes, it would be a crime scene. With our electronics, our clothing, the cotton in our clothing, we would have blood all over our houses, and we know it. The thing is that we know it. We know it. I’m not saying that the guy who wakes up every morning, drops off his kids at school, and drives down to the firehouse, has to organize to free the Uyghurs, or to free our bishops who have disappeared. What I want to know is why the hierarchy of my church is virtue signaling on popular issues like global warming and the rainbow flag issues all the time? Why do they never mention the Uyghurs? Why can’t they fight for their own? Jesus Christ said, “Even the Gentiles, even they love their own.” Are we worse? Are we worse than the pre-Christian revelation pagans, the Gentiles, that don’t even remember their own? Are we embarrassed to remember our own? People will often commend me for advocating for other ethnic and religious minorities, but they look at me crossways when I stand up for my own. If I’m not willing to fight for Catholic bishops that are imprisoned by the CCP, you should trust my motives on why I’m fighting them for the Uyghurs. Is it to be liked? Is it to show how broad-minded and intolerant I am? Is it virtue signaling? No, when I fight for people I don’t look at their religion and I don’t look at their ethnicity. It’s the idea that people are being pummeled, thrashed, brutalized, tortured, imprisoned, and killed, while I live in a world of unimaginable comfort and luxury with access to all sorts of technologies. I have opportunities to speak out for them and I’m not going to? Because there’s some great streaming series I got to watch at home? No, no, no, no, no. I’m going to fight for the Uyghurs. I’m going to fight for Falun Gong, but you can bet I’m going to fight for my own too. I’m going to fight for my co-religionists. I’m going to fight for Catholic priests. I’m going to fight for Catholic bishops. I’m going to fight for a Catholic laity like Jimmy Lai, and by God’s grace, he will not die in prison. I’m sure he is fine with it. I’m sure he’s sitting there praying and getting closer to God, but that’s his business. My business as a Catholic lay man in America is to get him out of prison and to get our bishops out of prison and to bring down the CCP because the CCP is a menace—first to the people of China, all of the people of China, and then to its neighbors, and now the world. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to me how you think it’s possible for the Catholic Church to have made this deal with the regime? Mr. Jones: I bet you already know the answer. We know how that’s possible. It was the disgraced former Cardinal McCarrick, a known pervert and predator, who brokered a deal with the regime that deals in using sex to blackmail people. You send the most blackmailable human being in God’s creation to broker a deal with the CCP. We don’t know the terms of the deal. We hear that it’s 1 or 2 billion. But here’s what I know. When I spoke at the International Religious Freedom Conference last year, Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of State Blinken condemned the CCP. Cardinal Dolan criticized the United States, but was silent about the CCP. The only speaker at the International Religious Freedom Conference that was silent two years ago was the representative from the USCCB [United States Conference of Catholic Bishops]. Pope Francis has never once mentioned the Uyghur genocide. The CCP can’t make its own bishops. Could you imagine if Donald Trump just started making bishops? I’d rather have Antifa start ordaining bishops than the CCP. This is just really unbelievable stuff. Silence. There is a famous scene, it’s speculation, of a Chinese woman talking to Pope Francis in an audience, and he slaps her, a famous scene. I talked to a journalist who said she was asking him why he had been silent on the Uyghur genocide. I don’t know if that was the case. I do know he swatted a Chinese woman away who was pleading with him over something. I also know that our church was silent on the genocide of the Assyrians and Chaldeans at the hands of ISIS in Iraq. I was there documenting it. I had a Chaldean priest grabbing me with tears in his eyes saying, “Why is the Pope beaming images of wild animals on St. Peter’s Square, when he was bringing attention to global warming with Al Gore, and yet not beaming the images of my children who are being murdered by ISIS?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Has the West forgotten us?” I had to tell him, “Father, the West doesn’t even know you exist.” This is sorrowful. There are only two ways to order the world. You ignore, trample, and shunt aside the vulnerable, or you order your community to serve the vulnerable. It could be your family. Does your family push aside the member that struggles with a physical disability or a mental illness or an addiction? Do you push them aside, trample them and abandon them, or do you order your family to serve them? It’s the same thing with a town, a nation, a state or our family, the human family. There is no middle ground. Either we order our communities to advocate and serve those who are most vulnerable or we push them aside, trample them, abuse them, and exploit them. Right now, it appears in the most sad times in human history, we are exploiting, pushing aside, trampling, and abandoning. This will only end in catastrophe for our posterity. I’m just racing to save the world so my posterity can live in peace. That’s it. That’s how I see my work. Mr. Jekielek: One person at a time. Mr. Jones: One human being at a time. Mr. Jekielek: I was coming to the same conclusion that sadly we are less and less ordering communities to help the most vulnerable. It’s a good way of looking at the world. You’re also doing work in Ukraine, of all places. Actually, the light is very much being cast on Ukraine. At the same time, very few people really know what’s going on over there. But you know what’s going on over there through your project. Please tell me about that. Mr. Jones: Again, we’re not looking to be do-gooders, gallivanting around the world looking to throw out lifelines. We’re always called upon, and we got requests early on after the Russian invasion. Our success in evacuating people from Afghanistan got a lot of international media attention. There were NHL players whose fathers and mothers were stuck behind Russian lines and others who had asked us to help evacuate their family members. I had no previous involvement in Ukraine, and it was sort of the same thing. I opened up my laptop, I picked up my phone, and I saw what I could do to help evacuate family members of people who reached out to me. We were able to get those family members out. That led to us buying vehicles for groups that were helping us evacuate people. Then, that led to us providing food, and then we discovered this great need for insulin. That’s something I’ve learned, that insulin is very important in times of crisis. We bought a refrigerated truck in Hungary, and since the very first weeks of the invasion, we had our insulin truck going all over Ukraine. We partnered with an organization called Solve.Care that asked us to sponsor 700 beds for young orphan girls that were sent to the West alone, and really were being captured by human traffickers and sex traffickers. We helped build those shelters. We partnered with Ryan Hendrickson. He wanted to found a new organization. He partnered with us and then we launched this new organization through our Olive Grove Project, where we plant olive trees with the new organizations that we help create. Ryan Hendrickson with his Tip Of The Spear landmine removal now is removing landmines from the front lines. Thousands of landmines have been removed. We bought landmine removal robots, the most sophisticated landmine detectors that can even detect landmines that don’t have metal in them. For Ukraine, I want to be very clear, I advocate and have advocated from the very beginning for a negotiated peace. The world has been silent on why there is no one calling for a peace agreement. Why did General Milley come out—I hope this isn’t too controversial—why did he come out in the first weeks of the war and say, “Our goal is not victory, but a quagmire?” I don’t see that using the people of Ukraine as a means to our end is virtuous. I can’t see that in the long run this in any way advances our national interest. Maybe it’s in the interest of the military industrial complex, and maybe in the interest of these big entities that profit off of war reconstruction. I’m just thinking of the Ukrainian folks who are just trying to farm and their tractors are hitting landmines and artillery and killer drones are flying into their buildings. But even there, with our work in Ukraine, it’s like we’re doing what other people won’t do. We’re removing landmines from active battlefields so farmers can farm. These farmers were unbelievably courageous. They never stopped farming, and Ryan Hendrickson was there clearing their farms so that they could farm. Now, as Russia has done their tactical retreats, and the military just continues to do the mission of the military, the civilians then flood back in. Now, we have just women and children losing their life and their limbs with all these landmines that were left by the Russians. Ryan Hendrickson, this Green Beret who had actually had his leg blown off in Afghanistan, wants to go in there and remove landmines to help fathers keep their children’s bodies intact and keep them alive. I’m all for that. Mr. Jekielek: This is the picture that you don’t hear about as often. It’s the realities that people are facing on the ground. It’s something that you can actually speak about from having people there. Mr. Jones: I went there and I went very early on in the invasion. We had medical teams to treat the refugees as they were leaving. One of the things that I will say that was unbelievable, I think Poland should win the Nobel Prize. The country of Poland should win the Nobel Prize. I had a young woman who was my diplomatic liaison, and we were going to check on our medical teams in Ukraine that we set up to treat the refugees. I was trying to prepare her for the sea of human sorrow that she was about to witness as we were getting close to the border. But it wasn’t there because Polish families did such a good job of welcoming and bringing in the Ukrainians and caring for them. The food trucks that were along the route, it was the best food I ever had, and no one has heard this story. Poland’s response to this was absolutely unbelievable. I have never seen anything like it. I’ve been to a lot of places where there’s war and there’s a refugee crisis. Your heart never recovers from the wounds. But this was something like I had never seen or heard. People just took it for granted and it was just so organic. It was so organic and so overwhelming. There really never was this mass crisis at the border that one might have expected. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, I know from people who were there for some of our reporting, especially early on when we sent reporters to see what was going on. It was very much organic with millions of refugees. Poland suffered at the hands of Ukrainians in World War II and hasn’t forgotten. Poles haven’t forgotten that. Of course, it suffered at the hands of Russia repeatedly over the decades and centuries. It was very interesting that there was this organic understanding by the Poles, and there was no government propaganda campaign to convince people. Everybody understood that whoever comes out of Ukraine, we are going to help them, and all these homes opened up. It was very interesting to me. A lot of people in the West might not understand why. Do you have a sense of why? Mr. Jones: Understanding why? Mr. Jekielek: Why was it so obvious for Poles to do this. I have my own thoughts on this. Mr. Jones: There’s no better way to be empathetic than to experience suffering, and Poland has experienced immense suffering. In fact, look at the Afghan people. If you’re Polish this might seem strange to you, but I have a real affinity for Poland. My patron Saint is St. Maximilian Kolbe. I’m friends with Jerzy Popiełuszko’s family, and worked on a film about Father Jerzy. I’m now working on a film on Maximilian Kolbe, “Max and Me,” that will be coming out in theaters this year. It’s a big budget animated film on St. Maximilian Kolbe. I also have an affinity to the people of Afghanistan. If you look at Afghanistan and Poland, these are two countries that have been placed in impossible situations. Afghanistan was menaced by the Russians. They had their war with Russia, and then, their war with the United States. They were invaded by the two most powerful militaries in the history of the world. St. John Paul, the Great, in his book, “Memory and Identity,” his last book, which is really his best writing, reflects on his life and the invasion first by the Nazis and then of the Soviets that he experienced. He said that when the Nazis came in, he knew that they wouldn’t be there for long, because the evil was so rabid. His theology taught him that evil is the absence of being, and evil regimes don’t last very long. He said, “I knew they wouldn’t be there.” But then, the Soviets followed right in. He understood that this regime, the Soviet Union, would collapse too, but it would take a little bit longer, and he weathered this. When you think of what the people of Poland weathered, this is a people that have earned their empathy. They have learned empathy the only way you can, and there’s no easy way to learn it. Sympathy, maybe. Empathy is only learned through suffering. Every family in Poland knows intimately the sorrow and suffering and anguish and pain of these Ukrainians that showed up at their border. The only thing they could do was respond. I have a friend who’s a Grammy-nominated musician who lives in my neighborhood. When I needed someone to be my manifest director for my work in Afghanistan, I knew that I was luring someone into something that’s going to change their life. They’re going to look at passports, and they’re going to be putting children’s passport photos and names and ages into a database. Some of these children are going to live and some of them are going to die, and they’re going to experience all of this. I said, “Who can I ask to do this?” It was my friend Armen Chakmakian, a Grammy-nominated musician. He’s Armenian. I knew because of his family’s experiences in the Armenian Genocide, that he grew up hearing these stories. I knew he would have the empathy and the strength to do the job that I was asking him to do. I used to joke with my Afghan partners, “I only wish Poland was your neighbor, because Ukraine has been so much easier for us to evacuate and rescue people and move them to safe conditions, where in Afghanistan, not so much.” I said, “I just wish you were neighboring Poland. It would make my life a lot easier, and my job a lot easier.” Mr. Jekielek: It is a fascinating perspective, thank you for that. Speaking of Armenians, you’re actively involved in a project for Armenians, a very small one from what I understand. Please give me an overview. Mr. Jones: Yes, it’s really sorrowful. There is a corridor to an ancient community where Armenians have lived since before recorded history, Artsakh, and they are being starved out by Azerbaijan. It’s a campaign of ethnic cleansing. There are 120,000 souls there. What makes this to me so troubling is I wrote a book, The Race to Save Our Century, that came out of the hundredth anniversary of World War I. We looked at the Armenian Genocide in World War I as sort of those two big dominoes that fell and led to a great catastrophe, which was the 20th century. Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Here we are just a little over a hundred years later, we have Azerbaijan and Turkey conspiring to cleanse the Armenians from a place where they have lived since before recorded history, and the world is out to lunch. No one is paying attention. Hitler famously said, “Who remembers the Armenians?” That was his answer to his generals who said, “The world will remember what we did to the Jews. We can’t do this.” He said, “Who remembers the Armenians?” Here we go again. Who remembers? It’s really quite startling. It would really be as if we saw the Nazi Germany Kristallnacht [Night of Broken Glass] again. Could you imagine if you turned on your television and you found out that Jewish shop owners across Berlin today had their windows smashed out. You would say, “What is going on? Here we go again.” What we are seeing today with Azerbaijan is the Kristallnacht again, and we have forgotten. If we don’t hold the line here at Artsakh, there’s no line to hold, really. If we don’t hold the line with the Uyghur genocide, if we don’t make a stand against the CCP, what line will we hold? What is this going to mean for our posterity? What is this going to mean to our children and grandchildren? All of us, when we order our life to serve the vulnerable around us, we’re ordering our lives to serve our own descendants. We’re being thoughtful of them. If we don’t stand with the Armenians who now are being starved out, our grandchildren will be starved out. If we don’t stand with the people of China who are being smashed by brutal tyranny, if we don’t stand with the people of Hong Kong who have everything they knew ripped away from them, if we don’t stand with the people of Taiwan who are being menaced, our children will live in tyranny. This is how it works. Mr. Jekielek: When you look at the reality of communist China today, we know there’s one official genocide happening. There are at least three, but we’re still doing business with them. Bill Gates in an interview is saying that China should adopt greater governance roles in the world. Mr. Jones: That’s quite frightening, Mr. Jekielek: Right? Mr. Jones: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: In the 1930s in Germany, we knew there were incredibly racist laws, but we didn’t know there would be a final solution. That had not been formulated yet. Mr. Jones: Exactly right. Mr. Jekielek: It makes me think, what are we doing? That’s one thought. The second thought is here in the U.S. and in the West, a lot of people are very concerned about more authoritarian practices across a variety of realms. They’re thinking about that. They’re thinking to themselves, “We have to take care of what’s going on here in America. We need to secure freedom and liberty for Americans before we look out into all these places that you just described.” Perhaps there’s a case to be made here. How do you square these things? Mr. Jones: I agree with that a hundred percent. We have to take care of our home first. But sadly, I have a phone in my pocket that was probably assembled by slave labor. I have clothing in my drawers that has cotton that was picked by Uyghur slaves. Can you imagine? I do. You do. We all do. This is just a fact. It does impact me. My country made promises around Afghanistan like Mardi Gras beads, promises that I didn’t commit to. I’m not an advocate of regime change wars. I’ve opposed every regime change war. I’m not an advocate of nation building. These are myths. These are lies that we sell to people so that we can do $2 trillion in grifts over 22 decades. I knew that two decades ago, but if my wife writes a check, I have to cash it. I have to put money in the bank. My country made promises around Afghanistan like Mardi Gras beads. Then, we snuck out of there in the middle of the night. I feel a responsibility there. We sabotaged a peace agreement in the very first days of the invasion between Zelensky and Putin. Now, we’re sending tanks. We’re pressuring Germany to send tanks. Sending Panzer tanks towards Russia seems like a really good idea for peace, doesn’t it? My teams in Ukraine said that the Ukrainians say, “The Americans are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.” I would agree with all of that. It breaks my heart that we’ve behaved so ignobly on the world stage. Disney makes Mulan, a film that perpetuates genocide. They shoot the live action version of the film in Xinjiang in East Turkestan. The cast and crew were bused past the concentration camps there. Could you imagine if in 1941, Disney made a film in Germany where the Jews were the villains, and they bused the stars past the Sachsenhausen concentration camp? This is bizarre. We live in a very bizarre world in our local communities about how we shop. My family and I like to go to thrift stores. If you want Nike, you’re going to get Nike made in 1982. We’re going to go down to Goodwill. We’ll find your Nikes down there in Goodwill, because you’re not going to buy a shoe that was made by a slave today. I can promise you that. I agree with all of that. But for me, it just really comes down to this—why was I created? What is my purpose? How should I live my life? I want to live my life in a way that’s noble. I want to be gentle around those who are vulnerable. I want to think of those who the world has forgotten. I do this exercise before I go to sleep where I will close my eyes and I will think of the world. I will think of man and myself through different theologies. I ask myself, “If I was Muslim, how do I want to live? If I’m Hindu, how do I want to live? If I’m an atheist, how do I want to live?” I want to dance in front of the abyss by living a life so beautiful, that nothingness is shocked. I want to stand with those who are crying, who are sad, who are lonely, and who feel forgotten. The great French Catholic anthropologist, René Girard, says, “When you serve with the vulnerable, you become as vulnerable as they are.” I think that’s true. That has helped me understand why I fail in so many of my attempts to care for vulnerable communities, and do nothing but put myself into vulnerable positions in my organization so many times. I understand that’s how it goes, but there’s a mystery that you can’t shake. It’s very strange when you choose to live your life to serve those who the world abandoned, you are never alone. You never feel alone. When we live a life to serve those who have been abandoned, I feel guilty sometimes. How come I have the best friends in the world? How come my family seems to be so happy and beautiful in a world that’s so lonely and sad? It seems like through my work I’m chasing, I’m running in one direction, but I keep ending up in the other direction. We need to order our lives to save others; our cousin who has an opioid addiction, our best friend who’s struggling with bipolar disorder, that young woman who works for us, who’s in severe depression. We need to order our businesses, our families, our state and local governments to serve those who are vulnerable. As a world, we need to say, “We’re not going to abandon the Armenians. We’re not going to abandon Falun Gong and the Uyghurs. We’re not going to abandon Jimmy Lai.” When we think like this, and we live like this, we’re going to live in a beautiful world. The world is becoming darker and more sorrowful every day, and we are becoming more self-obsessed. All we are doing is chasing happiness, and we’ve never been more unhappy. All we are doing is swiping right, swiping right on these dating apps, and we’ve never been more lonely. The world is going in the wrong direction. I just hope the work of the Vulnerable People Project in a little way is an exemplification of how people should live. As a Christian, I believe it is true that I find Christ in those who the world has despised, and that’s who I want to stand next to. Mr. Jekielek: Jason Jones, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Jones: It’s a privilege to be on this show. This show is a big show. With all my friends, this is their favorite show, so you’re helping me impress my friends. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jason Jones 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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California just passed a health bill that aims to increase vaccination rates in schools and colleges against a sexually transmitted virus. Lawmakers believe vaccination against HPV, or the human papillomavirus, will help reduce the risk of rare cancers five to 20 years down the line. But many parents are calling the bill deceptive. Testimonies during the hearing have questioned both the efficacy and safety of the HPV vaccines Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/hpv-vaccine-is-it-even-worth-it_5215185.html “If 100,000 People are vaccinated with the HPV vaccine, at best, eight cases of cervical cancer might be prevented, but at the same time 2,300 people—2.3 percent—will experience serious adverse events,” Joshua Coleman, a father of a vaccine-injured child, testified during the bill’s hearing in front of California’s Committee on Health on April 18, 2023. Coleman presented an insert from Merck’s Gardasil 9 vaccine, which is the only HPV vaccine available in the United States. The insert lists the risks associated with the vaccine and notes that 2.3 percent of the participants in its clinical studies experienced a serious adverse event (SAE). The FDA defines an SAE as an event that causes death, threatens life, results in hospitalization, or intensive treatment, or disrupts the ability to live a normal life. In contrast, Dr. Jeffery Klausner, professor of medicine and infections disease at University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, stressed during the hearing that Gardasil 9 “has proven to be very safe, and highly effective.” “Further studies have shown that HPV cancer vaccination clearly prevented cancer and 88% reduction at the population level in Sweden,” said Klausner. The Epoch Times has reviewed some of these studies and we have found that several authors have been receiving HPV vaccine research grants from Merck, the manufacturer of the Gardasil 9 vaccine. Assembly Bill 659, or the Cancer Prevention Act, started out as a mandate that would require all Californian girls and boys to get vaccinated against HPV before entering grade eight. The backlash against this version of the bill from parents was strong. In particular, parents with children who were injured by Merck’s Gardasil HPV vaccine or other childhood vaccines took to social media and other venues to raise awareness on the risks surrounding vaccination. After hearing a round of feedback, Assembly Member Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, who is the author of the bill, changed the mandate part to only affect college students. The new version would require students aged 26 or younger, who were enrolling in a higher-education institution for the first time to be fully vaccinated against HPV. But that was changed again after more pushback from parents. The version of AB 659 that eventually turned into law is not a mandate. But it declares that it is now “the public policy of the state” to expect students to be fully vaccinated against HPV before entering grade 8, as well as the college students that fall in the category mentioned above. “This bill will help notify and educate Californians at these vital ages when receiving the vaccine is most effective. It will foster a private conversation between doctors, their patients and parents,” said Aguiar-Curry. Parents and students will now be receiving letters, presumably from the department of public health or their schools, informing them that their children are “expected” to be vaccinated. The nuance here is that while HPV vaccination is “expected,” it is still not required. But parents who oppose this bill believe this language will trick families into thinking that they have no right to decline the HPV vaccine. And overall, because the topic of vaccine safety is heavily censored on social media and in legacy news outlets, these parents fear that more children and their families will unknowingly be coerced into taking a product without properly understanding the risks. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Dan Skorbach: In the past 16 years, one law firm estimates that the federal health department has paid $70 million in compensation to young people that were injured by this vaccine. So there are risks that come with HPV vaccines. But how about the rest of cancer from the HPV virus? Well, first lets talk about what is HPV? It stands for the human papillomavirus and you get it through sexual contact. HPV is not just one virus. There’s over 200 of them. And less than one percent of these viruses are associated with HPV cancers (14 strains to be exact). CA Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry: Cervical, anal, throat, penile, vaginal and vulvar cancers are caused by this virus and there is no way to know who will develop the cancer or other health problems from HPV. Dan Skorbach: But while some strains of HPV will go on to develop into cancer, parents say this virus has nothing to do with a classroom setting where kids come to learn. And some doctors agree. We spoke with Dr. John Littell, a family physician in Florida and author of “The Hidden Truth: Deception in Women’s Health Care.” Dr. John Littell: One of the biggest loads of bull I’ve ever seen as a doctor, [is] when they were able to convince every physician in America, that every child in America, would acquire this sexually transmitted disease. And not only would they acquire it, but that there would be no way to ever get rid of it. And then they acted as though it was like HIV, or maybe hepatitis B or herpes—the other Hs—I call it “the four H club.” But HPV is different. It’s a skin virus. And it’s so simple. Once you educate women who’ve been exposed to it, to just watch and wait for it to disappear, just like any other wart virus on the skin. To delude America’s parents into believing that the only way to protect their 10, 11 year old boys and girls was to put a jab in their arm, which I have personally seen—talk about destroying fertility [and] put women into premature ovarian failure— that’s not unheard of. But now this campaign by Merck, to pull a fast one on the medical profession was unfortunately, very successful, because they were able to somehow portray these children as eventually getting cervical cancer, which is a very rare disease. How Rare is Cervical Cancer? Dan Skorbach: So we’ll talk about vaccine injuries in a second. But first, let’s look at the rarity of cervical cancer. It happens in about 11,000 women per year. That’s according to the CDC. In 2019, 7.6 women were diagnosed per 100,000. And the death rate from this cancer is 2.2 in 100,000 per year. Now the average age of women who get diagnosed is between 35-44 to years old. And to put it into perspective in that same age range, ladies are twice as likely to die in a car accident than from this disease. (5.05 in 100,000) So relatively this cancer is a rare event. And the U.S. has a screening program that helps detect this cancer early. And because of that, death rates from cervical cancer have actually been declining even before HPV vaccination was introduced. DR. JOHN LITTELL: I’ve said this many times in the mid-90s. In the United States of America, there should be no cervical cancer, because every woman in this country can get a free pap smear. And so we we should talk about the difference between women who have been at risk for their whole lives [who] are getting HPV—who would never get screened, have never been to a doctor and end up with cervical cancer, versus the young woman who has—I wrote it in my book— when you’re first become sexually active, get the exam with your doctor, make sure you don’t have HPV. And if you don’t, that’s all the information they need. How Effective is the HPV Vaccine at Preventing Cancer? Dan Skorbach: Okay, now let’s go back to the HPV vaccine. Because the real question lies in its effectiveness. In 2009, 36.7 percent of all American girls aged between 13-17 were fully vaccinated against HPV, according to CDC’s TeenVaxView. And the incidence of cancer between ages of 15-39 was 6.6 in that year, according to SEER data. Now in theory, it takes time to realize the benefits of this vaccine. We would expect to see at least at a tiny dent in incidence rates. But that didn’t happen. Ten years after this cohort was vaccinated, and reaching age 30, this number remained the same as it was in 2009—6.6. This is real world data folks. Now vaccine clinical trials from Gardasil show a 98 percent effectiveness at preventing HPV infection types that cause cervical cancer. But preventing infection doesn’t yet correlate with preventing cancer based on real world data. And that’s because you really have to wait another 12-37 years for the 2009 cohort to age and see if this vaccine would make a difference at the ages that cervical cancer incidence is the highest. That’s between 35 and 60. Which means, this vaccination program is still a living experiment. We don’t have real world national data to justify that it works. So does it make sense to coerce students into taking Gardasil like they are trying to do in California? Let’s look at this vaccine’s safety profile. Biased Clinical Trial Data Dan Skorbach: So three years ago, a group of scientists from Denmark conducted a thorough review of HPV vaccine clinical study reports. They looked at Gardasil and another vaccine that’s available in Europe and tried to gauge whether the benefits outweigh the risks. Together the data came out to over 95,670 participants across 24 different trials. And what they found was that in 72 percent of the cases, when it came to events of serious harms, these events were incompletely reported. And all 24 clinical study reports contained redactions in the sections that talked about the harms. So the authors have concluded that these trials were biased toward showing the effectiveness of the vaccine and had lower interest in looking into the harms. Which is already a red flag. Nervous System Disorders Dan Skorbach: But even with the lack of data, these scientists identified an increase in serious nervous system disorders by 49 percent. One of these was POTS or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It’s a condition where the patient experiences a rapid heartbeat when they try to stand up from sitting or lying down. This is a dysfunction of the nervous system. The authors also note that Gardasil 9 had 27 percent more serious harms than the original version that Merck rolled out in 2006. They speculate it could be because Gardasil 9 contains 2.7 times more HPV proteins than the original. Autoimmune Disorders Dan Skorbach: And you know that for example the spike proteins used in the COVID vaccines are toxic to human cells. What about the virus proteins used in the HPV vaccine? Well this 2019 study examined the proteins used in HPV and concluded that they overlap with some human proteins. Meaning that if we develop antibodies to the vaccine’s proteins, that could also train our immune system to attack some of our own cells. And that can lead to a range of autoimmune diseases. In Denmark, Gardasil has been in the childhood vaccination schedule since 2009. And since then a team of epidemiologists has been tracking adverse events associated with this vaccine using hospital-based health care registries. By 2017, they looked at data from 3 million women aged 18 to 44. And they found that hashimoto’s disease, celiac disease, lupus, adrenal insufficiency, brain inflammation and spinal cord inflammation, which are all linked to autoimmune diseases, have a statistically significant risk associated with HPV vaccination. But this gets more interesting. Long COVID Symptoms In the capital of Denmark, there is a center for treating HPV vaccine injuries. From 2011 to 2018, they had seen over 845 patients. One autoimmune specialist, Dr. Jesper Mehlsen, has reviewed the patient data and has noted that the most frequent symptoms reported were dizziness, irregular hear beats, cognitive impairment and sleep problems. Which are signs of dysfunction of the nervous system. And the author notes it is very similar to the symptoms of long covid. He also notes that there is one protein in the HPV vaccine that resembles human autonomic nerve receptors. So again, this could trigger the person’s autoimmune system to attack the nervous system. Here’s a whole list of human proteins that the HPV proteins overlap with. What could happen if the immune system attacks these proteins within its own cells? Authors of the 2019 HPV vaccine study we mentioned earlier, speculate that it could trigger infertility in men, premature ovarian failure in women, increase in breast and ovarian cancer and even lead to neuropsychiatric diseases. Deceptive Bill Dan Skorbach: So coming back to this California bill. While it’s not a hard mandate, parents who oppose this bill are worried that this type of language will trick families into thinking that their child needs to be vaccinated to remain in school. Carina Powers: AB 659 coerces our most underserved and vulnerable families to go against their personal medical decisions in order to comply with perceived requirements. Dan Skorbach: And just to clarify here, both female and male students will get the notice. All boys will be expected to be vaccinated against HPV as well. But why target boys with this? How big is the cancer risk for them? Boys don’t have a cervix, they can’t get cervical cancer. Why are California lawmakers trying to coerce all boys to take this vaccine before reaching grade eight? Dr. Littell broke down for us the pathology of HPV. Do All Boys Need the HPV Vaccine? Dr. John Littell: The HPV—the human papillomavirus—attacks the squamocolumnar junction. It goes to places where you have one type of cell transforming to another. The most obvious example right now is on the cervix on the woman’s cervix where you know, the baby comes out of the uterus. It transitions from normal skin cells which are called squamous cells to columnar which are glandular cells. Those are what produce secretions. And so that squamocolumnar junction is—there’s a lot of things happening there. There’s a differentiation of cells all the time—continually doing this—changing from one to the other. So when you have continued cellular replication, division and differentiation, you have a higher chance of creating a cancer when you put the HPV into the mix. So it’s at those junctions between the one the glandular cells and the skin cells. Well there are other places in the body. We have [them] deep in our throats, where the GI tract, which is mostly columnar, becomes then more skin cells up higher. And then the anorectal area where the same thing, where the intestinal columnar cells which are glandular, become skin cells at the perianal region. And so what I’m kind of alluding to now is the reason boys—boys don’t have a cervix, boys can’t get cervical cancer. But they have those other two squamocolumnar junctions. So if they’re engaging in sexual relations involving those areas, then yes, they’re at risk. And so, you know, we’re literally vaccinating boys—and ACOG, and the American Academy of Pediatrics wants us to vaccinate every boy as though they’re going to engage in those sexual behaviors, which lead to cancer in those regions. Dan Skorbach: If we’re talking about pure data, 1.9 per 100,000 people get anal cancer in the U.S. And yes, homosexual men are at greater risk. But they are a relatively small percent of the population. So it doesn’t make sense to vaccinate every single boy. Especially those who simply won’t engage in these behaviors. Then here’s another question. Is there another way to protect oneself from infection? Look at this graph. This is a recent study on HPV unvaccinated men and women. And the real insight here is that the more sexual partners you have the higher the risk of HPV cancer. The risk also increases when the infection persists for a long time. Which can happen if the immune system is weak or the person is frequently re-infected. And of course, if you don’t use the oral cavity and the anus for sexual activity, then you’re not going to get HPV cancer in there. So a young person’s lifestyle and life choices are very important in this health equation. But as it stands right now, every parent in California will get a letter saying that their kids are expected to be vaccinated with this vaccine by grade eight. But it’s not clear that it’s not actually mandatory and that parents still have the right to decline. The problem is that after COVID, the mandate culture will most likely deceive many parents and make them think that their kids need to get this vaccine to be able to attend school. So please share this video, because you will help more parents be informed and make better decisions. This is Frontline Health, I’m Dan Skorbach. Stay Healthy America. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity by Anna Varavva. ———– 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. 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“If it’s the last job I ever do—which at the moment, it looks like it is—I’m proud of it,” says British actor Laurence Fox. He is the star of the new film “My Son Hunter” and leader of the UK’s Reclaim Party. “It’s almost as if the Hunter Biden story was made for cinema,” Fox says. We discuss the making of the film, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and the growing assault on free speech and objective truth. Fox faced the brunt of cancel culture after pushing back on claims that the UK is a systemically racist country or that Meghan Markle was “torn to pieces” because she’s black. “I think to apologize to people that have malevolent intent towards you is essentially to beg while being dragged to the scaffold … If you’re going to be hung and digitally removed and executed, then you might as well do it with your head held high.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/hunter-biden-story-made-for-cinema-star-laurence-fox-talks-my-son-hunter_4752744.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Laurence Fox, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Laurence Fox: Thank you so much for having me, Jan. Nice to see you. Mr. Jekielek: Laurence, I’ve been watching My Son Hunter. Actually, I watched it a couple of times, because I would call it a dense film. There’s a lot of information and it flows beautifully. Congratulations on this achievement. What surprised me is that you spend a considerable amount of time in this film exposing the realities of human rights abuses and corruption in China. Mr. Fox: Yes. And that surprised me as well, to the point of my jaw hitting the floor in a lot of ways. And also, the fact that this was done on official presidential business, if you will. Hunter was flying over to China with his father to conduct some of these deals. Taking off my acting hat for a minute, and putting on the lover of democracy hat, some of the backhanders, things that he received and some of the people he worked for and what’s subsequently happened to them makes one feel very, very worried that the son of the vice president of the United States was working with some extremely dodgy people in China. Looking at how the world has developed and looking at some of the things that Biden himself has said about China, I found a lot of that very, very disturbing. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start at the beginning. The film is centered around Hunter Biden’s laptop. There’s a lot of drama around that throughout the film. Now, here’s the question. When you were invited to do this film, did you understand what was on the laptop? Did you understand that it was real? To what stage was the story developed at that time? Mr. Fox: Yes. Obviously, I had been aware of the laptop, and I gather there is more than one laptop. And I had been following it with curiosity, because I thought this would seem to be a story of political relevance, as well as being an interesting piece of drama. So, when the script arrived on my desk, the only script that’s arrived on my desk since my cancellation over two years ago, I was quite curious to play such a weirdly voyeuristic and troubled and strange individual like Hunter Biden. Mr. Jekielek: When you play Hunter Biden, despite some of the very difficult realities and his being an addict, you actually portray him as a somewhat sympathetic character. Mr. Fox: It’s really important for an actor to take a dispassionate view of their character, and not judge their character at all. Being one of the many small cogs in a creative wheel, an actor’s job is really to provide humanity to the characters. It would be a much more boring piece of work if one was judging this human being, rather than just trying to find his humanity. Robert Davi, the director, was very keen to make sure it wasn’t political posturing or the Right-wing equivalent of wokery, which means vilification and hatred of this person. As the creative team, we both thought that it was really important to make this a human story, even though once you consider it more broadly, it has global consequences. Mr. Jekielek: You saw this script and you were eager to wade in. Did you understood the implications of starring in a film with such a politically charged topic? Mr. Fox: Way back in 2020, I had already experienced the ramifications of having a view about anything nowadays, when I said that the UK wasn’t a racist country. I’m not sure what else could be thrown at me. I just leapt at the chance to do what I had been trained to do at a great drama school in the UK. I had spent 22 years as an actor relatively incident-free, and I was keen to put on my acting shoes again. So, I wasn’t too concerned about getting caught up in the politics of it, because my politics are massively misrepresented. And as I said before, I just approach it as a creative task, and something to get your creative teeth into, because politics doesn’t feel very creative to me. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back a little bit. Please tell me more about your background and what you’ve done, because our viewers in the U.S. might not be as familiar with you as many people in the UK already are. Mr. Fox: I went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which is a wonderful drama school in England. Sadly, now they are sending out emails apologizing for their own systemic racism. I worked on a television show called Inspector Lewis, which is also on PBS. I did that for 10 seasons, and it became quite popular in the UK. Then, I finished that show because it had run its course. I realized I had been doing it for more than a quarter of my life and I wanted to try something new. And I was also doing music at the same time. I had written a song about how upside down the world was. In the process of promoting this song, I was invited onto a political panel show in the UK called Question Time in. The topic of Meghan Markle, our favorite member of the royal family, or ex-member of the Royal family, as we seem to say now, came up. A woman in the audience said that Meghan Markle had been hounded out of the United Kingdom, because of the fact that we were a very racist country. I begged to differ with her and I said, “No, she’s been hounded out of the United Kingdom because the people of the United Kingdom don’t like her narcissistic opportunism.” I was then told that I wasn’t allowed to have that view, because I was a white, privileged male. Then, I replied, “It’s a racist comment to use immutability to deny someone their right to an opinion.” And after that happened, my phone exploded and along with it, my acting career. I was immediately denounced by the British actors union, Equity, so aptly called equity. They called for me to be denounced, like in the Salem Witch trials. Within 24 hours, my acting career as I’d known it was over. My agent hung on for another six months, but then with repeated internet pile-ons, she gave up the ghost as well. I ended up in a position where I didn’t have a job and was unable to support my family. But I was still very awake to the idea that free speech was being so deeply suppressed, certainly in the UK, which is probably one of the most tolerant and welcoming countries on earth, just behind Canada and New Zealand. So, I started a political party, which is now more of a political movement, because political parties are pointless in the British first past the post system. And yes, I find myself trying to tell everyone that without free speech, we don’t have a democracy. Mr. Jekielek: That’s quite the career trajectory. Let me ask you this. Many people, upon being denounced in the way that you were by the association that’s supposed to protect you, will turn around and apologize in a very specific way. Did you ever contemplate doing that, because it could prevent this cancellation, or at least that’s what people believe? Mr. Fox: The short answer is, no, I didn’t. I didn’t contemplate it for two reasons. The first being the fact that I have principles and I really truly am a patriotic person. I love this country and I love what’s great about it. So, I’m not going to make up a fake apology or a mea culpa. Secondly, to apologize to people that have malevolent intent towards you is essentially to beg while being dragged to the scaffold. If you’re going to be hung and digitally removed and executed, then you might as well do it with your head held high. So, no, apology wasn’t at top of my list. Also, I hadn’t said anything that was remotely controversial, so I didn’t see why I should apologize for it. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to go to something that Gina Carano, the Secret Service agent in the film, says at the beginning. She says, “None of this is true, except for all the facts.” And this idea comes through the entire film. Aside from the stylistic details, there is a lot of information that is true. This makes it a very unusual film. Mr. Fox: Yes. My mind always went back to films like “JFK,” or “W,” those Oliver Stone films, which really tried to investigate political inconsistencies and things that needed to be examined and explored, and that would make for good dramatic content. I was surprised that Hollywood wasn’t interested in looking at this. Actually, I wasn’t really hugely surprised. We all know why Hollywood doesn’t want to look at this. But I thought, there’s real dramatic spectrum here. It’s almost as if the Hunter Biden story was made for cinema. For two journalists and filmmakers to come along and crowdfund the budget for this film, put it together on such a shoestring, and get it out before mainstream culture had even accepted the veracity of this laptop was an incredibly brave and interesting thing to do. And I think it’s great. If it’s the last job I ever do, which at the moment it looks like it is, I am proud of it. Mr. Jekielek: As it would happen, at the time of the film’s release, everyone that was denying the laptop or saying it had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, is now agreeing that the laptop is real. What a lot of people don’t know, and what hasn’t been covered in the legacy media is the content of the laptop, which of course is revealed in various ways in the film itself. How do you think that will impact the reception of the film. Mr. Fox: Again, Robert Davi did not want to make partisan, troll film, even though it does have elements of that. There certainly was conservative frustration at the fact that this story hadn’t been told properly. Robert Davi wanted to make a film which would appeal to what I would call a sane Democrat, a Reagan Republican, that sort of thing, rather than a squad Democrat. It would be great for a standard Democrat-voting American to watch it and be able to digest the information and take it for what it is. I’d describe it as a gangster comedy in a way, but it also looks at one end of the spectrum. This film is giving one hard end of the spectrum, to understand that there is a story within this laptop about the son of the current sitting President of the United States doing deals with China and Ukraine, essentially not the allies of the United States, and what the repercussions of that may be for America more broadly. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about how it was to work with Robert Davi. Mr. Fox: Robert Davi is absolutely stark raving mad, which is brilliant, and which is what you want in a director. He’s a big New Yorker, and very, very passionate, and very, very keen on authenticity. He’s quite scary. I love him. The thing about making a film is the longer you do it, the more you realize how irrelevant you are in the other aspects of the creative process. The actor’s job is, as my great mentor once said to me when I was struggling with a piece of acting, “Say your lines and F-off. That’s your job as an actor.” Davi’s job was to take two-and-a-half million dollars and make it look like 10 million, which he has done beautifully. It was very difficult to make. There are some exposition aspects to the film, the revealing of these stories, that can be quite tricky and difficult to dramatize. Davi is wonderfully talented and passionate and a man of great integrity. I feel absolutely blessed to have worked with him. Interestingly, for a set full of people that were canceled, I have never worked in such a nice atmosphere. Mr. Jekielek: As I was watching the film, I saw filmmaker Phelim McAleer’s fingerprints all over it. I have seen his strong, page text drama, which was just purely made of the words in those texts. It was quite an unbelievable thing to watch. So, these facts are integrated in curious and unusual ways into the film. Mr. Fox: Yes, there’s a name for it. I was reading a review somewhere and there was a name for what happens when you turn a whole sequence of facts and events and exposition into a short film. But yes, he’s fantastic. Phelim and Ann McElhinney, who worked from a reported story and who produced the film, are very strident in their pursuit of the truth. They’re probably a bit more partisan in their approach, which is fine, because producers have to have a reason to make a film. Then, there’s a delineation and a distance between the producers and the writers and the actor and the director. The ultimate goal is to bring to life a set of very, very uncomfortable facts. Mr. Jekielek: When you were preparing for this role of Hunter Biden, what did you do? Mr. Fox: I listened to his book, Beautiful Things. The worst thing is, once you do a film and you finish it, you just wipe your memory of all of it. But anyway, I listened to him because I wanted to hear what he thinks. I get a very strong sense from him that he feels he is authentic. Whenever I have watched him, he genuinely seems to believe himself, which is probably a very strong trait of an addict anyway. But in order to prepare, I adopted the David Mamet approach. He is another man whose career is hanging by a thread for having some common sensical views. He said that the character is on the page and in the script. All you have to do is just say your lines and believe them and you become that character. I listened to him and actually became strangely bewitched by him and how compelling he is in some of his narrative and his truth, if you will. I looked into the laptop from hell and listened online about it, because that’s the only place you can find stuff about the laptop. I just wanted to get a picture of who this guy was. I focused it mainly around the fact that whatever he is, and has or has not done, there seemed to be somewhere inside of him, this very complex relationship with his dad, or the Big Guy. That fascinated me, because we all have that highly complex relationship with our father. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of folks here in the U.S. and Canada are very interested in Gina Carano, another actress who has been canceled from her extremely high profile gig on The Mandalorian. What was it like working with her? Mr. Fox: Working with Gina was just an absolute pleasure. She got off a plane after having just finished shooting a Daily Wire movie, “Tara on the Prairie,” and she literally climbed on a plane, got off the plane, came in and just basically gave the whole set an enormous hug. She’s one of the warmest, most authentic, gentle, kind people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. It was really hard for her, because as I said, the way the script is written is quite expositional in lots of ways. She did struggle a bit with having to deliver all that info, but she’s brilliant. She has a wicked charm to her, but a kinder person you will never meet. She’s highly talented, a highly compassionate, lovely person, and very lucky. And now she’s a friend, which is a great bonus. Mr. Jekielek: I believe that this film will become a valuable entry into the popular culture. Actually, as I watched it, I was thinking that it has a lot of hallmarks of a cult film. These are films that weren’t necessarily expected to succeed, but they did, because of their quirkiness, and because of their very unusual nature. I’ve never seen a film structured quite this way with the juxtaposition of script, character development, exposition and then these moments where there’s a fact check all of a sudden, asking “Is this true or false?” I think it has some promise. Mr. Fox: I think so too. Robert Davi is a very bold director. He pays a lot of homage to the great directors from the nineties and further back. He’s looking back to the age of cult cinema, where cinema was much more daring. Therefore, it’s not going to be one of those films that you can look at and say, “Oh, it belongs in this time, or it was made then.” It has a strange and light loveliness to it. It’s difficult to describe, but it’s certainly not what I was expecting when I signed on the dotted line. I was expecting something much more serious, much more brutal, much more partisan, and much more of an attack dog film. But actually, it’s not. It’s a gentle wandering through one man’s suffering and another man’s profit. Mr. Jekielek: In the final sequence of the film, one of the lines from Grace really tore at my heart. She says, “The truth itself has become the fairytale.” Mr. Fox: That’s where we’re at now, aren’t we? With almost everything, we are struggling to define even the simplest of terms. I used to think that we had a freedom of speech problem, but now I think we have a meaning-of-words problem. Words have been misappropriated, gathered up and then put back together to mean something totally different. And if one doesn’t have a basic concept of truth, it’s very destabilizing for people. The loss of truth is something that should concern us all. Without empiricism and truth, the world is in chaos. So, with this film, I think that art is reflecting life. Mr. Jekielek: I was speaking about this with numerous people recently, including the folks over at Triggernometry from the UK. We talked about truth seeking. Who has the monopoly on the truth, and who can say they have the whole truth? Well, nobody of course. But the question is whether it’s genuine truth, or whether what people say is the truth is just an arbitrary exercise of power. Whoever has the power defines truth, and that becomes the truth. These are fundamentally different ways of looking at the world, and you absolutely touch on that in this film. Mr. Fox: Yes. In order for the truth to be true, and for us to be able to pursue it, it has to be equal and belong to everybody. So, as you say, the minute someone in a position of power decides what the truth is, the truth stops becoming the truth, and it just becomes a narrative or a weapon with which to silence and destroy others, and therefore also destroy the knowledge that truth exists, and the seeking of truth that can only lead to noble ventures. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the passing of the Queen of England. For us Americans, there isn’t an understanding of how important the Queen was to the people of the UK. There were these massive lineups of 400,000 people at the Queen’s funeral. To many of us, it’s an antiquated institution, not really that important, and purely symbolic. But watching this incredible outpouring of love and affection and respect, there’s something deeper going on. Mr. Fox: Yes, you’re absolutely right. The Queen was a physical human manifestation of British tradition and culture and heritage. We Brits are very much rooted in our history. We’re not a particularly revolutionary society like France, where when something goes wrong, they just rip it apart and chop off everybody’s head and start over again. England likes to carry on, and likes to learn and grow with its traditions and with its heritage. So, Her Majesty was the physical manifestation on earth of our history. And you are right, you could see the crowds. The queue went back five miles. People were queuing for over 15 hours just to walk past her coffin; people of all different colors, and creeds, and religions, and sexual orientations. She was a huge uniter, and the British will continue to hold her in very high regard for her selfless service to the people of this country and her nonpolitical service. All she did from the minute she ascended the crown was to represent Britain and our values overseas and at home for 70 years. Mr. Jekielek: Of course, Prince Charles has now become King Charles. He has held various strong political views in the past. How do you expect this to play out in the future monarchy with King Charles? Mr. Fox: It’s interesting. There are two hereditary peerages in the UK, which means Lords and Earls. One of them is the Earl of Norfolk. I can’t remember what the other one is. But these are 16, 17 generations of people who have essentially been in charge of how the King operates, how accessions take place, how the monarchy is run, how funerals are planned, and everything like that. They are really close advisors. I sense from King Charles that he knows what his job is now. His job is also to put aside some of the things, both good and bad, that he’s campaigned for politically and to take the role of the non-political monarch. It will be very, very interesting. He said in his speech that he was going to leave his causes in more capable hands. If he started to act upon those causes while being the monarch, public opinion would very, very quickly fall away from him. Perhaps what we might find is that the Prince of Wales becomes more of a political activist position, whilst the monarch remains silent on matters political. That would be for the best in our country. Mr. Jekielek: I look forward to seeing how this all turns out. What do you make of these calls of people wanting to abolish the monarchy? How big of a movement is that? Mr. Fox: There’s always people that want to abolish the monarchy. Sometimes, I want to abolish the monarchy. I get frustrated with it. But the popularity of the monarchy in the UK is running at about 80 per cent. As you say, there was a five mile long queue. The mainstream media would love to report that the monarchy is unpopular. But time and time again, the monarchy has proven to be hugely popular to the people. But the people are not represented in the media. The media represents its own smaller and more progressive echo chamber. The monarchy represents something which really isn’t progressive. It’s like a rock on which the nation stands. Good luck if you try and knock that one over, but we’ll have to wait and see. Mr. Jekielek: You said that your Reclaim party has moved from being a small upstart political party into a movement. What did you mean by that? Mr. Fox: In the UK we have the first past the post voting system. I suppose first past the post is meant to give one party more power, but it’s not friendly to small political parties. Without proportional representation like you have in parts of Europe, it’s very difficult for small parties to do well. So, we will stand candidates in the election, but we can’t really stand them expecting to win. We can only stand them expecting to affect the result for a particular seat. There’s only been one party that’s actually managed to get—other than the three dominant parties, Conservative, Labor, and the Lib Dems—managed to get anyone elected. And that’s a woman called Caroline Lucas for the Green Party in Brighton. But Brighton is not what one would describe as a typically British city. It’s very, very progressive. It’s the Portland, Oregon of the UK, if you will. Mr. Jekielek: What about the Reclaim movement? How has this become a movement? Mr. Fox: We’ve started up another organization that runs alongside the Reclaim party called The Bad Law Project, which seeks to find out where the law is being used inappropriately in England. What we’re seeking to do with that is to remove politics from all of our foundational institutions via the legal route. That is more of a movement thing to do, than a political thing to do. So, you have things called non-crime hate incidents in the UK. I won’t go into them, but you can imagine what they are, a non-crime crime. Then, the political solution would be to get rid of those. We have a specific school education class in the UK called PSHE; Personal, Social, Health, Economic. In it, they teach children all sorts of madness, including gender ideology, white privilege, diversity, equity and inclusion and this sort of stuff. We would campaign to have a standardized curriculum for PSHE. We don’t have a standardized curriculum for PSHE in the United Kingdom right now. So, rather than saying, “This is our manifesto, we will stand on it,” we will campaign the Education Secretary to have a standardized curriculum. Because we’ve got to be really, really careful with what our kids are being taught in the UK and in America at the moment, as you can see all the time. Mr. Jekielek: What is a non-crime crime? Give me one example that you guys have tackled. Mr. Fox: For example, I posted something during the most holy month of Pride, which we’re on to three months of the year now, where one has to worship at the flag that cannot be criticized. Whereas, the Queen only got 10 days after 70 years service for us to pay attention to her. I shared a meme of four pride flags put together, which resembled a swastika. The point being, this is a flag that you cannot criticize in any way. And sure enough, it was banned. Then another man posted this same meme and just said, What do we think of this? He was visited by the police and told he had committed a crime, and they arranged an interview with him. I made sure that we were there when the police came back, and we told them what the actual law was. Non-crime hate incidents were invented for a noble reason, after the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It almost means pre-crime, trying to stop something before it becomes a crime. But now they’re being used by the police to suppress free speech. And people should be having a debate about this flag. If you walk down Regent Street, the main shopping street in London during Pride month, it literally looks like some sort of rally. I’m very nervous and critical of this Pride movement, because it seems to be using minority groups to push a political agenda of diversity, equity and inclusion, privilege, and gender ideology that not a lot of people believe in or want to follow. So yes, we went after the police on that one, and told them that this man hadn’t broken the law. Subsequently, the Chief Constable of the force that intimidated and harassed this man and his family was removed from her post. So, we do all right. All you have to do is push back a bit. At the moment, the higher echelons of the police in England are very ideologically driven, and have made the police into a very political police force. If you say the wrong thing and someone is offended, they can report you to the police, and you can expect a visit from the police. That to me is very, very dangerous, and reminiscent of other parts of history that haven’t turned out well. We really push back very, very hard on any suppression of free speech. The other day, a very famous footballer in England said, “I’m not going to mourn the Queen. What did she ever do for brown and black people?” This was literally minutes after she died and the Right tried to cancel this guy. I came to his defense and said, “No, he has the right to say it. Whether you like it or not, he has the right to say it.” The problem with free speech is that it includes the offensive, and the police in England are trying to make that not the case. The police in England are trying to say, “If you’re offended, it’s a crime.” It’s not, and they need to be reminded of that. Mr. Jekielek: Laurence, thanks for coming on the show again. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Mr. Fox: The eyes of the world have been on Britain in the last few days and just over a week now. They can see that what the monarchy has done. Ancient traditions and institutions bring people together and they provide a stability from which we can move forward. The world as we live in it now is in a period of near revolution. When we look back to the past and learn from it, and we move forward from that steady rock, we can truly have hope for the future. But if we have to tear everything down to get there, then that’s not be the best way forward. Mr. Jekielek: Laurence Fox, it’s such a pleasure to have you on again. Mr. Fox: Thank you. Lovely to see you again. 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 American Thought Leaders, Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz discusses his book, “The Price of Principle: Why Integrity is Worth the Consequences,” and argues that “unprincipled” partisanship has taken over America. “How dare they call themselves progressives,” says Dershowitz. “They are regressive. They are reactionaries. They are repressors.” One of the top constitutional lawyers in the country, and a self-described liberal Democrat, Dershowitz has been excoriated by both the right and the left for defending highly unpopular public figures. “People love me when I defend people they like and they hate me when I defend people they don’t like,” says Dershowitz. “The more unpopular you are, the more likely I am to want to defend you.” Dershowitz shares his thoughts on COVID-19 mandates and censorship, due process and civil liberties, as well as the rise of antisemitism in America. “You see these protests against Zionism by people who have no idea what Zionism is,” claims Dershowitz. “I’ve been a Zionist from the time I was born. All it meant is that the Jewish people, like every other people, have a right to a homeland.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/alan-dershowitz-unprincipled-partisanship-has-taken-over-america_4751972.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Alan Dershowitz, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Alan Dershowitz: Thank you so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Your book, “The Price of Principle,” comes at the right time for me. These are exactly the kinds of questions I have been kind of struggling with. Has partisanship completely taken over? In a sense, has partisanship almost become principle? Mr. Dershowitz: I would say partisanship has taken over, but it’s an utterly unprincipled partisanship. If you ever dare to put principle before partisanship, you’re canceled. Your group won’t have anything to do with you. You have to be 100 per cent partisan no matter what the principles are. I’ll give you an example. Caroline Kennedy’s father wrote the famous book, “Profiles in Courage.” I showed a little bit of courage defending President Trump in his impeachment, even though I’m a liberal Democrat and voted against him twice. Caroline Kennedy said if she knew that I had been invited to this dinner party, she never would have come. The public library in Chilmark, Massachusetts, a bastion of liberalism, canceled my speeches and stopped circulating my books, all because they don’t like who I defended. Even though I vote the same way they vote, that’s not good enough. They say that I, “enabled President Trump by being one of his lawyers on behalf of the Constitution.” That’s how far we’ve gotten. Mr. Jekielek: You say in the book that principles have actually become a weapon for partisanship. What do you mean? Mr. Dershowitz: People claim principle, but they’re using it in a partisan way. It’s the opposite of principle. It’s doublespeak. Today, you cannot be a principled person. If you are a principled person, you’ll be punished for it. Nobody wants principle. Nobody wants consistency. The Republicans are perfectly happy to say, “Oh, we’re not going to allow Merrick Garland to get a hearing for the Supreme Court, because it’s eight months before the election.” And then a few weeks before the election when President Trump nominates Justice Barrett, they say, “Oh, that’s fine.” And you ask them, “What’s the principle?” And the principle is, “Because we can. We have the votes to do it.” The Democrats do the same thing. They silence people. They attack people, particularly in academia today. I just learned something last night. I was having dinner with the president of one of the city universities in New York. She said that at the City College of New York, where I went to Brooklyn College, the law school faculty has now voted unanimously to boycott Israel, and only Israel. They had as their primary speaker at graduation a guy who advocates terrorism against Israel, and doesn’t believe it has a right to exist. I don’t want to debate Israel here today, but if a student at that university dares to dissent from the faculty’s unanimous vote, they’re not going to get recommended for a job on Wall Street or for a clerkship. That’s not education. That’s propaganda. In 50 years of teaching at Harvard, I never once expressed a personal point of view in class. I taught the students how to think, not what to think. Today, classrooms are propaganda mills, and they’re our future leaders. Mr. Jekielek: You have a chapter in the book talking about systemic racism. As an assessment, are we still systemically racist? It made me think about this whole woke movement. Essentially, it is partisanship masquerading as principle, isn’t it? Mr. Dershowitz: It is. Meritocracy is a dirty word. You can’t use meritocracy. That’s white supremacy. There has to be racial advantage. But when there’s racial advantage, there’s racial disadvantage. Look at the Harvard case. Who’s suing Harvard? It is Asian students, because they’re being discriminated against because of quotas for black students. That case is going up to the Supreme Court, which I think will decide it the right way. But you know what will happen? Universities will cheat. All the major universities will cheat. They will still have racial quotas, but they’ll describe them as something else. Is that different from what the south did when it totally avoided the Supreme Court’s decision on desegregation? The south cheated, too. They pretended that they weren’t segregating, when they were. Universities shouldn’t be cheating and shouldn’t be looking for ways to circumvent Supreme Court decisions, but I assure you they will. Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, I have a message from one of our sponsors. For all of you with retirement savings accounts, America’s federal debt is now at $30 trillion and our policies during this pandemic are causing inflation to soar to multi-decade highs. A lot of folks are rightly worried about what this will mean for their retirement savings. You can protect your life savings with the only thing that has always held value, physical gold and silver. To get started, you can call Gold Co at 855-973-0470 for a free wealth protection kit. They have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau. They guarantee highest price buybacks and they always offer free shipping. Ask how you can even get $10,000 or more in free silver. Don’t wait. Call 855-973-0470. Now, that’s 855-973-0470. Mr. Jekielek: Do you see these Harvard student quotas as a form of racism? Mr. Dershowitz: No, it’s an attempt to eliminate racism. But it’s a very, very awkward attempt, and it introduces new elements of racism. It’s not going to work in the end. We are not a systemically racist country. We’re a systemically anti-racist country. When I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, we were a systemically racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Latino country, and that changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. When I graduated from Yale Law School, first in my class, editor-in-chief of the Law Review, and a potential Supreme Court law clerk, I didn’t even get an interview, except for one Wall Street firm. I applied to 32 Wall Street firms. They all turned me down. That was systemic racism. That doesn’t exist in America today. Today, we have sporadic racism, which the government tries very hard to overcome and sometimes overreacts. Perhaps the most significant event in transforming America in the 21st century may well be the killing of George Floyd. That changed everything in corporations, in the media, and in universities. We were right to have a reckoning about race. The killing of George Floyd was inexcusable and horrible, but this event transformed us so dramatically. The transformation was already occurring. It was already on the way, but that one event changed it so quickly and so dramatically, and the result is not equality. The result is to introduce a new kind of inequality, and an anti-meritocratic approach. Mr. Jekielek: Many people have argued that this basically allowed this illiberal movement that you describe in multiple ways in the book to come out. It was an opportunity to codify it and make it official. Mr. Dershowitz: I think that’s right. Less radical people, from the communists in the 1930s and 1940s to today’s woke generation look for opportunities. They find events and use them to project their narrative and to project their agenda. The thing that’s so hard about it is they’re often right. Many of these are decent people, the ones who now want to impose censorship on universities. I tend to agree with a lot of their substantive points of view. I just don’t agree with the means. They don’t care about means. They think the ends justify the means. Their utopia is going to be achieved, and so we don’t need the barriers of equal protection, due process, and free speech. Why do you need free speech if you already know The Truth with a capital T? Why do you need due process? If you already know that a man who is accused by a woman is, of course, guilty, why do we need to have a trial? You may have seen just the other day, in that case that was on the Serial podcast for many months, the prosecution agreed to release the guy who had been wrongly convicted, and had been in jail for so many years. The Left loves it when somebody they identify with is released, but they don’t want to apply the same due process standards to President Trump, or to a white person who was accused of oppressing blacks. I don’t like it when that happens, but I’ll defend anybody who the government is after. The more unpopular you are, the more likely I am to want to defend you. Mr. Jekielek: Are you familiar with Marcuse’s principle of repressive tolerance? As you’re speaking, this is what I’m thinking about. Mr. Dershowitz: Oh, very much so. I grew up with that. He was at Brandeis University when I started at Harvard University, and he was a neo-fascist of the Left. He was one of the first academics who justified censorship, and justified repression. He said over and over again, “There’s no reason to let them have their ideas expressed. We know we’re right.” This was part of the so-called Berlin School of whatever. It’s interesting, because although it grew out of anti-Nazism, it turned into its own form of fascism. So, Marcuse was kind of the godfather of the woke repressionist movement. How dare they call themselves progressives? They are regressives. They are reactionaries. They are repressors. They want to stop due process and free speech and equal protection. Mr. Jekielek: I think you meant the Frankfurt School, is that right? Mr. Dershowitz: Yes. That’s what I meant. Mr. Jekielek: There are three principles that have dominated your life. I’m going to read them, because I found this very valuable. Number one; freedom of expression and conscience. Number two; due process, fundamental fairness, and the adversary system of seeking justice. I want to get into that because it’s very underappreciated why this is so critical. Number three; basic equality and meritocracy. You argue that these three things are fundamental. The moment you dispense with any one of them, things fall apart. Mr. Dershowitz: Yes. The one that’s the most unpopular today is the adversary system. If you want to appreciate defense lawyers like me, go to Iran, go to the Soviet Union, go to Russia, go to China, or go to Cuba where people can’t get defense lawyers. Don’t wish for things that you don’t want. People say I’m such a horrible person because I defended O.J. Simpson. I defended Leona Helmsley. I defended so and so. Yes, and I’m going to continue to do that, just the way John Adams defended those who were accused of the Boston Massacre, and Abraham Lincoln defended unpopular people. Clarence Darrow did. Thurgood Marshall did. It’s the essence of our system, and yet it’s very unpopular. People love me when I defend people they like, and they hate me when I defend people they don’t like. People walk up to me in the street and say, “We used to like you and respect you. Now we’re so disappointed.” I say to them, “You were wrong to ever respect me or like me. I was never on your side. I was on the side of due process and justice and civil liberties.” Back in the day, things came out on their side. But today, the victims of due process and civil liberties are often Republicans, conservatives, Christians, Jews, and people who are not popular with the woke generation. Mr. Jekielek: I’m also going to read something which I pulled from the book. It was a powerful quote from H.L. Mencken that I hadn’t been aware of, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels, for it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning, if it is to be stopped at all.” Wow. Mr. Dershowitz: I think of that every day when I’m accused of defending Donald Trump. In many ways, Donald Trump is a scoundrel. I don’t agree with him. I voted against him. If he committed a crime, I would want to see him impeached or go to prison. I’m not rooting for him. But I don’t want to see the laws applied against him. And now, so many civil libertarians want to expand the criminal law. I’ll give you an example. There’s a statute called the Espionage Act of 1917, the most hated law by the liberals. They got Eugene V. Debs with it. They got Dr. Spock with it. They got Daniel Ellsberg. The liberals all said, “Oh my god, we have to abolish that statute.” Now, you have the New York Times and the liberals editorializing in favor of expanding that statute and applying it broadly to the Donald Trumps or the sedition statutes. They were used against anarchists and communists in the 1910s and 20s. Now they want to use them against people who participated in January 6th. Now I’m opposed to what happened on January 6th, but I’m more opposed to using sedition laws to try to get them. This was a protest that got out of hand. A violent protest that shouldn’t have happened. But don’t overreact by keeping people in prison for months without a trial and charging them with sedition, as some people want to do. My former colleague, Laurence Tribe, has suggested that the Attorney General of the United States should prosecute Donald Trump for attempting to murder Vice President Pence. My God, what would that do to the rule of law? There is no law of attempts that would apply to that. Tribe is making it up, but he’s willing to make it up if it’s to get Trump. By the way, that’s the title of my next book, Get Trump. It will be about how the attempt to get Trump is destroying civil liberties and human rights in America. Mr. Jekielek: You have views on the election, views on free speech, and these things come together around Trump, so we’ll talk about that in a moment. Before we get there, I want to finish this piece. You said you’re on the side of justice, but you also make this really interesting distinction. You cite Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes who says, “No, I’m on the side of law. I’m not on the side of justice.” It isn’t necessarily obvious why these things are not the same. Mr. Dershowitz: I’ll give you an example. Today to convict somebody, you have to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. What if he is guilty, but there’s no evidence of reasonable doubt? And so you have a guilty person going free. That’s not justice. That’s the law. That’s a good law. It’s better that ten guilty go free, than one innocent be wrongly convicted. That’s a good law. It emanates from the Bible, from Abraham’s arguments with God over the sinners of Sodom. But it’s not justice, and I have produced injustice on some occasions. Yes, I have occasionally gotten guilty people off. I don’t lose any sleep when I do that. Let me tell you I lose sleep when I get an innocent person convicted. That’s only happened a very, very few times in my life, but it has destroyed me, because then I say it’s my fault. If a guilty person is set free, that’s part of our system. It’s better that ten go free. But if an innocent person is convicted, I can’t deal with that. It’s so hard. That’s why I fight so hard against that happening. Mr. Jekielek: It’s foundational that you follow the law, and you don’t make exceptions. Mr. Dershowitz: That’s right. Now look, you can have lawless law. If I were living in Nazi Germany, I wouldn’t follow the law. But we live in a country of law, and our legal system is a good one. It doesn’t always produce the right results. I’m not Socrates. I wouldn’t drink the hemlock. There isn’t room for civil disobedience. I’ll give you a wonderful example. My grandfather was poor as a church mouse. He had no resources, and lived in a small place. On the eve of the Nazi invasion, he found out that he had 28 relatives in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He went around to every neighbor and said, “You have a basement that’s now a synagogue. You need a rabbi. You need a cantor.” He had 28 false affidavits, and saved the lives of 28 people from Nazi Germany. It was the proudest moment in his life. If you ask me what I admire most among the wonderful things done by my family, I say it’s my grandfather’s illegality in helping to bring in those 28 people. They are now among the most accomplished Americans. One of them was chairman of the Department of Engineering at Columbia. Another one is a major investor in medical technology. Another is a rabbi in Los Angeles. Another is a public relations person. These are great Americans, and they were brought out of the Holocaust by an illegal act. That is why I tend to be sympathetic to immigrants who will do anything to come to America to save themselves from prosecution. Mr. Jekielek: In the book, you mentioned the case of Jussie Smollett. If I recall correctly, his case was dismissed at one point. Presumably, it was dismissed on some kind of principle, even though the law definitely didn’t suggest that it should be dismissed. Subsequently, it got re-litigated. I’m thinking that the prosecutor dropping the charges imagined they were following some sort of principle that’s greater than the law. Mr. Dershowitz: Yes, but the principle there was one that they would be embarrassed to articulate, because it was completely based on improper considerations like race. The real villain there was Don Lemon, who just recently got fired by CNN, but didn’t get fired soon enough. He was a very close friend of Smollett and gave him legal advice about how to not give the phone to the police. He never disclosed it when they interviewed him on television, whereas Chris Cuomo was fired. I have a chapter in my book about CNN. CNN doctored a tape of mine, they doctored a tape. They made me say exactly the opposite of what I had said. I said that a president could be and should be impeached if he committed criminal behavior or criminal-like behavior. But they had me saying a president can’t be impeached, even if he commits criminal behavior, even murder. Therefore I’m like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. That’s why I’m suing CNN for their unprincipled distortion of what I had to say. I strongly believe in the First Amendment, but the First Amendment doesn’t give the media the right to make up defamatory stories in order to serve their partisan interests. Mr. Jekielek: When you realized that tape was doctored, what was your reaction? Mr. Dershowitz: I couldn’t believe it, because I had been a guest on CNN many, many, many times. But as soon as I defended Trump, my status changed. I knew that, and that’s okay. They’re a network with an agenda. But they doctored a tape like this, and took my words out. I had used these words in my answer on the Senate floor; unlawful, illegal, corrupt, in order to define what would constitute an impeachable offense. They took out those three words, just as if they had taken scissors to snip them out, and then had commentators saying, “Dershowitz says a president can do anything that’s unlawful or legal or corrupt,” when I had said exactly the opposite. So, I sued them. I hate to sue. I had never sued anybody in my life until I was 75 years old, and now I’m involved in three lawsuits. Mr. Jekielek: You said there were three things you did that changed you from being seen as one of the top legal minds in the nation, to being some kind of pariah in certain social circles. Mr. Dershowitz: Okay. Representing Trump was number one, and that put me in the “margins of academia.” CNN contributed to that by distorting what I had to say. Number two was representing Jeffrey Epstein, which I did and got him a good deal. He didn’t like the deal, but most people think it was too good of a deal. And the third, as the result of representing Jeffrey Epstein, I was accused by a woman named Virginia Giuffre, who I never met and never heard of, having sex with her on seven occasions, including in front of my house in a limousine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in places that I never was during the relevant time period. Her own lawyer admitted on tape that she was, “Wrong, simply wrong.” Her other lawyer admitted that she was wrong. There were emails that we discovered that they tried to suppress which admitted she never knew me, and yet people believed it. But it’s interesting, what these different people think. The people on the liberal Left don’t believe the sexual charges against me. They only attack me because of the Trump business. Others don’t attack me on the Trump business, but they attack me because if I’ve been accused, then I must be guilty. I wrote another book on that called Guilt by Accusation, where I clearly document how it’s impossible for me to have ever been in the same place where she was, under the circumstances she suggests, including, as I say, sex in a limousine in Cambridge, Massachusetts with two women. She just has a phenomenal imagination. But I’ve clearly proved her to be a serial liar, and I’m suing her now. She’s suing me, and it will be resolved in court. Mr. Jekielek: We live in this time where identity plays a role in ascribing guilt or innocence. In a sense, this has infected almost all areas of inquiry. Are you seeing this? Mr. Dershowitz: The ACLU is dead in the water now. They don’t defend people on college campuses from being denied free speech or due process. For the most part, they have become a partisan, political organization Mr. Jekielek: Alan, I want to switch gears and go into your book, “The Case for Vaccine Mandates.” This is something that I’ve been following very closely. It’s based on the idea that the vaccines need to reduce the spread of the virus for there to be a case for mandates. Right? Mr. Dershowitz: That’s absolutely right. If you invented a new vaccine that could immediately stop all heart attacks, all cancer, and all diabetes, I would be opposed to the government requiring you to take it. I would urge you to take it, but I would not allow the government to make you take it. According to John Stuart Mill principles, the only way the government can force you to do something is to prevent harm to others. However, if there is a vaccine, even if it doesn’t help you personally, if it helps to prevent the spread of a deadly disease, then as a last resort I would allow the government to compel you to take it. I own a letter written in the hand of Alexander Hamilton dictated by George Washington in which he urges his commanders to make every soldier in the American Revolutionary War get vaccinated against smallpox. Essentially, he says, “We’re not going to lose to the Brits, but we might lose to smallpox.” But I agree with you that the key point is that the vaccine has to prevent contagion, and that burden hasn’t yet been satisfied, at least with the earlier vaccines. The current new vaccine claims that it does prevent the spread. That’s a scientific fact. Now, we’ll have to wait and see whether it’s borne out by the research. Mr. Jekielek: Here’s a question. I can imagine the people that were very pro-mandate at the beginning would grab Alan Dershowitz’s book and say, “Look, Alan Dershowitz says that there is a case for mandates.” Whereas, as we know, these genetic vaccines certainly didn’t stop the spread, and in some cases, some of the research is now showing that they’re actually promoting viral replication, as opposed to the opposite. Here’s the thing I want to get at. Early on we were told by pundits and politicians that the vaccines would stop the spread, but there was a suppression of information and a quelling of voices of scientists who were seeing through serious research that it was just the opposite. How do we deal with this sort of thing in a legal framework? Mr. Dershowitz: It’s very hard, and I was completely against trying to censor. I was willing to debate Robert Kennedy, who I disagreed with. Nobody else was willing to debate him. We had a really good debate about these issues. Science is science and it should never be suppressed. I wrote a piece in March of 2020 saying, “Believe science, be skeptical of scientists.” Back then, in March, 2020, scientists were making two claims. Number one, they were saying that the virus is not spread by aerosol, it’s only spread by touching. Number two, they were saying, “Don’t buy masks. Masks are no good.” In the second one, they were making a deliberate lie. They knew that masks were good, because the doctors were using them. They just didn’t want us, the non-doctors, to hoard the masks, and so they were willing to mislead us. As to the first point, I said, “You’re just demonstrably wrong. If the virus spread by touching, it would spread much more slowly. Touching is not something that induces quick spreading. Obviously, it has to be something that comes from aerosol.” I was proven correct in both instances, but I was so criticized when I wrote that article. Because they said, “How dare you challenge the medical establishment?” Well, I did, and you did, and others did. That’s a healthy way to go. I still promote vaccination for people who choose to have it. But until it’s proven that it really can prevent the spread of contagion, I would be reluctant to go to the ultimate step. Government force should always be used only as a last resort, and only after all other alternatives have been tried, and only if the justification is clear. There is Supreme Court precedent allowing it, probably, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing. Mr. Jekielek: We did a very thorough literature review around mask use. There are many papers now that have tried to address this both in vivo, and in vitro, so to speak. There’s a very marginal benefit for masks that aren’t fully sealed like the N95 versions. There are still places that enforce these kinds of mask mandates. But then on the other hand, you have Governor Ron DeSantis prohibiting municipalities from creating these vaccine or mask mandates. What are your thoughts? Mr. Dershowitz: I don’t like governors telling cities what to do. Governors should have limited power. They don’t make the law, they enforce the law. We’re in a period of relative uncertainty. I carry around my N95 mask every day. I wear it. I put it on right. I seal it. Thank God. I want to cross my fingers I haven’t gotten COVID. I’m 84 years old with some medical conditions, so I tried very hard to avoid that. I was at a scientific event the other night. There were about a hundred world famous scientists and I was the only one wearing a mask. So obviously, either scientists aren’t sure, or they’re willing to take a risk themselves in order to have better social interaction. But I continue to wear the mask. I’m entitled to make that decision. I’m probably not entitled to impose it on you. For example, I’m sitting on an airplane and you’re sitting next to me. I wear my mask. Am I entitled to tell you to put it on a mask, if you’re sitting next to me? And if your mask would reduce spreading more than me wearing a mask alone, then you wearing a mask too would help reduce the spreading. I think if I ask politely, I am. I’m not sure I’m entitled to compel you to wear the mask. These are hard questions, and it’s a work in progress. I commend people who take varying points of view on this and let the debate continue. I don’t want to see a singular point of view. I would like to see more people be very conservative on this, which means wear the mask, take the vaccine. When in doubt, do that. But government compulsion is not something I’m in favor of. Actually, the title of my book, The Case for the Vaccine Mandate was a little misleading. It should have been, The Case for the Vaccine Mandate Under the Right Conditions as a Last Resort, but books with titles like that don’t sell, so my publisher shortened the title. Mr. Jekielek: There’s another element to these vaccines, especially the genetic vaccines. It’s a new technology. This is the first time it’s really been deployed, and certainly the first time it’s been deployed on this scale. One of the big concerns of people is the right to informed consent around medications. The potential harms of the vaccine, or even the known harms that have since come out through FOIAs on the Pfizer documents were largely hidden from the public. Mr. Dershowitz: Everybody should be fully advised and fully informed, even if the information hurts the narrative of the government, and even if it results in fewer people being vaccinated. Information should never be suppressed in the name of an agenda, so I’m completely in favor of making sure that all the information is always released. Mr. Jekielek: You make a distinction between your personal view and the legal view. I find it very interesting that you make that distinction. What does the law have to say in a situation where information like this is withheld, and at multiple levels? It could be withheld by companies which stand to profit. It could be withheld by Big Tech. It could be withheld by media in general. You have a chapter in the book talking about media taking incredibly partisan positions or very convenient positions for whatever reasons. Where does the law stand on this and how does one deal with this, especially if it turns out there were very serious personal harms caused by withholding such information? Mr. Dershowitz: Basically, the law makes a tri-part act distinction,. There’s the government. The government should not withhold anything except material essential to national security, like the names of spies, or the location of nuclear weapons. That’s the government. Second, there are quasi-governmental organizations like the FDA that control private pharmaceutical companies, that are halfway between government and private. And then, there are purely private companies, where the government has very little control over what’s disseminated, except if it is fraudulent, and even if it is fraudulent, if they’re not on the stock market and if they’re not selling certain materials. Unfortunately, just lying to the public is not a crime. In the Theranos case that was tried recently, the people who were in charge got convicted. Unfortunately, the lawyer escaped liability, in my view should have been convicted. But it’s really a work in progress. Just today, some courts rendered decisions about the freedom of the internet and whether the internet can make rules about censoring materials. This is probably the most interesting and difficult free speech question of the 21st century, and I’m glad to be involved in it. I don’t have a simple minded solution, obviously. The presumption is in favor of letting-it-out speech, then it has to be overcome by very strong arguments on the other side. Mr. Jekielek: In the typical situation where there is a novel virus, and people don’t know how to deal with it, what will happen typically is doctors will go out and try to find ways to treat it based on the utility and the safety of the various drugs that they may be testing. Depending who you are, there are particularly famous or infamous drugs of that nature. But right now there are something like 20 or 30 different therapeutics that can be used for early treatment of COVID. Some of them are licensed in here in the U.S. Some of them are in other countries. It’s a whole big mix. Here’s my question. There was an inordinate focus on using vaccines to deal with the virus, which has its own issue, because coronaviruses mutate so much. I’m not going to go into the details, but it’s a questionable thing whether vaccines are the optimal thing for a highly mutable virus. At the same time, people were looking at various therapeutics and found various levels of efficacy. If there is evidence of a deliberate intent to prevent therapeutics from being used against this disease, therapeutics that showed efficacy in clinical trials, how does the law deal with this? Is there some way to address this, because it would seem to be a huge problem. Mr. Dershowitz: It’s a huge problem, and the law does not adequately address it, because it doesn’t involve producing a product that’s fraudulent. Look, we know there is some very good therapy. I know people who have been involved in the development of some of these therapeutics that work, and everybody should know about all of them and should have access to them. And believe me, if I ever got COVID, the first thing I would do is to call my friend and say, “What should I take?” Everybody wants the best medical care, and the government has a role to play, but it shouldn’t be the role of medical dictator and medical czar. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump to the free speech issue. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed this Federal District Court ruling that was blocking the implementation of the Texas law, HB 20. Are you familiar with this? Mr. Dershowitz: Not by name, but tell me about it. Probably, I am. Mr. Jekielek: Texas can implement this law that prevents social media networks from censoring users based on ideology, and based on their politics. That was blocked by the Federal District Court and now that block has been rescinded by the Fifth Circuit. You said this is one of the most difficult areas that we are facing right now. Please explain to me why this is so difficult. Mr. Dershowitz: Because it’s about private people and private companies. Big as they are, they’re claiming their First Amendment right to decide what to put on their platforms, and they’re claiming the right to censor. You know, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison would be turning over in their graves if they thought that giant private companies could do what the government can’t do, and that is censor. Now, there have been some theories that have been proposed, like the theory of common carrier. Back in the day, even though they were private, train companies or telegraph companies were regulated by the law. There is a case to be made for that. There are cases on both sides of this. There’s a case to be made that Google and Facebook and Twitter and others have become common carriers, and maybe are subject to some regulation. But you don’t want to give the government too much power over these companies, either. Imagine if we had a totalitarian country with a tyrant being able to control Google. You would want it to be free. So, these are such hard questions. It’s the kind of thing I would spend a whole semester on if I was still back teaching at Harvard where I was for 50 years. Mr. Jekielek: When these companies are effectively almost infrastructure, very much like a phone system. they can become the tyrant. Mr. Dershowitz: Of course. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Or both can become tyrants, which is an incredibly troubling proposition. Mr. Dershowitz: But it’s less troubling if each becomes a tyrant and they’re against each other. So, that at least gives the two tyrants the opportunity to fight with each other. The worst possibility is if there’s only one tyrant, or if the government takes over everything. That’s why there is some concern. Look at what’s going on in Russia today where the government is obviously controlling the media. They’re not doing a particularly good job. By the way, it’s become much harder for governments to control the media. In China and Iran they try hard, but with the internet and with other methods of communications, things sneak out now. When I was representing dissidents in the Soviet Union back in the 1970s, they would circulate what was called samizdat. They would type a pamphlet and they’d make 10 copies. The 10th copy you probably couldn’t read, because it was done with carbon paper. Then, they would distribute them. That was their method of circumventing censorship. Today of course, we have more high tech methods of doing it, and it’s a continuing war. It’s a war with some positive consequences for free speech, because it means that there isn’t one unit anywhere that controls everything, and that’s the key to avoiding tyranny. Mr. Jekielek: That is a hugely valuable point. I’ll read this from the court’s opinion, “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.” So, that’s at the Fifth Circuit now. Apparently, it’s going to go up the chain. Mr. Dershowitz: I think so. That’s a statement that Jefferson would probably agree with. You know, I own a letter from Thomas Jefferson when he was president, written in his own hand on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He talked about the importance of free speech, and how nothing should be censored, so long as there is the opportunity to correct errors. And of course, that’s not so easy on the internet. When CNN defamed me, it went all over the world. And when I tried to say no, they edited the tape. Yes, I got page 28, or two minutes at the end of a TV show. But by that time, the damage had been done. There is a quote that has been attributed to Winston Churchill, “Lies get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on.” That was before the internet. With the internet, of course, it’s clearer. The same thing happens with accusations. This false accusation of me became a front page story, and the conclusive proof that I couldn’t have done any of the things I was alleged to have done hardly got covered. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. Now we’re getting to a case in point, and I’m going to be talking about the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. So, we have elected government. And we have this unelected bureaucracy of Big Tech and legacy all telling their story. Let me lay out a couple of things which are relevant. First of all, in late 2019, the FBI collects the laptop, verifies it, knows it’s real, and is sitting on it for its own reasons. Later, we have Zuckerberg telling us that the FBI told Facebook to watch out for Russian disinformation just prior to the New York Post publishing on the Hunter Biden laptop. After this publication, we have five past CIA directors and other well known people in the establishment saying that this laptop has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And this is all before the 2020 election. Now fast forward to today, where everyone agrees the Hunter Biden laptop is real, and the contents are authentic. Now, you have people like Jack Dorsey saying it was a mistake to do this censorship. What is your take here? Mr. Dershowitz: It’s always a mistake to do censorship. Always let the story play out. We never know what the truth is, and what it’s not, particularly in the context of Russia, in the context of American elections, or in the context of partisan media. Nobody should censor any of this. I don’t know what the truth is. I don’t know what the answer is. There seems to be enough to raise a level of suspicion, but I want to hear all sides of the issue. I don’t want to be told by big media or by the government, “No, this doesn’t deserve to be aired.” Look, I voted for Joe Biden. I support Joe Biden. I’d like to see him reelected if he runs. But I want the truth to come out about his son and the laptop. That’s more important than who gets elected. Mr. Jekielek: Okay, but let’s go back a little bit. In the book and elsewhere you said the election was free and fair. Mr. Dershowitz: No, no, no. No, I didn’t say that. I said the results of the election were correct. I think there were problems with the election. I think Pennsylvania acted unconstitutionally. I think there are questions about voting machines. I think there are questions about mail-in ballots. I think we have to make sure that the next elections are beyond reproach. But I have not seen any evidence that would support the conclusion that Donald Trump was elected rather than that Joe Biden was elected. So, my views are a little bit more complicated. Mr. Jekielek: That’s actually great for me to understand. But I want to sort of move all that aside, all the stuff around machines or whether the votes were cast properly or not. Let’s just take all that aside. You could argue convincingly that this Hunter Biden laptop revelation was supposed to be the October surprise for the side of the Republicans. And indeed, there’s been polls done on this that if people understood that this was a real thing and knew that it existed at all, in many cases they might have voted differently. Does this constitute a form of election interference? What does the law have to say about this? Or is doing stuff like this perfectly legit, where you have all these massive institutions essentially telling the same story which turns out to be false? Mr. Dershowitz: We’ll find out. The truth, falsity, gray somewhere in between, we don’t know. But the law doesn’t protect against false information that impacts an election. We know that the election of 2020 may very well have been impacted by James Comey’s ill-advised statement about Hillary Clinton. Everybody always expects October surprises, and it’s the nature of the media. Why do we say October? Because if they do it in October, it’s too late to correct it in November. So, the Justice Department has a rule that we don’t make public announcements on the eve of an election, because they could impact the election. The media has the opposite rule. Generally, they go out of their way to make disclosures that could impact the election. Then finally, you have the selective media. They won’t make disclosures if they don’t help their favorite candidate, or if they hurt their favorite candidate. So, that’s what we have to be worried about, but the law doesn’t really have anything to say about it, unfortunately. Mr. Jekielek: We have seen all these huge institutions effectively work in concert. We don’t know exactly how it happened. We were seeing some resolution due to FOIA emails around this. But are there no remedies? Is this something that could happen again? I find this very troubling. Mr. Dershowitz: It is troubling. It could happen again. The answer has to be in the court of public opinion, where all sides have to be given an opportunity to strongly make their view, and try to persuade the public. It becomes a strong issue in a political campaign that the other side is suppressing information. But to allow the law to come in and tell the media what to do would be difficult. Of course, the government is different. The government shouldn’t be selectively suppressing anything. But if all sides say, “We’re not going to make disclosures within months of an election,” that may be fair. But they can’t do it selectively. Mr. Jekielek: I understand your position on the election now, and that’s good. I understand it’s nuanced. But this kind of activity, which has nothing to do with specific ballots, but it has everything to do with influencing public opinion, precludes people from being able to see both sides of the issue, for lack of a better term. This is the issue that’s concerning to me. Mr. Dershowitz: Let’s go back several years earlier when then businessman Donald Trump was trying to influence the election of Barack Obama by falsely claiming that he was not eligible for running for president. It was false on two grounds. First, he wasn’t born in Kenya. He was born in Hawaii. Second, he could have been born on the moon or in Kenya or in communist China and he would still be eligible to run, because his mother was a citizen, and that makes him a natural born citizen. So, it was wrong in every regard. What should the media do with something like that? We know that a story like that might influence the outcome of the election, but it’s patently false. So, we don’t want the government to come in and say, “Here’s the distinction. One story is true. One story is false.” The last thing we want is the government to determine truth or falsity. My view is that all these stories ought to come out. Let the public judge them. And that’s what happened with the Obama argument. It went out there. It was out in public. People saw documents, and in the end most people disbelieved it. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. And when the government appears to be putting its finger on the scale, how do we deal with that? Mr. Dershowitz: Well, then you can file lawsuits. You can bring legislation. Mr. Jekielek: Finally, please talk about this element of systemic racism that we discussed earlier. Mr. Dershowitz: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Is the U.S. A systemically racist country? You argue no, because of these changes that we discussed earlier. But there’s lots of evidence that anti-Semitism is very much on the rise in this country, both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. What is the relationship? Some people say that Zionism itself is a huge problem. Please talk about this, because you have some very good ideas about it. Mr. Dershowitz: There was a very good program by Ken Burns on television about the role of America during the Holocaust. It was so clear that America in the 1920s and 1930s was a systemically anti-Semitic country. Jews weren’t allowed to work in Wall Street. They weren’t allowed to work in law firms. They weren’t allowed to live in neighborhoods, and the government stood behind it. They weren’t allowed to go to certain clubs. That was pure anti-Semitism, and that basically disappeared with the Second World War. What’s come up after that, largely as a result of people from the hard Left like the Berrigan brothers and Noam Chomsky and others, is that there’s a new disguise for anti-Semitism, and it’s called anti-Zionism. I remember when one of the prominent black leaders, Stokely Carmichael, said, “Zionists are selling us rotten meat in Harlem.” Now, what does that mean? There are no Zionists in Harlem to speak of. They were Jewish butchers, and he didn’t like them, so he called them Zionists and that protected him from attack. Now, we see arguments that Zionists have too much control over the American media. You know, The New York Times is an anti-Zionist newspaper. The Washington Post is certainly not pro-Zionist. So, Zionism becomes a euphemism for Jew. If you say I’m anti-Zionist, you can get away with it, because that’s political. That’s not racial. And in my mind, Zionism is a great thing. I’ve been a Zionist from the time I was born. All it meant is that the Jewish people, like every other people, have a right to a homeland. Zionism is nothing to do with displacing Palestinians. You can be a strong Zionist like I am and believe in the two state solution and believe there should be a Palestinian state. If there were a word for Palestinian Zionism, I would be one of those, too. I favor a Palestinian state as long as it’s peaceful and non-terrorist and doesn’t demand the end of Israel’s existence. But at universities around the world, and I speak at them all the time, you see these protests against Zionism by people who have no idea what Zionism is. And now added to that is the claim of identity politics. Jews are white and they’re wealthy, which is a myth, of course. They’re not white. For example, with the Jews in Israel, there are many dark skinned people, black people, Ethiopian people, and people from North Africa. And Jews aren’t rich. Some are, but the Jewish religion isn’t anywhere comparable to other religions in terms of richness. So, you have all these myths being circulated and you try to fight them. I go on campuses. I try to fight them. I’ve been canceled by many campuses, partly as the result of that. Mr. Jekielek: The question is, where does this come from? I’ll give you an example. I just had Nicole Levitt on the show. She’s a lawyer with one of the biggest anti-domestic abuse organizations in the country. They were basically promoting some social justice-related activities there. She emailed an article about anti-Semitism in the social justice movement, basically saying, “We should cover this as well, since we’re talking about racism.” In response, she got a ton of disapproving emails accusing her of furthering white supremacy. How does pointing out anti-Semitism in the social justice movement promotewhite supremacy? Mr. Dershowitz: It doesn’t, of course. It’s part of intersectionality. Every group should work together except the Jews. The Jews are white, they’re rich, and they’re supreme. For anti-Semites, Jews are hated because they’re communists, and they’re hated because they’re capitalists. They’re hated because they’re sexually impotent and weak men. They’re hated because they’re sexually aggressive and strong men. If you hate a group, you can come up with any ideas about them. In the history of the world, Israel, in its 70-something years of existence, has contributed more to humankind than any other country of a similar size and in a similar time period, in terms of medicine, biology, physics, and literature. You name it. It’s a miracle. They renewed a language that never existed before. They’ve taken in refugees from around the world. Are they a perfect country? Of course they’re not a perfect country. But to single out Israel? You say, “But Israel took over land that may have had Palestinians.” Of course, Jews lived there originally. New Zealand is 10,000 times worse. Not a single person in New Zealand now, in terms of the dominant culture, had anything to do with that island. They came from England. And what did they do with the Maori? They killed them and they marginalized them. But New Zealand is now at the UN constantly berating Israel for the way it treated the Palestinians. This double standard is so rampant around the world and I’m fighting against it as a point to principle. One of the reasons I wrote my book, The Price of Principle, is to also get into this issue. And of the social movements, the Women’s March was headed by a virulent anti-Semite. Black Lives Matter was headed by anti-Semitic people. The Million Man March on Washington had Farrakhan as one of its sponsors. Mr. Jekielek: Alan, congratulations on your book, The Price of Principle. My final question is, are we forever condemned to be living in this partisanship that dominates our discourse, even within our families? In the book you mentioned the foundation of the family. You say, “My loyalty to the family comes first, even ahead of some of these other things.” But even in the family now, there is this partisanship, with people not talking to each other. What’s the way out here? Mr. Dershowitz: There is no clear way out. The pendulum tends to swing pretty widely in the United States, and less widely than in Europe. In Europe in the 1930s, there were only two choices, communism and fascism, or communism and Nazism. In the United States, we had Roosevelt, the New Deal, and compromises. We have been a nation of compromises over the years. Even in the debates leading to the Civil War tried to reach compromise. They couldn’t compromise over that, though. Sometimes we’ve done better, and sometimes we’ve done worse. This trend toward the new McCarthyism on the hard Left is going to be enduring, because today it’s being taught to our future leaders in universities. I see it having a longer pendulum swing than many of the other things. McCarthyism in the 1950s was gone in ten years. Left wing-McCarthyism will last many years longer than that. So, I’m not optimistic. I’m going to end with the description of a pessimist and an optimist in Israel. In Israel, a pessimist is somebody who says, “Oy vey. Things are so bad they can’t get worse.” The optimist says, “Yes, they can.” And so I’m both partly a pessimist, and partly an optimist. Things can get worse. But I do believe, along with Martin Luther King, that the arc of justice moves in the right direction, but we need to help it. It doesn’t just move. We need to help it. I wrote the book The Price of Principal to try to stimulate debate and discussion. Thank you for putting me on the show to give me an opportunity to speak to your audience about that. Mr. Jekielek: Alan Dershowitz, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show again. Mr. Dershowitz: Thank you so much. Be well. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Alan Dershowitz and I 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

In this episode of American Thought Leaders, I sit down with Geoffrey Cain, an award-winning journalist, technologist, and author of “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.” “Everybody was constantly being watched by an artificial intelligence system, which was called the IJOP,” says Cain, referring to a pre-crime surveillance platform that the Chinese Communist Party launched in Xinjiang to predictively police the population. Cain recently testified before the U.S. Senate about TikTok and why he believes the social media app’s troubled emergence in America, its shadowy corporate structure, and its connection to China’s security and data laws make it a unique national security threat. “It is a disaster waiting to happen because TikTok, though the company denies it, is fundamentally obligated to follow … the laws that were created by the Chinese Communist Party,” Cain says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-tiktok-trojan-horse-and-chinas-long-arm-of-artificial-intelligence-geoffrey-cain_4757917.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Geoffrey Cain, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Geoffrey Cain: Thank you for having me, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve wanted to have you on the show ever since you put out “The Perfect Police State,” which is an absolutely amazing book and we’ll definitely talk about this. Before we go there though, just recently you were in the U. S. Senate giving testimony about social media and national security issues, specifically around TikTok and how it functions in the U.S. and around the world. So tell me, what did you find? Mr. Cain: Oh, so much. The problem with TikTok is that it is a national security threat to the United States and to countries outside of China. It is a disaster waiting to happen, because TikTok, although the company denies it, is fundamentally obligated to follow the laws of China, laws that were created by the Chinese Communist Party. So, here’s how TikTok works. It’s an app that is extremely popular among Generation Z users. It’s like the next Facebook or the next wave of social media and anyone can go on there and create a short 12 or 15 second clip of them dancing to music or showing their cat. You can load up celebrities and see what they’re up to. The app itself seems quite harmless, and there’s nothing about it that at first glance would look particularly nefarious or evil. But beneath the surface, there is a lot going on. TikTok was originally created by ByteDance, a Chinese company based in Beijing. It had been created by one of the major figures deeply involved in Chinese artificial intelligence technology. It received enormous amounts of funding from a major Silicon Valley investment firm, Sequoia Capital, a company that was trying to expand in China. It wasn’t until about 5 or 6 years ago that TikTok was created by this company ByteDance through an expansion into the American market. They had acquired a fellow Chinese company that was developing a music app that was getting popular in America called Musical.ly. ByteDance decided to acquire it and used it to create what we now know as TikTok. Now, here’s the first big red flag, and there are many red flags. But the biggest red flag is that upon this acquisition, TikTok did not notify the U.S. government. There is a body called CFIUS, which is the Council on Foreign Investment in the United States. This is the body that is charged with reviewing all sorts of Chinese investments in America, and not just Chinese, but also foreign investments in America that might pose some kind of national security risk. CFIUS has reviewed investments in semi-conductors, in surveillance cameras, and military weaponry and components. Anything that could potentially pose a risk to the security of America has to go through a review by CFIUS. Now, TikTok, upon entering America, had these grand plans to use data. TikTok is essentially a data-scooping machine. It’s getting your face, your voice, your behavior, your movements, and it’s learning about you. TikTok has not said much publicly about its algorithms, but like all social media platforms, these systems are extremely profitable, because they gather so much data and they use that data to sell ads to consumers. The first problem here is that TikTok entered the American market trying to appeal to Gen Z, to the next generation, to the celebrities, and trying to build up the cat videos and the dancing videos. This was a kind of mask that covered up some of the darker realities going on underneath the surface. The big problem is that this is a company that is based in China, and upon request, it is a company that will be responsive to Chinese law. And yet, they’re expanding in this massive way in America. There wasn’t even a CFIUS review at the beginning. That should sound alarm bells. Why did TikTok decide not to do that review? It is as if they snuck into the market and placed their software in the hands of the next generation. Mr. Jekielek: Let me jump in right here. Okay. The fact that they didn’t disclose this for review with CFIUS, doesn’t that somehow create an opportunity to do a CFIUS review? What is the status of this right now? Mr. Cain: Back in 2020, the Trump Administration initiated a CFIUS review. Donald Trump wanted to get TikTok banned. So, TikTok challenged this review in court, and challenged some of the decisions. The goal was going to be to probably sell TikTok to Oracle. This would be a forced sale, and Oracle was lining up as the main buyer. This sale was never initiated. The Biden Administration stepped in later, but didn’t completely kill the review. For the last year, TikTok has been under a CFIUS review, but they have been very quiet about it. It’s not clear what’s going to come of it. Currently, there are conversations happening between TikTok and Oracle, the American company. I can’t say for sure now whether it’s going to be sold to Oracle or sold to an American company. According to TikTok, there will be some kind of agreement with the U.S. government to ensure that this kind of data sharing with China won’t be possible. That’s their claim, and I don’t totally believe it, but we’ll get into that. Mr. Jekielek: There are two areas that I see are hugely problematic, maybe it’s already obvious to our viewers. Number one is that every conceivable data point in these highly sophisticated computers that we call smart phones is being gathered by this app. That’s number one. And this company is subservient to the CCP. The CCP, whatever advantage it can take, we know it will. So, this is not a good recipe. That’s one. The second part which I didn’t see covered as much in your testimony, is that they also decide what you can see or not see. Mr. Cain: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: And they are very non-transparent about it. This could also be in the realm of what we call ephemeral experiences. In other words, there isn’t someone actually watching what is being served up to people and somehow tabulating it. It’s gone forever, and we won’t know what our kid or our person working in the national security establishment is seeing as they’re using it. So these are the two areas that jump to mind. Mr. Cain: Oh, yes. I agree completely. One of the big problems is that the TikTok algorithm does decide what you see. These algorithms in all the social media platforms are very opaque and are seen as protected intellectual property. They don’t want that information to leak out, because they say it will damage their business. But in the past, TikTok executives have admitted that TikTok has been used to suppress bad news coming out of China. There was a TikTok executive who testified before the British Parliament saying that news about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang was being suppressed at one point. There are also other examples. Back in 2019, there was a leaked moderation guideline. It showed ByteDance instructing the global TikTok moderators, including in America, to look around for material that might look bad. That included anything that shows poverty, slums, poor people, and so-called ugly people. It literally was saying these kinds of things. The moderation guidelines said, “You need to suppress this kind of material. We only want to see beautiful people on here who are happy and nice and great to look at and attractive. This is an example of abusive censorship because not only are we discriminating against the poor and people who don’t look super attractive, this was being used to tow the party line, to suppress news about the Uyghurs, and to suppress news about human rights abuses in China. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump to the data gathering and what exposure that creates. Please give me the picture. Mr. Cain: Here’s the problem. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has repeatedly said that it wants to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, and that AI is going to be a major pillar of Chinese military power and surveillance power. Xi Jinping has made it clear that he’s trying to build this new society that will be driven by this total surveillance state that will know everything that’s going on within China, and potentially outside of China too. This is where the TikTok and the ByteDance connection becomes extremely problematic. Under Chinese law and under the Chinese Communist Party, any executive, whether you are at TikTok, the American version of the app, or you’re at Douyin, the Chinese version of the app, there’s not going to be a separation between those two. The Chinese Communist Party will see TikTok fundamentally as a Chinese company and one that needs to report to the Chinese Communist Party. With the National Intelligence Law of China and National Security Law, these are some very terrifying and totalitarian laws that require people in China to take part in intelligence operations upon request. So let’s say something hypothetically, and indeed this may have happened, but we can’t say for sure because it would be all secret. But hypothetically, let’s say the Ministry of State Security or the Ministry of Public Security, two very powerful bodies in China, issue a demand to Chinese employees of TikTok who are based in China to hand over the data of certain people. These could be Hong Kong dissidents, these could be American military commanders, it could be anybody who might be of interest to the Chinese Communist Party. Those executives are required by Chinese law to hand over the data. It doesn’t matter if TikTok says, and this is how TikTok responds, they always say, “We are an American company, we’re separate, we’re based all over the world, we’re not the same as the Chinese company ByteDance.” But they also admit that they have employees in China and these employees, as we know, are subject to the harsh and brutal realities of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about what is called the master admin. Mr. Cain: Yes. This was a part of audio files that were leaked in Buzzfeed, the news website. There were 20 audio files that were taken from various meetings between ByteDance and TikTok software developers. They were just talking about the problems inherent in having Chinese executives who are overseeing them. In one of these audio recordings, one of the executives was talking about this master admin, who is an unnamed figure. We’re not sure who this person is, but it said that this person is somebody in Beijing who has access to all TikTok data, all global data. TikTok denies that this is true. They say that there is no master admin, and that there is nobody with this title, but it’s clearly on the audio recording. These are internal meetings and somebody is talking about a master admin. That’s very strong evidence right there. If you go back through TikTok’s testimony before the Senate, they have always testified that the Chinese company does not have access to American data, and that there is a wall between them. This evidence right here contradicts what they’ve been telling us under oath. This is truly devastating for them, because if they are found to be lying under oath or withholding information under oath, that could put TikTok in big legal trouble. There are a number of executives who have testified, and we’ll see exactly what’s going to happen in the future. But the evidence that keeps coming out contradicts what they say under oath in front of U. S. senators. So, this revelation about the master admin is the big one. There were also audio files on there, which you could hear people talking about how they had to go through Chinese executives and Chinese developers in China to figure out how the data of Americans was being observed and used. We could go on and on about this, but that Buzzfeed report was particularly devastating. TikTok has come out full blast trying to deny that this is the case, but the audio files are there. Mr. Jekielek: One thing we know about AI is that you want to have maximum data to feed into AI to teach it, and to have it to function. This is what I’m seeing from what you’re telling me. We have 80 million American TikTok users. That’s a pretty large dataset and this unlimited data coming from the phone 24/7, because these apps are also collecting when they are not open. And we have the Chinese Communist Party, which is deeply interested in developing AI. You might think there is a prerogative on their side to use that information, given how they function. Mr. Cain: Without a doubt, there is a huge prerogative under the Chinese Communist Party to do whatever it can to get that data. We all know that the Chinese Communist Party is a ruthless organization. It is vicious and authoritarian. They have put 1.8 million people in concentration camps in Western China, which is the biggest internment of a minority since the Holocaust. We’re talking about very serious crimes against humanity and genocide here. We know that the Communist Party is not going to care if there is a small legal wall that separates the Chinese ByteDance company from the American TikTok company. One other piece of evidence is in TikTok’s own privacy policy. If you read it carefully, it says, “We can share data with our corporate group.” And that’s in quotes, that’s literally what it says. TikTok was pressed about this in a previous congressional hearing. The senator asked them three times, “What is the definition of our corporate group? Does this include ByteDance in China?” And after dodging the question repeatedly, finally TikTok admitted, “Yes, our corporate group includes ByteDance.” That means, according to their own policies, they might actually share the data of people around the world with the Chinese arm. Mr. Beckman: We do hold that to a high standard and we have access controls. Senator: Mr. Beckman, we’re going to try a third time because the words that came out of your mouth have no relation to the question you were asked. Your privacy policy says you will share information with your corporate group. I’m asking a very simple question, is ByteDance, your parent company, headquartered in Beijing, part of your corporate group? Yes or no? As you use the term in your privacy policy. Mr. Beckman: Senator, I think it’s important that I address the broader point in your statement. Senator: So are you willing to answer the question, yes or no? It is a yes or no question. Are they part of your corporate group or not? Mr. Beckman: Yes, Senator, it is. Mr. Jekielek: YesIt’s all in the fine print, isn’t it? Mr. Cain: It is absolutely in the fine print, and that has been TikTok’s strategy. When they come under criticism, when they’re under the microscope, their strategy has been to deflect, to distract, to confuse people and to use fine print and little technical slight-of-hand to try to distract people from the reality and the truth. Even in my testimony, a TikTok public relations officer responded on Twitter, pointed out all these little technicalities like, “Technically ByteDance is not in China. The parent company ByteDance is technically in the Cayman Islands, where we’re technically not reporting to a Chinese company.” But that’s absolutely missing the point, that’s just taking my testimony out of context, and trying to smear me and discredit me with these little technicalities. It doesn’t address the underlying reality that TikTok reports to the Cayman Islands company, and the Cayman Islands shell company also owns ByteDance, the Chinese company. They’re all a part of the same corporate group, and there’s no fundamental separation between them. Mr. Jekielek: What is the relationship between these large companies like Huawei, ByteDance, and TikTok with the Chinese Communist Party? Mr. Cain: In China, there is no separation of private business and the public government like in the United States. Here, Google does not have to report to the American government, and Tesla does not report to the White House. They might have their relationships and their lobbying, but the White House cannot call Apple and tell them what to do and what not to do. Apple even built in a feature that prevented the FBI, for a long time, from breaking into phones and gathering data. So, there’s a clear separation between government and private business, which is quite healthy. In China, it is not the case at all, and that is absolutely a line that does not exist. A company might look like it’s private on paper, and it might have all the legal fixtures in place that give the impression that ByteDance or Alibaba is a separate entity from the government, but the Chinese system is so different from America. In America, we have separation of powers, and we have three branches of government. In China, everything is ruled by the party. It’s simply the Communist Party. There is one single party that runs everything. All laws are underneath the party, and the judicial system is underneath the party. It’s not rule of law, it’s ruled by the party. That is why the Chinese Communist Party is just so threatening and forceful when it comes to forcing these companies to follow its dictates. We’ve seen in recent years, with various cases of the Chinese Communist Party cracking down on tech companies. Jack Ma, the head of Alibaba, had disappeared for quite some time. Others were being sentenced and arrested. There was a lot of action in this area because the Chinese Communist Party did not want companies going outside of its dictates. They wanted to remind private companies, “Ultimately, you work for us.” Mr. Jekielek: Yes. And that was actually a very interesting moment. I mean, one of the analyses I heard was, “Well, you got a little bit too independent there, Jack.” Right? Mr. Cain: With that whole crackdown, the Chinese Communist Party was just concerned about the wealth being amassed by these private technology tycoons. These tycoons were amassing their own followings in China, they were perhaps even rivaling the Chinese Communist Party in many ways. But ultimately, the Chinese Communist Party is the one in charge and they want to have access to that AI, to that data, they want to have access to those private technologies being developed by ByteDance and WeChat and Alibaba. So, if they do get too far away from the party core, which is Xi Jinping and the Politburo, they will always reach out and try to bring them back in, back into the center, back into the fold. Mr. Jekielek: There’s people that believe that TikTok should be banned. It almost was, as we mentioned earlier, and then there are others that say, “Hey, it’s a free market, that’s unfair, unreasonable to do. It’ll have other negative downstream consequences.” Where do you stand on this? Mr. Cain: My stance is that TikTok should at minimum be sold to an American company. We cannot have major Communist Party-connected companies in China running massive social media platforms in America. It is the Trojan horse, it’s the mole, it’s everything that you do not want in a modern democracy. It’s also a new problem, because we now live in this age of smartphones and software. This kind of problem did not exist in the past in the Cold War, we were more concerned about the hardware aspect of it. So, the missiles being pointed at each other and the potential for nuclear war, it’s still a possibility, it hasn’t gone away, but there’s this added element now of the way that we use software and social media and the way that it exposes us to major foreign threats from hostile powers who are looking to undermine us from the inside. Mr. Jekielek: Well, it’s interesting that you say that. I just want to briefly mention the work of Dr. Robert Epstein, who basically has looked at how certain Big Tech companies, multiple different ones, are able to influence public opinion in many cases without the people realizing themselves that they’re being influenced. Some of the work that he’s done has shown that you can, for example, for someone that’s undecided, this isn’t for people that already know exactly what they want to do, you can shift how someone will vote without them even being aware that they’ve been shifted by doing basically extensive, double blind tests on how people’s preferences change and so forth. This work, to me, is incredibly disturbing. And by the way, he also shows that it has been done by American companies in different contexts. And I’ll mention this, one of the most stark examples, and I don’t think the company even realized at the time that it was doing something like this, but Facebook at one point basically sent out, “Hey, come out and vote.” Basically to the Hispanic community and it worked, it increased the voting. And they actually publicized this saying, “Look, we’ve been really effective at doing this.” Of course, the reality is that a political actor or someone who wants to act in a political way might say, “Oh, look, this group in particular, votes a particular way. Let’s get them to come out because we want a particular political outcome.” So now, let’s forget about America for a second. The reality of this kind of power, which is all in these ephemeral experiences, where people get things projected to them, no one will ever know that they saw it except that person, is now potentially in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, that to me is a wild threat. Mr. Cain: It is absolutely wild. It’s a threat that we haven’t taken seriously enough until now. I do think that as Americans, when we’re dealing with hostile foreign powers, we tend to be naive. And that’s because we forget that being an American and growing up in New York or Chicago, life for you is quite different from life for somebody in Russia or China or somewhere that has always been underneath this authoritarian government and might not have the same outlook on life. We just have to remember that not all of the world is a liberal democracy, that there are different systems around the world and that we can’t simply trust TikTok coming from this authoritarian background, within an authoritarian country to simply, automatically follow American laws as they are written. It’s just not how the world works, it’s not how the system works and it’s something we need to be mindful of as we deal with the TikTok problem. Mr. Jekielek: There is this fine print and in this case, you’ve shown how the fine print exposes a really crazy reality, I would argue. But with the Chinese Communist Party, I’ve never seen any evidence that they’ve been interested in caring what that fine print is, if they can get away with it. The WTO finds that it’s illegal, that there’s this required technology transfer when American companies come into China. They’re required to transfer their technology to be able to get market access. That is illegal, and I didn’t even realize this until I read it in your book, that this is actually an illegal act by the WTO. But has China cared? No. How many American companies have agreed to transfer their intellectual property? Hundreds. I is billions upon billions of dollars of intellectual property. Mr. Cain: Yes, billions and billions of dollars. This is something that the Chinese Communist Party has mastered. It is looking for ways to extract technology and intellectual property from companies that want to do business in China. The Chinese government advertises China as having a major consumer market, with its 1.2 billion people. It’s been growing wildly, there’s a lot of money, a lot of profit to be made. But here’s the catch, once you come to China, if we decide that you have to do it, you’re going to have to transfer that IP to a local Chinese company. Just so many American companies have tried operating in China over the years, major companies, including Google, but they’ve ultimately been shown the door. It’s as if they try to open the door to China, and compete with local companies. Maybe sometimes they’re idealistic and believe that they’re trade or their economic engagement with China will open the way to reforms and potentially democracy in the future, when the rising middle class will want to rise up and change the government. These are all a fantasy, none of this has happened at all. Google is perhaps the best example of this repeatedly happening in China because Google originally tried to enter the Chinese market, they left voluntarily, but also they were harassed and shown the door by the Chinese government. They were out of favor compared to Baidu, which is the Chinese equivalent. But the experience of Google and the experience of major American tech firms trying to enter China is that, “Look, China doesn’t want your values. The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want you to open up a major search engine that’s going to be open and hopefully uncensored in China.” They don’t want any of that, they want you out of there. And that’s the major lesson that we’ve learned in the past decade or so trying to engage with China, that we become more like China rather than they become more like us, which is a point that you’ve made very well. Mr. Jekielek: Okay, so we definitely need to talk about that. Is it bizarre to you? It’s bizarre to me. That’s why I’m asking the question this way, that Google may have an AI development arm functioning in China. Given everything we’ve talked about, we know that the Chinese military and the regime itself is, if not deeply intertwined, is watching it very closely, and almost certainly deeply intertwined. Yet they’re not as quick to work, for example, with the U.S. military. I just find this a really bizarre endpoint in how a company of this stature, of this size, of this influence in the U.S. and globally is functioning. Mr. Cain: Yes. American companies, they really trip over themselves when they try to justify what they’re doing in China. They will often try to cover up their tracks or maybe try to keep the information in Mandarin, Chinese, and just hope that nobody’s translating it. But there are people translating it, there are lots of investigators looking into this. They trip over themselves and attempt to make it look like they’re working harmlessly in China. But then you lift the veil, and at least I’ve found that there’s quite a lot of activity going on that should be better monitored and potentially should be illegal in some respects. One example that you mentioned is Google, with this possible AI laboratory there. Microsoft is another excellent example of a company that set up a major artificial intelligence laboratory. This is Microsoft Research Lab-Asia, that’s the name of this laboratory, opened up under Bill Gates. It was a public relations attempt to build a stronger relationship with the Chinese market, but it ended up evolving into a laboratory that was almost autonomous, and that didn’t report as it should to the Microsoft parent company in America. And in the process, it became the breeding ground, and the training ground for the future leaders of China’s artificial intelligence sector. Many of its alumni had gone on to found major Chinese companies that were involved in human rights abuses and in various national security and military abuses and who are now sanctioned by the U.S. government as a result of their efforts. So, it’s an indirect line. Bill Gates didn’t pick up the phone and say, “Please train the future of AI officials in China.” But he did set up the institute there that is now being used against us by training all these people who go into these malevolent companies that are acting against American interests. Mr. Jekielek: Right. And this was one of the originals, it was originally named China and then they renamed it Asia to make it sound a little more innocuous. Mr. Cain: A little more neutral, yes. Mr. Jekielek: When I read your book, it caused me to go into a state of deep introspection about many things. Because you actually had a guide at one point and he told you the three steps, and I thought it was amazing that this guy was so astute in his observations. But there’s basically three elements of the perfect police state effectively. So maybe if you could reprise that to me, and explain to me this police state? What are the elements? And then we’ll get to, how is it that Xinjiang became that? Mr. Cain: Yes. So, the perfect police state. Then I was writing the book, one of the most interesting things I found was that many of the Uyghurs who I was talking to, including my guide in Xinjiang, were not just awash in propaganda. They were well aware of what was going on. They were informed about what was happening around the world, and they were not simply in the dark. They were not simply suffering like these passive sufferers who the Communist Party is just acting against and they’re just going to camps and that’s it. They were very sharp on what was going on around them. My guide told me that it was a three step process, and that he had been observing it very carefully. The first step was this process of ensuring that technology, these social media apps, these various technological apps and websites were in the hands of everybody. They were in the hands of regular people and then they were being used to blast misinformation at them that there’s a major terrorist threat. The terrorist threat comes from the Uyghurs and we have to do something about this, the Chinese government, the Communist Party must act. That was stage one. It was a process of alienating and othering this particular group and just blasting out the propaganda to the point where people started… Mr. Jekielek: Through this new technology that’s basically ubiquitous, you can’t live without it. And we’ll get to talking about social credit scores, but now you have apps that you need to be able to function in society on these phones. Mr. Cain: Yes. Now you are chained to your phone. You must rely on WeChat to purchase items at the local 7-Eleven convenience store. There was so much that was happening, just a sea change of technology in China at this time. The Chinese government exploited that to feed people with misinformation, to spy on them, to gather data on them. But people didn’t really have a choice. Mr. Jekielek: And then to other this one specific group of people. Okay, what are the other two steps? Mr. Cain: The second step was to create these artificial categories. So this goes back to the othering that I talked about before, looking for ways to separate the population. For example, to bulldoze cultural artifacts, to clear out certain neighborhoods and move people, move the local Uyghur population to different areas from the majority Han Chinese population. This is also something that the Nazis were very good at in terms of moving Jews out to the ghettos. Mr. Jekielek: Creating ghettos. Mr. Cain: … creating ghettos. It’s the physical and the digital separation of these two groups, of othering them and making it clear that they are the national enemy, they must be tamed or they must be oppressed in order for the nation to survive. The final step, the third step was what my guide called the panopticon. This is an old term that influenced George Orwell in 1984. It’s this concept of a…imagine that there’s a circular prison camp and there’s a guard post in the center and there’s one guard in this post who can look out at all the prisoners, he can see all of them because it’s a giant circle around him. But the way that it’s set up, the prisoners can’t see the guard looking at them so they can only guess if they’re being watched at any moment. And maybe they are really being watched, maybe the guard is looking at them intently, or maybe he’s watching TV and taking a nap, there’s no way to know. But this is a very good system for controlling the prison population, because everybody is scared of being watched and nobody wants to get in trouble. This is the system that the Chinese Communist Party set up in Western China back in 2016 and 2017. It was a digital panopticon in which everybody was constantly being watched by an artificial intelligence system, which was called the IJOP or the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. And this platform would gather data from smartphones based on people’s usage. It would gather data from cameras. This region had cameras that covered almost every square inch. They would track everybody, track everything that they’re doing and try to create this sense of fear that the party is watching and you have to fall in line. Now, a lot of times the AI turned out not to be that sophisticated, the software would make silly predictions, like someone’s going to become a terrorist because they bought too many cigarettes that day. It would make these silly predictions that didn’t make sense, but the point of that was to scare people. You never knew if you’re going to be the next target, so it’s better just to fall in line, and become a robot for the Communist Party to survive. Mr. Jekielek: On this show, maybe not that often, but I’ve talked about the film, The Lives of Others. It’s been maybe 15 years ago that it came out, of course, talking about East Germany and showing what living in a police state might look like. What struck me about that film is that for the first time I saw something that might explain to people who grow up in a free society, where you’re not expecting everyone and every device to be spying on you, to understand what it’s like to be in a society which is structured that way. Back then, the Stasi were arguably the best at it, but the technologies weren’t so efficiently advanced that every aspect of your life could be scrutinized or might be scrutinized. So I’m going to plug that film, folks. Go see it if you haven’t, it’s a very important film. But now what you’re describing is this taken, they say on steroids, but it’s even more than on steroids, because it’s almost like your gate. Are you moving in a way that might seem like you’re drunk? Everything about what you’re doing is now in some way being categorized and sent to a central repository where an AI studies it and determines things almost in this, and I’m thinking of another film, Minority Report, this sort of pre-crime way. And actually this idea of pre-crime figures into things here. So tell me about this. Mr. Cain: Yes. The AI system, the IJOP is a pre-crime system. It’s gathering all this data about everyone it can in the region of Xinxiang, because it wants to predict who will become a terrorist and what kind of behaviors are indicators of who exactly will become a terrorist. I’ve gone through lists. The Chinese Communist Party is extremely boastful about what it’s done despite its being a very dark and heavy topic. We’re talking about genocide and crimes against humanity. But surprisingly, Communist Party officials are very blase about putting this on the internet and bragging about everything that they’re supposedly accomplishing. I’ve looked at lists of behaviors that the IJOP does not like. One example would be going out and buying a tent. Suddenly purchasing a tent is something that regular people don’t do often, so the AI system is trained to look at someone who buys a tent and to see that as something that’s somehow suspicious or indicative of a terrorist mindset. This is predictive policing. This is the goal of being able to create a total security state, and that’s what China wants. It’s a total surveillance state that not only documents what people are doing right now, but is supposed to know what people are going to be doing one week from now. The goal is to eradicate all crime, all terrorism, create like this Truman Show world almost, in which all of life is plotted out and planned in the future. It’s truly dystopian. Mr. Jekielek: How far away is that from what you have seen in Xinxiang, and from how you understand Xinxiang operates right now, and frankly, other parts of China, which are, as I understand it, adopting the model to various degrees? Mr. Cain: It is already spreading throughout China. Back when I was writing the book, I had started researching it back in 2016 when this police state was starting to emerge. I had seen reports and I was alarmed at the reports that were coming out, so I decided to go out there and see it for myself. It was absolutely a dark, horrendous, scary sci-fi movie. It felt like Minority Report with Tom Cruise, as you said, where the systems are trying to predict what people are going to do and they’re taken away to concentration camps if they’re believed to be suspicious. This system has already been spread around many parts of China, Tibet has been enacting some of these measures. Also, Inner Mongolia, another region that is often not really examined as much as the other regions. Also, the rest of China has now been engulfed in the system of social credit, which they’re not as repressive as what is happening in Xinxiang, because they’re not targeting the minority in these other parts of China. But they’re repressive in the sense that they track people’s purchases and credit histories and to see if they can be reliable enough to buy a house. Should you be allowed to purchase an airplane ticket and travel overseas? Do we trust you, the state, enough to give you this privilege to fly to America for two weeks and then fly back? What is scary is that even if there are no concentration camps in Beijing, in the capital right now, there is a system of total surveillance that has enveloped the whole country and most recently has done so with the COVID lockdowns in China, which are very extreme. Mr. Jekielek: Exactly, and we’ve seen footage of people lining up in mass trying to get their vaccination status updated, for example. And we’ve seen also examples of how this vaccination status has become a key piece of this surveillance regime. In fact, there are other examples where we’ve seen where people, obviously for political reasons, had their vaccines header swapped from green to red all of a sudden because they did something wrong politically. So it’s almost like we’re seeing the application of this technology. But here’s the reason why I became introspective about this type of technology. It’s not only in China now that this is being applied. Mr. Cain: No, it’s not. It’s spreading, it’s going everywhere. And this goes back to the problem of TikTok. What is it that separates TikTok and ByteDance operating around the world from what’s happening in Xinxiang? ByteDance, they might not be literally running the concentration camps, but they’ve been involved in suppressing and censoring news about these atrocities. They’re using fundamentally the same technologies as what the Chinese government has been using to monitor and surveil its people. The lockdowns have only been more alarming in China, because they’ve been just so repressive to an extreme that it’s like all humanity has been stripped away in the major cities of Beijing and Shanghai. There are these videos that you’ve probably seen of people standing on their balcony during the lockdowns and the police drone will come by and order them to go back into their room, just because they’re on their balcony for just five seconds, and that supposedly is a major pandemic threat to the Chinese nation. The real reason for these lockdowns, and I’m sure people in the Chinese government know that they’re ineffective, and they’re not going to stop COVID, but it gives the sense of control. It makes it clear that we are the ones who have power over you and you have to do what we say, even if the lockdowns themselves do not have that intended effect of stopping COVID. Mr. Jekielek: The AI and the system being wrong is actually a feature, not a bug as they say, right? Because that creates this sense of insecurity, “I might be next, I didn’t actually do anything wrong. Or am I doing something wrong?” And this is a very weird mental state to be put into and it obviously affects people living in this kind of panopticon. Mr. Cain: It does. This is the riddle of Chinese Communist Party rule. The riddle is, where is the line and how far can I go before I’m crossing the line? The Communist Party never makes the line fully clear, it’s simply if they want to target you and they want to make an example of you and they want to oppress or surveil you in some way, then they’ll draw the line. But they’re always going to draw the line far behind you, you’ve already stepped over it. So nothing you do is going to prevent them from taking you to a concentration camp. Nothing you do is going to prevent the Communist Party from arresting you on a lockdown violation. If they want to harass you and threaten you, if you are a dissident in Hong Kong or you are a Uyghur Muslim practicing in the West, they will do everything they can to make your life as difficult as possible. Mr. Jekielek: A number of our viewers, I know, will be listening to this whole conversation and thinking to themselves that they’re worried that they’re seeing the seeds of this sort of thing happening in this country, in my home country of Canada, and in the West. We have emails that show that the CDC, Center for Disease Control in the US, essentially colluded with social media, in this case Facebook, to basically censor dissident voices around these lockdown policies in America, the people that wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which turns out, were extremely important voices that weren’t heard, and which may have basically prevented these cataclysmic policies from having been put into effect economically and socially. We’re just beginning to see the ramifications. But when you talk about all this, I start thinking about how government and corporate seem to be somehow colluding and working together. Are you worried that we’re seeing these seeds of what’s happening in China happening here? Mr. Cain: Yes. This is something that worries me, and something that I’ve been thinking a lot about too. At what point does what’s happening in China start to also look like what’s happening in America? We have a handful of social media giants that control our platforms, that control the flow of information, which does give them enormous power. We have a White House that might not always be the most responsible in terms of its own decision making. But at what point does what’s happening in America start to look like the collusion of government and corporations to create a very over-moderated information environment? And it’s true what you’re talking about. Going back to the pandemic, there were voices that were censored or shut down because they were deemed to be spreading misinformation. But now that some years have passed and now with the benefit of hindsight, we’re looking back and saying, “Well, actually what the CDC was saying was not entirely accurate at the time.” Even Dr. Fauci just said this recently at an event that one of his regrets was that he wishes that he would’ve said at the time that we’re making decisions based on all the available data we have. We don’t know everything yet and once more data comes out, then we’ll know what’s going on. That’s essentially the gist of what he was saying. This is one of the problems with the label of misinformation and it’s something that worries me. At what point does a fair criticism or a fair point being raised suddenly become misinformation? If you go on Twitter or Facebook and you’re questioning a U.S. government policy or a Facebook deplatforming policy, at what point are you spreading something that’s totally reckless versus spreading information that is just simply heathe lthy questioning and skepticism that we should have in a democracy? And especially, the Left in particular has gone too far on this. They’ve attempted to use the term misinformation as this blanket term for anything that might hurt someone’s feelings or offend somebody. This whole misinformation debate is spreading into something different. Mr. Jekielek: I mentioned to you that a certain former U.S. senator told me at one point that he really believed, and I believe him, he believed that we could change China, and help it become a more democratic, more fair, open system, a free system. And then he said, “Well, actually, but I think they changed us.” And I agree with that. Mr. Cain: I think so. The Chinese system has changed us and I think that you can get the answer to that by asking any major corporate CEO of any major company operating in China, “What do you think about China’s human rights record?” Just go to Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, who about a year ago announced a major expansion into the Chinese market, which was widely criticized in the finance community and ask somebody like that, “Well, what’s your stance? Do you condemn the genocide of the Uyghurs? Do you consider it a genocide? What is your stance on the lockdowns in Beijing and Shanghai? What is your stance on Tibet, on Taiwan, on Falun Gong, and on all these different groups?” The typical response that these executives will give is that they’re not diplomats. They’ll often say, “We’re not human rights activists, we’re not diplomats, we’re just here to do business.” What they’re admitting is that they don’t care, they just want the money. And this is problematic in America because we are a democracy. We are supposed to care about our values, and those values should be embedded in our companies too. It’s not simply that you push aside your values when profit is suddenly being discussed. This is a debate that goes back through American history. This is not new to our times. But the question of the corporation and its role is something that we need to pay closer attention to today, because a lot of big corporations are acting against America and turning us into something more like China with this vow of silence that we are not allowed to criticize China, we’re not allowed to raise the problem of human rights, and we must take a vow of silence in exchange for the promise of profit. Mr. Jekielek: This is actually quite interesting. You’ll recall back in 1999 when the Chinese regime outlawed Falun Gong, and started persecuting practitioners, I was thinking about the othering you were describing. They didn’t have the pocket tools for othering people at the time, but they did have the whole TV media. There were 500,000 pieces of state propaganda that went out demonizing these people, and basically making them enemies of the state, just a reason to show why it is okay to persecute these people. American companies went, in some cases, there’s been multiple court cases on this, basically advertising themselves to the regime that they can help them find Falun Gong practitioners. We know where this has gone. This whole organ harvesting regime was created with this huge prison population in the labor camps. Anyway, terrible things happen and to me, the logical conclusion of all of that, because we didn’t act, because we just kept quiet, as you say, is Xinxiang today is the perfect police state. If a regime is doing this sort of thing, how can we trust a regime? Even if you’re a company, let’s say I’m Larry Fink or whoever it is that wants to put a lot of money in there, how can I trust them if I know, and of course they know, the horrific things they’re willing to do to people? Mr. Cain: You can’t trust them, I think that’s the only answer. Companies go in on the assumption that China will change for them, that China will open the red carpet and welcome them in and help them make a lot of money, but a government that does this to its people cannot be trusted. That same government, they might welcome you today as a company operating there, but tomorrow they might show the door to anybody. They could show the door to BlackRock and Larry Fink. They could say, “Well, thank you for the IP.” Going back to what we talked about earlier, BlackRock is a good example of a company that has some major IP in the financial technology area, the predictive analytics relating to where to invest your money. BlackRock has a system that goes back in time about 50 years and that documents all major news around the world and then attempts to predict how news events today are going to shape the market. It helps move around people’s wealth based on that. This kind of IP is enormously valuable. And I don’t personally know what kind of system BlackRock has in place to protect that IP, but that’s just one example of something that the Chinese government would love to have its hands on. I’m sure there are Chinese employees in BlackRock who are thinking about this already, “The Communist Party is instructing us to steal the IP, so just go into BlackRock and see if we can take it.” If they treat their people that way, if they abuse their human rights, they’re also going to abuse foreign companies. They don’t see that as a separate issue. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to ask this question again and you’ve already answered partially, but how do we change policy to try to address this threat that we seem to keep bolstering? Mr. Cain: Yes. It’s a tough question, because the question of how to counteract a major international threat is always a hard one. How do we counteract China without accidentally starting a war, for example? Personally, I’m a China Hawk and I am in favor of stronger sanctions and protections. The U.S. government has done a good job of putting certain groups of refugees at the front of the line. So, if you’re a Uyghur, there’s a new bill that’s going through Congress that is going to push them to the front of the line. This should be extended to Tibetans and Falun Gong, as you’re saying. I think that we need to recognize what’s going on. Part of the issue is that China is an extremely opaque nation. It’s also hard to get information there. And I think that one of the solutions that I’ve been thinking of recently is, is there a way that we could form underground communications networks that get information in and out, that bypass censorship on people’s smartphones to tell dissidents in Hong Kong or wherever what exactly is happening around the world? What is going on? This is more than a VPN. I’m not talking about just setting up a VPN and loading Google. But is there a way that the U.S. government can actively circumvent censorship? So, if a conflict were to break out over Taiwan, is there a network that we could use to ensure that reliable information about that conflict is getting to the Chinese people, and they’re not simply being deceived by the Chinese Communist Party? That’s just one idea. There’s a lot more we could do, like export controls and sanctions. I think that we need to sanction China harder. One major issue concerns the farmland being bought up by Chinese Communist Party-connected companies. If conflict does heat up in the future, that is land that can be used against us. It can be used to spy on us. A lot of that land is right near sensitive U.S. military installations. There’s a bill going through California at the state level right now to attempt to ban these kinds of foreign farmland buyouts. But I think that we need to do more with our laws to ensure that it’s hard for these bad actors from the Chinese Communist Party to actively be here undermining American democracy. Mr. Jekielek: The Chinese regime has a massive lobbying arm in Washington DC, and furthermore, as you astutely mentioned earlier, many companies are really beholden to the regime, especially if they’re very active there and they have a lot of money or manufacturing invested. There’s nothing of this nature in the other direction that I can see, so this is a very asymmetric type of leverage that the regime has over this country and the West. Mr. Cain: It is. Asymmetric is the right word. Chinese government entities can hire American lawyers and lobbyists to work for their behalf in Washington DC, but can the American Pentagon hire a lobbyist in Beijing who is going to go knock on the door of the Politburo and tell them what they want? Mr. Jekielek: It’s preposterous to think about, right? Mr. Cain: It’s preposterous. Mr. Jekielek: It’s hilarious when you say like that, I’m just laughing to myself. Mr. Cain: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What? That’s impossible. Mr. Cain: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: That’s just so out of… Mr. Cain: And it’s not just lobbying, but going back to farmland. Chinese companies that are shown to be connected to the CCP can buy vast acres of farmlands right next to U.S. military bases, but could the opposite happen? Could American investors go to China and open up a giant farming plant near the South China Sea, near all the islands that are being filled in there, all these fake islands, and just watch Chinese naval movements in their free time? That would be preposterous, it would be absolutely ridiculous. So, why is it that we have this open system of laws and procedures that allows countries like China to use against us, but then we can’t do the same thing there? I think that reciprocity is an important concept here. If Americans can’t buy farmland in China, for example, then people connected to the Chinese Communist Party are barred from buying land in America too. That’s just common sense. Mr. Jekielek: Final question as we finish up. Some people who are on the hawkish side would say, “Really, the only thing that’s possible is to really foundationally decouple the economies.” What do you think? Mr. Cain: I do agree that we need to decouple to a large extent. But realistically, I don’t think we’re going to be able to decouple completely, because the world that we live in now with all our technology and our interconnected networks and all the globalization that’s happened over the past 20 years, it’s not something that we can realistically do in a short amount of time. I do agree that we should work towards decoupling, we should decouple strategic industries. Semiconductors should be decoupled, surveillance equipment certainly decoupled, and anything with a military application should be decoupled. But realistically, there are other areas that maybe just can’t be decoupled anymore. There are a lot of American companies that operate in China that have manufacturing plants there and they don’t want to move their plants because of the costs. One possibility is the U.S. government could help subsidize the movement of plants out of China into Vietnam and India and other places. But I haven’t heard that proposal yet in Washington DC. It’s something that we should look into. I think that it would help enormously to ensure that our supply chains are not tainted, that we are not buying products made with slave labor, and that our equipment is not spying on us because it was made in China. Mr. Jekielek: Geoffrey Cain, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Cain: Thank you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Geoffrey Cain and I on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. TikTok did not immediately respond to our request for comment. 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

1, Tucker Carlson: Inside BlackRock’s $1.5 BILLION Stake in Fox News Last week, after we published an episode going through how Fox News lost money, lost ratings, and lost paying subscribers (all because they fired Tucker Carlson), a lot of people left comments below that video, urging us to look into the role that BlackRock played in the whole affair. An article from Forbes magazine suggested that the reason Tucker was let go was because of his constant battling against the rise of the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) agenda—one that’s being pushed by the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and by giant institutional investors like Blackrock, which just so happens to own a large stake in Fox Corporation. Therein lies the problem: Tucker Carlson’s program would, night after night, rail against the very concept of ESG, and he oftentimes attributed many of the problems that we’re seeing around the world to exactly this type of global agenda. 🔴 Join us with a very special OFFER: https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW11 2, The Secret Campaign to Destroy Tucker Carlson; Can Free Beer Save Budweiser? | Crossroads Tonight Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is facing public hit pieces. Leaked internal videos from Fox and internal communications at the network have been provided to The New York Times and to leftist organization Media Matters. It appears public sentiment is still more on the side of Carlson, but the attacks are raising questions of whether or not these leaks were motivated by business. In other news, Anheuser-Busch is still reeling from boycotts following a Bud Light promotional campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. But they might have a solution: free beer. In this episode of Crossroads, we’ll discuss these stories. 🔴 Stay informed. Stay Free. Join us on EpochTV: https://www.joshphilipp.com 3, Is Man’s Best Friend Politically Correct? | Over The Target Progressives won’t stop until they’ve infiltrated every part of American life. They’re relentless, insinuating their way into your home, your garage, your kitchen, your bedroom—and now even your doghouse. In this eye-opening new episode of Over the Target, Lee Smith speaks with William Jacobson, Cornell Law School professor and editor of Legal Insurrection, about the latest trend in critical race theory. America’s top vet schools are making animal doctors parrot race and gender talking points. 🔵 Watch the Full Episode 👉🏻 https://ept.ms/RacistVetsPetsYT-OT 🔵 Unlimited EpochTV access starts at only $1: https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW

“These corporate outlets have really blurred the lines so aggressively that people can’t even tell the difference anymore between who is actually trying to impart truth and who is trying to impart an agenda,” says Amber Athey, The Spectator’s Washington editor and a senior fellow at the Steamboat Institute. How did activism take over journalism? And what will it take to cut through the information war? “Their power comes in their stranglehold on information. And if they don’t have that anymore, then they no longer are able to operate with this monopoly that they’ve enjoyed over the past few decades,” Athey says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-did-activism-take-over-journalism-amber-athey-cuts-through-the-information-war_4768102.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Amber Athey, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Amber Athey: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Amber, you study one of my favorite topics, which is media. What I want to do today, we’re going to talk about how to look at our traditional mainstream, or what I call legacy media. But actually, why don’t we start with just by talking about what is the media landscape and how would you describe the current media landscape in America? Ms. Athey: Well, the current landscape is that the corporate media outlets have vast control of the airwaves. When I say corporate media, I mean these huge financial behemoths that publish news content. We’re talking about the Jeff Bezos owned “Washington Post”. We’re talking about Turner owned CNN. We’re talking about the “New York Times,” even the “Wall Street Journal,” which is part of News Corp. All of these news organizations are actually corporations. They’re big businesses, and I think a lot of people don’t realize that. They think of people in a newsroom like they see in “All the President’s Men,” “Washington Post” reporters being scrappy and running around DC and meeting with sources. But, really how the media works now is that these corporations own usually multiple newsrooms actually, and most of the people who work for them sit on their laptop all day, and don’t ever actually go out and do bootleg, shoe strapping reporting. They get a lot of their information directly from democratic sources, whether that means activists, or the DNC, members of Congress, and even left wing cultural institutions like Big Tech. So, most of the information that people are actually getting in today’s media landscape is filtered through this real left wing ideological flow of information from the political left to the cultural left and then down the news media. A great example of how this works in practice was when Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida was prepared to sign the Parental Rights and Education bill, and all of a sudden all of the media in lockstep in their headlines started referring to that as the Don’t Say Gay bill. Well, where did Don’t Say Gay come from? It was actually a small left wing activist group based out of Florida that had tweeted the moniker, and their original tweet only got about 200 likes. But because the right people, meaning larger media reporters and larger activist groups were following this small Florida outfit, that was the phrase, the term that was used to describe the bill from there on out. So there really is a sort of echo chamber that exists in the media because so many of them are not interested in truth, but they’re interested in ideology and profit, and most of them are actually concerned that they will lose out on profit if they buck the traditional left wing party line because of the existence of cancel culture and woke mobs. So that’s really where we sit right now is these large corporate outlets are towing the Democratic party line, the left wing progressive line. Because they think that if they do anything different, they’re going to lose readership. Mr. Jekielek: But you’ve got two elements. So these institutions also hire disproportionately what you would call cultural left. Is that right? Ms. Athey: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: So it strikes me that there’s kind of two elements. On one hand, there’s people who are ideologically interested in, let’s say, reinforcing particular kinds of narratives, but then there’s also the financial interest. And actually your point is good. There’s strong incentives being put on these companies to report correctly, right? Or less you be canceled, less you lose market share, less you get vilified by all your peers, I mean peer companies. Ms. Athey: Yes. Well, look at what happened to the “New York Times” when they ran that Tom Cotton oped. There was an internal revolt, but there was also an external revolt from Left wing subscribers. Most of the people who read the “New York Times” are coastal liberals, elites, and they want to be reading a certain narrative. They want the newspaper to confirm the way that they view the world. And for Tom Cotton to write in the pages of the “New York Times” that the National Guard should be sent into quell riots, which none of the people who read the “New York Times” had seen firsthand, that was simply unacceptable to them. So they all threatened to cancel their subscriptions. But the internal revolts are another thing I want to touch on because this is a good explanation for why the media has trended so far left as well. We have seen that the millennials who were orchestrating woke mobs in college, whether by shutting down speakers or lobbying the administrations for certain diversity quotas or racial sensitivity training, forced diversity requirements for undergraduate courses have now graduated. And instead of, as many on the right suspected, being slapped in the face with reality and being told that there were no safe spaces in the real world, actually used the same tactics that they used on campus to infiltrate institutions and bend them to their will. At the “New York Times,” what those staffers were orchestrating with their public shaming of the organization for publishing Tom Cotton and his idea, was the same way that the campus militant left would orchestrate guilt trips against speakers who would come on campus and say things they don’t like. Or professors who would teach truth as opposed to woke left ideology. So they really exported those tactics and used them to strong arm the media to go even further left than ever imagined. Mr. Jekielek: We have this cultural trend and then we have this financial incentivization or dis-incentivization element. It strikes me, is that enough to explain how, for lack of a better term, extreme many of these media have become in their reporting? Ms. Athey: Well, the other part of it is that we have to consider that the media was already sympathetic to these causes, because ever since media was objective after the penny press, it leaned left. People claim that there was this era of objectivity that we should strive to return to. But the reality is that the Walter Cronkites of the world were just as liberal as Jake Tapper is on CNN, if not more so. And if you look at the breakdown statistically of who actually is in the media, they are overwhelmingly from a wealthy background, they’re overwhelmingly registered as Democrats. They overwhelmingly believe in left wing causes or have ties to left wing activism. They overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton, for example. So if you have a group of Democrats who are running the media, and then in come the woke millennials who want to go further to the left, these people didn’t realize the threat that was coming because they sympathized with the woke millennials. They thought the woke millennials were on their side. They quickly learned that wokism does not accept anything but a hundred percent fealty. And these people had never experienced what conservatives experience when you push back on the woke, which is you get called racist, homophobic, sexist, the whole list of the isms that they like to call you, and they didn’t know how to handle it. To a coastal, elite liberal, being called a racist is the absolute worst thing you can be called in your entire life. So when the woke millennials came into the newsrooms and started telling them that unless they followed their demands, they were racist, they said, okay, you’re right, sorry. Do whatever you want to do. And things happened very quickly after that, because there was no one who was willing to take a leadership role and push back on the woke kids. Mr. Jekielek: So back in 2015 and 2016, I observed a substantial shift in how these media that we’ve been discussing right now behave. Do you agree that things changed somehow significantly and that it’s never gone back? What exactly happened? Ms. Athey: Yes, I do think things have changed. And what changed was the way that people who worked for the mainstream media viewed their role. Their role used to be about speaking truth to power, searching for the truth, aiming for objectivity, being the sort of thin, black and white line, if you will, between government and the people, to make sure that people were getting accurate information and that the government wasn’t lying to them. When Trump took office, and even when he was campaigning, everything changed, because the members of the media hated him so much because of the threat that he posed to the left and to really just the way the regime was operating in general, they decided that their role was actually to become a voice for the voiceless, to protect democracy, to oppose a dictator, to oppose authoritarianism. It was no coincidence that the “Washington Post” changed its header at this time to “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” They used all of these new labels in a very opinionated way to say that they were opposed to Trump. And when you drop standards of objectivity or of trying to be unbiased or of being on a fact finding mission, you open yourselves up to all kinds of corruption within the media. And so this only added to this volatile cocktail of left wing activists joining media outlets because they were able to use these new rules to push their own ideology. Mr. Jekielek: Now, there’s something called activist journalism, right? And we became aware as we were hiring at different times that this is actually … it’s not just a concept, it’s actually something that is taught in J-Schools as we speak. So this truth seeking as being a foundational value of the media has somehow changed. Can you explain this? Ms. Athey: Yes, I think that people realized that the media was so powerful that it was really a … if you could corrupt the media, then you had free rein to impart your message onto basically the entire American populace. And you didn’t have to worry about how the media was going to spin your ideas, or how they were going to fact check your ideas, because you controlled all of those means of disseminating information. I actually, though am not necessarily a hundred percent against activist journalism because I think it can be a very powerful tool for the right as well if it’s done correctly and effectively. I think the problem is when activist journalism gets confused for journalism writ large, and the left, and the establishment media in these corporate outlets have really blurred the lines so aggressively that people can’t even tell the difference anymore between who is actually trying to impart truth and who is trying to impart an agenda. And the American people have lost so much trust in the media because they feel like they’re being lied to about the intentions of the reporters that they’re reading. CNN, for example, is much more despised than MSNBC because people know when they watch MSNBC that they’re getting progressive opinion for the most part. When they watch CNN, they’re told that they’re watching the most trusted name in news, but they know that that’s not true. They can see that Don Lemon and formerly Chris Cuomo and Jake Tapper are not these objective media reporters. They know that they are imparting their opinions on people. And the fact that CNN lies about it is what really bothers Americans the most. Mr. Jekielek: Isn’t activist journalism just another word for pushing narratives or actually just propaganda? Ms. Athey: I don’t know that I’d necessarily agree with that, because I think, for example, what Project Veritas does could be described as activist journalism. To me, what activist journalism is, is that you are open about your opinion. But what activism journalism shouldn’t do, which is where I think the left goes too far, is that if they’re investigating something and they don’t like the outcome, they either lie about the results or they choose not to publicize them. And I think the right is a lot more open when they are doing activist journalism, of making sure that they are still having truth seeking as the foundation of what they’re doing. Activism journalism to me can mean choosing what stories you want to investigate or choosing what stories you want to cover, and coming at it from a certain perspective. Or maybe you’re writing an opinion piece that has journalism imparted into it to help prove whatever point you’re trying to make. But I agree that what the left does is definitely propaganda and goes way too far into the activist side of that journalism. Mr. Jekielek: Okay, I see. So you’re saying, if you disclosed at the outset, what you’re doing, here I’m just doing pure truth seeking. I’m trying my best, I’ve got my opinions. Sometimes they might leak in there, but I’m really trying to give you the truth. That’s one thing. And this other thing, I specifically want to convince you around a particular topic, a particular political position. Here’s the evidence I’ve got, and as long as you disclose that that’s what you’re doing, that’s- Ms. Athey: That’s the way that I view it. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. I think we’ve given a bit of a picture of the kind of current media reality today and some of the incentives. What do you see as the opportunity for media, like the Epoch Times, which don’t feed into this ecosystem, but are growing and eager? Ms. Athey: There’s an amazing opportunity, there’s so much space open for new and independent outlets to operate and be very, very successful. Because there is such an appetite among the American people for outlets that are still committed to these traditional journalistic principles, like truth and objectivity, and seeking to be unbiased, in trying to make sure that the American people have access to the most accurate information— imparting truth onto them. One of the beautiful things about the rise of the internet is that, although it has given a lot more power to corporate outlets, it also has sort of destroyed their monopoly. Because if you can create your own digital outlet or have your own podcast, or have your own program that airs online, people can access it, and they can get this independent alternative information. The problem, of course, is that Big Tech is trying to strangle these alternative outlets. So in addition to building alternative media outlets, now the right has to start trying to either crack down on Big Tech legislatively, or basically build their own new internet, because Amazon Web Hosting Services hosts the vast majority of websites and can destroy them as though we’ve seen with places like Parler or Gab. We’ve seen that Big Tech can wipe you off of social media if you push a story that they don’t like; a la the “New York Post” with the Hunter Biden laptop story. And so they are starting to realize that this outgrowth of new outlets on the internet is dangerous in terms of stifling their narrative, and so they’re going to try to crack down. So there’s a lot of work for conservatives and independent media outlets to do, to make sure that their content is still getting to the audiences that they want it to reach. Mr. Jekielek: And so we’re here at the National Conservatism Conference, and your main topic here actually is figuring out ways to deal with exactly the kinds of problems that you’re describing. So let’s dive into that. Right? Ms. Athey: I would say there’s two main points that I would make, and this is outside of a technological standpoint, but this is solely from how do conservatives approach the media, how do they interact with the media? And the first is, I think that one of the most powerful tools that the left wing media has used is cancel culture. And I know people will say that cancel culture comes from individuals, but the media does it too. They try to do it with Libs of TikTok, for example. They have used that cultural phenomenon as a means of silencing their political opponents. And we as conservatives have to stand up for each other. And one thing that always drives me crazy, is when somebody gets canceled, you’ll often see that a lot of conservatives will crawl into the DMs and say, oh, I really support what you’re doing, good for you. But they don’t say anything publicly because they don’t want to be associated with the person who is considered toxic. Or they’ll play the game of, well, I don’t agree with what they said, but I don’t think that they should lose their livelihood. And we have to be forceful and unwavering when we support each other. And I’ve found that so many more people are anti cancel culture, agree with sane, rational, conservative principles, than agree with woke mobs. And yet this vocal minority of the woke mob exercises so much power in the media. And it’s because conservatives are so individualistic and fractured sometimes, that they aren’t able to present that united front that the woke mob does. When I was canceled by a radio station for making a joke about Kamala Harris’s outfit, I found that a hundred times more people were willing to contact the radio station to complain about me being fired, than people who actually wanted me fired in the first place. And if that’s the kind of response that we can have every time someone is attacked by the media, are canceled by the media, then we’re going to have a much better time combating their influence. So that’s one, and I can get into two in a moment. Mr. Jekielek: But inherently, conservatives tend to be more liberty oriented, and self determination oriented, and doing your own thing oriented. And so well, that does present a problem in the sense of if you’re trying to create a sort of quorum or large … you’re trying to create a large group of people providing support, people all have to decide to do it individually. There isn’t sort of a switch you can flip and then have people respond, because it’s obviously the one thing that everybody has to be doing. Ms. Athey: Yes, it’s a great point. It’s a huge challenge because conservatives naturally just don’t orient themselves towards that type of response. But I’ve also seen over the past few years that a lot of conservatives know what time it is. They see the massive gains that the left has gained in politics and in culture. They see what they did during the pandemic where they shut down churches. They told people that they weren’t allowed to work if they were deemed non-essential. They told your kids that they couldn’t play sports. They hardly even allowed you to go to the grocery store. And now they’re trying to limit your freedom of movement by forcing you into electric vehicles, even though the places that are doing that like California have rolling blackouts. So I think a lot of conservatives, and particularly the people at Nacon, understand that the influence of the left is so great that we have to change our rule book. We have to change our playbook, because the way that we’ve been responding to this for the past few decades has clearly led us nowhere but self destruction. Now, the second way to combat the mainstream media, in my opinion, is that conservatives have to stop playing the game. And what I mean by that is conservatives need to stop giving interviews to these outlets. They need to stop giving scoops to these outlets. They need to stop treating these outlets as if they’re anything else but left wing propagandist machines. These are activist organizations. Why on earth was Trump giving an interview to Bob Woodward for his third book after he got totally slammed the first couple of times and treated incredibly unfairly? I don’t understand the impulse from a lot of people on the right to secretly want to be accepted and heralded by the mainstream press. These people despise us. They hate us, and so I think we should freeze them out. One person who’s done a great job of this is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis’ Communications team does not give interviews to the “Miami Herald.” They don’t give interviews to the “Washington Post.” And the only quotes that they give to them are when they’ve already publicized the questions and the full response to the journalist. Christina Pushaw for example, when she was asked to do a profile for the “Washington Post,” instead immediately tweeted the interview request and explained exactly what was happening to her followers, and why this profile was going to be biased. So cutting that off before it even got to the point where the “Washington Post” could interview her and put it in print. And then we all have to backtrack and play catch up trying to explain why what they did was wrong, cut it off at the head, refuse to do it. DeSantis only operates with media outlets that are fair to him. And I think every conservative should do that. There are tons of people in Congress, for example, who still will leak stories to the “New York Times” or to “The Hill” or to “Politico” and then come running to conservative or independent outlets when they inevitably get screwed over. And as a journalist, it’s like, why did you go to them in the first place? You knew what was going to happen. Mr. Jekielek: I see why you might go, because the thing is that there’s a huge danger. We’re a very polarized society. Maybe we’re not as polarized as some people might want us to believe, but we are quite polarized, and our media ecosystems are quite different as you’ve been outlining right now. So, the philosophy would be we need to try to reach the people that are outside of our sphere with these messages, otherwise, because we’re supposed to, if you’re a politician, you’re supposed to be representing all the people, not just your group or the group that votes for you. How do you break through that? I think this is the struggle that people that go to some of these outlets that you mentioned have, and I think they have a point. Ms. Athey: It’s understandable, but if the message is being distorted before it reaches the people, then what is the point? Right? Because they’re not getting your message. They’re getting the mainstream media’s interpretation of your message. And so I think that alone is a good enough reason to not operate within these media spaces. And if you freeze these people out, they’re no longer getting scoops, they’re no longer getting exclusives, they’re no longer getting interviews, they no longer have original information. They’re blurbing everybody else. At that point, what is their value to the American people? If you’re someone who actually wants new information, you’re not going to subscribe to any of those places anymore. Their power comes in their stranglehold on information. And if they don’t have that anymore, then they no longer are able to operate with this monopoly that they’ve enjoyed over the past few decades. Mr. Jekielek: It’s very interesting what you’re saying because in each of these media, there’s always a few reporters that are decent, and it’s those people, of course, that one would try to go to because they’re going to try to give you a fair shake. Sometimes it might work, sometimes it might not. But again, so the philosophy is, if we can at least try, maybe we can get the message through. You’re saying just forget it. It feels almost like an isolationist position. Ms. Athey: It is, in many ways, because even those people who are considered the good ones in the mainstream media outlets are still beholden to their editors. So even if you have someone who’s willing to tell the truth, if your outlet is not supporting you, then you’re not going to get very far. Mr. Jekielek: Some of us, like myself, have an intrinsic dislike of this kind of a strategy, okay. Because again, it just comes back to this foundational idea. We’re supposed to be, just like the Epoch Times. The Epoch Times wasn’t created to be a media for conservatives. Our goal is to be a media for everybody, in fact, that we think we are one, just that certain people choose us. I just have this intrinsic opposition to the idea of isolating ourselves into particular groupings of people and saying, no. I understand why you’re your strategy, why you’re describing it. And you’re certainly right that in most cases you can almost predict how people will be treated. But it almost feels like an intractable problem because we have to strive to be a media for everyone. Ms. Athey: Well, and I don’t want people to just isolate themselves into a conservative media bubble or to only talk to conservative activists. I think there are tons of independent outlets who do represent both sides, but are fair about it. And that’s where we really need to find the balance of which outlets are going to treat conservative ideas or Republicans with the respect and fairness that they treat people on the left. And unfortunately, I don’t think the corporate outlets are doing that. So it’s all about identifying who the good faith actors are, and staying away from the bad faith actors. It’s not about creating an echo chamber or silo of conservative thought and conservative media, but about making sure that you’re cutting off the people who are only out to do you harm. Mr. Jekielek: When I think of activist journalism, I essentially think of what you’re talking about as bad faith actors. It’s basically activist propaganda masquerading as journalism, or narrative reinforcement masquerading as journalism, which always should be truth seeking, that’s how I imagine it. So really what you’re talking about is trying to isolate all the people who are non-truth seeking, right? Non genuinely truth seeking. Ms. Athey: Yes, I think that’s right. Because there is this prevailing mindset in a lot of these outlets now, meaning corporate and establishment media outlets, that there’s no such thing as presenting both sides. They actually derogatorily refer to this as both sides-ism. And what they mean by that is, they think that one side is so irredeemably wrong and actually harmful to the fabric of society that their views don’t deserve air time. And if their views are going to be put on air, then they need to be immediately destroyed by whatever activist you have actually reading the news. And so they’re immediately telling people what they should think about people on the right, and what they’re saying. They don’t similarly qualify views from the left. So the push in journalism is actually to sort of preemptively color the way that views are presented when they’re coming from one side. And if you don’t do that, then you are guilty of actually perpetuating the harmful ideology of the right. Mr. Jekielek: Right. So just it’s this inordinate obsession with the narrative and to push only the “correct narrative.” Ms. Athey: Yes, that’s exactly what it is. And journalists get rewarded for that, not just financially, but also by getting more scoops, more exclusives. Because if you are reporting on Congress, for example, a lot of your information is going to come directly from democratic press releases. The people who go on cable news are going to get the morning talking points from the Democratic National Committee to see what the party line is on whatever the issue of the day is and what they should say when they go on television. They’re going to get calls from Democratic offices explaining the latest piece of legislation that they put out and how the media should talk about it. And if you’re someone who refuses to just become a stenographer for the Democratic party, then they actually do cut you off. And so my perspective of cutting people off from the right is a little bit different. I don’t think you should cut people off for not repeating or parroting your narrative. I think you should cut people off if they lie about you, operate in bad faith, or actively seek to harm you. Mr. Jekielek: One of the criticisms that’s been hoisted on, let’s call it conservative media, right wing media, is that they’re kind of the right wing or conservative mirror of what some of these left wing media are, different sort of narrative reinforcement. Are you worried about that on the conservative side? Ms. Athey: I am worried about it. I do think some outlets are like that. But I have actually found that a vast majority of the people that I’ve worked with over the years, are not afraid to say negative things about conservatives or Republicans or the like. And I know I’ve come under attack for criticizing certain narratives from the right or criticizing things that I found to be untrue. The right and conservative media have some really great fact checking organizations that will just as often fact check a Republican senator as a Democratic senator. I actually came under fire a couple of weeks ago because I found that a story that was being floated around by Naomi Wolf and her operation about the vaccines causing miscarriages was not accurate. And I’m someone who’s very vaccine skeptical. I’m by no means a Pfizer shill, but I have just as much of a problem with people on our side peddling false information as people on the other side, because ultimately we have to ground ourselves in truth. And I think what conservative media is trying to do, and at least what I’ve seen in their ethos in the various outlets that I worked at, is that truth is still under guarding all of what they’re striving to do. And it would be ridiculous if it weren’t, because isn’t one of the main tenants of conservatism that our views are founded in truth, in biological truth, in cultural truth, in historical truth? That’s what under guards most of what we believe. Mr. Jekielek: So as we finish up, what would you say is the single most useful thing that one of our viewers, obviously someone who’s kind of interested in truth seeking, interested in understanding reality as best they can, in consuming good media to help frankly understand the world. What is the best way for people to arm themselves? Ms. Athey: Can I give two? Mr. Jekielek: Sure. Ms. Athey: Thank you. So the first is really what informed many of my views about the media, which is really just consuming as much as possible. And I will provide a fair warning that it’s not great for your mental health. But when I was a media reporter for “The Daily Caller” for about a year and a half, I had three TVs in my office set to CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. And I would watch the way each outlet covered a story, from the chyron that they used, from the way that they even introduced the story, from what aspects of it they covered. And I would read pretty much every newspaper. And giving yourselves as many sources to read as possible really helps you learn about how to identify truth in different aspects of media. Who’s telling the truth, who’s not? How narratives are shapen and the way that partisanship can affect the way a story is presented. I think that’s really important. And the second is to always strip down a media story or a news story to the sourcing. Who is actually making the claim? Who are the experts that the media is citing? Who are the anonymous sources? What might their motivations be? So for example, when the media was running Russian collusion narratives against Donald Trump, who were the anonymous sources for their stories? Could it have been Adam Schiff on the Intelligence Committee who obviously had a very concerted and obvious reason to pedal untruths about the Russia investigation? And might that shape the way that the media was reporting on the story and whether or not it’s accurate? In terms of the experts, if you’re reading a story from CNN, the experts are all saying that it’s normal for children to undergo these procedures, or get on hormone therapy and actually prevents them from committing suicide or dying. That if you don’t give this to children, they’re literally going to die. Well, who are the experts? Who do they work for? Who are they funded by? And are the numbers that they’re providing even accurate? There’s a study from the Heritage Foundation recently that found this claim that children who are struggling with gender dysphoria who don’t get gender reassignment surgery or go on hormone therapy have a higher suicide rate. And it turned out that actually wasn’t true. There were a lot of confounding variables that affected that study. So people have to be committed to digging more for themselves. I think independent journalists have to help them along in that process. And that’s the thing I always try to do when reading a news story is look at the motivations for it. Who are the sources? Why might they be making this claim? Not just is it true or false, but really where is it coming from? What is the origin story? And unpacking that I think can give people great insight and the ability to see whether something is based in truth, and whether or not the reporter or paper that’s peddling it can be trusted. Mr. Jekielek: Well, Amber Athey, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Athey: Thank you. I appreciate it. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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1, Tucker Carlson and the Power of Truth | Crossroads Tonight During the 2023 White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, President Joe Biden declared that “a poison is running through our democracy and parts of the extreme press. Truth buried by lies and lies living an honest truth.” Yet what is the “extreme press” and what is this alleged “poison” running through the American system? The United States is having a fundamental debate on truth, and on whether voices should be allowed to challenge established narratives. Tucker Carlson struck a chord in a video published on Twitter after he left Fox News. In it, he raises a new debate for the news outlets of the world, questioning whether the stories of choice actually matter for the public, and questioning even more deeply why the stories that matter are not being discussed. 🔴 Stay informed. Stay Free. Join us on EpochTV: https://www.joshphilipp.com 2, Ex-CIA Director Reveals Secret Origins of the Disinformation Letter Signed by 51 Spies | Facts Matter The House Judiciary Committee just released a bombshell—it turns out that the man who orchestrated the U.S. intelligence letter that brushed off the Hunter Biden scandal as “Russian disinformation” was none other than our very own Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. This information came from the very top—the former deputy director of the CIA, Michael Morell. In his interview with the House Judiciary Committee, he revealed to them how the letter came to be—as well as the true reason it was written at all. 🔴 Join us with a very special OFFER: https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW11 3, This Is Terrible News for Bud Light | The Beau Show In the wake of the Bud Light transgender partnership, consumers have reacted unfavorably, hurting the company's bottom line and reputation. Budweiser stock tanked, losing around $6 billion in market cap. The company also garnered high-profile criticism and lost brand partnerships. Anheuser Busch responded by releasing a statement that failed to impress their alienated consumers. Then Bud Light put Vice President of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid and Vice President of Mainstream Brands Daniel Blake on a leave of absence. Heinerscheid and Blake were hired because of their pedigree and experience. They have credentials, but they clearly lack common sense. This is the result of minds infected with woke ideology. Regardless of someone's education, if their mind is influenced by warped culture, they will forgo logic and embrace damaging progressive ideology. 🔵 Watch the Full Episode 👉🏻 https://ept.ms/TBS-BudLostYT 🔵 Unlimited EpochTV access starts at only $1: https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW

On this episode of American Thought Leaders, I sat down with Claremont Institute fellow David Reaboi at the National Conservatism Conference in Florida to discuss the broader impact that progressive ideology is having on America. “We’re seeing the necessary consequence of, let’s say, ‘radical left thought’ over the last 50 years really in full bloom,” says Reaboi. “We’re living in a place now, or an America now, where the most grave threat to our lives and liberties come not from a foreign country, but from our own government.” We discuss a host of topics, from the roots of conspiracy theories, to the redefining of the concept of justice, to the pitfalls of urban planning. “The conservative movement needs to sit down and address what urbanism looks like in a way that is not a kind-of free-market, post-Cold War, fundamentalist libertarian, free for all … Walgreens and Starbucks and Orangetheory lining the streets of every city,” says Reaboi. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/are-we-in-a-cold-civil-war-david-reaboi-on-elite-mentality-concepts-of-justice-and-the-lefts-self-radicalizing-ice-cream-cone_4766557.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: David Reaboi, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. David Reaboi: Great to be here. Mr. Jekielek: David, I recently did a quick interview here at the National Conservatism Conference with Senator Rick Scott. We talked about him being in New York on 9/11. We were doing the recording on 9/11, and immediately I was surprised to see in my feed that someone was talking about it being an inside job. You have some thoughts about 9/11 “conspiracy theories.” Tell me what you’re thinking. Mr. Reaboi: I was a New Yorker at that time. I lived through 9/11. I was right there. At first, I used to get very angry about it. I didn’t understand how people could be conspiracy theorists. Then over the years, especially in the last couple of years, it dawned on me why, and a few thoughts occurred. One was that we’re living in a place now or an America now where the most grave threat to our lives and liberties come not from a foreign country, but from our own government, whether it be in terms of persecution of political enemies, whether it be draconian nonsense in regards to COVID and all this, or what they want for us in terms of Green New Deal and all this stuff. It’s pretty uncontroversial to say that. Essentially, what we saw the other night with Joe Biden’s speech, our own leaders hate us more than any foreign country hates us. Okay, so you’ve got that on one hand, that realization. And then on the other hand you start to think, “Well, if they could do something terrible, then maybe they did.” I think that’s necessarily a mistake. It’s an analysis mistake where you see that the people who I hate the most could do this horrible thing, and in fact, they did do it, only because they’re bad and that’s what bad people do, and we saw that. The best example for that was Trump-Russia for the last several years, which is you had an entire credentialed class of Russia experts all come together and say, “You know what? We hate Trump and we hate Putin; therefore, these two things have to go together. There is nothing that’s going to prevent us from imagining all kinds of nefarious dealings between these two.” So, you have that on one hand. Then, on the other, the conspiracy temptation at the end of the day is a security blanket. It’s a security blanket that says, “There is some order to the world. Our intelligence services or their intelligence services or whoever, they’re ultra-competent. Our enemies are 12 feet tall, and anything they set out to do, they can achieve. They can manipulate every little possible.” That may be terrifying superficially, but at the end of the day, it is a security blanket, because it presumes that there is order in the world, and it presumes that if we just fix and we just get rid of the bad guys and we replace them with good guys, the whole thing will be fixed. This is the QAnon phenomenon in many respects. My message is, I think, that the government class, our elite class, yes, they hate us. No, they’re not good at their jobs, and no one is coming to save you. There’s not necessarily an order to the madness that can be explained by a vast conspiracy theory. Now, I think there are definitely conspiracies, for sure, but they operate on a smaller level. When you have one conspiracy theory that explains everything, it is more than likely not true, and more than likely speaking to a deep need in the believer. Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about the hate you’re describing, i.e., “The elite class hates us.” I’ve heard people say that, and I’ve also heard people say, “No, this is just a political ploy. There isn’t deep emotion involved here. This is just simply a power play and marginalization of the political group that we’re not aligned with.” How do you see that? Mr. Reaboi: I think there’s definitely hate from the point of view of the elites, the hate elites have of most of the country. At this point, it’s very obvious. Twitter has been amazing for this, because you see it raw and unvarnished. Heck, you can now see it on broadcast TV. You see it on The View every night or every day. You see it on MSNBC and CNN all the time. There is a palatable amount of contempt that these people have for their political enemies. All of these people, as a few folks have said, all of these people, at the end of the day, the Left, let’s say the mainstream Left, have all bought into the old Marcuse idea of repressive tolerance, which is that, “In the service of our ideology, they’re all fascists.” “We don’t allow fascists to speak.” Once you’ve defined half the country as fascist, and once you’ve said half the country then has no right to speak, and these opinions are not legitimate political disagreements and speech is violence, by the way, then you have a moral obligation, or not a moral, but an intellectual obligation, an ideological obligation to follow through on this stuff. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing the necessary consequence of, let’s say, radical Left thought over the last 50 years really in full bloom. Really, it’s terrifying, because I always say, “If they believe 50 per cent of what they say, we’re in a lot of trouble as a society.” Mr. Jekielek: To me, it strikes me that there’s these political operatives. Someone else wrote President Biden’s speech. He didn’t write that. I’m pretty sure, right? Someone else wrote that. President Biden: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Mr. Jekielek: In fact, I think he was back peddling on it the next day. So, there’s a political motivation to all of this, that is what you’re saying. Do you think that hate and contempt are the primary motivators here? Do I understand that right? Mr. Reaboi: No, I think that’s the flowering of the necessary … It’s the flowering necessary consequence of their ideology. They’ve been put into a box or put themselves into a box where they say that we are fascist and punch a Nazi. Of course, they’re the ones who decide who is the Nazi. They’re the ones who decide who’s the fascist on an ever-shifting scale. Definitely, we’re in a cold civil war. I believe personally that the country is coming apart in an irreparable way, and that we are at the end of this American experience. How that is going to take shape in the future is an open question. But I don’t think we can come back from this. I don’t think an election or anything like that can come back from this, because the basis of our disagreement, I think, is a disagreement on the concept of justice. Every civilization needs to agree at the very basic level, what is justice? Justice as the West has traditionally understood it since the Enlightenment is equal justice. You and I, we may be from different backgrounds. We may commit a crime, our different backgrounds have no bearing on our guilt. For half the country now, we say that that’s right and proper, and in fact, that’s really the only way to run a civilized country that is fair for all the people. The Left has rejected that in favor of group rights and in favor of group conceptions, of social justice, so it really turns that on its head. Now this particular understanding of justice has infected every bit of society. There are so many examples every day that pop up to really illustrate this, to the point where we just shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh, it’s a Trump supporter who’s facing a jury in Washington DC. Or a conservative that, ‘Well, that person obviously isn’t going to get a fair trial.'” We say it’s not a big deal, but in fact, it is a big deal. Because the basis of our country and our civilization is that, yes, that person should be able to get a fair shake, and the people should decide based on things that are not related to Klan or race or politics or religion or whatever. So, I think once that’s eroded, you don’t just get it back. You have to suffer the consequences of that erosion. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t really actually think it’s half the country that believes in this alternate model of justice. I think it’s a much smaller but very fervent group. and then there’s some portion of the people that just go along to get along. What do you think? Mr. Reaboi: You’re probably right. The number of people who think about it in these terms is probably very, very small, but that’s it. I think it’s a larger group than you may think; not explicitly endorsing a two-tier justice system, but who de facto say, “Okay.” In this country, we tried very hard explicitly to overcome these types of prejudices when it came to different ethnic groups, and we understood that it is something that should be overcome. It’s like if you are of a certain race, you are allowed to say something, where someone of another race cannot say the same word, even if all things are equal. Some school district, I think in Michigan or somewhere, they said, “You know what?” Or Minnesota, “You know what? When we cut our budgets, we’re going to cut the white teachers first.” This would’ve been crazy, unfathomable not long ago, but here we are. As you said, it’s so ingrained in our elites and in the elite mentality that through the elites it infects many other things, and it does so through social media and journalism and all that stuff. But I’m not sure how you defeat this particular point of view with the elites, other than to appeal to the folks who have this old fashioned, very American conception of equal justice to just say, “No, this is an important thing that we need to hold on to.” Mr. Jekielek: Speaking of conspiracy theories, people pointed to this conspiracy theory that the academy, that all these institutions are being taken over by the Left. People say, “No, they’re just some students. They’ll grow out of it. There’s no big plan.” Do you think there was a big plan to have people with this ideology specifically be able to work together to grab the levers of power? Mr. Reaboi: Well, yes and no. I don’t think that 50 years ago they would have looked around and said, “You know what? They’re talking about weird gender stuff and at some point, we’ll get to the point where we’ll talk about weird gender stuff, and that’s good, and that’s what we want.” I don’t think it works that way. I think that the Left has been … It’s established to be a self-licking ice cream cone, a self-radicalizing ice cream cone over the years. 50 or 60, 70 years ago, when they were first encountering some of these institutions with the very explicit idea of subverting them and taking them over, they didn’t know the result, but they knew approximately the form that it would take because they were smart people. Mr. Jekielek: So explain to me the self-radicalizing ice cream cone. Mr. Reaboi: It’s in the nature of progressivism. It’s in the work. It’s progress, it’s not a destination. It is always the search for more expansive rights, for more expansive understandings of expression, for breaking down more barriers. Every couple of years, you will encounter folks who used to be on the Left, even the far Left, who say, “Whoa, this is completely crazy.” They will say, “Yes, of course. It’s the natural result of moving towards an egalitarian society” Even Barack Obama used to say, and what does it mean, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” Well, we don’t know what’s over that rainbow, but it’s going to be good. That has been the currency of the Left. In fact, it’s been the Left since the French Revolution at the very least, which was continually radicalizing. It ended up in a very bloody way, with one group killing the other group. And it happened in Communist countries, happened in the USSR, and under Mao. One group was not radical enough. They have to be liquidated to make room for the more radical groups. So, that’s the history of the Left. Mr. Jekielek: A number of guests on this show who, for example, lived through the cultural revolution in China, or through the killing fields in Cambodia, have pointed out on this show that there’s a lot of similarities. But what the difference is there isn’t this large-scale killing, which seems to be characteristic of all these cultural revolutions that have happened. Is it fair to make this comparison? Mr. Reaboi: I think it’s very fair. I would compare the temptation and the intentions of the Left in America today, and I’m including, let’s say, the mainstream Left and the government, to some of the worst regimes in history. I would do it. I would say the intention is there. However, they’re a little more sophisticated and a little more squeamish when it comes to violence. They don’t want to get their hands dirty, so they can very easily shut off a financial spigot or they can de-platform you. I think for them, social media is a great opportunity to be able to regulate the thoughts and opinions of the people in society that they despise. They think that by shutting it off on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and removing from Google searches and YouTube and all this stuff, they think they’re able to disappear the air in which, let’s say, dissent from orthodoxy happens. I think they may be right about that. At the end of the day, they don’t need to throw us in camps if they take away our livelihood, if they take away our bank accounts, if they take away the ability for us to express ourselves and to understand ourselves, and to get news to navigate the political and cultural space. They don’t need to do anything more to us than that. Mr. Jekielek: What you’re describing is, you could call it Communism. I think Rod Dreher calls it a soft totalitarianism. Fascism actually comes to mind as a term, because there’s this corporate-government fusion, which constantly we’re learning more about how closely that works together. Have you ever come across, I believe it was James Lindsay’s term, the iron law of woke projection? Mr. Reaboi: Sure. Yes. They accuse you of doing what they’re doing at all times. Mr. Jekielek: Why is this an iron law? Because frankly, whenever I see examples of it, I rarely see counter examples, but it could be just because of my confirmation bias, right? Mr. Reaboi: I don’t know. I try not to get overly psychoanalytic about some of these folks, especially not ever having met all of them. I think it’s different in every case. But I do think at the very base level it’s something that’s common throughout humanity, and especially common since, let’s say, the dawn of the Left. You can even say since the French Revolution, which is to say people get so obsessed with ideology. Ideology takes the form that fanatical religiosity used to take in the ancient times. They get so obsessed with the ideology that it overrides their basic humanity. We see this in terms of the trans kids issue. I wonder and I was thinking the other day. I see Taylor Lorenz devoting her life, who works at the Washington Post, devoting her life to make sure that nobody knows who’s performing these horrible medical procedures on minors and trying to destroy anyone who points out that yes, it is happening. I think what could be the motivation of someone like this to do something so horrible? Then I thought she, I’m sure, sees herself as a trans-ally, and any bad reflection on her, what she perceives to be as the trans community needs to be tamped down and needs to be squashed, regardless of circumstance. If you make an anomaly, you’ve got to break some eggs. She and others on the Left have just closed off their basic humanity, because they’re obsessed. They’re ideologically fervent, true believers. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve talked to perhaps over 100 separate people who have told me that, and these are people that would call themselves disaffected liberals, perhaps that’s the term. They’ve told me that roughly, paraphrasing, that the thing that opened their eyes, that red pill moment, that’s another term that’s commonly used, is when during COVID, the Black Lives Matter riots and protests are happening and this letter is published by some, I think it’s 1200 health professionals that says, “No, this is good and just. This is good health policy to have people out here in the midst. For everybody else or any other reason, it would be terrible health policy because of COVID, but because racism is a bigger health issue, these things are good and just.” I’m paraphrasing, and a lot of people at that moment, as you were describing earlier, said, “Okay, whoa, there’s something really, really amiss here.” Ideology can be incredibly powerful. Mr. Reaboi: I think those people who you’re describing, the disaffected leftists or disaffected liberals, at the end of the day, they had a classical liberal understanding of things, which is to say, an unequal justice understanding of things. The folks who you’re talking to who were disaffected Leftists or liberals, they look at that and they said, “That’s crazy. How can you do that? That violates the most basic law of classical liberalism, the enlightenment, all this stuff.” The answer is, “Yes, of course, it does.” That’s who we’re dealing with. Mr. Jekielek: We’re here in Florida at the NaCon Conference, and we had Governor Ron DeSantis speak earlier. A lot of what he spoke about was actually in various ways standing up to the fruits of this ideology. A lot of his popularity seems to come from him standing up to the fruits of this ideology, now that I think about it. Why is Florida so different than many other states in the country in your mind? By the way, you moved here too. Mr. Reaboi: I moved here before COVID. I moved here in early 2019. I was fortunate to be here before, and then everyone started coming. I thought I would be alone here, but so many friends came to join me. As I say, Miami has had a boom time before, like Orlando and Tampa and other major cities. But this is really the first time in the state’s history that the whole state is booming. That is, I think, a 100 per cent a reflection of the leadership of Governor DeSantis during COVID, and really, since then. We all know what he did. He was coming out very firmly and saying, “No, let’s not go crazy about this. Let’s not make this state a biomedical security state. Let us allow for people to live freely and really make their own decisions and not be hysterical about this.” He stood up and he took so many arrows from the press, from other politicians, from activist groups, not only the United States, but internationally. Without his example, I don’t think there’s another state that would’ve come out ahead and lessened their COVID restrictions and allowed people to get back to normal life the way they did after Ron DeSantis did it in Florida. I do think that he saved the country in that respect. He was the guy who was there, and he was the guy who did it, and he was a great example. And people don’t forget it. Also, they came down here. I didn’t know this until I heard from him last night, that 45 per cent or something, maybe 40 per cent of the total tourism to the United States from abroad has been to Florida in the last year. So, people from all over the world understand that what we’ve created here is something very special. Mr. Jekielek: Certainly, amidst the very populated states with these large cities like Miami, it was a very unusual approach, and it has withstood the test of time. Mr. Reaboi: I think that Florida is experiencing a boom, which is wonderful for a number of great reasons, but they’re also pitfalls because a lot of this stuff is not cost-free. For example, I am very bullish on the state of Florida, but I think that the leadership of the city of Miami is terrible. It started me thinking about how we understand urbanism, and how we understand citizenship and how we understand ownership of space and ownership of the country. After 2016, conservatives have come to understand that Donald Trump was right about the most basic things. If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. We understand now on the Right, most of us out there, understand that there is a finite number of immigrants, both legal and illegal, that any given country can take in without being overwhelmed with assimilation issues or changing the character of a country issues, all these things. We understand on a basic level, what Ron DeSantis said the other night, which is the state, the government is there to protect the lives of its citizens. That’s an important distinction. The people who live here, they’ve started businesses and families and all kinds of things. Okay. So we understand that when it comes to the United States of America. But our urban policy when it comes to, let’s say, the city of Miami is, “Okay, open the doors. Double the size of your metropolitan area. It’s okay. The people who live here, it’ll be fine. Even if they’re priced out of their homes and their businesses and only multimillionaires can now afford to buy property or to live in a place, it’s fine. Because at the end of the day, the only thing matters is the free market and the tax receipts, and the economic activity that’s generated by the city.” It occurred to me that there is a massive disconnect here. We’ve come to understand one thing about the country, but we toss away all of those lessons when it comes to the city or the county or the location. I think the conservative movement needs to sit down and address what urbanism looks like in a way that is not free market, post-Cold War fundamentalist, Libertarian, free-for-all, Walgreens and Starbucks and Orange Theory lining the streets of every city. I think the Left has a very good point when it comes to gentrification. I’ve seen it, it’s real, and it’s a mixed bag. It’s good and bad. But for the Right, the Right has for the last several decades refused to deal with the bad. It’s just said, “You know what? Creative destruction is fine. It doesn’t matter that all of these old businesses could no longer afford to operate. It doesn’t matter that this once Cuban or Italian neighborhood is now full of newcomers and its character has completely changed.” In fact, the people who used to live there got priced out. They’re now living 100 miles away and in the middle of the swamp. That’s okay, because it’s still Miami, it’s still wonderful. So we have to recalibrate our idea of what urbanism is, about what city policy and city planning is. I would love to see Miami avoid that fate, because I see it happening. I saw it happening in San Francisco and New York and Washington D.C. and in Austin, places where I’ve lived. It’s very important to maintain the tie to what made a place great. I think it’s a very conservative value, and it’s something that needs to come back. Mr. Jekielek: Looking back at woke ideology, which is really what we’ve been talking about earlier, it has this huge, what I would call antipathy towards history and tradition. It believes that these things are just power plays and it needs to construct its own variance to justify itself, because that’s just how things work. It just strikes me that there seems to be a parallel between that approach and what you’re describing as perhaps happening in the cities. Mr. Reaboi: I don’t know. I tend to look at the deficiencies of folks on the Right maybe before I look at them on the Left. Because I think that for people who are Republican legislators, that there’s no excuse to do horrible self-destructive things. But in regards to Miami, the Mayor Suarez, look, think he’s a run-of-the-mill craven materialist. His entire pitch for the city of Miami, and his entire understanding of the city of Miami is an empty vessel where you can do commerce. That’s nice and everything. I believe in the free market as well, but the city is more than that. And if you can’t understand that, I don’t think you have any business running a city, at least certainly not a big city. I’ll say this for the Left. For the Left, they understand for as bad as they are, as crazy as they are when it comes to urban policy, they at least understand that, “You know what? This neighborhood, it’s tied to the people who live here.” I think that’s better than a rootless materialist point of view that just raises neighborhoods and prices people out of these cities. So we need a third way, because really neither of these approaches is working. Mr. Jekielek: It seems like our city architecture in all sorts of places and design and so forth, it’s all zeroed in on this minimalist type approach. I don’t want to know if I want to say IKEA. But it’s almost like the default design of most things is the minimalist way, as opposed to something that is a lot more work and has some very distinctive style or tradition or culture contained within. Mr. Reaboi: I’m going to speak in defense of IKEA and minimalism for a moment. Not because I love it, but because I do think that it is an advance on what came before. It wasn’t beautiful artisanal, handmade Stuckey-Wood furniture replaced by IKEA. It was also mass produced, ugly heavy ornate cheap stuff that was produced. So, we had many different aesthetic collapses before we got to IKEA. I’ll say this for IKEA, at the end of the day, something clean and minimalist is better than something that looks like garbage. Now, yes, I agree we should try to get back to the place where people don’t have to spend $10,000 to buy a kitchen table for it to be a thing of beauty and handmade and with a history and heirloom type stuff. For a lot of people, that kind of thing is out of reach. I would rather give people a functional cheap thing that is okay than to give people a really ugly thing that is disposable and horrible. Mr. Jekielek: So what’s happened? What’s happened? You said it’s better to have the minimalist than the ugly prefab, but what happened? Mr. Reaboi: Yes, think it’s a complicated case and it’s different probably across different types of architecture and film and art and music and literature. It’s different across all of these, but I think at the basic level as the thing that I talked about in my speech is that we have collapsed the distinction between childish things and adult things in terms of culture. What I mean by that is we have this assumption that children could take things that were very simple because they did not have the experience. Nursery rhymes are a great example. Here is a life lesson. Here is something that is memorable. The melody of a nursery rhyme is something that a kid can sing. You don’t need perfect pitch to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb. We had an assumption that as we would get older, our tastes and let’s say our experience being exposed to cultural things would deepen our taste, make it more sophisticated, and by necessity, more abstract. We had young adult fiction. We used to give kids recordings of symphonies to listen to because we had an expectation that this is what you needed to do to be a well-rounded person, because this is how you fire your own creativity. That sort of has disappeared. We’re left with a culture where everything is made now for the same basically 12, 13-year-old boy. By necessity, a superhero movie or a big-budget film can only be made by a large multinational corporation because it takes $100 million to make or even more. Then it crowds out the marketplace. Tell me why there are no more films for adults. Why is it that when you say it’s an adult film, it makes you think all of a sudden it’s pornography? When in the old days, there were films that were made for adults dealing with adult subject matter and relationships and divorces and romance and things like this that for a 12-year-old kid would seem pretty boring. But we have this expectation that adults could handle boring, that adults had a larger, longer attention span than 12-year-old kids. Now, we’ve come to the point where adults don’t, and I think that makes us very poor as a civilization. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve talked about a few different things today. One of them is what you describe as being in a cold civil war with different waring cultures, or of conceptions of justice, to be more specific, so we have that. Then we have, you’re describing a world, like you said, that you don’t think we can go back to what was before, and I think COVID sealed that. Mr. Reaboi: I agree with you, but maybe with a caveat. We do have an opportunity now to go back, maybe not to go back, but to take some positive steps. Now, when it comes to politics, yes, it’s very hard. What are we going to do? Is it impossible to turn back the clock? It is. But that said, when it comes to culture, film is a great example. There’s more than 100 years of cinema history, let’s get to watching it. There’s no reason why you can’t learn a little bit about the history of cinema and see the great films. They’re all there at the press of a button. The same thing with music, the same thing with literature, the same thing with great art, great painting. We live in an era where if we wanted to, and I do this in my own home, I see artwork that I really love and I have it printed up on canvas and I hang it in my house. Up until now, that was impossible to do. So, I encourage people to surround themselves with beauty, to expose themselves and one another to things that are great and things that excite them, and things that have actual deep meaning. Because I’ll tell you, once you see Citizen Kane, it’s very hard to take Star Wars seriously, so that’s the white pill note. That’s, I think, the note of optimism that we have. We do have the benefits of access to all this technology. Yes, of course, it’s a mixed bag, but we may as well take every opportunity we can to read the benefits. Mr. Jekielek: This is a very positive vision. With respect to the ideological Cold War that you’ve been describing, what do you think the right way for people who are deeply concerned about it to respond individually? Mr. Reaboi: I would say that we need to respond in a way that is far deeper and more consequential than simply voting. I would say if you are in a position to support a content creator or a publication or a group of folks or an institution like Claremont where I’m affiliated with, or the Epoch Times, then absolutely do so. Mr. Jekielek: David Reboi, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Reaboi: It’s my pleasure. Thank you. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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“Our border … is in the operational control of narcoterrorists, the cartels … You don’t have to go that far back to remember the Opium Wars. You bring down a dynasty with drugs … They’re hitting us with the drugs pouring in, killing 100,000 or more last year,” says Kari Lake: The Assault on Patriotism and the Fight to Restore the American Dream. Prior to running, she was a television news anchor for more than two decades. We take a deeper look into her motivations, her policy proposals, and what she sees as an assault on the freedoms that built America. “What good is that hefty paycheck, what good is that retirement plan, those benefits … if we don’t have a country at the end of the day to enjoy that money in? What good is my retirement if my children don’t have freedom?” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kari-lake-the-assault-on-patriotism-and-the-fight-to-restore-the-american-dream_4777948.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Kari Lake, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Kari Lake: I am so honored to be here, Jan. I’ve watched your interviews for a long time now, and I just feel lucky to be in this chair with you. Mr. Jekielek: Very kind. We actually met, I think, in mid-2019 at a live taping of an American Thought Leaders’ episode, if I recall. Ms. Lake: That’s right. Mr. Jekielek: You were doing some pretty serious soul searching, actually. Ms. Lake: Yes. It was one of the many times I’ve been canceled by the Left. I was in the middle of my career, and I think I had a hot mic issue where someone overheard me saying something, which was basically me responding to an attempt to silence the conservative voices, or just voices. There was really an effort to get me off of different outlets, and different social media platforms like Parler. My issue was, why? We’re reaching people. Twitter, it was pretty obvious to me way back then, was about censoring. I was trying to get on other outlets to try to reach people who had been censored from Twitter. I wanted to hear their voices as well. I remember being frustrated. I was so excited to meet you, because I really admire The Epoch Times and their fair journalism. Mr. Jekielek: It’s funny. As you’re talking about this, I almost thought for a second you’re talking about your campaign, but this is long before anything to do with campaign. You have your 22 year job as a Fox affiliate main host at this local Fox affiliate in Arizona. You’re starting to wonder what’s going on. Then I remember, a year after that, you come out with this video where you indict the media. Ms. Lake: Yes. When we met I really was really noticing all the censorship, and starting to see that it was getting increasingly hard to speak truth, because the media has been taken over, the corporate media, by Liberals. I mean, 90 per cent of the people working in corporate media are Liberals, some of them hardcore Leftists. Look, we’ve got to have ideologies of everybody included. They’re looking at diversity basically based on skin color or country of origin, but they’re not looking at diversity based on ideology. We’ve gotten stuck with 90 per cent of the people running the media being liberals. I’m not opposed to having liberal thoughts. That’s great, but let’s have some conservative thoughts as well. I was seeing this happen, and then during COVID it really hit like a ton of bricks. I saw that the media was pushing an agenda to push only one side of the COVID story. Any little bit of information that could’ve been helpful, that could’ve helped people get back on to life as normal, that could’ve helped people with their health, was being censored. It was very worrisome. This wasn’t just censoring for political reasons. This was censoring when it was coming to people’s health, when it was coming to life or death. This was censoring when it was coming to the life or death of your business, to the life or death of your children’s education. I thought, “Wow. I don’t want to be part of this. I can’t be part of this.” It’s not just unethical. It’s not just unbalanced and biased. It was truly immoral what was happening in journalism during COVID. Mr. Jekielek: When did you realize this? For me the moment was when I was watching Governor DeSantis implement policy, which after a while I realized was quite good policy. I was trying to figure out why he was doing something so different than many other states, and certainly the big states. Right? Like Florida-size or larger. When did you actually realize that there’s something really amiss? Was it right at the beginning? Ms. Lake: Well, I’m going to be honest. When I started hearing Dr. Fauci speak, my little antenna went up. There was just something about him and the way he was presenting himself that made me think, “This doesn’t feel like he’s on the up-and-up here. It feels like there’s something missing.” You know? I guess it was just my women’s intuition, but I started to really watch him with a little more of a critical eye. It seemed like he was pushing against anything that President Trump wanted to do that might help, he was pushing against. There was always a reason for no. When President Trump started throwing out a few ideas about potential treatments that might work, it was met with such hardcore resistance from the media. I got to thinking, “If this were the other way around, if this was President Obama up there throwing ideas out, the media would’ve run and jumped and explored all of those treatments. “How can we do a story on them? Maybe they would work.” Their disdain for President Trump was so obvious. There was just a complete shutdown and censorship of anybody who wanted to at least dig into and explore these treatments that might save lives. That was a really big aha moment, I guess you could say. Another one was during the election when that election was called so quickly in Arizona before the polls had closed, but our understanding was people were still in line voting. That election was called, and I finally just went, “This is really disturbing, what’s going on.” I did some heavy soul searching, a lot of praying. It was scary to walk away from that job. I was making really good money, 27 years covering Arizona, 22 years as the main lead anchor, the lead news voice in the state. I was making a really healthy and hefty paycheck. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t want to walk away from that. It was scary to walk away from that. I did a lot of praying. I just said, “God, I know this is the right thing to do. Please, I’m going to do this. I need you to have my back.” Then I ended up here, which was not in the plans, by the way. Mr. Jekielek: Right. I wanted to talk about this. I think there’s so many people out there who saw something increasingly amiss, starting in early 2020. We’re looking at COVID policy, and especially in a lot of the big blue states, they were very frankly authoritarian policies. Right? Ms. Lake: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Even if they’re temporary, maybe even for there’s such an emergency that you need it briefly. Right? You can imagine, but they’re still authoritarian policies. Right? Ms. Lake: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Basically the power is going to a very, very central place. Ms. Lake: Yes. 15 days to slow the spread. I think all Americans were like, “Okay. We can maybe get behind that, if this is really bad,” and then things just didn’t make sense. We did have a couple of good governors. You mentioned DeSantis. Kristi Noem I think handled it pretty well, putting the information out, letting the American people understand what was going on, at least to the best of her ability, what she knew, and then saying, “You now know what’s going on. You make the choices for your family, and your life, and your business.” Mr. Jekielek: This is what I was going to say. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “I have a hefty paycheck. I have to care for my family. I saw what was happening was wrong. I saw that the medical information was being misrepresented. I saw doctors being silenced. I saw many things, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t step out.” Ms. Lake: Well, what helped me with that was realizing that what good is that hefty paycheck? What good is that retirement plan, those benefits, any perks that came with that job, if we don’t have a country at the end of the day to enjoy that money? What good is my retirement if my children don’t have freedom? That to me was like, “Wow. I will run through every last penny that I have to save this country.” I think more and more people, Jan, are waking up to that. We saw it. Think of the healthcare workers who were forced out of a job. They were forced to either get the jab or leave. Many of them did get the jab. They didn’t feel they could leave at that time for whatever reason. Maybe it was that they had to put food on the table, and they had to feed their children. Obviously, that’s a stressful, difficult choice to make. Others said, “I’m walking away.” I just had somebody reach out and said, “I went through three jobs during all of that. I am not making as much money as I used to make, but you know what? I’ve got my principles intact, and I did the right thing. You know what? My health is intact too.” Mr. Jekielek: We knew this was sort of an insane policy, because these were the people that were most likely to have natural immunity. They are in close proximity to people with COVID all the time, so basically all of them had natural immunity, or were likely to, or had innate immunity, and could never get infected. Those are the people you’re going to fire? There were so many examples. Now, in hindsight… Ms. Lake: Things that didn’t make sense. The airline workers—talk about being around people and having immunity. They’re around every germ you can imagine all day with their job, and they were being forced to get the jab. None of it made sense, and I decided to walk away. I did not decide to get into politics until after I walked away. When I finally resigned from my job, I put out a video because I wanted the people of Arizona to know why I was leaving. I didn’t want to just walk away from that, and disappear, and have them wonder. I wanted them to know, “Look, I’m leaving this career because something is not right. You see it. I see it. I know it.” I put this video out just to let the good viewers who had invited me into their homes for nearly 30 years. I put that out to let them know. What I didn’t expect was it would go viral within a matter of hours. Mr. Jekielek: You said you don’t like the direction, if I recall, that the media is going in. The media have been liberal, as you said, for quite a long time, but there’s something different. Right? Something changed. Ms. Lake: Something much bigger. I think it went from low-level bias. At least I always felt like I could keep it on the straight and narrow, because I was the last line of defense. When you’re the anchor, you’re reading the stories. You’re talking to the viewer about it. I always felt like I could kind of make sure we were putting out an unbiased product. During COVID, and I’m not the only one in the media who felt like, “Wow. There’s no control about what’s being putting out right now. We’re being controlled by the government. We’re being controlled by Fauci.” That’s where I think it went from a little bit on the low scale to, boom, maxing out on just propaganda in a very short amount of time, in a matter of weeks and months. Mr. Jekielek: So initially, no interest in politics. I remember you had a very different kind of job actually lined up at the time. Ms. Lake: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: But then people came out, this is what I remember you telling me. Ms. Lake: I was actually planning to go work and do some media training for an organization that I care deeply about, and that does great things. I thought, “You know, I had a great career. I’m just going to say what a great career I had. Chalk it up as that’s the end of my broadcast career, and I’ll move on to something a little more behind the scenes,” which I was totally ready to do, be behind the scenes. Actually, I was kind of looking forward to being behind the scenes after being in the public eye for a long time. It sounded attractive to be behind the scenes. Then an amazing thing happened. I put that video out. It went viral overnight. Thousands and thousands of messages came in over the course of the next three weeks, month. They were so kind. Really overwhelmingly wonderful positive messages. “Thank you for being honest. Thank you for covering our state so fairly for so many years. Thank you for telling us what’s happening in the media.” One of the common threads that was very common, it was like a steady drumbeat, was, “Would you please consider running for office? We need people in politics who we trust, who understand the issues of our state, who understand us. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, and we trust you to get in there and clean things up.” At first, I’m going to be honest, I laughed. The first few messages I saw that said, “Get into politics,” I’m thinking, “Are you kidding me? I’m just leaving the corrupt world of media, and they’re suggesting I go into the even more corrupt world, the swamp of politics. They must think I’m insane.” I had zero interest in it, but then it was such a steady drumbeat that I thought, “Wow. Maybe this is God’s way of tapping me on the shoulder and saying ‘I freed you up for this.'” Mr. Jekielek: Before we jump deeper into issues, because there’s a ton I want to cover with you here, let’s talk about how does God or the divine fit into your picture here? Ms. Lake: More and more important every second of every day. I’m so blessed that I was brought up in a household where faith was important. My mother was Catholic. My father was Lutheran, so I got confirmed in both churches. We went to Sunday school every week. That’s how it was back when I was growing up. Pretty much every kid had some sort of a religious foundation, something to base in their life what is right and wrong. I’m so blessed to have grown up in that kind of a family. Of course, in my 20s and 30s, I kind of strayed away after working a long week, and being busy with the kids. I would just hang out on the weekends with them, but I’ve always felt a connection to God, a very close connection. Interestingly, it was during COVID that I ended up switching churches, because the church that we belonged to was closed for COVID, and open by appointment only. That was when I was going through all of this, and really struggling. I remember thinking, “We need to get our butts into a church right now.” I just felt that need, and I ended up stumbling into a different church. That church really opened my eyes and changed my life. During that COVID time, I was working from home because half of the staff went home, and half stayed at the station just in case we got COVID. We didn’t want to get everybody sick, so I was working from home. I was finding myself listening to pastors on YouTube, and listening to different sermons. I was finding myself reading the Bible a lot more, and really leaning on the Bible, which I hadn’t read since I was young, since I’d gone through confirmation. To have all of this life experience from reading the Bible when I was young in confirmation class to, fast forward, now I’m in my 50s. All of that life that has happened, and I find myself opening up the Bible and reading it. In the meantime, I’m also reading news scripts over here, the Bible here. I’m like, “Wow. In the news scripts are lies. In the Bible I found the truth.” It was really a very powerful period for me spiritually during COVID. I don’t think I’m alone. I think a lot of people have returned and wrapped their arms around, I don’t want to just even call it religion, but around God. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely fascinating to me. One thing I learned, actually, in one of your campaign videos, I had no idea about this, is that you’re one of nine kids. Right? Ms. Lake: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: That’s a different way of growing up. I had large family like that as well, but it’s a completely different thing than the typical nuclear family with one or two kids. Ms. Lake: I’m the ninth of nine. I’m the last one, so thank goodness my mom was pro-life, because I was the baby. A great way to grow up, because you grow up having to work together. You grow up with adversaries some days, friends other days. You know, one day you might have one sister who’s your closest friend, and the next day you’re fighting with them. At the end of the day, you come together because you’re still family. We had nine kids. Eight girls, and one boy. I have a lot of sisters, and sisters fight differently. Girls fight differently than boys. That helped me, actually, when I ran in the primary. You know, you have to fight for what you believe in. Growing up in a family where every day there’s going to be some tiff, or some argument, you have to learn how to fight and make sure that you are getting your points across. I think that’s why I’m able to make arguments, and I was able to be very effective in my communication skills, because I had spent a lot of time arguing with my sisters when I was a kid. Mr. Jekielek: I also know that your husband has been just generally very supportive. I keep thinking about this. Right? It’s a difficult decision to make, especially a time when there’s economic uncertainty. Between 2020 and 2021 we saw the largest wealth transfer in history probably, by orders of magnitude, something like that happened. A lot of business died. You’re out there giving up a very, very lucrative job. I just want to get your comment on this a little bit about the family support. Ms. Lake: My husband has been amazing. Not only is he with me every step of the way on the campaign, but in making that decision to leave. He would see the frustration I felt. I would come out of my office after anchoring the newscast, and I would say, “I can’t do this much longer. How do I continue? I got into journalism to tell the truth, and I don’t feel like that’s possible right now.” He could see the frustration. When I said, “I really want to walk away from this,” we looked at what was going to happen. Financially, you’re going to take a huge hit. He said, “I can’t expect you to do a job that you believe is immoral. It goes against who you are. That would be the worst thing,” so he’s been very supportive. We had a little bit of savings, and we’ve been living off of that. Like I said, what does all of this money, benefits, all of that, matter if we don’t have a country? I fear we are very close to that moment where we won’t have our freedoms and a country if we don’t get real people who love this country involved like our Founding Fathers envisioned. They didn’t envision a political class. They were escaping that. They envisioned real men and women, real Americans, stepping up and running for office, getting involved, representing their fellow countrymen, and helping out. Mr. Jekielek: There’s people like one of our columnists, head of The Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker, who basically saw what was happening with the various shelter-in-place, otherwise known as lockdown policies, and said, “Centuries of progress have just come to an end.” This type of sentiment is something that so many people, really from across the spectrum, Left and Right, have been saying to me as we’ve watched dramatic social change happen over several years. Right? Ms. Lake: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: My question is, it sounds alarmist to say we don’t have a country. Right? That might even sound like a political talking point to say, “We don’t have a country. You have to elect me.” Tell me what you’re thinking, and what you mean. Ms. Lake: What I’m thinking is I’m in Arizona. We’re not that far from the border right now. Where we’re sitting right now, we’re less than 100 miles from the border. Much closer than that, actually. We don’t have a border right now. Our border, with our country right now, is in the operational control of narco-terrorists, the cartels. We don’t have control of our border right now. Everyone’s pouring across. Five million people have poured across our border since Joe Biden took office. We went from having the most secure border with Mexico under President Trump to, on day one, Joe Biden coming into office and, for some reason, pulling that back and exposing us to crime, to drugs, to smuggling, and to trafficking of children. I don’t know why. I’m trying to figure out why, because right now it appears that Joe Biden is on the side of the cartels, and the people of Arizona have had enough. We don’t have a country if we don’t have a border. Millions have come in, and millions more will until we get some strong governors who will put their foot down and say, “No. We’re going to secure the borders in our states. We’re not going to allow our country to be overrun with the most deadly drug that we’ve ever seen, fentanyl.” For your listeners out there, I know that they’re very much aware of history. You don’t have to go that far back to remember the Opium Wars. You bring down a dynasty with drugs, and they’re trying to do that. They’re hitting us from every angle. They’re hitting us with the drugs pouring in, killing 100,000 or more last year, young people. These are 18 to 45-year-olds. Number one cause of death is not cancer and car crashes. It’s not COVID. It is absolutely the drugs that are coming in across our southern border. We don’t have fair elections. Our elections are a mess, and we don’t have a border. We’re not going to have a country much longer. That’s what I mean by this. Not to mention, you can look at our Constitution which is under siege, and our First Amendment. Everywhere I go across the state, I have talked to hundreds of thousands of Arizonans in person. I ask them, “How many of you feel that your First Amendment rights are intact? How many of you? Show me. Raise your hand. How many of you feel that your freedom of speech is intact?” Not a single hand goes up. If you’re conservative, you don’t have freedom of speech. We saw our religious freedoms taken away when the government shut down our churches. We see the press, which has completely gone crazy. They’re nuts. The First Amendment is on shaky ground right now. That’s why I’m outspoken, because I’m going to speak my mind and use my freedom of speech while we still have it. Now they’re trying to chip away at the Second Amendment, our right to bear arms. What’s next? They don’t want the Constitution is next, so we’ve got to save this country. That’s what I’m referring to. It’s not just a political talking point. It’s a reality. I have two children. I would certainly like for them to have the freedoms and the opportunities that I had coming up. Even though I grew up in a home that was poor, I had a lot of love. I have wonderful siblings, and I’m so blessed for that upbringing. Coming from those humble beginnings, I was still able to live the American dream. It’s getting harder, and harder, and harder for our young people. They can’t even imagine being able to purchase a home right now, a lot of our young people. They’re so buried under debt. They’ve been all sent off to college to get degrees many of them don’t need. We’ve ignored the trades where we need workers. We’re sending our kids off to get into debt with degrees that are meaningless when we really should be pushing them into the trades and vocational training to actually get a job, so they have a better chance at living that American dream. Mr. Jekielek: This censorship that you’re describing, you’ve experienced it yourself. Right? Ms. Lake: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: In general, what has been the impact on you and your family with you stepping into the spotlight and running? Ms. Lake: It’s interesting. I felt the censorship more when I was a journalist, because you really are supposed to keep your personal opinions to yourself. I was good at doing that. People during this run said, “I didn’t even know you were conservative. I didn’t know where you were.” I said, “That’s because I was an honest journalist. You shouldn’t know where I stand on politics.” The greatest thing about stepping out and getting into politics, when I finally said, “You know, this is what I think God maybe has freed me up for,” we’ve been very successful in politics, for being a newbie, the nicest part of it is that I can speak my mind. In a way I feel for you, Jan, because you don’t have freedom of speech, at least to speak your opinions, because you are a fair journalist. Now I can, and I love being able to speak my mind, and tell people what’s up, and what I think, and what I think are great solutions to our problems. I love that part. Am I being censored? I’m sure shadow banned and all that on Twitter, but we have more options now. We’ve got Truth Social. We have GETTR. We have other ways of getting our message out, like Rumble. I’m using each and every one of those platforms. We reach millions of people on social media. We have run a campaign that hits social media hard. We want to reach more people, and we’re reaching them on every platform we can. We are going out. We’re taking our issues and our solutions on the road. My husband videotapes everything that I do, and we put it up on a Rumble page. I didn’t even realize this, but now I have a national campaign. People from all over the country are writing, are sending in donations, are sending in messages of encouragement, because they’re seeing what we’re about here in Arizona thanks to social media. I’m using it to our advantage right now. Mr. Jekielek: You don’t treat all media the same way. I was just watching a press gaggle that you had been in. This was after your opponent decided not to debate you. I don’t even know what newspaper it was, but I think you said, “Your newspaper is a rag. I’m not going to talk to you. Next question.” Ms. Lake: That is a fact. Mr. Jekielek: That might seem overly harsh to some. Right? Why couldn’t those people have the benefit of your opinion might be the question. Right? Ms. Lake: I have given them many interviews. Since the beginning, since before I stepped in, when I was in journalism and I was trying to get information out to people about Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, talking and putting out information on my social media as a journalist just about other ideas that were out there on COVID. Doctors who were saying, “Wait a minute. This actually might work better. This might be a way to save lives.” That paper was actively writing attack pieces on me, saying I was trying to kill people. Now that I’ve been in the campaign, I offered them many interviews saying, “Look, we’ve got a great policy here. We’ve got a policy on the border that you’ve never even covered. I’ll sit down and do an interview with you on that.” They sit down, and you can tell by the tone of each question that it’s an attack piece trying to tear down the policy, which is fine. I’m okay with that. I can answer those, but it turns out to be just attack after attack. At the end of the day, I just said, “Why are we wasting our time with them?” For that paper, it’s going to be a very long, dry eight years, because I will not work with propagandists. I’ve given them many, many chances, and they’re only interested in running hit pieces. That’s why I said that. Mr. Jekielek: The America First movement, I want to touch on that very briefly. It seems to me like a whole bunch of policies that traditionally would be considered centrist, and maybe JFK Democrat or something that would be close to that. Somehow it’s being described as extremist by even the highest levels of government. Ms. Lake: That is so true. It’s funny. I’ve been having these conversations with people saying, “These are policies that you might have even seen Democrats embracing before.” We want to bring manufacturing back, and bring it to Arizona. We want to make sure that the middle class is healthy, that our industries have workers, so we have people ready for the trades. These are issues that the Democrats used to be for, and now they’re opposed to. Something happened politically, and I don’t know why. You might want to talk to somebody who’s a historian. We saw the creation of the uniparty where the Democrats and Republicans in DC kind of formed one big party. They were also known as the Swamp. When President Trump came in, he had to kind of break that up. You really started to separate and see who really does want to put America first, and who’s just part of this Washington DC Swamp. I see the America First movement as bringing in, and we’re seeing some Democrats pull away, saying, “This is not the party that we thought it was.” They don’t care about the middle class. They don’t care about the working class. They don’t care about security. They’re starting to pull over to come into our movement. A lot of the Republicans see it as the way to have success in dealing with issues that we’ve been dealing with for decades now. The policies that work, and it’s all about solutions. A secure border, who’s not for that? Why would you not be for a secure border? Why would you want to have drugs pour across? These are really common issues. We want safe streets. Who would not want to have safe streets? These are totally centrist. And that’s why I tell people, “Go to our website. Go to our issues page.” Every single issue that we talk about, all of my policies are there. I think they’re good for all Arizonans, whether they’re Democrat, Independent, or Republican. I think this globalist movement to try to drag us into one big globalist kind of agenda where we don’t really have nations, we don’t have borders, the people are waking up to that, and they do not want it. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a lot of people right now who are what you’d call black pilled. Okay? At least I come across them all the time. People are saying, “I just don’t think there’s going to be any change. People have tried change. There’s pushback. In the end, nothing really happens. What’s the point?” I hear that a lot, actually. What do you think? Ms. Lake: Kind of a nihilistic view, there’s no hope. I’m an optimist. I really am. Maybe it’s easier for me to be an optimist, because I’m on the campaign trail now. I go to an event where they would normally have 30 people. This is how it started. “We’re having you at an event, Republican women. We have 30 people.” Then they would call a few weeks later and say, “We’re moving it to the auditorium. We have 150.” That’s a really good sign when you’re a politician. We do events. This has been since the beginning. They’re growing, growing, growing. We decide to have an event, and we book it three or four days out. Couple hundred people show up. People are very enthusiastic. They’re getting involved. Young people are getting involved in our campaign because they were tortured. I’ll tell you, the young people were tortured during COVID. They were the last ones to get the masks off their beautiful faces. In 115 degree heat in Arizona, wearing a mask is like living in hell. We’ve got a young movement of people who are involved in what we are talking about, which is putting Arizona first. I’m very hopeful because of that. There’s a movement. There’s something going on right now. It’s so beautiful. It’s so exciting, and you see it with President Trump still being able to draw in crowds of 20, 30, 40, 50. I think he drew maybe 60,000 in Florence when he came in January. These are massive crowds. The people are awake. There might be a few people who are not optimistic, but I am because I know the power of the human being is so massive. When you get a whole bunch of us together working toward the same goal, protecting and saving our country, nothing can stop that. Mr. Jekielek: I want to dive into this First Amendment question, and define some of the reasons you decided to do what you’re doing now. There’s a lot of evidence that’s come out that government agencies have been influencing some of these media companies, or Big Tech, some of the biggest social media companies, to either censor, to silence, sometimes even deplatform people. The people I’m talking to are saying, “These are flagrant First Amendment violations,” but they seem to persist. There are legal challenges now. There’s a number of them, very significant ones. How do you see this unfolding? Ms. Lake: I’m really disturbed to find out the government was involved in some of that. I think it was the FBI when it came to telling Facebook not to air and put out anything on Hunter Biden’s laptop. That is horrifying. Media should be all over that story. That’s fascism, really. That’s truly fascism, by the way. They’re telling a company what to do, and controlling that company. Mr. Jekielek: To be fair, if I recall what Mark Zuckerberg said, he said, “No. They just told us that there’d be some Russian disinformation coming soon.” Right? Ms. Lake: Yes. And Zuckerberg decided to censor that pretty much. Twitter censored that. Really disturbing when the government’s getting involved and doing that. I think competition is always good. We’re seeing other social media that’s coming up. Maybe with these companies, people will get sick of them and leave. I think that there should be some restrictions on them, especially when they’re censoring political figures. The fact that they kicked President Trump off of Twitter should’ve been met with complete outrage by everybody in the media if they really, truly care about freedom of speech and the First Amendment, which you should as a journalist, and they didn’t. Many of them applauded that. We have to make some changes. There have to be repercussions to that kind of attack on our First Amendment rights. We’ll see what we can do here in Arizona. I know Governor DeSantis has made some moves in Florida. If we need to just copy that full on, we will. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel if it’s working, but we want the ability to speak freely. We used to have it with the telephones. Compare a telephone to what we have with Twitter and social media now. Imagine if you were on a phone call, and you and I were talking about something, and the phone company didn’t like what we were talking about, and they just cut the line. This is outrageous. This is, in effect, what’s happening with social media, and it’s got to stop. Mr. Jekielek: Is there a governor that you draw inspiration from, then? Ms. Lake: My favorite governor of all time was Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California. His whole life was just amazing. He and I grew up about an hour apart, and obviously a few decades apart. He was the president of my youth. His rise to politics was so inspirational, coming from his acting background. He also had some broadcast background. You know, they said a lot of the same things about him that they said about me. “What does he know? He’s a former Democrat. He’s just an actor. He just reads scripts.” He was an optimist. He had great ideas. He knew right from wrong, and he was a great communicator. He got into California at a time when that state was in shambles, and helped turn it around by bringing outsiders into politics. He didn’t just rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, moving bureaucrats around. He brought in fresh blood and fresh eyeballs to the government who could look around and say, “Wait a minute. There’s incredible waste going on here. Why are we doing this?” People who’ve had experience and success in the private sector. That’s what I plan to do as governor. I thought he was fantastic. Then, of course, he came in, as you know, as president at a time when our country was in great despair. Jimmy Carter had left America almost in an ash heap. President Ronald Reagan came in and gave us optimism and hope that we could get out of it, that we could climb out of that, and we could do it by coming together as Americans. He pushed something that unfortunately has been now denigrated. He pushed patriotism, a love for this country. We all come from different backgrounds. We all come from different areas. Some of us are immigrants. Some of us are been citizens since the beginning of this country, and native. We all have one thing in common. We have this great country that we love and we want to protect. With President Trump, he wanted to do the same thing. That’s when the media started attacking, and attacking patriotism, attacking saying the Pledge of Allegiance, attacking the National Anthem. It’s been an all-out assault on people showing patriotism and love for this country. We need to come back and return to that for the sake of our country. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve discussed the border. We’ve discussed the First Amendment somewhat. These are obviously key platform issues for you. What are the others that are really top of mind? Ms. Lake: They all kind of come together when you think about the border. How do you get a handle on it? We are going to tackle chronic street homelessness. How do you get a handle on that and get people off drugs, which we’re planning on doing. We’re going to get people into treatment. How do you do that if you have an unending source of drugs pouring across the border? We have to tackle the border. There’s no ifs, ands, and buts. We can’t look the other way. We will do that invoking our Article 1, Section 10 powers in the U.S. Constitution. We’re going to get boots on the ground. We’re going to hit key areas. Stop people from coming over rather than allowing them to come in. We’re going to take a really hard stand on the border when it comes to illegal activity. Then we’re going to tackle chronic street homelessness because we can’t restore safe streets, we can’t come back to a law and order if we have thousands of people living on the streets, many of them hardcore drug users that are using drugs, and many causing crime. We’re going to get them help. I don’t believe for one second that God envisioned any one of us to live on the streets with a needle in our arm. We’re going to work to get them off the streets, banning urban camping by building shelter beds to get people help. There will be a segment of that population that doesn’t want help. They’re choosing to live on the street. Unfortunately, many of our policies have enabled that. Many of our policies have enabled people to stay on the streets, use, and sink further into despair. Think about that. We’ve got an industry that’s formed around homelessness, and not everybody in that industry wants to solve the problem. No more state money will go to any homeless program that does not show results. We’re going to get people services first, get them job training, and help them become contributing citizens to our society. There might be some people who don’t want that. In that case, we will start going after them for the crimes that are being committed: trespassing, vandalism, and public drug use. It’s called broken windows policing. I know you’re aware of what that is. If you lived in New York City during Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, you saw how he turned that city around quickly. We’re going to do that in Arizona. Broken windows policing is basically you go after each little crime, because little crimes lead to bigger crimes. Broken windows, blight, prostitution, that kind of stuff, will detract from a neighborhood, and pretty soon more crime comes into that neighborhood, and more crime. We’re going after all of that, and we’re going to push cities to do that kind of policing. I think they will, because state shared funding will be attached to that kind of policing. The cities need to serve their residents, and the residents want safety. We don’t have that right now. Also, education. My education plan calls for funding the student, but thankfully we have that now. Our legislature, along with some amazing groups and great parents, worked really hard to get ESAs for all. People call them vouchers. Basically, right now in Arizona, you can take your son or daughter, if you don’t like the school they’re going to, you can move them to another school and the money follows. That’s huge. That’s so massive. We’re going to take it a step further and start pushing for dual track education. After 10th grade, your student can decide if they want to take that track and go off to a four year college, and then keep going with the college prep classes. Or if they want to go and get a skill, some work skills, we’re going to bring back trade skill training, vocational training, career certification, starting in high school after 10th grade, so that kids can get out of high school and have a real chance at making a good living. I was down here not too far from where we are in the Vail School District near Tucson, and they have a great program. It’s a vocational program right in their high school, from culinary arts to career certification. You name it. The welding program was so popular they had to expand it. Every single student in that class not only looked happy, they were using their hands. They knew what they were learning was something they were actually going to use in the real world. The instructor said, “Kari, every single one of these kids,” there must have been about 30 in there, “will get out of high school with their diploma and a full-time job offer making 70 to $100,000 a year with full benefits and zero college debt.” Why are we not preparing our kids in high school for the real world? Why do we make them get out and try to search for some sort of job training, search for another degree? We don’t need that. Many of them don’t need that. The jobs are there. We just need to make sure they’re getting out ready for them. Mr. Jekielek: You obviously have a strong team advising you on policy. You have this outspoken uncompromising approach, it seems. Right? I’m wondering if some of your advisors ever tell you, “Kari, you need to tone it down and do it differently.” Ms. Lake: Not so much. Maybe a little. I go to them sometimes, and I say, “I really like this policy. Help me find a way to explain it really in a basic way.” Because I don’t like when you’re throwing policy out and it’s just numbers. I came through storytelling from a television and journalism background. I want to make things simple, so people understand. These issues are real basic. We can see what the issues are. Let’s make the policies and the solutions a little easier for everyone to understand. Not so much. They’ve learned that I do fine on my own. They understand that telling me what to say is probably not going to work. As I’ve been speaking for 30 years, I understand the issues. I covered them. Not many careers—I’m so blessed to have had a career in journalism—require you every day to walk in the door at work, wrap your arms around the biggest issue facing the state, dig into that issue, understand it, find the experts on that issue, and then explain it to the viewer or the reader so that they understand the issue. That’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years. People are surprised that here’s this television journalist coming into politics, and that I’m so well-versed on so many things. But that’s what I’ve been covering for 30 years in this beautiful state of Arizona. I don’t need a lot of people telling me what to do, but I’m never afraid to ask for help. I’m never afraid to go to the experts. That’s how we put our policy together, going to the experts. That’s how we’re going to continue going forward. Hey, listen, I’ve got great policy. It’s right there on my website. I think all of it’s going to work to bring solutions. Will it work 100 per cent the way we’ve laid it out? Maybe not. Obviously, you come up with plans, and sometimes you have to make adjustments. We will have to make adjustments. We will have missteps along the way, and I’m sure the media will capitalize on every misstep we make. They’ll cover it for days on end, but we’ll adjust and we’ll keep moving forward. We have to move forward in tackling these problems. We can’t sit paralyzed on the sidelines waiting for the media, afraid we’re going to be attacked, afraid we’re going to be canceled. We’ve been doing that. We’re afraid we’re going to be canceled so we don’t speak out. We’re afraid we’re going to be canceled or lose a client, so we stay silent. Look what’s happening to our country. I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not afraid of being canceled. They can call me whatever they want. What I’m afraid of is not doing something. I’m afraid of what happens to our country. As I said in a speech at CPAC, with our Founding Fathers, for them America was an idea. For us, it’s been an amazing reality. An amazing reality, and I don’t want America to be just a memory for our kids and grandkids. It’s too important. We’re going to get in there, and we’re going to do a lot of work. We’re rolling our sleeves up, Jan, and that work ethic I got growing up in the Midwest in a big family is going to help. We’re going to tackle all the hard problems. We’re going to work fast, and we’re going to work hard, and we’re going to bring about great change for the people of Arizona. I think other states will follow suit actually, especially when it comes to that border. I was in Texas about a week and a half ago. The people of Texas were so into what’s going on. They’re following our race. They’re rooting for us because they want more to be done in Texas. They want Governor Abbott to do more. I’m not governor yet. I can’t do it right now, but I’m telling you. Starting January, when I take the oath of office, immediately after taking my hand off the Bible we’re going to sign and issue a Declaration of Invasion and start tackling that problem on the border. Mr. Jekielek: As we come to the end of our interview, there’s actually 15 other things I want to talk to you. The big question I have is you’ve been a Republican, from what I understand, your whole life. You’ve been a conservative, even though you kept that quiet while you were a host. You’re saying that you’re going to be governor for all Arizona, all Arizonans. Is that how you say it? Ms. Lake: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: That’s not how it’s being portrayed, because conservative is something very specific, and not for all Arizonans. Right? It’s a very specific way of looking at the world, so how can you be for all Arizonans then? Ms. Lake: Let me actually correct you a little bit. When I was 18, I registered as a Republican. I’ve been a Republican almost all my life, but I did register for four years as a Democrat, and a few years as an Independent. I am, I believe, the only person running for governor who can relate to all: Democrat, Independent, and Republican. Remember, when I was covering this state, I covered people who were Democrat. I covered all Arizonans. I’d never asked somebody going into a story if we were covering. Maybe there was a fire, or maybe there was a big piece of legislation that was happening that was affecting someone’s life, I didn’t ask people, “What’s your political background?” I didn’t care. I cared about the person. I don’t think it matters that I’m a Republican if the ideas I’m putting first are Arizona first. That’s what’s so beautiful about that movement. It really isn’t about politics. It’s about common sense solutions, so I think I’m going to be able to do great things. People are not believing the media. They’re trying to paint me out to be a radical Right-wing this or that. Let me remind people that our Founding Fathers, if they were alive today, would be MAGA. They would be America first, 100 per cent. Our country was founded on conservative values, but the Left has been almost evil geniuses with the way they use the language by trying to turn the Republican party conservative traditional values into something negative. We need to start changing the narrative on that and speaking the truth. What’s wrong with values that want to help families protect children? What’s wrong with values that want to make sure our kids are properly educated and love our country at the end of their education rather than hate our country? What’s wrong with values that want to make an environment so that when you go to start a business you have a chance at making that business grow and living the American dream? I don’t know what’s wrong with that, but we’ve allowed the Left to twist and turn words and make our ideas, our principles, and our solutions into something negative, when they are frankly the most positive, wonderful, beautiful solutions out there. I invite everybody who’s watching, whether they’re Independent, whether they’re Democrat, whether they’re Republican, to take a look at where we stand on the issues, because they will be helpful to all. I don’t care what you are registered as. I want your vote, and I want you to know that I will work tirelessly for you. My opponent won’t even show up to debate. She’s afraid to even speak to the people of Arizona. Can you imagine my opponent trying to stand up and be and be an ambassador for Arizona? We’re going to be battling for companies that are leaving in droves, these blues states, because the taxes are too high. The regulatory environment is horrible. The people are leaving these blue states, and they are looking for common sense great states to move to. I’m ready to go toe to toe with Governor Abbott and Governor Ron DeSantis. I love those guys. Ron DeSantis is fantastic. I had a chance to meet him. I’m ready to go toe-to-toe with the governors of Texas and Florida, and fight and duke it out for companies to come and relocate to Arizona. I don’t think my opponent will stand a chance with them. She’s afraid to debate me. How is she going to go up against the cartels? How is she going to make our streets safe? We need somebody in office who’s ready to make transformational change for Arizona, ready to stand up and fight for the people, and I will fight every single day. Mr. Jekielek: Kari Lake, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Ms. Lake: Thank you so much. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Kari Lake and I 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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“I told them what I was doing. And every single one of them said, Jeff, why are you throwing your career away over this?” When COVID-19 hit, Jeff Childers, a bankruptcy attorney in Gainesville, Florida, found himself stunned by the sudden imposition of a mandatory mask mandate. He launched himself into constitutional law and got the first appellate decision in the country finding mandatory masking presumptively unconstitutional. “If they could get away with encroaching on our constitutional rights to that extent, dictating what we wore, then they were going to go to the next level. That seemed obvious to me. And it was not something that was obvious to my peers,” Childers says. In the last two years, he’s successfully fought against vaccine mandates, defended high-profile individuals in the Jan. 6 committee investigations, and sued a hospital for forcing a patient to stay hospitalized on a ventilator and remdesivir against the wishes of the patient’s family. After many lawyers reached out to Childers for advice, he launched an informal network around the country to share information and help other lawyers launch similar lawsuits in their states. “Every major institution in this country has closed ranks to protect those wrongdoers … There will be accountability,” Childers says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/attorney-jeff-childers-on-how-he-won-against-mask-and-vaccine-mandates-and-inspired-other-lawyers-to-do-the-same_4783217.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jeff Childers, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jeff Childers: Thank you. Nice to be here. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been deeply involved in litigation around many issues surrounding COVID. Mr. Childers: That’s true. Unexpectedly, I would say. Mr. Jekielek: So, very briefly, tell me how you got involved in this. Mr. Childers: So my background is I’m a commercial litigation attorney, which means I usually represent businesses and fight about money. And I’ve been doing that for a long time and was very successful at it and had a nice boutique practice where I didn’t have to work that hard and still did very well, and then the pandemic came. And I had one of those moments that you have in life where you never forget it. And for me, it was sitting on my back patio, watching my first county commission meeting that I’d ever seen in my life. My wife was sitting next to me. I can visualize it like I’m sitting there right now. And I saw those commissioners discuss an out of control pandemic in about 10 minutes, and then pass the first mandatory mask mandate in the state of Florida that was countywide. And something just grabbed me in an almost spiritual way. I was so offended. I looked at my wife and I said, “There’s no way that’s constitutional. They can’t tell us what to wear. They can’t tell us we have to strap something to our head and wear it around. That’s insane.” Now, I had never practiced any constitutional or civil rights law in my entire career. I didn’t even know where to start. But I fired off a demand letter to the county commission, hit the books, and within a week or two, I filed my very first complaint against any government entity. I didn’t even know where to serve it. Who do you give it to, the mayor? You put it in that little slot at the library where you return the books. I had to figure all that stuff out. And as I do with any case that has novel issues, I called my peers for advice, and I told them what I was doing. And every single one of them said, “Jeff, why are you throwing your career away over this?” And it was a real gut check. These are people that I have profound respect for who have decades more legal experience than I do. But I decided to push through and to tackle it. And the result of that one, which is what put me into the middle of the hurricane, was we won. We won on appeal. We got the only appellate decision as far as I know in the entire country, finding that mandatory masking was presumptively unconstitutional. And so when people heard that I was willing to take these cases, and you remember we’re talking about the summer of 2020, the peak of mask hysteria, where even asking the question about the masks would get you the response, “You’re literally killing grandma.” Right? You remember that? And so there were very few attorneys who had any real serious litigation track record that were willing to take these cases. So we started to get all kinds of things, and very quickly we challenged the vaccines. And on my first vaccine case, we won, as far as I know, the first broad preliminary injunction against the government vaccine mandate in the entire country. We got death threats over that one. We removed a school board member who was about to pass a sweeping CRT-related transformation of the school district. We challenged one of the largest hospital chains in the country over its private vaccine mandate. And while we didn’t get a preliminary injunction on that one, they immediately backed down after we got the verbal order from the judge, because it was so strong in recognizing the irrationality of the mandate. So, this is all brand new territory for me, completely unlike anything I’ve ever done. And I’m not used to being in the limelight. Now, I’m being invited to talk, like recently at the Moms for Liberty National Conference. My session with Joe Harding was right after Governor DeSantis spoke, and I mentioned AR-15s in an analogy. And all across the country, newspapers were running stories about attorney Jeff Childers talks about AR-15s. Tiffany Justice is the national co-chair for Moms for Liberty. She was on Dr. Phil the other day, and he asked her about what I said. I’m not used to that kind of stuff. I’m just a quiet boutique, small town attorney fighting over business contracts. I’m as surprised as anyone to be sitting right here talking to you. Mr. Jekielek: Something you said really made me think. Everyone you reached out to, your peers or learned peers said, “Why are you throwing your career away?” Why was that so obvious to them, do you think, that this is what was happening? Mr. Childers: Wow, that’s a really good question. All or almost all followed that comment up with some remark like, “This will all be over in a few weeks or a few months.” So, I think there was a sort of dual recognition in the profession that this was politically dangerous and that you could be even potentially disbarred. I think that’s the implication, right? Throwing your career away means you’re going to lose your bar license over this. Their conventional wisdom was just wait it out, but I didn’t believe it was going to be over soon. It didn’t even occur to me. To me, this mask thing seemed like just the beginning. And if they could get away with encroaching on our constitutional rights to that extent, dictating what we wear, then they were going to go to the next level. That seemed obvious to me, but it was not something that was obvious to my peers. My peers seemed to think it was politics as normal. If I could jump to a related story that I think is analogous to this, I also became involved with defending some high profile folks in the January 6th committee investigations. And once again, because I’ve never represented anyone who was the target of a congressional investigation before, that seems very serious. We’re getting subpoenas and demands for depositions and things like that. And again, one of my superpowers is I’m a fast learner. I have a lot of self confidence that I can learn quickly. But you don’t want to make a mistake. So, I called my connections in DC and got references to tall building attorneys who make $1,500 an hour and up, who normally represent folks in that situation. And all of them said, “Jeff, this is just business as normal in DC. The commission is just going to write a report, and then this whole thing’s going to blow over.” And I said, “I don’t know if I believe that. I feel like they’re collecting evidence for DOJ investigations. I feel like there are going to be criminal indictments coming based on all this information that the committee’s scooping up that the DOJ couldn’t get.They don’t have the same powers that Congress does. And all these attorneys in DC, these very highly paid guys who swim in that world all told me, “No, they’ll never do that. It would be politically toxic for them to translate this into criminal indictments and criminal prosecutions.” And so I stopped talking to them. It’s the same kind of groupthink that I saw at the beginning with the masks. I don’t know what it is. I can’t explain it because attorneys are very smart people. You have to go through law school, pass the bar, think on your feet in front of judges, and handle things that come up in a second. You have to be very intelligent and critical. You have to be a critical thinker. But there was no critical thinking being applied to these issues. And so at bottom, I’m still sort of baffled by the ubiquitous thought process by most conventional, what I call tall building attorneys or large firm attorneys. And if you pressed me, I would probably suggest to you that these large law firms now are so intertwined with government. They get large cases from different government agencies, for example. And so they have to be careful that they don’t offend their government clients that it makes them very conservative when it comes to anything that challenges the conventional published government narrative. That’s my best explanation for why we didn’t see all the traditional civil rights firms jump into this, the ACLU and all of these other civil rights firms that will pick it up if a teacher somewhere can’t put up a pride flag, then you’ve got 10 attorneys there the next day. But if the teacher doesn’t want to wear a mask, there’s nobody showing up to represent them. The difference is that one has the imprimatur of government, and the other one has whatever the reverse opposite of that is. And so there’s a problem, there’s a fundamental problem with the system right now. The big law firms, and by big, I mean it went all the way down to law firms with like 50 attorneys, which you would probably call small or medium-sized. But they’re so dependent on government now that they are unwilling to challenge these sorts of official government narratives, at least not without a lot of thought and very cautiously. And that’s a problem I think for normal citizens. We’ve got to break that interdependence between government and our legal community because it’s not good whatever is behind this. Mr. Jekielek: You are sitting in that community meeting where you realized, and you thought to yourself, “They can’t do this.” You described it as an almost a spiritual experience. Why do you describe it that way? Mr. Childers: I was an agnostic for most of my life and raised Catholic, always believed in God. Just the idea that all of this occurred by accident was ridiculous to me. It just never gripped me at all. And in my early forties, I had a bonafide spiritual experience with a vision and everything else. And that was when I really started reading the Bible and going to church every single weekend and tithing. It was a complete transformation. It happened to me on a bike ride. And if you ask my wife, she’ll say I came back from that bike ride a different, better person. I started to be more in tune with suggestions that I felt like were coming from a divine source, that weren’t anything that I would’ve thought of on my own. The idea, for example, that I would sue the government over something, it would’ve never occurred to me. That idea is so alien. Any UFO alien was more alien or less alien, I guess, than that idea. So, I pay attention to those feelings. I feel like if you don’t follow those suggestions, then the divinity is going to turn up the temperature on you, and that becomes uncomfortable. It’s better to just go with it at the beginning. I went into this having this spiritual conviction that what was happening was just wrong, was morally and ethically wrong. Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on the Constitution. I don’t want people to misinterpret that. What I mean is it’s a fantastic document. It has created the largest, most powerful, most successful country in the history of the world. But it is a piece of paper created by men. There is a higher power. The founding documents refer to the higher power. All of our rights come from the Creator. They don’t come from government. Those constitutional rights are supposed to be a reflection of our God-given freedoms. Why me? Why a commercial litigation attorney in Gainesville, Florida who’s never even dabbled in this area of law? Aren’t there better lawyers to tackle these problems than me? And remember we’re right at the beginning. I’m talking about March 2020. Why weren’t the 10 lawyers showing up instantly in Alachua County from the ACLU to fight this? It wasn’t happening, and that was strange. That was very, very weird to me. To answer your question, I feel like there was a spiritual element, that there were forces at play, forces of even good and evil, if you want to put it in those terms. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. If I wound up losing my career over it, then I felt like that was something I needed to do. I needed to be able to say I tried. Mr. Jekielek: What did your wife think about that? Because she was sitting beside you, right? Mr. Childers: She was. And I have been so blessed. I don’t have a perfect marriage. I don’t want to make it sound like that, but on the big things, Michelle goes right along with me. She took up the cause and worked heroically at home. She was one of the original moms who was involved in the Moms for Liberty movement, for example, and made countless phone calls and Zoom meetings and things trying to organize citizens who had never been politically active in their entire lives. That’s so remarkable. Where we are is that we’ve seen is a revolution among the apolitical, among people who felt like if as long as they minded their own business and did their job and took care of their kids and participated in their community, everything would be fine. I don’t think they feel that way anymore. And there’s a lot of them. My wife was one of those, and it would’ve been so much different if I didn’t have her support. I don’t know if I’d be sitting here. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve obviously talked to a lot of people on this boat that you just described, and what are the things that made people suddenly become active? Mr. Childers: There’s probably more than one answer to that question. Mr. Jekielek: Certainly there are. Mr. Childers: At a fundamental level, a lot of people were shocked that the world didn’t work the way that they thought it worked. I think that what happened was when you saw this worldwide, certainly nationwide response for governments turning on a dime—when have you ever seen government do anything fast? But it happened this time. And when have you ever seen all the government actors agree with each other? But it happened this time. You, me, our peers, people younger than we are, people older than we are, have never seen anything like that in their entire lives, and with these emergency powers that previously had only been used in short periods of time after a hurricane. I can’t even remember a medical emergency that caused the state of Florida to declare an emergency. I can’t remember that. So that was new. Nobody had ever seen that before. People always thought that our government officials would exercise some degree of moral and ethical restraint, that they would balance competing interests when they shut down all these small businesses, these small business owners, a lot of whom are my clients. They don’t spend their time in politics. They’re working 12, 14, 16 hours a day making their small business work. They never had to pay any attention to it. If they had to go and vote every four years, they would do that. But apart from that, they kept their nose to the grindstone. Well, the government from one day to the next just took their small business away. That was offensive at a level that they had never been offended on before. And so people refer to that as awakening. I don’t know if that’s a good descriptor or not, but they were certainly shocked. It was like electric shock therapy. When somebody goes through something like that, it’s a very profound experience, maybe even a spiritual experience to have your worldview challenged so fundamentally. Then, to a lot of people, it seemed like the government came after the children. That flips switches that are buried in your reptilian brain, these protective instincts that we have toward our kids. I used to talk to pastors. When the churches were shut down, that was another one. I thought that was an incredible constitutional invasion. And sure enough, the Supreme Court has ratified that belief. But way back at the beginning, I was trying to find any church that would let me sue the government for them for First Amendment violations. And I couldn’t find any. I was out talking to groups of pastors. “Listen, you guys have rights. This is wrong what’s happening. You need to wake up.” And yet there was among the pastor’s group, not all of them, but most of them, there was a great fear or reluctance to directly challenge the government, the government that issues permits when you want to build a new wing on your church, the government who gives you the tax exemption because you’re a nonprofit. Whereas the folks that sat in the pews whose kids were not allowed to go to school were outraged. It was very, very challenging trying to navigate those two communities. When the parents saw what their kids were being taught on these Zoom classes and things, it horrified them even more. Again, they had this worldview. Their worldview was shaped by how school was when we went to school. Reading, writing, arithmetic, class projects, field trips, Americana, that kind of thing. What they saw was something completely different. And again, it just shredded their concept of ordered liberty. When I talked to the pastors, and this is around the summertime of 2020, I said, “You know, you guys have seen these YouTube videos, right? They’re really great where the moms are down at the school board, and they’re tearing up the school board, and they’re pointing out all the flaws in each of their personalities and stuff and getting thrown out and holding signs.” And I said, “Some of those are really entertaining, aren’t they?” And the pastors laughed, and they said, “Yes, yes.” And then I would say, “Where are the men? Where are the men?” I don’t mean that as a criticism to the male gender. Especially in hindsight, that protective mechanism was activated first and most strongly in the moms. That’s why you saw almost universally these school board sessions packed with ladies because they recognized the threat. Even if they couldn’t enunciate it, they knew there was a threat. So, there’s a movement that we all know is there. We can all see it. And that movement is people who were struggling to adapt to this new reality. And it is in very stark terms to them, terms like protecting kids. Who wouldn’t do anything to protect children? What wouldn’t you do to protect your kids? I was saying this from the very beginning, that our public officials made a horrible mistake in the way that they conducted this pandemic. They made short term expedient decisions to satisfy what they thought were the requirements of controlling a germ, an uncontrollable virus, and not properly considering what was going to happen after. Sure, you can keep the folks locked down for a while, but they’re going to come out, and then they’re going to be looking to see if those decisions that you made, made sense. And I think we’re entering that phase now. We’re beginning to enter the phase of accounting where people are starting to say, “Was it worth it?” And the folks who were responsible for making those decisions are at some point going to have to be accountable for the decisions that they made. And what will they say? You can only disassemble and obfuscate for so long. Mr. Jekielek: Except we’re in Florida where things seem to have played out a bit differently than what you’re describing. So explain to me what you’re saying here. Mr. Childers: Something happened in Florida different than in other states clearly. Everybody wants to say that we have the best governor in the country, and I think we have the best governor in the country. But that is an inadequate explanation. The governor signs laws. He doesn’t write the laws. There is a whole legislature that writes those laws. And if the legislature doesn’t give the governor the laws to sign, he can’t have these signing ceremonies where he gets to take the credit. So our legislature fueled what happened here in Florida. Now, Florida was a purple state going into the pandemic. It’s clearly a solid red state now. Something happened. I was there at the beginning when Governor DeSantis sort of launched into the man that he is now, which is love him or hate him, he is recognized as one of the most influential people in politics, right? But when I filed my little mask lawsuit against the county in April or May of 2020, I named the governor as an additional defendant. I sued the governor. I sued the governor because he wasn’t doing anything about these mandatory mask edicts or whatever you want to call them, executive orders. And I sued him, not because I felt that he was culpable, but because I wanted to get his attention. I felt like surely if he knew what was going on here in Alachua County, he would act. And at that time, without revealing any confidences, I was hoping to get, and I did get an attorney from the governor’s office assigned to the case. And at that time, the governor’s office position was they really didn’t want to get involved. And I wound up dismissing him out of the case, because the only reason I put him in was to get his attention, and it wasn’t going anywhere. Somewhere along the way, he started to become bolder. Now remember, he barely beat Andrew Gillum in his election, so he didn’t come in with a mandate. But he started to pick up. As we started to get wins in the courts and started to push back a little bit, the governor’s office was also coming along, and I saw a change. And as I was filing more suits, the governor’s office was becoming more engaged with me. Ultimately the governor’s office would call me and ask if I could help by filing a lawsuit. For example, I sued several counties that were rebelling against the state’s mask mandate, the holdout counties, and the state really can’t sue itself. My lawsuits were in large part a result of contacts from the governor’s office asking if I was willing to take up that cause, and we were successful in those lawsuits. So, there was an evolution there. And then with the parents’ rights thing, Governor DeSantis has really made a name for himself in the area of parents’ rights, as I’m sure you know. But it was an evolving process. At some point, Florida, I would say, stabilized. We had our schools open. We had our businesses open. We had the masks off. There was a temptation to feel like we had won. Then, there was another one of those never forget moments. I gave a talk at the Ocala COVID Summit, it was in October of last year. I think it’s been a year, and it was very well attended event. And afterward I was mingling with folks and talking to them, and this nice young lady came up. I remember she had this big flowery hat on and she shook my hand and told me how much she enjoyed my talk and whatnot. And I recognized she had a Canadian accent. So I said, “Are you from Canada?” And she said, “Oh yes.” And then she told me, and again, I’ll never forget this story. Meanwhile her whole family started gathering around, more Canadians. She said they had been smuggled out of Canada across the border in the middle of the night. They had left their homes. They had left their bank accounts, their cars, all their property. They basically got connected to an underground railroad through a plane-train-automobile type of sequence in the middle of the night crossing the border. And they went straight to Florida. What I recognized in October was that we were far from done. Florida is a little outpost, but not only is there Canada, there are other states, blue states where they still have horrible problems with government overreach. So, to answer your question, do you remember the old Florida man meme which you don’t hear that too much anymore? We’re all a bunch of dumb redneck idiots down here that wrestle alligators and jump our pickup trucks over the swamp and that kind of thing. But there was something to it. There’s an independent streak in Florida that I think fueled what you see. Again, it’s not just one man. It’s a whole legislature. It’s all the constituents of those legislators who were pushing them and supporting them and everything else. I don’t know if it’s a libertarian streak. I think that’s maybe too facile to say that. But there’s just a doggedly independent streak in Florida that allowed us to create this outpost of freedom. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think DeSantis shifted and his agencies shifted during that time? Mr. Childers: I believe that Governor DeSantis is one of the most honest politicians that we’ve seen in a long time. I believe that he embraced things that he wanted to do. But again, he didn’t start with a mandate. He was not a strong governor for Florida when he first started. With Andrew Gillum, I don’t want to say anything critical, but he should have beat Andrew Gillum by a country mile. And the governor also, remember, he was a Trump candidate. They love to point that out. And he’s a lawyer, and he’s a very smart man. He watched what President Trump went through. And so his administration is very, very protective, almost to the point of paranoia. When I say that, I always like to point out it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. It’s prudence. They’re very prudently protective of the governor. At the beginning, that was a disadvantage for him. But what happened was it protected him politically from making some early obvious mistakes. Maybe if he had come out against the vaccines from the get go, they would’ve destroyed him for it. He didn’t do that. But where are we now? Now, the state of Florida does not even officially recommend taking the vaccines, and they recommend against it for kids. I don’t know if there’s another major state in the US that takes that position, but he’s getting away with it. The governor has incredibly naturally developed political instincts, and when he saw the opportunity to lead, he took it. Could another governor have done it? Could Greg Abbott have done it, or one of these other conservative governors? I don’t know. I think that there was a unique combination of factors. DeSantis didn’t have a lot to lose because he wasn’t on the political map when he started. He wasn’t invested. He didn’t owe a lot of favors, because he hadn’t been around for a long time and because they were so protective. So, that gave him a lot of freedom that other governors didn’t have. I think he’s a good person. He did the right thing. Mr. Jekielek: It was almost surreal to me when you said he’s not recommending the vaccine, and he’s recommending against it for children, of course, through Surgeon General Ladapo. And then he’s getting away with it were your words. What do you think about that? Doesn’t that sound like a surreal thing to say? Mr. Childers: Right. This is one of those things that if I had said it pre-pandemic, you would’ve written it off as a sort of hyperbolic, maybe conspiracy theory-minded emotional comment. But now, you know exactly what I mean, and it is surreal. This is the world that we didn’t think we were living in, that we found out that we are living in, which is that somebody like you or me, an average citizen could say something on social media that would draw the attention of the entire federal government to try to cancel us and relieve us of our livelihood and put us out of business. That’s possible now. I didn’t think that was possible two years ago, and we complained about cancel culture pre-pandemic, but we had no idea what cancel culture was. When the entire corporate media lines up behind the government, when Big Tech lines up behind the federal government to carry out and enforce the federal government’s policies—enforce them—I choose that word carefully. We have something different than the democracy that we thought we had. I don’t know what we have right now, but it’s not what we thought we had. Mr. Jekielek: How many lawyers are there in this country right now who are doing the kind of work you’re doing? Mr. Childers: That’s a great question. The good news is there are more lawyers now than there ever were. And that number is steadily increasing. We’re starting to see larger and larger firms getting involved in these battles. I’m not aware of any large firm taking on a mask case, but I’m starting to be aware of medium-size firms that will do it or that’ll get involved in these hospital kidnapping cases. Mr. Jekielek: What do you mean by that? Mr. Childers: Yes. A phase that we went through in my COVID litigation history was when hospitalizations were at their peak. What we would see over and over again is patients who were in the hospital with a COVID diagnosis, many of them entered the hospital for something completely different, but were given a test in the ER or something and were admitted as a COVID patient. They didn’t want Remdesivir. They didn’t want the ventilator, but they were being put on the ventilator, and they were being given Remdesivir against their wishes. I can’t tell you how many calls we got, hundreds, thousands, and they were dying. The calls that we were getting were panicked relatives who wanted us to use legal process to force the hospitals to either treat them with alternative treatments that the patient wanted or let them go. And the hospitals wouldn’t do either one. In one case that I had, I took it up on an emergency appeal. It’s inexplicable. There were three corporate law firms that were hired by the hospital to defend the hospital’s position in that appeal and keep that patient in the hospital, and all the relatives wanted to do was get him out. The hospital said he was not sufficiently stable to move. They said they’re willing to sign whatever releases that the hospital wants. They don’t want him on that ventilator anymore. They want him in a different facility. We had a different facility who was willing to take him. We had a doctor who was willing to take over his care, and the hospital probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting us to keep him in the hospital. That’s what I call a hospital kidnapping case. It doesn’t make any sense. If you’re the patient and your wishes are that you don’t want them to treat you anymore, why can’t you make that decision in a free country? It’s supposed to be a business. You’re just a customer, right? But wasn’t what was happening. Mr. Jekielek: So more and more… Mr. Childers: More and more law firms are getting involved. I maintain a database of what we call our allied attorneys. When we become aware of an attorney or a law firm that has litigated one of these, what I call a freedom case, then we contact them, and if they agree, we add them to the list. We’ve got basically a referral network in almost every state in the country now. When we get someone calling us from Michigan, and I’m not licensed to practice in Michigan, I can’t help them effectively. We’ve got a list of attorneys in Michigan who we know for a fact will take these cases. I should be able to refer them to any law firm. Any competent lawyer should be able to help these folks, but many lawyers won’t. That was a problem at the beginning, but like I said, it’s so encouraging that more and more lawyers are joining the fight. Mr. Jekielek: Do you feel free to say how many freedom lawyers there are now? Mr. Childers: It’s so many that I lost count, or I stopped tracking it—hundreds and hundreds. Most of them are small practitioners like I am. There’s a very simple explanation for that. Again, these are lawyers who don’t have historical connections with government. I never litigated against the government or for the government. I don’t care if they don’t send me any business. I never got any business from them. Other larger firms have to make that calculation, so it’s the small lawyers that saved us. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying you’re expecting there to be accountability. That’s interesting. There’s a lot of people out there who are what you’d call black pilled. They just don’t expect there to ever be any accountability. What do you have to say to them? Mr. Childers: First of all, I understand how they feel. It’s incredibly frustrating what’s happened. It’s so obvious to many people what happened was wrong. And again, in the old world that we used to live in, people who did things that were wrong were arrested, and were tried. Maybe they could get off on a technicality, an OJ defense or something. But at least they had to go through the process. What we’ve seen in the last two years is that every major institution in this country has closed ranks to protect those wrongdoers. And it seems overwhelming. How could you possibly overcome the universities, the federal government, the state, local county dog catcher, all working together to prevent anybody from having to be accountable? How can you overcome that? So, that is a legitimate concern. But that’s not how justice works. That’s not how history works. It has only been two years. Now, two years seems like a long time when you’re in the middle of it. When you’re in the war, two years on the front lines, that is a long time. But it’s not a long time in historical sense. There are any number of great old slogans about it. But the wheels of justice move slowly, but they eventually will get there. I’ll give you a tangible example. When I first started litigating in this area with these COVID cases, your rank and file judge didn’t want to hear anything about it. They were totally closed-minded. When I filed my first mask lawsuit, I expected to lose at the trial court, because I’m asking a person, an individual just like you and me, their job is to be a judge. They have to run for election. What judge in the summer of 2020 wanted to be the anti-mask judge? That’s throwing your career away. That’s what they were hearing from their peers. But now when I go into court before a judge, I have at least an open mind. That’s a sea change from where we were. It’s completely different. I got an oral ruling from a federal judge in Pensacola division. I won’t say his name to embarrass him, but he called out this hospital that we were suing for their totally irrational vaccine mandate. Now, he didn’t give me the relief that I wanted, but he went on and on about how disgusted he was about it and how unpleasant and irrational the policy was. I couldn’t have got that the first year of the pandemic. So I feel like we’re on a trajectory. I almost got there with that judge, and I got enough. Well, what about next year? I study the news related to COVID every morning because I write a blog about it. So, I’m pretty well informed about current events. And what we’re seeing is that while the government could gain the scientific literature for a while at the beginning, they’ve lost control of that now. You know this. Study after study after study now are critical, for example, of the vaccines. Study after study after study are critical of the masking. There is a great wait, and it’s just one little study at a time on some narrow issue. But when you add them all up, there’s a body of scholarship forming that’s outside the control of the government. They don’t have enough officials to control all of that. When I go into court next year, I’m going to have even more ammunition. When I started, I had nothing to work with. It was brand new. It was all just people’s hypotheses and what Dr. Fauci said. Now I can point to this study and this study and this study and this study until I get tired. So we are going to get there. There will be accountability. I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take. I can tell you that these things tend to drag out. We’re up against a very well-organized, well-resourced opponent. They are not going to give in easily. They’re going to slow it down however they can. But it is coming. It is a force that is so large and heavy and unstoppable. They cannot hold it back forever. We will get accountability. Mr. Jekielek: Jeff Childers, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Childers: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jeff Childers and I 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

In this episode, I sit down with Brownstone Institute fellow Debbie Lerman to discuss her research into U.S. government documents and the origins of America’s pandemic policies. The response to COVID—from lockdowns to mask mandates to vaccine mandates—was actually a national security response, not a public health response, she argues. According to Lerman’s research, in a sharp break from official pandemic preparedness plans, the National Security Council (NSC) was put in charge of the pandemic policy in 2020. And Health and Human Services (HHS) was removed as the lead federal agency for the pandemic response and replaced with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who “were like a deer in headlights,” she argues. What really happened in the first few months of 2020? And for years now, scientists have been working on mRNA technology, but prior to the COVID-19 vaccines, nothing had been approved. The pandemic turned into an opportunity, she says, and now—despite growing evidence of critical side effects from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—Moderna and BioNTech have dozens of new mRNA vaccines and therapeutics in development. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview:https://www.theepochtimes.com/debbie-lerman-how-americas-national-security-complex-took-over-the-pandemic-response_5197188.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Debbie Lehrman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Debbie Lerman: Thank you so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Debbie, you’ve done some really fascinating research, from my perspective. You discovered that the U.S. pandemic response in terms of policy was actually led by the National Security Council, not HHS [U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services], as a lot of us had assumed for a long time. We’re going to get into that. Before we go there, your background isn’t researching the government. Please tell me about how you came to be doing this work. Ms. Lerman: That’s a good question. You’re right. I don’t have the background of somebody who is an investigative journalist or who is reading through government documents and trying to figure out how different agencies are doing different things. I didn’t know what any of those acronyms meant. But when March, 2020 came along, I felt like everything that I knew and everything that I believed in went away. I really got a little crazy and I didn’t know what to do. Most people where I come from were all very much afraid of the virus and in favor of any measures that the government suggested that we take against it. Mr. Jekielek: They were ready to take those measures, basically. Ms. Lerman: They were absolutely ready and happy. Whenever I questioned it, they asked me if I was a Trumpist. That really got to me because I’m a socialist liberal Democrat. I was. They know that. My friends and my family know that I’ve always been that and never voted for a Republican, and didn’t like Trump at all. But I also didn’t think with everything Trump said that we had to do the opposite. I also didn’t think that if you are looking at evidence and facts, that it has anything to do with Trump. There was such a disconnect between what I was saying and what their reaction was. That is what scared me. I said, “I’m talking to you about facts and you’re coming back to me with some kind of either political or ideological response. There’s a disconnect between reality as I see it, and the reason that you think you’re doing things or I’m doing things.” That really, really disturbed me. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about your background, because I do think it’s relevant. I actually don’t think you were not qualified to do some really good in-depth research here. Please tell me about your educational background. Ms. Lerman: Sure. Mr. Jekielek: And your work. Ms. Lerman: In terms of education, I have an undergraduate degree from Harvard in English. My whole career was in writing. Yes, I am a writer. I did a lot of medical writing, and I knew how to read medical studies. I also knew how to translate complicated medical information and scientific information for a lay audience. I knew how to look at numbers. The first thing I did when they talked about the pandemic was to look at the numbers. Why? I want to know how scary it is for me. I want to know, “Am I going to get it? If I get it, am I going to get sick and die?” That’s what everybody wants to know, first thing. I looked at the numbers coming out of Italy at the beginning when everybody was terrified. Let’s say 20,000 people died in Italy. I said, “There’s 60 million people in Italy and 20,000 people died, or 20,000 people got sick. They were talking about tens of thousands of people that they were worried about. I said, “In a 60-million-person country, even 20,000 people getting sick or dying is not a reason to do anything at all, except increase the capacity of the hospitals, and find ways to treat them if you can. There just didn’t seem to me to be a big emergency, and it seemed like the emergency was being fabricated. It also seemed to me that the people who were falling for it were those that I used to identify with. They were telling me that because I didn’t, I was somehow ideologically and politically wrong, and that I was not in their tribe anymore. Mr. Jekielek: What was that like? Ms. Lerman: It was horrible. It was really horrible because I felt lonely. I felt isolated. I don’t do social media, so I don’t do Twitter and I don’t do Facebook. A lot of people that have had the same experience that I did told me that they went onto the social media platforms and found like-minded people. I think those platforms are pretty destructive to democracy, which is a totally different topic, but that’s why I’m not on them. It took me a while to find the like-minded people. What I did was to follow the real science, not, “the science.” I followed the actual numbers in science. The first week of the pandemic, the middle of March 2020, I was talking to a good friend and explaining that if this was an extremely contagious pathogen with everybody getting it and nobody dying, that means it has a very low infection fatality rate. Everybody was saying 10, 5, or 2 percent, and throwing out all these percentages. She sent me the John Ioannidis article, March 17th, 2020, in Stat magazine. I read that article. I read it every day for two years because that article said, “We are basing our response to the pandemic on no knowledge and we don’t understand what’s happening. We don’t have the information, and our response is not proportional to what’s happening.” That’s basically what he said. Now, he didn’t say only 10,000 people would die, which is how people have distorted what he said. He didn’t say he knew how many people were going to die. But he said within the range of possibility of how many people are going to die, nothing that we’re doing makes sense. And that’s how I felt. Mr. Jekielek: It gave you a sense of sanity at this point? Ms. Lerman: Just that article. Then, that article led me to another scientist. I was only following scientists at the time. I started following Ioannidis online. He led me to other scientists like Jay Bhattacharya and other scientists at Stanford where he worked. He also led me to Vinayak Prasad, who is another scientist from UCSF [University of California, San Francisco], who was giving podcasts and YouTube videos about the truth, basically. He was saying what was actually happening, and what we should be doing, and what we should not be doing. Because what I was mostly terrified about was that what we were doing was extremely, extremely harmful. I started writing articles. The first article I wrote in March, 2020 was, “The Virus Doesn’t Scare Me, Our Response Does.” I sent it to newspapers as an op-ed. Obviously, nobody looked at it or responded. Then, I sent it to friends. I said, “Don’t you think this is crazy? Here, I’m telling you, and I’m explaining the science. I’m explaining the numbers. I’m explaining why what we’re doing is not good and probably very, very harmful.” That’s when I would get the response, “Are you a Trumpist? What’s wrong with you? Have you completely changed your politics? They would say things like that. They would just say, “Well, people are dying.” If I would say to somebody “Children don’t die of Covid,” the response that I got was so extreme. People would scream at me or get angry at me. So, I just stopped doing that. I stopped writing those articles because nobody wanted to read them. When I found Brownstone, the first article that I sent to Brownstone was a letter that I had written to an art institution. I live in Philadelphia, which I had been affiliated with for a long time, where they were still requiring masks and they had vaccine mandates. I got the first two vaccines because I was so naive. Even though I knew our whole response was wrong for some reason, which I can’t even fathom right now, probably I had succumbed to some of the propaganda. I thought, “Okay, I’ll get those vaccines and everything will go back to normal.” Mr. Jekielek: That was the messaging. Ms. Lerman: That was the messaging. Mr. Jekielek: That was the messaging. I forget exactly what it was. Ms. Lerman: It changed a lot. Mr. Jekielek: It did change a lot, but then we’ll be fine. It was ubiquitous. Ms. Lerman: Right. I probably wouldn’t do it again. But I did get the two first vaccines, and then nothing changed. Everybody still had to wear masks. Then, we started with all of the variants. Whoever heard of a variant? Then everybody started getting even crazier. I wrote a letter to this organization and I said, “You have to stop with the mask mandates and the vaccine mandates. Because I come from a very liberal, Democrat background, I know what is important in that world. And I said, “You know what? This is also true.” I wasn’t saying anything that was false, but I was using the levers that I thought might work in that world. I said, “It’s a racist policy. The vaccine mandates are a racist policy because,” and I gave the numbers, because I always use numbers, “the uptake in communities of color is 30 percent in Philadelphia, and the uptake in the white community is 80 percent. When you have a vaccine mandate, you’re actually excluding most of the communities that you are trying to bring in with your diversity and inclusion efforts.” They immediately dropped the vaccine mandate. I didn’t succeed with the masks, because I couldn’t figure out a way to say that masks were racist. I sent that letter to Brownstone and I said, “Listen, I used this, and maybe other people can use it.” Five minutes after I sent it, Jeffrey Tucker from Brownstone sent me a one word email, and he said, “Okay.” That changed my life because after he said okay to that article, I started writing all the articles that I had been writing in March, 2020—updated—now that I knew, two years later, how bad everything had been. I knew it was going to be bad. I didn’t know how bad it was going to be. He started publishing the articles. Now, I was writing articles more from a philosophical perspective or an overarching perspective. What happened? What was the propaganda? What was the politics? Because politics played such a big role, at least in this country, for sure. In each country, the politics played out in slightly different ways. I wrote a big article about the Covid catastrophe and what were the things that came together. The “Catastrophic Covid Convergence,” is what it was called. I said, “There were four things that came together.” Mr. Jekielek: I remember that piece, but please go on. This is very interesting. Ms. Lerman: It was panic, politics, propaganda and prophets, the four P’s. Panic; everybody was in fear. I worked on this article for a really long time to make sure that I got all of the different components, and that I explained it in a coherent way. By the time I finished the article, I realized that it had to have been a lab leak. There’s no way there could have been that much panic in the population if it didn’t come from above, if there wasn’t a really powerful group of people or organizations that were really panicked. The only reason I can think of that they were panicked—because SARS-COV2 isn’t really that scary, it spreads really fast, but it doesn’t kill a lot of people—the only thing I can think of is that they knew it had escaped from a lab. In my naive state at the time, I thought, “They panicked, even though in the real world it wasn’t killing a lot of people. They thought it was a potential bio-weapon, so it could kill a lot of people. They panicked.” They said, “We’re throwing out all of our pandemic preparedness plans. We’re going to just lock everything down, get a vaccine, and then everything will be fine.” That’s the panic part. Then we had the politics, which in this country played right into it. Everybody who was opposed to Trump, with anything that Trump said about the pandemic. When he said, “Masks don’t work,” everyone said, “We’re all going to wear masks forever.” He said, “It doesn’t affect children.” Then, everyone said, “We’re going to close our schools forever.” It was kind of this… Mr. Jekielek: Do the opposite. Ms. Lerman: Do the opposite. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to comment very briefly. Ms. Lerman: Sure. Mr. Jekielek: A few people told me this, including former Trump administration officials that I’ve worked with or that I’ve interviewed. They said, “Yes, we think this is what the other side is doing. Whatever we wanted to do, they would just do the opposite.” I said, “But that is patently insane.” I refused to believe it. I said, “I refuse to believe your assertion here.” It has taken me another year since I first heard that. Ms. Lerman: Really? Mr. Jekielek: I was like, I think this is true. But that is so preposterous. Ms. Lerman: You didn’t realize it because you weren’t in the community of the people who were doing it. I was living there and I saw it happening in real time. I saw when Trump said that children don’t die of Covid, or similar things, sometimes the way he phrased them wasn’t exactly scientifically right, but he got the gist of it. Again, I’m not a Trump supporter and I don’t love Trump, but he said things that were right. He said, “Kids aren’t affected by Covid.” That’s why whenever I said to somebody, “You understand that kids don’t die of Covid, right?” I knew the numbers of deaths and the numbers of hospitalizations. I knew all the numbers. That’s why they got so upset because he had said that. Now, I was repeating something that Trump said, and God forbid they would agree with anything that Trump said. Mr. Jekielek: Before we get to the other two, do you agree that this so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing? Ms. Lerman: Yes. Trump Derangement Syndrome segued perfectly into what I call Covid Derangement Syndrome. The way I define Trump Derangement Syndrome is that people got so emotionally attached. In fact, their identity became attached to hating Trump. It was no longer rational. It no longer mattered what he said. The way I define it is if you have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you’re no longer able to evaluate what he says rationally. You can’t evaluate it rationally, because you have an emotional response. You have an identity-based response. You have a lot invested in it in terms of how you feel about yourself and how you define yourself. That was so perfect because it led right into Covid Derangement Syndrome, which is the exact same thing, which is, “My identity as a good person, as a person who cares about my community, as a person who takes care of other people is dependent on my following every single thing that I’m told. I’m going to wear ten masks forever, and I’m going to wear them everywhere, even outside.” Mr. Jekielek: Do what you’re told by the anointed people. Ms. Lerman: Exactly. Mr. Jekielek: Right. But please, continue. Ms. Lerman: By the anointed people who are saying the opposite of Trump. The anointed people in the minds of the Covidly-deranged are the people who are saying the opposite of Trump. “I can’t do anything that Trump says, so I’m going to do everything religiously that the people who are saying the opposite are telling me to do,” even about opening schools by Easter. I was so hopeful when I heard Trump say, “We’re going to open everything by Easter.” I don’t know if you remember that statement, but that statement was so hopeful to me. I said to my husband, I just can’t believe this. Not only is Trump right, but we have to do what he says. The opposition was so fierce because of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, which had turned into the Covid Derangement Syndrome, which was saying, “Are you kidding me? We can’t open at any time, basically. We can’t open at all until we get the vaccine.” I don’t even know. They didn’t really have an endpoint. Maybe it’s when we get the vaccine or when we flatten the curve or when the hospitals have a certain number or don’t have a certain number. I never really understood. There really never was a good endpoint. That was one of the problems. The politics played out so that Trump Derangement Syndrome, which was absolutely real, turned into Covid Derangement Syndrome, which is what prevented some people from seeing through some of the stuff, or who might have been wanting to open the schools. Children were one of the areas where people woke up a little bit earlier than on some other things. But they just couldn’t do it. They couldn’t do it, just because Trump said we should do it. Mr. Jekielek: You were going to tell me your other two P’s. But it’s the power of the repetition of information, propaganda, and indoctrination. This has been one of my lessons during this whole time period. But talking to you here, it’s really unbelievable in a way. Ms. Lerman: It is unbelievable. It’s so powerful and scary. The third P is propaganda. The propaganda that was happening was so strong and so powerful and so overwhelming, and it played on the Trump Derangement Syndrome. It played on people’s fears and identity politics and any performative acts that they could do to show virtue signaling. The propaganda just played right into all of that, and it worked. It worked. I didn’t think in my lifetime that I would be a witness or a subject. We read about it in history—World War II, communist Russia, places where a whole population was subjected to an enormous amount of propaganda, and a lot of the population succumbed. It was bad. I thought we learned from those lessons. We should know not to do that. We know that when somebody tells us something that doesn’t make any sense and that’s harmful to other people and our children, that we’re not going to do it. We’re going to say no, or we’re going to actually think independently. I’m still flabbergasted by it, but I understand better how strong the force of the propaganda was. Then, the fourth thing is the prophets. Once all of that happened, there were the profit making companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the mask makers, the test makers, and the social media companies. The shift in wealth was just mind-boggling. Mr. Jekielek: It was trillions of dollars in upward transfer, the biggest wealth transfer in history by some order of magnitude. Ms. Lerman: I suddenly realized something after that article, and I started researching. The propaganda really got to me, and I started looking at who was doing it and why. All of a sudden, my whole structure of panic and politics and propaganda and prophets got inverted, because I realized that the propaganda, the prophets, and the panic all happened at the same time. When I wrote that first article, I got some really interesting responses from people who worked in the Department of Defense and various associated industries and research. Somebody wrote to me who had done research for the Department of Defense, not on biodefense, but on something else. He said, “You’re a little naive when you say that there was panic from above because it was a lab leak. I don’t think they were scared. I don’t think they were panicked. They saw it as an opportunity.” And a light bulb went on. I said, “That’s so interesting. That actually makes a lot more sense.” Because what if there was a whole system out there, or a whole network of for-profit companies, government organizations, and other interested entities that had all kinds of things that they wanted to do if there were to be a pandemic, and then a pandemic happened? I’m not saying that they caused it. Some people would tell you they did it on purpose because they wanted to activate all of their plans. I think it was a leak. I don’t even think it matters whether it was or wasn’t, because when it happened, when there was the pandemic, I no longer think it was panic from above. Right now, I think that the prophets and the propaganda were all part of a plan that had already been in place, and it was just waiting for Sars-CoV-2 to happen. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to throw out one more thing before we continue. It could have been both. Having been in the China space for some years, there is an understanding, certainly with the Trump administration and Secretary Pompeo, that the CCP is capable of anything, and is ready to do anything. There’s no limit. You have to, “distrust and verify.” You see something coming out of there that looks like it might be a leak. My God, what could this be? I think there’s a very legitimate case for having- Ms. Lerman: Concern. Mr. Jekielek: Deep, deep concern and some kind of strong response. At the same time, there could also be a system that’s ready to take advantage of that, because they can make money hand over fist in this kind of a context. I’m saying it could be both. Ms. Lerman: It could be. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Ms. Lerman: In this case, and I’ll agree with you, the CCP is a power to be reckoned with and not to be trusted. I actually don’t trust any information that they have put out about the virus; where it came from, where it didn’t come from, when it started, or when the first cases were detected. I don’t trust any of that. But I also know that we were involved in the development of gain-of-function viruses. Some people say we were trying to get ahead of pandemics, so that we would know what the viruses were going to evolve into, and then we could develop vaccines ahead of time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because we have no idea what viruses are going to develop into in nature. I’ve talked to people who have worked on that kind of research who say it doesn’t make any sense. But it does make sense if you think that your enemies are going to try to develop bio-weapons based on gain-of-function technology, or you want to develop that kind of capability yourself. If you want to develop that kind of capability and you want to know what your potential enemies are trying to develop, there are ways you might do that. I know Andrew Huff worked for EcoHealth Alliance, who was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and they were working on that kind of thing. I don’t think it was just the Chinese, I don’t think it was just the CCP. It was the CCP and a bunch of western countries’ biodefense organizations working together. Germany was involved in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but another institute in Wuhan that was looking at stuff like that. Brownstone has reported on that. France was one of the countries that actually created the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Mr. Jekielek: Correct. Ms. Lerman: The United States was funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A lot of things were happening around there that made me think that everyone was in it together. Mr. Jekielek: You found that it was in fact the National Security Council that took control of pandemic policy, as opposed to what you would expect in a normal situation, which most of us thought that it would be HHS running the show. Ms. Lerman: Yes. I don’t know if you want to know the story of how I got to that research. I wrote the article that was really very general, and it was a very broad analysis of the panic and the propaganda. I wasn’t intending to get into the minutia of what was the pandemic policy before Covid? What did it become during Covid? Who was running it? Who were the people? I really wasn’t interested in the particular people who were involved until Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone said, “I need somebody to review Deborah Birx’s book about Covid.” I do anything that Jeffrey says. I took the book and started reading it, and after 50 pages I told my husband something really, really shady is going on here. It’s hard for me to explain, but I’m a literature major. I don’t read books for what the words say. I read it for what they mean and the subtext. The subtext of what she was saying was, “I want you to believe something and I’m covering something up.” That’s how it came across to me. In the intro to her book, she says, “I really cared about Africa. That’s all I really cared about.” But I got a call from my friend Matt Pottinger, who was the Assistant National Security advisor on China, and he told me to come to the White House. Actually, it was his wife that I used to work back in the eighties. I said that none of this makes sense. Nobody who is an Assistant National Security Advisor to the President of the United States asks his wife, “Who did you work with in the eighties?” She tells him, “I worked with Deborah Birx and she was great. You should call her because she should really run the pandemic response.” I don’t know. Maybe that makes sense to some people, but when I read that it made no sense at all. Why does the Assistant National Security Advisor to the President for China have anything to do with the pandemic? Mr. Jekielek: I know why. I can tell you. Ms. Lerman: We know why. Mr. Jekielek: I can tell you why. Because he’s someone who actually understands the CCP threat deeply. I know the guy. He understands it very well. He would be someone who would be thinking, “Oh my God, what is this?” Ms. Lerman: Right. But would he be the one who you would turn to, to lead or choose a leader for a public health pandemic response? Do you see what I’m saying? That’s where the disconnect was. I wasn’t worrying about whether this national security advisor was caring about Covid. Yes, he has to care about our relationship with China. “Why didn’t they tell us about it? Were they covering it up? When did they know about it?” All of that. Why is he telling us that Fauci or Collins shouldn’t be leading the government task force, but it should be this other person who he’s bringing in? Why is that part of our public health response to a pandemic? That’s where my mind went. It just didn’t make sense to me. All I was trying to figure out was why was our response so bad? Why did we make so many mistakes, intentional or unintentional? I don’t know. All of a sudden, I see that the person who is now put in charge of the task force is somebody who has no experience with anything except for AIDS. She did AIDS research in the eighties, and then she was an AIDS ambassador for a few decades after that in Africa. No experience. No knowledge. There are so many people like John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya who have been doing this all their lives. They’ve been studying epidemiology, and yet, we’re putting Birx in charge of a public health task force. I didn’t understand it. That’s why I started looking at the documents. Once I started looking at the documents, I found the closest thing that we have to a Covid pandemic response plan. As a democracy and as a country where we pay taxes for our government to be prepared for pandemics and all of that, we have the right to know the plan that our government has, and what plan they’re implementing. I looked at all the plans that we had. We had a whole bunch of plans that were public health plans. We had a whole bunch of plans that were biodefense plans. There were plans that were started mostly after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks in preparation for a bioterror attack, which means somebody trying to release a virus that might kill a lot of people. We had all those plans, and then we also had the public health plans. I read all the plans, and I read everything that we were supposed to be doing. The public health plans all said, “There’s no proof that masks work.” If we are talking about PPEs [Personal Protective Equipment] or NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions], that type of universal masking doesn’t work. Testing and quarantining doesn’t work. These are really fundamental things that every epidemiologist or virologist knows. Because when you have an airborne respiratory virus that is very quickly transmitted, you can’t test and quarantine. You can test and quarantine when there’s three cases. You can’t test once it’s in the population, which it already was by January, 2020. It was already everywhere, and we knew it. There are maps on the internet that show in January, it was in a bunch of countries and a bunch of states. If it’s in a bunch of countries and in a bunch of states, you cannot do testing and quarantining. Anyways, that’s what those plans said. The plan that we had said that the states should be prepared to respond, depending on how many cases there are, but mostly how many hospitalizations there are, and how serious it is. We need to increase hospital capacity, not shut down to flatten the curve, so that too many people won’t go to the hospital. That’s not part of any pandemic preparedness plan. The pandemic preparedness plan says we need to quickly step up and increase hospital capacity, so that we don’t have to shut everything down and flatten the curve. Those are all things that are in every plan that the government had. And who’s in charge? Like you said, it’s Health and Human Services, a big umbrella agency. Underneath Health and Human Services is the CDC, the NIH, and the NIAID, which is Fauci’s organization. That’s the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. NIH is the National Institutes of Health. CDC is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are supposed to be in charge. All of a sudden, Deborah Birx comes in and they say, “She’s just another public health person. She’s going to be in charge now.” But Fauci and Collins are still responsible, and everybody thinks they’re the ones who are making the plan. I found the document, it’s called PanCAP-A. That was the plan they put together in 2018, and this is the government’s plan. When we are taxpayers paying our government to have plans, we also are paying to be able to see those plans. It is difficult to find these plans on the internet or anywhere else. They are really, really hard to find. Now, I think that’s really weird. We have a public health crisis, we have a pandemic, and we don’t even have a piece of paper or a site from our government saying, “This is our plan.” Then, I found these plans. There is a March 13th version of the Pandemic Crisis Plan. On March 13th, 2020, you can see that they updated the 2018 plan for pandemic preparedness, which says all the things that I said. “We have to be able to increase hospital capacity. Each state has to respond based on how things are happening. “ There is an awareness in pandemic planning that it’s not all happening at the same time everywhere, because the virus is spreading in different places at different times. Some places like Utah or Texas might not have any cases for a few months, while New York is experiencing a huge explosion of cases. In that case, New York should be responding in a certain way, and Utah or Texas should be responding in a completely different way. That’s all in the plans. But the March 13th, 2020 version of the plan has a few things inserted. There’s an org chart that’s in all the plans that says that the CDC is doing this, and that the NIH is doing that. Health and Human Services is the lead federal agency. Now, the lead federal agency is the government agency that’s designated as the agency in charge. That means they make the policy. They decide what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. They get help from other agencies that are designated to help in different areas. FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] helps with on-the-ground help to different states that need the help at certain times. The Department of Agriculture helps if needed, and the Department of Transportation helps if needed. Each department is helping, but HHS is in charge. All of a sudden, there was a new square on the org chart that said; Policy, National Security Council. Underneath that, very interestingly, it said; WMD, weapons of mass destruction. Why? First of all, why is the National Security Council suddenly in charge of pandemic policy? Second of all, why does it say weapons of mass destruction? What does this virus have to do with weapons of mass destruction? If it does have to do with weapons of mass destruction, why aren’t we being told about it? That to me was mind-boggling. This document has a few footnotes and insertions, and that’s where you find the information. I’ve realized and I’ve heard this before, but I didn’t realize it until I started researching all the information, that what they don’t want you to know is hidden in the footnotes. The footnotes said that the National Security Council had a plan, but it wasn’t included in this document. This was the old document. This was the CDC/NIH document that they had inserted a few things into. I started looking on the internet for their plan. I found out President Trump did something that was not reported anywhere. He invoked the Stafford Act. I had never heard of it before. The Stafford Act is used when there’s a disaster like a hurricane or a flood to release funds for FEMA. It gives FEMA the ability to, and it allows the governor to declare a state of emergency. It starts the whole cascade of things that you need in order to help people when there’s a national disaster. There’s a whole list of natural disasters that FEMA is in charge of. A pandemic is not one of them. Public health is not on the list of the things that they do. President Trump invoked the Stafford Act in all 50 states simultaneously. It had never been done before. This is in the public record. It’s not like I had to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] any of these documents, but I had to dig. The National Security Council, who is now in charge of policy, is saying there is now a disaster in all 50 states at the same time. This is exactly the opposite of what the actual pandemic preparedness document says. If you’re doing it in the public health way, all 50 states are completely different. A uniform blanket disaster is decreed on the entire country. On March 18th, 2020, I found this through Senate hearings on what went wrong during our initial pandemic response and also some FEMA documents from the Inspector General who was commenting on what they did wrong or what went wrong. HHS was taken off as lead federal agency for the pandemic response. That to me was even more significant than the National Security Council taking over the policy. Because like you said, Matt Pottinger, knows the danger from China. This is also a national security issue. We have to worry about our relationships internationally. We have to worry about how this is going to impact our national security on a broader level, not just public health, as you might say. But if the HHS, which is supposed to be the lead federal agency for pandemic response, isn’t even in charge of communications or implementation of policy, who is in charge? FEMA. FEMA was like a deer in headlights. Nobody told them this was going to happen. A few weeks before this happened, there’s an internal document saying, “We should be prepared if certain states need our help, but there’s nothing right now that we really need to worry about.” They were totally unprepared and all of a sudden they’re in charge. There’s another new org chart in one of the Inspector General’s documents that shows that everything that the CDC, the NIH, and HHS were supposed to do as lead federal agency for pandemic response, now, FEMA had to do, with no preparation, no documents, and no history of doing anything like that. In their testimony to the Senate committee they said, “We shouldn’t have been put in that position. We didn’t know what we were doing.” Nobody in that hearing asked why HHS was taken off and why FEMA was put in? FEMA is an agency that is under the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency are in charge of keeping us safe from wars and terrorism and things that threaten our national security. They’re not in charge of keeping us healthy or safe from threats to our health. I didn’t have to FOIA any of those documents. I just found them by digging and digging and digging. Nobody else knew or was reporting about it. I didn’t sleep for a few days. I thought, “This is really crazy.” It got published on Brownstone. I thought, “Clearly somebody’s going to see this and it’s going to be news. People are going to care.” No, nobody cared. I’m still really shocked. It meant that the response was not a public health response. It was a national security response. If it’s a national security response, that means it doesn’t follow the principles of public health. The number one principle of public health is to not panic, keep everybody calm, help the people who are affected by the health problem, solve the health problem, and let everybody else live their life. That’s what it is. We did the opposite. We shut everything down. We threw everything out that we knew about masks not working, about testing, and quarantining when you have an airborne respiratory virus that’s already spread everywhere. All of a sudden case numbers became the metric of how worried we should be about this virus. Case numbers mean absolutely nothing. Because if everybody gets Covid and nobody dies, then we could have 330 million cases and we wouldn’t care at all. They were also constantly talking about the cases in order to foment panic, and all of those things had nothing to do with public health. I realized we had been subjected to some kind of weird national defense exercise. Maybe they really were worried, because they thought it was a bioweapon, but it wasn’t a public health response. All they cared about was shutting everything down until we had the vaccine. I called it, “quarantine until vaccine.” In order to get everybody to quarantine, because who’s going to agree to that, they had to panic. This is why my whole paradigm from the beginning got shifted. The panic wasn’t from the top. The panic was induced by the propaganda. The people who induced panic with the propaganda also were interested in the profits and in everything that had to do with the development of the vaccines. I was looking at the public health documents for pandemic preparedness and also the bio-defense documents. In the bio-defense documents, there is one thing that they care about. Again, this isn’t even assigning some kind of blame as if they had some really dark, evil purpose. Everybody was doing their job. The public health people got pushed out. The national security people said, “We’re taking over for whatever reason and our plan is that we’re going to keep everybody as separate as possible, so that as few people as possible get it until we have the vaccines. For the past 20 years, we’ve been developing this amazing technology that we’ve been wanting to try called mRNA technology. We think that that’s the best way to deliver a medical countermeasure against a bioweapon. Medical countermeasures are different from vaccines in the sense that first and foremost, they’re developed in order to protect the troops and people on the front lines who might be attacked with a bioweapon. Second of all, they have to be done really fast. In a document from 2003, Fauci said, “In 20 years, we want to go from bug to drug in 24 hours.” Bug to drug. Fantasy. He had billions and billions of dollars, though, that were devoted to that research. Then, DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and all kinds of other organizations that work on medical countermeasures for the national security agencies and the Department of Defense had $5 billion a year devoted to this stuff. In 2017, when they were starting to work on DNA and mRNA platforms, they said, “It’s not 24 hours bug to drug. It’s 60 days. We want a platform that in 60 days, no matter what is thrown at us, we’re going to be able to develop a countermeasure.” That’s in 2017. 2020 comes along. They are nowhere near getting anything out. Nothing that they’ve ever developed has ever worked. People have been working on mRNA technology for a really long time, and have found they haven’t been able to develop any safe products. Because in order to deliver the mRNA to the bot to the cells, you have to do all kinds of things to it that make it really toxic. There were two main companies that were working on mRNA; Moderna, which was working closely with Fauci, and BioNTech in Germany. They had developed them and they were working on them. BioNTech was working mainly on cancer, and Moderna was working mainly on these biodefense things. Those are all the facts that I know. My theory is that in January or even December, they knew about this virus and they already had the genetic sequence. They decided that for this mRNA technology they had been putting billions of dollars into for a decade or two, this is the chance. What is the chance? The chance is that now we don’t have to go through the whole long, boring, annoying, regulatory process. If you think you have a platform that works and is going to deliver a miraculous way to protect the troops and also the population from anything in 60 days, you don’t want to wait 10 or 20 years with all the clinical trials and all the possibilities of failure to finally have something that works. You think—and I’m giving them a lot of credit here because I’m saying that they really wanted this to work—that you can bypass all that regulatory stuff. If you could just bypass it, then you could show everybody that it really works. This is where the profits come in, but it’s also where an honest desire to have these platforms work also comes in. It was predetermined—I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m researching it—from the beginning that the mRNA technologies were going to work no matter what. Unless everybody who got the shot dropped dead immediately, it was going to be a success. They got Pfizer to take over BioNTech. BioNTech had never been working on anything that had to do with viruses. They say they were doing some flu research, but 99 percent of their research was on cancer. Pfizer took over BioNTech. Moderna and Fauci and NIAID were already working together. Once they decided that it was a medical countermeasure and that we were developing it in opposition to a bio-weapon, it no longer had to go through any of the regulatory steps that a vaccine would have to go through. A vaccine absolutely cannot be developed safely and effectively in less than ten years, and some people say five years. It takes years. But if it’s a medical countermeasure, then you can present it differently. The process of manufacturing is called a demonstration. The actual thing that you’re manufacturing is a prototype. As a prototype, it doesn’t have to go through anything at all. I think that you know Sasha Latypova? Mr. Jekielek: I’m aware of her, yes. Ms. Lerman: She does amazing research. She combined my research about the fact that it was a national security response and that the Department of Defense was responsible for the vaccine research. The Department of Defense being responsible for the vaccine research is fact, and it’s in the public record. There were Army generals who were in charge of Warp Speed, not doctors, not researchers, and not public health people. It was run as a military operation. Because of it being in the military framework and in the medical countermeasure framework as opposed to the vaccine public health framework, they were able to bypass everything, manufacturing hundreds of millions of vaccines when there wasn’t any infrastructure for that. There wasn’t anything that was prepared for that or set up for that. Definitely not by Moderna. Definitely not by BioNTech. Pfizer was able to scale up, and they also had a lot of vendors and a lot of subcontractors that they used for it. All of a sudden, in less than a year, you’re somehow able to manufacture millions and millions of vaccine doses safely and effectively? It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all. But all they needed were the initial studies that said that it was 90 percent effective. Now, I’m reading the Moderna and the Pfizer books, and it’s 95, 96 percent effective in preventing death or serious disease in a very small number. They had lots of patients getting it, but only a few patients actually got sick or died. The number of people you needed to give a vaccine to in order to prevent one or two deaths was huge. It doesn’t matter. They can still say that it’s 95 percent effective at preventing death, and then they can stop the trials with no long-term safety follow-ups, and no long-term efficacy follow-ups. Even though we know that after a few months, the efficacy waned and possibly reversed, it didn’t matter because those vaccines were already successful. It means that the mRNA platform that they were so excited about works. It works. I’m not saying that it works. They are saying that they have proven that it works because they produced something that didn’t kill everybody right away. They were able to show short term that it prevented some deaths, and that it prevented deaths to a certain percentage without any follow up. We know after the follow-up how it really turned out. Based on that success, Moderna and BioNTech now have dozens of mRNA vaccine trials going on, which I think is just astonishing. Mr. Jekielek: This is where the pandemic industrial complex, as you describe it, which is various agencies and industry working together closely comes in. Ms. Lerman: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, please explain to me what that means, and where is this today? Ms. Lerman: That’s a good question because that brings us back to that original concept that I had and where it ended up. The propaganda, the prophets, and the politics all went together into this pandemic industrial complex. I’ll also add that it’s international. My research hasn’t been able to catch up to cover all the different countries. Where is it now? What’s happening now is that they have already baked in so much, because so many people are getting so much out of it. Mr. Jekielek: Do you mean financially? Ms. Lerman: Both financially and also in terms of validation. The biodefense efforts that so many billions and billions of dollars were poured into are validated. I’m putting all of this in quotes because I don’t think it’s true. But I think that they could say to themselves that it was because of the success of the vaccines. I actually think that where they are now is. First of all, there’s all the money. There’s all the profits for the pharmaceutical industry and also for the NGOs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that invested huge amounts of money in the vaccine effort and in the vaccine development. Even the government agencies that are involved have patents and have mechanisms by which they derive profits from the vaccines. A lot of it is money, and I’m not going to say it’s not. A lot of it is also this kind of hubris and lack of scientific rigor because they really, really wanted it to work. Where we are now is that they have baked it into the National Pandemic Preparedness Plan that Biden just put out in 2022. In that pandemic preparedness plan, it’s really interesting, because it says, “This is the first time that we have combined our response in a biodefense and a public health sense.” They admitted, and this is on the website where they talk about it, that at one point we had the public health responses and the bio-defense response and they were separate. Now they’re the same. To me, that is scary. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely fascinating. Any final thoughts as we finish, Debbie? Ms. Lerman: Thank you for letting me describe my research and my findings. It’s really important for people to understand this, and not on a theoretical level, but on a very practical level. Because all of the things that we did, the masking, the distancing, and the quarantining, none of that was a public health response. All of the things that they said were for your public health were actually done so that you would be scared and so that you would stay home and so that you would comply with the plan of quarantine until vaccine, which is a national security plan. It’s not a public health plan. My deepest desire, and the reason that I’m doing all of this is so that people never agree to do it again. Mr. Jekielek: Here’s the thing that concerns me. There has been a profound break in trust with our agencies and our responses through all this. There may be a need for a proper biodefense national security response in the future. How do we deal with that, given what we know now? Ms. Lerman: That’s a great question. First of all, the risk of a bioterror attack or a bioweapons attack is much smaller than people think. Even if it were to happen, we would still have to respond in a way that makes sense. I hope that we now know that masks don’t work, they just don’t. They just physically don’t work. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bioweapon or the flu, if it is a respiratory virus, they do not work. We know that testing and quarantining doesn’t work unless it’s a virus like Ebola where you can actually trace each case and quarantine. We need to learn, even if we have to respond to a bioweapons attack, that none of the things that we did were appropriate, whether it was an engineered virus or whether it was a virus that developed in nature. We need to say, “Let’s go back to the drawing board to all the plans that we had before for public health. Because even if it’s a bioweapon, it’s still affecting your body and your health. It’s not a gun, it’s not a grenade, and you can’t protect yourself from it in any way other than how you would protect yourself from any virus, whether it was engineered or not. Luckily, and this is actually a good thing, viruses that are very aggressive and that kill people really fast don’t tend to spread very fast because once they kill their host, it’s over. The viruses that spread the fastest and that infect the most people are the viruses that let their host live and let their host interact with a lot of other people. Viruses tend to be either very deadly or very transmissible. If there was a bioweapons attack, and I’m saying this only out of my general knowledge of viruses, I don’t know what a potential bioweapon would be. In the history of humanity and viruses, we have not encountered a virus that spreads as fast as Sars-CoV-2 and kills as much as Ebola. People would like to develop it. I don’t think they’re going to be able to. Sars-CoV-2 might have been a bioweapon, but it wasn’t a very effective one, because it didn’t kill very many people. Even if we are attacked by a bioweapon, we still have to respond in a public health way, because it’s still affecting our health and it’s still a virus. A public health response, no matter what it is, no matter who made it, no matter what their intent was, is to keep everybody calm, make sure that the most vulnerable people are protected, and let everybody else live their life. Mr. Jekielek: Debbie Lerman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Lerman: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Debbie Lehrman 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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